Joseph Brodsky

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Lore & Background

Brodsky was born into a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad. A descendant of a prominent and ancient rabbinic family, Schorr (Shor), his direct male-line ancestor was Joseph ben Isaac Bekhor Shor. In early childhood, Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad where he and his parents nearly died of starvation; one aunt did die of hunger. At fifteen, Brodsky left school and tried to enter the School of Submariners without success. He went on to work as a milling machine operator, later worked at the morgue at the Kresty Prison cutting and sewing bodies, and held jobs in hospitals, a ship's boiler room, and on geological expeditions. He learned Polish to translate Czesław Miłosz and English to translate John Donne. In 1955, he began writing poetry and producing literary translations, circulating them in secret. In 1960, he met Anna Akhmatova, who became his mentor. In 1962, Akhmatova introduced him to the artist Marina Basmanova; they started a relationship, and their son Andrei was born on 8 October 1967. In 1963, Brodsky's poetry was denounced by a Leningrad newspaper as "pornographic and anti-Soviet". He was arrested, charged with social parasitism, and in a 1964 trial the judge asked, "Who has recognized you as a poet?" Brodsky replied, "Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?" He was sentenced to five years hard labor and served 18 months on a farm in the village of Norenskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region. His sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by Evgeny Evtushenko, Dmitri Shostakovich, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Akhmatova. A secret transcription of trial minutes was smuggled out, making him a symbol of artistic resistance.

Reader's Guide

Joseph Brodsky's significance rests on his dual Russian-American identity, his defiance of Soviet censorship, and his literary canonization. According to Professor Andrey Ranchin of Moscow State University, "Brodsky is the only modern Russian poet whose body of work has already been awarded the honorary title of a canonized classic... Brodsky's literary canonization is an exceptional phenomenon. No other contemporary Russian writer has been honored as the hero of such a number of memoir texts; no other has had so many conferences devoted to them." Daniel Murphy, in Christianity and Modern European Literature, includes Brodsky among the most influential Christian poets of the 20th century, along with T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and W. H. Auden. In July 1972, following his exile, Brodsky 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." The contemporary Russian poet Viktor Krivulin said that "Brodsky always felt his Jewishness as a religious thing, despite the fact that, when all is said and done, he's a Christian poet." Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature and appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991. He taught at Mount Holyoke College, Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. His poetry was apolitical; he once said he began to despise Lenin even in first grade because of his "omnipresent images."

Did You Know?

• Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad, where he and his parents nearly died of starvation and one aunt died of hunger.
• At fifteen, he left school and tried to enter the School of Submariners without success.
• He worked at the morgue at Kresty Prison cutting and sewing bodies while trying to become a physician.
• In his 1964 trial for social parasitism, when the judge asked 'Who has recognized you as a poet?', Brodsky replied 'Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?'
• Brodsky's 18 months of hard labor in the Arctic village of Norenskaya were, according to his biographer Lev Loseff, among the best times of his life.