Prominent Refugees - Joseph Brodsky

Monday 17 January 2011

Joseph Brodsky 

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky, was born on May 24^th 1940 and died on January 28^th 1996. He was a Soviet-Russian-American poet and essayist.

He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 for alleged "social parasitism"* and settled in America. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.

Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity".

He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991.

Brodsky was born into a Jewish family in Leningrad where they lived in poverty and were marginalised by their Jewish status. He later commented that many of his teachers were anti-semitic and that he felt like a dissident from an early age. He noted "I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice [...] but because of his omnipresent images."

After leaving school at the age of 15 and various unsuccessful jobs, Brodsky engaged in a program of self-education were he learned Polish so he could translate the works of Polish poets like Czesław Miłosz, and English so he could translate John Donne, acquiring a deep interest in classical philosophy, religion, mythology, and English and American poetry.

In 1963, Brodsky's poetry was denounced by a Leningrad newspaper as "pornographic and anti-Soviet." His papers were confiscated; he was interrogated, twice put in a mental institution and then arrested. After a secret trial in 1964, he was charged with social parasitism.

“Since the stern art of poetry calls for words, I, morose,

deaf, and balding ambassador of a more or less

insignificant nation that's stuck in this super

power, wishing to spare my old brain,

put on clothes - all by myself - and head for the main

street: for the evening paper.”

from "The End of a Beautiful Era," (Leningrad 1969)

In 1971, Brodsky was twice invited to immigrate to Israel. When called to the Ministry of the Interior in 1972 and asked why he had not accepted, he stated that he wished to stay in the country. Within 10 days officials broke into his apartment, took his papers, and on 4 June 1972 put him on a plane to Vienna.

Although the poet was invited back after the fall of the Soviet Union, Brodsky never to returned to his country.

“I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland

by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on

in twos.”

From the title poem in A Part of Speech (1980)

In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth Russian-born writer to do so. In an interview he was asked: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?" He responded: "I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an English essayist"

Brodsky died of a heart attack in his New York City apartment on 28 January 1996.

In the year after his death, a plaque was placed on his house in St Petersburg (Leningrad) with his portrait in relief, and the words "In this house from 1940 to 1972 lived the great Russian poet Iosif Aleksandrovich" 

*social parasitism is a charge that is leveled against a group or class in society which is considered to be detrimental to the whole by analogy with biologic parasitism

Andreia Pinto