Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky

Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky was a Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright, and translator, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and United States Poet Laureate for 1991–1992. He wrote poetry mainly in Russian and essays in English. He is regarded as one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century.

Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad, at Professor Tura’s clinic on the Vyborg Side. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky (1903–1984), was a military photojournalist; in 1950, as part of the “purge” of Jews from the officer corps, he was demobilized, after which he worked as a photographer and journalist for several Leningrad newspapers. His mother, Maria Moiseevna Volpert (1905–1983), worked as an accountant. Joseph’s early childhood fell during the years of war, the siege, and then postwar poverty and crowding, and it passed without his father. In 1942, after the siege winter, Maria Moiseevna took Joseph to evacuation in Cherepovets.

Brodsky’s aesthetic views took shape in Leningrad in the 1940s and 1950s. Neoclassical architecture, severely damaged during the bombings, the endless perspectives of the outskirts of Petersburg, water, the multiplicity of reflections — motifs associated with these impressions from his childhood and youth are consistently present in his work.

In 1955, not yet sixteen, after finishing seven grades and starting the eighth, Brodsky dropped out of school and took a job as a milling-machine apprentice at the Arsenal plant. This decision was connected both with problems at school and with Brodsky’s desire to support his family financially. He unsuccessfully tried to enter a submarine school. At 16, he became fascinated with the idea of becoming a doctor; he worked for a month as an assistant to the prosector at a regional hospital morgue, dissecting corpses, but ultimately abandoned a medical career. In addition, during the five years after leaving school, Brodsky worked as a stoker in a boiler room, a sailor on a lighthouse, and laborer in five geological expeditions. At the