Joseph Brodsky Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early Life
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was born in 1940 in Leningrad to a Jewish family that had survived the hunger and terror of the siege years. His father, Aleksandr, had served as a naval photographer and journalist; his mother, Maria Volpert, worked as an accountant. The atmosphere at home combined affection, austerity, and the persistent anxieties of postwar Soviet life. Brodsky left formal schooling in his teens and took work wherever he could find it, in factories, a shipyard, geological expeditions, and even a morgue, reading voraciously at night and teaching himself languages. Early exposure to the ruins and resilience of his native city left him with a lifelong sense of human dignity under pressure.

Formative Years and Literary Circle
By the late 1950s he was writing poems and translations and had fallen in with a circle of Leningrad poets who gathered around Anna Akhmatova. Among his close contemporaries were Yevgeny Rein, Dmitri Bobyshev, and Anatoly Naiman. Akhmatova encouraged the young writers, urging rigor and moral seriousness. The voices of Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak became lodestars for Brodsky, as would the English metaphysicals and, later, W. H. Auden. In these years he forged a style at once classical and conversational, anchored in meter and rhyme yet driven by metaphysical restlessness.

Arrest, Trial, and Exile
In 1964 he was arrested and tried on the charge of social parasitism, a show trial whose transcript, circulated samizdat, recorded the judge asking who had made him a poet and his reply that he believed it came from God. He was sentenced to five years of internal exile and hard labor in the Arkhangelsk region. International protests from writers and intellectuals, including figures within the Soviet literary world such as Lidiya Chukovskaya, helped reduce the sentence; he returned to Leningrad after about eighteen months. The experience deepened his independence, and he continued to write, though publication inside the USSR remained largely impossible.

Forced Emigration and New Life in the West
In 1972 he was compelled to leave the Soviet Union. With assistance from friends and advocates, among them W. H. Auden and the scholar Isaiah Berlin, he flew to Vienna and then settled in the United States. The American Slavicists Carl and Ellendea Proffer of Ardis played a decisive role in publishing his Russian texts abroad and introducing his work to English-language readers. An early English selection carried an introduction by Auden, situating the younger poet within a cosmopolitan tradition of moral and formal exactitude.

Teaching and American Citizenship
Brodsky began teaching almost immediately after arriving, notably at the University of Michigan, and later at Queens College and Columbia University. He eventually made a long-term home at Mount Holyoke College while also lecturing widely. He became a U.S. citizen in 1977. In the classroom he was both exacting and generous, steering students toward Donne, Hardy, Frost, and Auden, and insisting that prosody was a moral discipline. Friendships with fellow exiles and poets, including Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney, broadened his horizons and sharpened his sense of poetry's civic role.

Poetry and Poetics
He wrote primarily in Russian but increasingly composed in English and self-translated, often working with translators such as George L. Kline, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht. Collections like A Part of Speech, To Urania, and So Forth display his technical prowess: long sentences coiled within strict meters, images of winter and water, and an ethical attention to time, loss, and responsibility. The Jewish inheritance, the memory of Leningrad, and the example of Akhmatova and Mandelstam are threaded through these books; so is the tutelage of Auden, visible in the steadiness of tone and civic gravitas.

Essays and Public Persona
Brodsky's essays made him a major Anglophone prose stylist. Less Than One, a book of memoiristic criticism, and On Grief and Reason, a later collection, range from meditations on Russian poets to analyses of Venetian light. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, his speech advanced a credo that aesthetics are the mother of ethics, an argument that linked poetic form to moral responsibility. During his term as U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991, 1992 he championed the public presence of poetry, encouraging initiatives that placed poems in newspapers and on buses and subways. Cultural figures such as Susan Sontag amplified his role in American letters, while publishers and editors helped sustain a broad audience for his work.

Personal Life
Before emigration, he had a relationship with the painter Marina Basmanova, a figure of profound importance in his early poems. Years later, in the United States, he married Maria Sozzani; their life together added a steadier domestic counterpoint to his rigorous schedule of teaching and travel. The deaths of his parents in Leningrad, whom he could not see again after exile, left an unhealed wound that surfaces pointedly in his essays and elegies. Friends such as Tomas Venclova and Sergei Dovlatov witnessed both his wit and his solitude, noting his habit of treating time as the one currency that could not be squandered.

Awards and Recognition
Beyond the Nobel Prize, he received major American honors and honorary degrees, and he served as a guide between cultures at a moment when empires were collapsing and languages were crossing borders. He stood as a bridge between Russian modernism and the late twentieth-century English lyric, a role recognized by peers like Milosz and Walcott who read him as a poet of sovereign conscience.

Final Years and Legacy
Brodsky struggled with heart problems and underwent operations, but he refused to slow his pace. He died of a heart attack in New York in 1996. He was later buried on the island of San Michele in Venice, a city he loved and eulogized for its aqueous light and funerary calm. His Russian and English oeuvres now live in tandem: compact, exacting lyrics; expansive narrative poems; and essays that treat reading as a form of citizenship. For the generations that followed, he exemplified how a poet displaced by history could reinvent a language without repudiating the one that formed him. The circle that sustained him, Akhmatova's stern encouragement, Auden's worldly tutelage, the Proffers' editorial care, the comradeship of Milosz, Heaney, and Walcott, frames a life in which poetry was both an inner discipline and a public trust.

Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written by Joseph, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - Friendship - Meaning of Life - Writing.

Other people realated to Joseph: Mark Strand (Poet)

• 1996 So Forth: Poems (Book)
• 1995 On Grief and Reason: Essays (Book)
• 1992 Watermark (Book)
• 1992 To Urania: Selected Poems (Book)
• 1986 Less Than One: Selected Essays (Book)
• 1980 A Part of Speech (Book)