An author’s life is seen by the public merely as a background to his or her work. Joseph Brodsky admitted once that biography and creative work can become intertwined, and not only in the reader’s mind but in the poet’s consciousness as well. A certain mythologization occurs. The reader has to choose whether to make do with dry biographical data (born, began writing poetry, was sentenced and exiled, emigrated, taught, died) or to accept the mythologized version of the poet’s life. Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940, though he detested the name of that city which was called Peter in everyday parlance. His family lived in one and a half rooms of a communal apartment shared by six families. Brodsky wrote that three people living in one and a half rooms was typical for a Soviet family of that time. His father, Alexandr Ivanovich Brodsky (1903-1984), was a journalist and newspaper photographer, and served in the navy after WWII. The War began for him in Finland in 1940, and ended in China in 1948. During that period he escorted naval convoys in the Barents Sea, took part in the defence and subsequent evacuation of Sevastopol in the Black Sea, joined a body of marines when his ship was sunk, and took part in the breaking through of the blockade. His mother, Maria Moiseevna Volpert (1905-1983) was unable to mask her petty bourgeois origins and had to give up all hope of getting college education. She spent her entire working life in routine jobs as a secretary or book-keeper. During the war she became an interpreter in a camp for German POWs, and was promoted to second lieutenant. After Germany’s surrender, she was offered promotion and a career with the ministry of internal affairs. Not being keen to join the Communist Party, she declined the offer and went back to her balance-sheets and accounts. Brodsky wrote that if anyone benefited from the war, it was his generation, its children, who had survived and had acquired rich material for their romantic fantasies. He was part of the generation born on the eve of the war, when the crematoriums at Auschwitz were working at full capacity and Stalin was at the height of his absolute power. It was the destiny of that generation to keep alive the human spirit that could so easily have been extinguished in Hitler’s extermination camps and the communal graves of the Gulag archipelago. But the militarization of childhood, that “ominous idiocy” as Brodsky described it, did not strongly affect his generation’s ethics and aesthetics. After the seventh grade Brodsky decided to leave school and find a job. His first job was as a miller in a factory. There he came face to face with the true proletariat, the kind of people whom Marx would have recognized at a glance: people who drank themselves into oblivion, quarreled with friends or neighbors in the communal kitchen or in the queue to the toilet, beat their women senseless, wept unabashedly when Stalin died or in a cinema, and swore constantly. Later Brodsky worked as an orderly in a morgue, as a stoker, and as a collector of specimens on geological expeditions. His earliest poems were written in 1957.

In the late 1950s the poet was already known in the literary circles of Leningrad. His poems were circulating illegally — even before the appearance of samizdat, as Brodsky put it. Jacob Gordin recalls that from 1958 or 1959 Brodsky regularly spoke in public — mainly in college auditoriums. His personality came across not only in the text of his poems but also in his way of reading, which affected his listeners strongly. Indeed his readings were such intense experiences that his listeners were completely overcome with emotion. In 1963 the Vecherny Leningrad newspaper published a highly critical article on Brodsky entitled A Literary Drone. In 1964 he was arrested, charged with social parasitism, and sentenced to five years in exile in the village of Norinskoe in the Archangelsk region. Many years later Brodsky said in an interview that the two years he spent in the village were the best years of his life because he could concentrate totally on his work. In 1965 the poet was allowed to return to Leningrad. His first collection Stikhotvoeriya i poemy was published the same year under the aegis of the Inter-Language Literary Associates. Brodsky was not involved in the preparation of this collection.

Brodsky had to emigrate in 1972. He did not see this as the beginning of a new stage in his life because for him life had never been a chain of clearly delineated transitions. He lived in the USA, teaching and writing, without particularly enjoying his professorial responsibilities. He loved discussing poetry when he was free of his academic schedule. Brodsky was not a born teacher. He was irritated as much by rote-learning as by ignorance itself, and did not hide his irritation. Brodsky taught at the Universities of Michigan, Columbia and New York, lecturing on the history of Russian poetry, 20th century Russian poetry, and theory of verse. In 1980, he became a tenured Five College professor, teaching in the old and prestigious colleges located close to each other in Massachusetts. His teaching style broke away from American customs and traditions. Whenever he felt that his students used similes and paradoxes excessively, he try to encourage them by saying that both he and they knew nothing, but that his nothing was greater than theirs. A Halt in the Wasteland, the first collection of his poems which Brodsky himself compiled, came out in 1972. In 1980, he became an American citizen. Brodsky wrote that if one were to define an exiled writer’s style of life it would be a tragic-comedy, though he admitted that exile may be a natural condition of a writer’s existence. Less than One, a collection of essays in English, was acclaimed in 1986 as the best book of literary criticism in the USA, and in October 1987 he became the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. John le Carre, the noted British author, remembered later that he once took Brodsky to a Chinese restaurant. Brodsky must have accepted the invitation for two reasons: firstly, it was customary at Rene Brendel’s not to drink (or to drink less than he would have wanted); secondly, he had to kill time waiting for the news. John le Carre’s wife Jane came, and the three of them sat at a table and began chatting about various topics — girls, life, everything. Then Rene Brendel appeared in the doorway. She was a big German woman. She still spoke with a slight German accent, and seemed to have assumed all the authority and fame of her husband. She said that Brodsky had to go home. He asked why. By that time he had already drunk two or three large whiskeys. She said he had been awarded a prize. He asked what prize? And she said it was the Nobel prize in Literature. When the party went out into the street, Brodsky embraced John le Carre in the Russian way, and said that he was now destined for a year of “gabbling”.

By the early 1990s Brodsky had become an “American” poet in every sense of the word. In 1991 he was appointed Poet Laureate. Brodsky was surprisingly serious about accepting this title. The post involves a lot of letter-writing, arranging occasional poetry readings, an office at the Library of the Congress and a salary of thirty five thousand dollars a year. Brodsky gave up teaching for a year, settling for a much lower salary, and spent about half of his time in Washington. In October of the same year he spoke in Congress, presenting a program called An Immodest Proposal which aroused a wide range of emotions — from admiration to mockery. In essence, Brodsky proposed to make poetry much more available, selling collections of poems in supermarkets and drugstores in line with the long-standing American tradition that books are not only sold in bookstores. Now the usual romances and thrillers would be supplemented by collections of poems that would be equally available and affordable. Brodsky died in New York on January 28 1996, of a heart attack. His funeral service was held on the eve of Candlemas, February 1, in the church of Grace, just a few blocks from his New York home. For one and a half years his body rested in the cemetery of the St. Trinity church on Manhattan, before being moved to San Michele, the “world’s most beautiful cemetery” in Venice, Italy.

Quoted from: 1. J. Brodsky, One and a Half Room 2. J. Brodsky, Spoils of War 3. J. Gordin, Delo Brodskogo 4. P. Vail, Rifma Brodskogo 5. P. Vail, Stikhi ryadom s molokom i aspirinom 6. Compiled by L. Losev, P. Vail, Joseph Brodsky: trudy i dni 7. V. Polukhina, interview with John le Carre 8. V. Polukhina, University of Michigan: 1980 9. J. Brodsky, Immodest proposal 10. Solomon Volkov, Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky 11. J. Brodsky, Less than One 12. J. Brodsky, Sostoiyanie, kotoroe my nazyavem izgnaniem ili poputnogo retro.