Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940. Forty-two years later, in an interview with a Dutch journalist, he recalled his hometown:

“Leningrad shapes your life, your consciousness to the extent that the visual aspects of life can influence us. It is a huge cultural conglomerate, but without tastelessness, without confusion. An amazing sense of proportion, classical facades breathe calm. And all this influences you, makes you strive for order in life, even though you realize you are doomed. Such a noble attitude towards chaos, which manifests either in stoicism or snobbery.”

In the first year of the war, after the blockade winter of 1941–1942, Joseph’s mother Maria Volpert evacuated him to Cherepovets, where they lived until 1944. Volpert worked as a translator in a prisoner-of-war camp, while Brodsky’s father, naval officer and photojournalist Alexander Brodsky, participated in the defense of Malaya Zemlya and the breaking of the Leningrad blockade. He returned to the family only in 1948 and continued his service as head of the photo laboratory at the Central Naval Museum. Joseph Brodsky remembered his childhood walks through the museum all his life: “In general, I have quite remarkable feelings towards the navy. I don’t know where they came from, but there’s childhood, father, and my native city… When I remember the Naval Museum, the St. Andrew’s flag — a blue cross on a white field… There is no better flag in the world!”

Joseph often changed schools; his attempt to enter a naval school after seventh grade was unsuccessful. In 1955, he left the eighth grade and got a job as a milling machine operator at the Arsenal factory. Then he worked as an assistant prosector in a morgue, a stoker, and a photographer. Finally, he joined a group of geologists and participated in expeditions for several years, during one of which he discovered a small uranium deposit in the Far East. At the same time, the future poet was actively self-educating, became passionate about literature. He was deeply impressed by the poems of Yevgeny Baratynsky and Boris Slutsky.

In Leningrad, Brodsky became known in the early 1960s when he performed at a poetry tournament at the Gorky Palace of Culture. Poet Nikolai Rubtsov described this performance in a letter:

“Of course, there were poets with a decadent tinge. For example, Brodsky. Grabbing the microphone stand with both hands and bringing it close to his mouth, he loudly and hoarsely, nodding his head to the rhythm of the poems, read:

Everyone has their own hr’lam!

Everyone has their own grlob!

There was a noise! Some shouted:

— What does poetry have to do with this?!

— Down with him!

Others yelled:

— Brodsky, more!”

At that time, Brodsky began to communicate with poet Yevgeny Rein. In 1961, Rein introduced Joseph to Anna Akhmatova. Although Brodsky’s poetry usually shows the influence of Marina Tsvetaeva, whose work he first encountered in the early 1960s, it was Akhmatova who became his personal critic and teacher. Poet Lev Losev wrote: “Akhmatova’s phrase ‘You don’t even understand what you have written!’ after reading the ‘Great Elegy to John Donne’ became a personal myth for Brodsky as a moment of initiation.”

In 1963, after the speech of the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev at the plenary session of the CPSU Central Committee, efforts began among the youth to eradicate “idlers, moral cripples, and whiners” who wrote in the “bird jargon of loafers and underachievers.” Brodsky became a target by then, having been detained twice by law enforcement: the first time for publishing in the handwritten journal “Syntax,” the second time due to a denunciation by an acquaintance. He himself disliked recalling those events because he believed a poet’s biography is only “in his vowels and sibilants, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.”

On November 29, 1963, the newspaper “Evening Leningrad” published an article titled “The Parasitic Literary Drone,” whose authors vilified Brodsky, quoting not his poems but juggling fabricated facts about him. On February 13, 1964, Brodsky was arrested again. He was accused of parasitism, although by that time his poems were regularly published in children’s magazines, and publishers commissioned him translations. The details of the trial became known worldwide thanks to Moscow journalist Frida Vigdorova, who was present in the courtroom. Vigdorova’s notes were sent to the West and appeared in the press.

Judge: What do you do?

Brodsky: I write poems. I translate. I suppose…

Judge: No “I suppose.” Stand properly! Don’t lean against the walls! Do you have a permanent job?

Brodsky: I thought this was a permanent job.

Judge: Answer precisely!

Brodsky: I wrote poems! I thought they would be published. I suppose…

Judge: We are not interested in “I suppose.” Answer why you did not work?

Brodsky: I worked. I wrote poems.

Judge: We are not interested in that…

Defense witnesses included poet Natalya Grudinina and prominent Leningrad philologists and translators Yefim Etkind and Vladimir Admoni. They tried to convince the court that literary work cannot be equated with parasitism, and that Brodsky’s published translations were of high professional quality. The prosecution witnesses did not know Brodsky or his work: among them were a supply manager, a military man, a pipe-layer worker, a pensioner, and a Marxism-Leninism teacher. A representative of the Writers’ Union also spoke for the prosecution. The sentence was harsh: exile from Leningrad for five years with compulsory labor.

Brodsky settled in the village of Norenskaya in the Arkhangelsk region. He worked on a state farm, and in his free time read a lot, became interested in English poetry, and began learning English. Frida Vigdorova and writer Lydia Chukovskaya petitioned for the poet’s early return from exile. The letter in his defense was signed by Dmitry Shostakovich, Samuil Marshak, Korney Chukovsky, Konstantin Paustovsky, Alexander Tvardovsky, Yuri German, and many others. The “friend of the Soviet Union” French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre also defended Brodsky. In September 1965, Joseph Brodsky was officially released.

That same year, the first collection of Brodsky’s poems was published in the USA, prepared without the author’s knowledge based on samizdat materials sent to the West. The next book, “A Stop in the Desert,” was published in New York in 1970 — it is considered Brodsky’s first authorized edition. After exile, the poet was enrolled in a certain “professional group” at the Writers’ Union, which allowed him to avoid further suspicions of parasitism. But at home, only his children’s poems were published, and sometimes he was commissioned translations of poetry or literary adaptation of film dubbing. Meanwhile, the circle of foreign Slavic scholars, journalists, and publishers with whom Brodsky communicated personally and by correspondence grew wider. In May 1972, he was summoned to the OVIR (Office for Visas and Registration) and offered to leave the country to avoid new persecutions. Usually, the processing of documents for leaving the Soviet Union took from six months to a year, but Brodsky’s visa was issued in 12 days. On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky flew to Vienna. His parents, friends, former lover Marianna Basmanova — to whom almost all of Brodsky’s love lyrics are dedicated — and their son remained in Leningrad.

In Vienna, the poet was met by American publisher Karl Proffer. Through his patronage, Brodsky was offered a position at the University of Michigan. The position was called poet-in-residence and involved interaction with students as a visiting writer. In 1977, Brodsky obtained American citizenship. During his lifetime, five poetry collections were published, containing translations from Russian into English and poems he wrote in English. But in the West, Brodsky became famous primarily as the author of numerous essays. He defined himself as “a Russian poet, an English-language essayist, and, of course, an American citizen.” The model of his mature Russian-language work became the poems included in the collections “Part of Speech” (1977) and “Urania” (1987). In a conversation with Brodsky’s researcher Valentina Polukhina, poet Bella Akhmadulina explained the phenomenon of a Russian-speaking author in emigration.

In 1987, Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing literary activity distinguished by clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” In 1991, Brodsky took the post of Poet Laureate of the United States — consultant to the Library of Congress — and launched the program “American Poetry and Literacy” to distribute inexpensive volumes of poetry among the population.

In 1990, the poet married an Italian woman of Russian descent, Maria Sozzani, but their happy union lasted only five and a half years.

In January 1996, Joseph Brodsky passed away. He was buried in one of his favorite cities — Venice, in the old cemetery on the island of San Michele.

Why was Brodsky buried here, in Venice? Not in New York, where he died, or in his homeland, Saint Petersburg — such proposals were made, and the author himself once wrote, “I will come to die on Vasilievsky Island.” Several factors converged here.

First, the writer loved Venice very much, often visited it, and used its images in his works. Second, his only official wife was Italian Maria Sozzani. Third, one of Brodsky’s friends, after his death, recalled these lines and saw in them a will about the burial place:

Although the insensible body

Is equally destined to decay everywhere, —

Deprived of native clay,

It does not mind rotting in the alluvium of the valley

Of Lombardy, — since

The same soil and the same worms.

Stravinsky sleeps on San Michele,

Having removed his historic beret...

Now on San Michele sleeps the great Russian poet of our time...

Sources:

Photo: biography.wikireading.ru

Photo: yeltsin.ru

https://dzen.ru/a/X8InjWPVdAQVwRSR

https://www.culture.ru/persons/2115/iosif-brodskii