Joseph Brodsky · Arts & Literature
Nobel Prize-winning poet and US Poet Laureate
24 May 1940, Leningrad, USSR — 28 January 1996, New York
Leningrad, New York
Joseph Brodsky is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Nobel Prize-winning poet and US Poet Laureate
Origins and early life
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was born into a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad, where they lived in communal apartments, in poverty, marginalised by their Jewish status.
Work and career
Anna Akhmatova was for a time his mentor. In 1964 the Soviet authorities tried him for 'social parasitism', judging his odd jobs and his poetry an insufficient contribution to society, and sentenced him to five years of hard labour, of which he served eighteen months on a farm in the Arkhangelsk region; in 1972 the state expelled him, and W. H. Auden helped him settle in the United States, where he taught at Mount Holyoke and at Yale, Columbia, Cambridge and Michigan.
Recognition
In 1987 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature 'for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity', and in 1991 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. One thing is said here plainly, as this directory requires: after his exile Brodsky said that, while related to the Old Testament by ancestry and by the spirit of justice, he considered himself a Christian — he figures here by birth, in a Jewish family that the Soviet state never let forget what it was.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Literature
This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.
Nobel Prize-winning poet and US Poet Laureate
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Literature
Similar Contributors
Louise Glück
Howard Nemerov
Mark Strand
Anthony Hecht
Boris Pasternak
