Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky was a Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright, translator, and the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, as well as the U.S. Poet Laureate in 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 Tour’s clinic on the Vyborg Side. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky (1903–1984), was a military photo correspondent; in 1950, as part of the “purge” of Jews from the officer corps, he was demobilized and afterward worked as a photographer and journalist for several Leningrad newspapers. His mother, Maria Moiseyevna Volpert (1905–1983), worked as an accountant. Joseph’s early childhood fell during the war years, the blockade, and then postwar poverty and overcrowding, and passed without his father. In 1942, after the blockade winter, Maria Moiseyevna left for evacuation with Joseph to Cherepovets.

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

In 1955, not yet sixteen and having completed seven grades and started the eighth, Brodsky left school and became an apprentice milling-machine operator at the Arsenal factory. This decision was prompted both by problems at school and by Brodsky’s desire to support his family financially. He unsuccessfully tried to enter a submarine school. At 16, he became fascinated by the idea of becoming a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant to a prosector in the morgue at the regional hospital, dissected corpses, but eventually gave up a medical career. In addition, over the five years after leaving school Brodsky worked as a stoker in a boiler room, a sailor at a lighthouse, and a laborer in five geological expeditions. At