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Joseph
Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age
of fifteen, taking jobs working in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room,
and a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and Polish
and began writing poetry. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after
serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp in northern Russia.
According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. |
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was a normal Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become a man
of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky's]
Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad." He
studied with the beloved Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and, after his exile,
moved to America, where he made homes in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts.
There, according to his fellow poet Seamus Heaney, he lived "frugally,
industriously, and in a certain amount of solitude."
Celebrated
as the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Brodsky authored nine
volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, and received
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. His first book of poetry in English
translation appeared in 1973.
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In addition
to teaching positions at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College,
where he taught for fifteen years, Brodsky served as Poet Laureate of
the United States from 1991 to 1992. In 1993, he joined with Andrew Carroll
to found the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a not-for-profit
organization devoted to making poetry a more central part of American
culture, "as ubiquitous," in Brodsky's words, "as the nature
that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes;
or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves." Joseph
Brodsky died on January 28, 1996, of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment.
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