Joseph Brodsky papers

Joseph Brodsky, Russian-born poet, essayist and Nobel Laureate, was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940 to Aleksandr Ivanovich Brodskii and Mariia Moiseevna Brodskaia (nee Vol'pert). His birth was just one year before the start of the Leningrad Blockade; thus his early years were ones of extreme hardship. The Brodsky family's Jewish heritage exposed them to the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the post-war Soviet Union, causing Aleksandr Ivanovich to lose his rank in the Army and preventing Joseph from entering into the submarine academy. The communal apartment where Brodsky lived with his parents (and where his parents lived until their deaths) was memorialized in his essay "A room and a half."

Joseph Brodsky ended his formal schooling by walking out of his public school classroom at age fifteen and worked in a variety of places, including a factory, a morgue, and on geological expiditions. He began to write poetry in his teens and soon demonstrated a keen interest in translation. He taught himself Polish and English in order to translate poetry, including that of Czes?aw Mi?osz and John Donne. Brodsky's Russian literary influences included Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva. His early writings in Russia were circulated in samizdat (self-published) collections, the most complete one compiled by Vladimir Maramzin.

Brodsky was arrested several times starting in 1961, tried in 1964 as a "social parasite" (tuneiadets), and sentenced to five years of labor in Norenskaia (a village in the Arkhangelsk Province of northern Russia). Brodsky lived in Norenskaia from March of 1964 to October of 1965 and wrote prolificly there. Brodsky's trial and sentence brought him increasing international attention when Frida Vigdorova's transcript was publicized in the Western media. It was also around this time that his poetry began to be compiled and published in the United States. Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy (Washington, D.C. & New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates) was published in in 1965, followed by Ostanovka v pustyne (New York: Izdatel'stvo imeni Chekhova) in 1970. Even after his release from Norenskaia, Brodsky continued to be at constant risk of arrest. In 1972 he was forced to emigrate when he was suddenly granted a visa (for which he had not applied) to emigrate to Israel. He had to leave Russia within a matter of weeks.

Brodsky traveled to Austria, where he stayed with W.H. Auden for several weeks, and to England before coming to the United Sates. He accepted a position as Poet in Residence at the University of Michigan (a post that Carl Proffer, founder of Ardis Publishing, was instrumental in securing). Brodsky taught at Michigan until 1981, when he accepted a permanent position on the faculty of Mount Holyoke College. He then divided his time between New York City and South Hadley, Massachusetts. He became a United States citizen in 1977. Brodsky never returned to Russia after emigrating, though later in his life political circumstances would have allowed it and his Russian readers clamored for it.

Among Brodsky's many awards and honors are a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1977), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation award (1981), a National Book Critics Circle award (1986), the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987), France's Order of the Legion of Honor (1991), and honorary degrees from Yale University (1978), Dartmouth College (1989), and Oxford University (1991). He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992.

Brodsky suffered from heart disease throughout his adult life and he had several open-heart surgeries. He died of heart failure on January 28, 1996.

During his lifetime, much of Brodsky's collected poetry and prose was published by Ardis in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Russian-language poetry) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York (English-language poetry, English translations and prose collections). Brodsky's major publications from 1977 to 2000 include: