Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky, born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) on May 24, 1940, was a poet and essayist who held both Russian and American citizenship. His run-in with Soviet authorities led to his expulsion—effectively a forced emigration—from the USSR in 1972. With assistance from W. H. Auden and others, he settled in the United States, where he taught at Mount Holyoke College as well as Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. In 1987, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for "an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity." He became the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991. Scholars have noted his exceptional status. Professor Andrey Ranchin of Moscow State University observed that Brodsky is the only modern Russian poet whose work has already been granted the honorary title of a canonized classic, calling his literary canonization an unusual phenomenon—no other contemporary Russian writer has been the subject of so many memoirs or conferences. Daniel Murphy, in *Christianity and Modern European Literature*, lists Brodsky among the most influential Christian poets of the 20th century, alongside T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova (who mentored Brodsky for a time), and W. H. Auden (who sponsored his cause in America). Irene Steckler was the first to state outright that Brodsky was "unquestionably a Christian poet." Brodsky himself, in a July 1972 interview after his exile, said: "While I am related to the Old Testament perhaps by ancestry, and certainly the spirit of justice, I consider myself a Christian. Not a good one but I try to be." Fellow Russian poet Viktor Krivulin remarked that Brodsky always felt his Jewishness as a religious thing, despite ultimately being a Christian poet. Brodsky was born into a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad. He was a descendant of the ancient rabbinic Schorr (Shor) line, with his direct male ancestor being Joseph ben Isaac Bekhor Shor. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, worked as a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy; his mother, Maria Volpert Brodskaya, was a professional interpreter whose income often supported the family. They lived in communal apartments in poverty, marginalized by their Jewish identity. As a young child, Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad, during which he and his parents nearly starved to death and one of his aunts died of hunger. The siege left him with lasting health problems. He later said many of his teachers were anti-Jewish and that he felt like a dissident from an early age, noting, "I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice ... but because of his omnipresent images."

As a student, Brodsky was unruly and known for misbehaving in class. At fifteen, he left school and unsuccessfully tried to enter the School of Submariners. He then worked as a milling machine operator. After deciding to become a physician, he took a job at the morgue of Kresty Prison, cutting and sewing bodies. He later held various jobs in hospitals, a ship's boiler room, and on geological expeditions. Meanwhile, he pursued a self-education program, learning Polish to translate poets like Czesław Miłosz and English to translate John Donne. Along the way, he developed a deep interest in classical philosophy, religion, mythology, and English and American poetry. He began writing his own poetry and producing literary translations in 1955, circulating them secretly; some appeared in the underground journal *Sintaksis*. His writings were apolitical. By 1958, he was well known in literary circles for poems like "The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad" and "Pilgrims." Asked when he first felt called to poetry, he recalled that in 1959, in Yakutsk, he found a book of poems by Baratynsky in a bookstore. Reading it, he said, "finally understood what I had to do in life. Or got very excited, at least. So in a way, Evgeny Abramovich Baratynsky is sort of responsible." His friend Ludmila Shtern remembered working with him on an irrigation project during his "geological period" as a geologist's assistant, traveling around the Leningrad Province examining canals. During those trips, she heard him read poems like "The Hills" and "You Will Gallop in the Dark" aloud between train cars. In 1960, Brodsky met Anna Akhmatova, a leading poet of the silver age, who encouraged his work and became his mentor. In 1962, Akhmatova introduced him to artist Marina Basmanova, a young painter from an artistic family who was sketching her portrait. Brodsky and Basmanova began a relationship, but his close friend and fellow poet Dmitri Bobyshev was also in love with her. As Bobyshev pursued Basmanova, the authorities began pursuing Brodsky; Bobyshev was widely believed to have denounced him. Brodsky dedicated much love poetry to Basmanova.