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On October 22, 1987, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Joseph Brodsky. From the article:
"Joseph Brodsky
Biographical
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years in exile at hard labor for “social parasitism,” but did not serve out his term.
Four of Brodsky’s poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967, but most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator and has translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets, and the Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into at least ten languages. Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books in London (1973), and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L. Kline and with a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky’s selected poems translated in French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag; and an Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Brodsky’s acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980.
On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country. After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He currently is Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”.
In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr. Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania, and in 1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1987, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1988."
"Joseph Brodsky
Biographical
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years in exile at hard labor for “social parasitism,” but did not serve out his term.
Four of Brodsky’s poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967, but most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator and has translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets, and the Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into at least ten languages. Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books in London (1973), and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L. Kline and with a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky’s selected poems translated in French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag; and an Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Brodsky’s acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980.
On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country. After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He currently is Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s award for his works of “genius”.
In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr. Brodsky’s essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic’s Award for Criticism.
In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania, and in 1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1987, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1988."
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1987
Posted from nobelprize.org
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Joseph Brodsky - The John Adams Institute
In the lecture series American Literature Today, the John Adams Institute presented an afternoon and an evening with the Russian/American poet and author Jos...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on October 22, 1987, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Russian author and poet Joseph Brodsky [Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky].
Joseph Brodsky - The John Adams Institute
In the lecture series American Literature Today, the John Adams Institute presented an afternoon and an evening with the Russian/American poet and author Joseph Brodsky.
Joseph Brodsky, one of the greatest Russian poets of our time and winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Leningrad in 1940. He was already an important young poet in the Soviety Union when he was charged with “social parasitism”, because his poetry and his bohemian ways did not advance the causes of communism. He was sent to work in the Arctic Circle in 1964. In 1972 the Soviets decided they could get along without Joseph Brodsky altogether, and he was sent to Austria where W. H. Auden, who was living there at the time, helped the uprooted poet on his way to the U.S. There Brodsky became an ornament to university faculties, a familiar voice on the lecture circuit, a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and eventually a Nobel Prize winner.
Keus Verheul was the moderator and was a personal friend of Brodsky’s, having translated many of Brodsky’s poems into Dutch.
At the beginning of the afternoon lecture, Joseph Brodsky unveiled a bust which sculptress Sylvia Willink-Quiel made of him. In 1985, Brodsky received a set of Willink reproductions which inspired him to write his poem “At Carel Willink’s exposition”. This poem so moved Willink’s widow that in turn she decided to make a bust of Brodsky. Painter, poet, sculptress: each inspired and understood by the other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6lo0CXUws8
Images:
1. Joseph Brodsky as a young man
2. Brodsky during his exile in Northern Russia. photo by Alexandr Brodsky
3. Lecture Brodsky. - photo from the archives of the University of Michigan.
4. Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani.
Biographies
1. poetryfoundation.org/poets/joseph-brodsky
2. poets.org/poet/joseph-brodsky
1. Background from [{https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joseph-brodsky]}
Joseph Brodsky 1940–1996
Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky was reviled and persecuted by officials in his native Soviet Union, but the Western literary establishment lauded him as one of that country’s finest poets. His verses were characterized by ironic wit and a spirit of fiery independence. From the time he began publishing them—both under his own name, and under the name Joseph Brodsky—he aroused the ire of Soviet authorities. He was also persecuted because he was Jewish. He was brought to trial for “parasitism,” and a smuggled transcript of that trial helped bring him to the attention of the West, for he answered his interrogators with courageous and articulate idealism. Brodsky was condemned to a Soviet mental institution and later spent five years in Arkhangelsk, an Arctic labor camp. A public outcry from American and European intellectuals helped to secure his early release. Forced to emigrate, he moved to Michigan in 1972, where, with the help of the poet W.H. Auden, he settled in at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as poet-in-residence. He then taught at several universities, including Queens College in New York and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He continued to write poetry, often writing in Russian and translating his own work into English, and eventually winning the Nobel Prize for his work. His predominant themes were exile and loss, and he was widely praised for his hauntingly eloquent style.
In many ways, Brodsky had lived as an exile before leaving his homeland. His father had lost a position of rank in the Russian Navy because he was Jewish, and the family lived in poverty. Trying to escape the ever-present images of Lenin, Brodsky quit school and embarked on a self-directed education, reading literary classics and working a variety of unusual jobs, including assisting a coroner and a geologist in Central Asia. He learned English and Polish so that he would be able to translate the poems of John Donne and Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry expressed his independent character with an originality admired by poets such as Anna Akhmatova.
According to a Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Brodsky’s poetry “is religious, intimate, depressed, sometimes confused, sometimes martyr-conscious, sometimes elitist in its views, but it does not constitute an attack on Soviet society or ideology unless withdrawal and isolation are deliberately construed as attack: of course they can be, and evidently were.” According to a reviewer in Time, the poet’s expulsion from Russia was “the culmination of an inexplicable secret-police vendetta against him that has been going on for over a decade.” Brodsky said: “They have simply kicked me out of my country, using the Jewish issue as an excuse.” The vendetta first came to a head in a Leningrad trial in 1964, when Brodsky was charged with writing “gibberish” instead of doing honest work; he was sentenced to five years hard labor. Protests from artists and writers helped to secure his release after 18 months, but his poetry still was banned. Israel invited him to immigrate, and the government encouraged him to go; Brodsky, though, refused, explaining that he did not identify with the Jewish state. Finally, Russian officials insisted that he leave the country. Despite the pressures, Brodsky reportedly wrote to Leonid Brezhnev before leaving Moscow asking for “an opportunity to continue to exist in Russian literature and on Russian soil.”
Brodsky’s poetry bears the marks of his confrontations with the Russian authorities. “Brodsky is someone who has tasted extremely bitter bread,” wrote Stephen Spender in New Statesman, “and his poetry has the air of being ground out between his teeth. … It should not be supposed that he is a liberal, or even a socialist. He deals in unpleasing, hostile truths and is a realist of the least comforting and comfortable kind. Everything nice that you would like him to think, he does not think. But he is utterly truthful, deeply religious, fearless and pure. Loving, as well as hating.”
Though one might expect Brodsky’s poetry to be basically political in nature, this is not the case. “Brodsky’s recurrent themes are lyric poets’ traditional, indeed timeless concerns—man and nature, love and death, the ineluctability of anguish, the fragility of human achievements and attachments, the preciousness of the privileged moment, the ‘unrepeatable.’ The tenor of his poetry is not so much apolitical as antipolitical,” wrote Victor Erlich. “His besetting sin was not ‘dissent’ in the proper sense of the word, but a total, and on the whole quietly undemonstrative, estrangement from the Soviet ethos.”
Brodsky elaborated on the relationship between poetry and politics in his Nobel lecture, “Uncommon Visage,” published in Poets & Writers magazine. Art teaches the writer, he said, “the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man … a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, or separateness—thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous ‘I.’ … A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct—free of any go-betweens—relations.”
In addition, literature points to experience that transcends political limits. Brodsky observed, “Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite—against the temporary, against the finite. … The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.”
Brodsky went on to say that creative writing is an essential exercise of individual freedom, since the writer must make many aesthetic judgments and choices during the process of composition. He pointed out, “It is precisely in this … sense that we should understand Dostoyevsky’s remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold’s belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. … If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature—and poetry, in particular, being the highest form of locution—is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.”
Even more compelling than the relationship between poetry and politics is the relationship between the writer and his language, Brodsky claimed. He explained that the first experience the writer has when taking up a pen to write “is … the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on language, on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished in it.” But the past accomplishments of a language do not impinge on the writer more than the sense of its vast potential. Brodsky added, “There are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. … Having experienced this acceleration once … one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol.”
In keeping with these views, Brodsky’s poetry is known for its originality. Arthur C. Jacobs in the Jewish Quarterly noted that Brodsky is “quite apart from what one thinks of as the main current of Russian verse.” A critic in New Leader wrote: “The noisy rant and attitudinizing rhetoric of public issues are superfluous to Brodsky’s moral vision and contradictory to his craft. As with all great lyric poets, Brodsky attends to the immediate, the specific, to what he has internally known and felt, to the lucidities of observation heightened and defined by thought.”
Though many critics agreed that Brodsky was one of the finest contemporary Russian poets, some felt that the English translations of his poetry are less impressive. Commenting on George L. Kline’s translation of Selected Poems, Joseph Brodsky, Stephen Spender wrote: “These poems are impressive in English, though one is left having to imagine the technical virtuosity of brilliant rhyming in the originals. … One is never quite allowed to forget that one is reading a second-hand version.” In A Part of Speech, Brodsky gathered the work of several translators and made amendments to some of the English versions in an attempt to restore the character of the originals. Brodsky’s personal style remains somewhat elusive in that collection due to the subtle effects he achieves in the original Russian, Tom Simmons observed in the Christian Science Monitor. Brodsky, he said, “is a poet of dramatic yet delicate vision—a man with a sense of the increasingly obscured loftiness of human life. But under no circumstances is his poetry dully ethereal. … He can portray a luminous moment or a time of seemingly purposeless suffering with equal clarity.”
Erlich also felt that some of the lines in Selected Poems are “strained or murky,” but that Brodsky at his best had the “originality, incisiveness, depth and formal mastery which mark a major poet.” Czeslaw Milosz felt that Brodsky’s background allowed him to make a vital contribution to literature. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Milosz stated, “Behind Brodsky’s poetry is the experience of political terror, the experience of the debasement of man and the growth of the totalitarian empire. … I find it fascinating to read his poems as part of his larger enterprise, which is no less than an attempt to fortify the place of man in a threatening world.” This enterprise connected Brodsky to the literary traditions of other times and cultures. Erlich concluded that “the richness and versatility of his gifts, the liveliness and vigor of his intelligence, and his increasingly intimate bond with the Anglo-American literary tradition, augur well for his survival in exile, indeed for his further creative growth.”
Exile was always difficult for Brodsky. In one poem, he described an exiled writer as one “who survives like a fish in the sand.” Despite these feelings, Brodsky was largely unmoved by the sweeping political changes that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union. He told David Remnick, then of the Washington Post, that those changes were “devoid of autobiographical interest” for him, and that his allegiance was to his language. In the Detroit Free Press, Bob McKelvey cited Brodsky’s declaration from a letter: “I belong to the Russian culture. I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can influence the final consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language.”
Shortly before his death in 1996, Brodsky completed So Forth, a collection of poems he wrote in English, or translated himself from poetry he wrote in Russian. So Forth was judged inferior to Brodsky’s best work by several critics, including Michael Glover, who in New Statesman described the collection as “more failure than success.” Glover felt that too often Brodsky “lapses into a kind of swashbuckling slanginess, a kind of raw muscularity that, at its worst, reads like embarrassing doggerel.” Yet others found So Forth powerful, such as the Publishers Weekly reviewer who called it “an astonishing collection from a writer able to mix the cerebral and the sensual, the political and the intimate, the elegiac and the comic. … Brodsky’s death is a loss to literature; his final collection of poems is the best consolation we could ask for.”
Collected Poems in English, published posthumously, is a definitive collection of Brodsky’s translated work and his original work in English. It is “dramatic and ironic, melancholy and blissful,” wrote Donna Seaman in Booklist. She argued this volume “will stand as one of the twentieth century’s tours de force.” Collected Poems in English is “a highly accomplished, deft, and entertaining book, with a talent for exploitation of the richness of language and with a deep core of sorrow,” in the estimation of Judy Clarence in Library Journal. It captures Brodsky’s trademark sense of “stepping aside and peering in bewilderment” at life, according to Sven Birkerts in the New York Review of Books. Birkerts concluded: “Brodsky charged at the world with full intensity and wrestled his perceptions into lines that fairly vibrate with what they are asked to hold. There is no voice, no vision, remotely like it.”
2. Background from {[https://poets.org/poet/joseph-brodsky]}
Joseph Brodsky
1940–1996
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry.
Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp in northern Russia. According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. "I was a normal Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky's] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad."
Before leaving the Soviet Union, Brodsky studied with the beloved Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. After his exile, he moved to America, where he made homes in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts. There, according to fellow poet Seamus Heaney, he lived "frugally, industriously, and in a certain amount of solitude."
Celebrated as the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. His first book of poetry in English translation appeared in 1973.
In addition to teaching positions at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College, where he taught for fifteen years, Brodsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. In 1993, he joined with Andrew Carroll to found the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a not-for-profit organization devoted to making poetry a more central part of American culture, "as ubiquitous," in Brodsky's words, "as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves." Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996, of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
A Part of Speech (1980)
Collected Poems in English (2000)
Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems (1967)
Selected Poems (1992)
So Forth (1996)
To Urania (1988)
Prose
Less Than One (1986)
On Grief and Reason (1995)
Watermark (1992)
Drama
Marbles (1989)"
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Joseph Brodsky - The John Adams Institute
In the lecture series American Literature Today, the John Adams Institute presented an afternoon and an evening with the Russian/American poet and author Joseph Brodsky.
Joseph Brodsky, one of the greatest Russian poets of our time and winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Leningrad in 1940. He was already an important young poet in the Soviety Union when he was charged with “social parasitism”, because his poetry and his bohemian ways did not advance the causes of communism. He was sent to work in the Arctic Circle in 1964. In 1972 the Soviets decided they could get along without Joseph Brodsky altogether, and he was sent to Austria where W. H. Auden, who was living there at the time, helped the uprooted poet on his way to the U.S. There Brodsky became an ornament to university faculties, a familiar voice on the lecture circuit, a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and eventually a Nobel Prize winner.
Keus Verheul was the moderator and was a personal friend of Brodsky’s, having translated many of Brodsky’s poems into Dutch.
At the beginning of the afternoon lecture, Joseph Brodsky unveiled a bust which sculptress Sylvia Willink-Quiel made of him. In 1985, Brodsky received a set of Willink reproductions which inspired him to write his poem “At Carel Willink’s exposition”. This poem so moved Willink’s widow that in turn she decided to make a bust of Brodsky. Painter, poet, sculptress: each inspired and understood by the other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6lo0CXUws8
Images:
1. Joseph Brodsky as a young man
2. Brodsky during his exile in Northern Russia. photo by Alexandr Brodsky
3. Lecture Brodsky. - photo from the archives of the University of Michigan.
4. Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani.
Biographies
1. poetryfoundation.org/poets/joseph-brodsky
2. poets.org/poet/joseph-brodsky
1. Background from [{https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joseph-brodsky]}
Joseph Brodsky 1940–1996
Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky was reviled and persecuted by officials in his native Soviet Union, but the Western literary establishment lauded him as one of that country’s finest poets. His verses were characterized by ironic wit and a spirit of fiery independence. From the time he began publishing them—both under his own name, and under the name Joseph Brodsky—he aroused the ire of Soviet authorities. He was also persecuted because he was Jewish. He was brought to trial for “parasitism,” and a smuggled transcript of that trial helped bring him to the attention of the West, for he answered his interrogators with courageous and articulate idealism. Brodsky was condemned to a Soviet mental institution and later spent five years in Arkhangelsk, an Arctic labor camp. A public outcry from American and European intellectuals helped to secure his early release. Forced to emigrate, he moved to Michigan in 1972, where, with the help of the poet W.H. Auden, he settled in at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as poet-in-residence. He then taught at several universities, including Queens College in New York and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He continued to write poetry, often writing in Russian and translating his own work into English, and eventually winning the Nobel Prize for his work. His predominant themes were exile and loss, and he was widely praised for his hauntingly eloquent style.
In many ways, Brodsky had lived as an exile before leaving his homeland. His father had lost a position of rank in the Russian Navy because he was Jewish, and the family lived in poverty. Trying to escape the ever-present images of Lenin, Brodsky quit school and embarked on a self-directed education, reading literary classics and working a variety of unusual jobs, including assisting a coroner and a geologist in Central Asia. He learned English and Polish so that he would be able to translate the poems of John Donne and Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry expressed his independent character with an originality admired by poets such as Anna Akhmatova.
According to a Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Brodsky’s poetry “is religious, intimate, depressed, sometimes confused, sometimes martyr-conscious, sometimes elitist in its views, but it does not constitute an attack on Soviet society or ideology unless withdrawal and isolation are deliberately construed as attack: of course they can be, and evidently were.” According to a reviewer in Time, the poet’s expulsion from Russia was “the culmination of an inexplicable secret-police vendetta against him that has been going on for over a decade.” Brodsky said: “They have simply kicked me out of my country, using the Jewish issue as an excuse.” The vendetta first came to a head in a Leningrad trial in 1964, when Brodsky was charged with writing “gibberish” instead of doing honest work; he was sentenced to five years hard labor. Protests from artists and writers helped to secure his release after 18 months, but his poetry still was banned. Israel invited him to immigrate, and the government encouraged him to go; Brodsky, though, refused, explaining that he did not identify with the Jewish state. Finally, Russian officials insisted that he leave the country. Despite the pressures, Brodsky reportedly wrote to Leonid Brezhnev before leaving Moscow asking for “an opportunity to continue to exist in Russian literature and on Russian soil.”
Brodsky’s poetry bears the marks of his confrontations with the Russian authorities. “Brodsky is someone who has tasted extremely bitter bread,” wrote Stephen Spender in New Statesman, “and his poetry has the air of being ground out between his teeth. … It should not be supposed that he is a liberal, or even a socialist. He deals in unpleasing, hostile truths and is a realist of the least comforting and comfortable kind. Everything nice that you would like him to think, he does not think. But he is utterly truthful, deeply religious, fearless and pure. Loving, as well as hating.”
Though one might expect Brodsky’s poetry to be basically political in nature, this is not the case. “Brodsky’s recurrent themes are lyric poets’ traditional, indeed timeless concerns—man and nature, love and death, the ineluctability of anguish, the fragility of human achievements and attachments, the preciousness of the privileged moment, the ‘unrepeatable.’ The tenor of his poetry is not so much apolitical as antipolitical,” wrote Victor Erlich. “His besetting sin was not ‘dissent’ in the proper sense of the word, but a total, and on the whole quietly undemonstrative, estrangement from the Soviet ethos.”
Brodsky elaborated on the relationship between poetry and politics in his Nobel lecture, “Uncommon Visage,” published in Poets & Writers magazine. Art teaches the writer, he said, “the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man … a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, or separateness—thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous ‘I.’ … A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct—free of any go-betweens—relations.”
In addition, literature points to experience that transcends political limits. Brodsky observed, “Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite—against the temporary, against the finite. … The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.”
Brodsky went on to say that creative writing is an essential exercise of individual freedom, since the writer must make many aesthetic judgments and choices during the process of composition. He pointed out, “It is precisely in this … sense that we should understand Dostoyevsky’s remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold’s belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. … If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature—and poetry, in particular, being the highest form of locution—is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.”
Even more compelling than the relationship between poetry and politics is the relationship between the writer and his language, Brodsky claimed. He explained that the first experience the writer has when taking up a pen to write “is … the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on language, on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished in it.” But the past accomplishments of a language do not impinge on the writer more than the sense of its vast potential. Brodsky added, “There are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. … Having experienced this acceleration once … one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol.”
In keeping with these views, Brodsky’s poetry is known for its originality. Arthur C. Jacobs in the Jewish Quarterly noted that Brodsky is “quite apart from what one thinks of as the main current of Russian verse.” A critic in New Leader wrote: “The noisy rant and attitudinizing rhetoric of public issues are superfluous to Brodsky’s moral vision and contradictory to his craft. As with all great lyric poets, Brodsky attends to the immediate, the specific, to what he has internally known and felt, to the lucidities of observation heightened and defined by thought.”
Though many critics agreed that Brodsky was one of the finest contemporary Russian poets, some felt that the English translations of his poetry are less impressive. Commenting on George L. Kline’s translation of Selected Poems, Joseph Brodsky, Stephen Spender wrote: “These poems are impressive in English, though one is left having to imagine the technical virtuosity of brilliant rhyming in the originals. … One is never quite allowed to forget that one is reading a second-hand version.” In A Part of Speech, Brodsky gathered the work of several translators and made amendments to some of the English versions in an attempt to restore the character of the originals. Brodsky’s personal style remains somewhat elusive in that collection due to the subtle effects he achieves in the original Russian, Tom Simmons observed in the Christian Science Monitor. Brodsky, he said, “is a poet of dramatic yet delicate vision—a man with a sense of the increasingly obscured loftiness of human life. But under no circumstances is his poetry dully ethereal. … He can portray a luminous moment or a time of seemingly purposeless suffering with equal clarity.”
Erlich also felt that some of the lines in Selected Poems are “strained or murky,” but that Brodsky at his best had the “originality, incisiveness, depth and formal mastery which mark a major poet.” Czeslaw Milosz felt that Brodsky’s background allowed him to make a vital contribution to literature. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Milosz stated, “Behind Brodsky’s poetry is the experience of political terror, the experience of the debasement of man and the growth of the totalitarian empire. … I find it fascinating to read his poems as part of his larger enterprise, which is no less than an attempt to fortify the place of man in a threatening world.” This enterprise connected Brodsky to the literary traditions of other times and cultures. Erlich concluded that “the richness and versatility of his gifts, the liveliness and vigor of his intelligence, and his increasingly intimate bond with the Anglo-American literary tradition, augur well for his survival in exile, indeed for his further creative growth.”
Exile was always difficult for Brodsky. In one poem, he described an exiled writer as one “who survives like a fish in the sand.” Despite these feelings, Brodsky was largely unmoved by the sweeping political changes that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union. He told David Remnick, then of the Washington Post, that those changes were “devoid of autobiographical interest” for him, and that his allegiance was to his language. In the Detroit Free Press, Bob McKelvey cited Brodsky’s declaration from a letter: “I belong to the Russian culture. I feel part of it, its component, and no change of place can influence the final consequence of this. A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language.”
Shortly before his death in 1996, Brodsky completed So Forth, a collection of poems he wrote in English, or translated himself from poetry he wrote in Russian. So Forth was judged inferior to Brodsky’s best work by several critics, including Michael Glover, who in New Statesman described the collection as “more failure than success.” Glover felt that too often Brodsky “lapses into a kind of swashbuckling slanginess, a kind of raw muscularity that, at its worst, reads like embarrassing doggerel.” Yet others found So Forth powerful, such as the Publishers Weekly reviewer who called it “an astonishing collection from a writer able to mix the cerebral and the sensual, the political and the intimate, the elegiac and the comic. … Brodsky’s death is a loss to literature; his final collection of poems is the best consolation we could ask for.”
Collected Poems in English, published posthumously, is a definitive collection of Brodsky’s translated work and his original work in English. It is “dramatic and ironic, melancholy and blissful,” wrote Donna Seaman in Booklist. She argued this volume “will stand as one of the twentieth century’s tours de force.” Collected Poems in English is “a highly accomplished, deft, and entertaining book, with a talent for exploitation of the richness of language and with a deep core of sorrow,” in the estimation of Judy Clarence in Library Journal. It captures Brodsky’s trademark sense of “stepping aside and peering in bewilderment” at life, according to Sven Birkerts in the New York Review of Books. Birkerts concluded: “Brodsky charged at the world with full intensity and wrestled his perceptions into lines that fairly vibrate with what they are asked to hold. There is no voice, no vision, remotely like it.”
2. Background from {[https://poets.org/poet/joseph-brodsky]}
Joseph Brodsky
1940–1996
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry.
Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp in northern Russia. According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. "I was a normal Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky's] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad."
Before leaving the Soviet Union, Brodsky studied with the beloved Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. After his exile, he moved to America, where he made homes in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts. There, according to fellow poet Seamus Heaney, he lived "frugally, industriously, and in a certain amount of solitude."
Celebrated as the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. His first book of poetry in English translation appeared in 1973.
In addition to teaching positions at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College, where he taught for fifteen years, Brodsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. In 1993, he joined with Andrew Carroll to found the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a not-for-profit organization devoted to making poetry a more central part of American culture, "as ubiquitous," in Brodsky's words, "as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves." Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996, of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
A Part of Speech (1980)
Collected Poems in English (2000)
Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems (1967)
Selected Poems (1992)
So Forth (1996)
To Urania (1988)
Prose
Less Than One (1986)
On Grief and Reason (1995)
Watermark (1992)
Drama
Marbles (1989)"
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Brodsky Among Us: One Book, Two Cultures
In her personal memoir of Joseph Brodsky, his American friend and publisher Ellendea Proffer Teasley offers much previously unknown material about the great ...
Brodsky Among Us: One Book, Two Cultures
In her personal memoir of Joseph Brodsky, his American friend and publisher Ellendea Proffer Teasley offers much previously unknown material about the great poet’s life in Leningrad, his leaving Russia and his career in the New World. Written in English, Teasley’s book had first come out in Russia to enjoy phenomenal reception and become a bestseller. In 2017 it was finally published in Boston by Academic Studies Press, in a book series on Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe. In her presentation, Dr. Teasley will discuss her book about Brodsky, how she wrote it, and how it was received first in Russia, Brodsky’s native country, and later in the US, his adopted country.
Dr. Ellendea Proffer Teasley co-founded Ardis Publishers and Russian Literature Triquarterly with Carl Proffer. She is the author and editor of various books, including Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography, Mikhail Bulgakov: Life & Work and, most recently, Brodsky Among Us. She is a MacArthur Fellow.
April 18, 2018
Speakers:
Ellendea Proffer Teasley, Author; Co-founder, Ardis Publishers and Russian Literature Triquarterly
Moderator: Maxim D. Shrayer, Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies, Boston College; Director, Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry; Center Associate, Davis Center
Cosponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. The Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry has been made possible with the generous support of Genesis Philanthropy Group. Additional support for this event provided by the Leon I. Mirell Fund."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FuBDigwrQw
Images:
1. Joseph Brodsky and his daughter Anna Alexandra Maria Sozztsani.
2. Poets Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky
3. Joseph Brodsky with a cat on his shoulder
4. Joseph Brodsky and Ellendea Proffer in St. Petersburg, 1970.
Background from [{https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/joseph-brodsky/]}
Prominent Russians: Joseph Brodsky
May 24, 1940 - March 28, 1996
Joseph Brodsky is considered one of the greatest poets to ever have lived. In his works, he shared his life with the reader - how he went to prison for his beliefs, how he loved two women (one who betrayed him for his friend), how his heart was breaking from a long separation with his son, how he was exiled from Russia (and yet later became a Nobel Laureate)…
In his poems Brodsky often compared different substances to the sea: himself, speech, but most often – time. His favorite formula was “fate is time with a mixture of geography” and he often spoke about “the city at the sea.” In Brodsky’s mind, water was the supreme element; and the sea his favorite form of water.
Three cities and their seas shared and shaped the poetry of Joseph Brodsky: St. Petersburg, New York and Venice.
“I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-grey breakers that always marched on in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan, flat voice that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all...”
The Baltic was his first sea.
Brodsky was born on 24 May 1940 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia where he survived the 900-day Nazi siege during the Second World War.
His father, Aleksandr Ivanovich Brodsky, was a professional photographer who worked for the main Soviet news agency “TASS,” and the newspaper “Izvestiya.” During the war his father was a press photographer for the army newspaper at the Leningrad front and after the war he served at the Leningrad Naval Museum. Brodsky’s mother, Maria Moiseyevna Volpert, was a professional interpreter who translated German during the war and afterwards worked as an accountant.
Joseph was an only child. When he was a boy, he dreamed of becoming a submariner. As a grown man, he considered the insignia of the Imperial Russian Navy (the St. Andrew’s banner) to be the most beautiful flag in the world. However when Brodsky was asked to recall his childhood, he rather reluctantly reflected: “Russians do not emphasize their childhood, at least I do not. It was just an ordinary childhood. I do not think that a child’s impressions need play a big role in the person’s further development.”
Relatively early in life Brodsky decided to become his own teacher. In 1955, at the age of 14, he gave up going to school. “It was a spontaneous move rather than a deliberate decision. One winter morning in the middle of a school lesson, for no obvious reason whatsoever, I left the classroom, clearly realizing that I would never return there,” Brodsky later wrote. It was in this year - at the age of 14 - that he began writing poems.
Upon leaving school he got a job as a metal worker in the “Arsenal” factory. His main goal at that time, however, was self education, mainly through reading. Brodsky recalled: “It was at first just an accrual of knowledge. Then it turned into the most important occupation to which everything could be sacrificed. Books became the main and the only reality.”
Brodsky often changed his jobs in an attempt to find a source of income which would spare him more time for reading and writing. Later, in a 1964 court hearing there were listed at least 13 trades which he had tried in less than a decade. These included stoker, photographer, interpreter, technician-geophysicist and even a sanitary job in the morgue at the “Kresty” prison, where he would be detained a few years later.
Brodsky joined a geological organization because it gave him the opportunity to attend university lectures as an external student. In 1959, during one of the group’s expeditions to Yakutsk, Brodsky bought a book of poems by Baratynsky in a local bookstore. Having read it once, he decided to devote most of his time to becoming a poet. “I had nothing to read. When I found this book and read it I understood what I should devote myself to. I became very excited… So, it is all Baratynsky’s fault,” Brodsky later recalled.
Brodsky burst upon the literary scene as a mature, audacious author. He differed from others in his openness, lyricism and abruptness. Many of his poems appeared on mimeographed sheets, known as samizdat, and were circulated among friends. For years he had been perfecting his skill by studying languages and the history of literature. He began joining street corner recitations and reading poems at literary soirees. “He recited as if in a trance,” one listener recalled, adding “his verbal and musical intensity had a magical effect.”
Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation.
It was either Dmitry Bobyshev or another friend, Evgeny Rein (both famous Russian poets), who introduced Brodsky to Akhmatova in 1961. The meeting was a turning point in Brodsky’s life as a poet - and as a man. Anna Akhmatova and her circle functioned as an unofficial incubator for talented youth. Anna praised Brodsky’s poetry as “enchanting,” and encouraged him to keep writing. He called her “the keening muse.”
During this time, in 1962, Joseph Brodsky met his first love, the artist Marina Basmanova. With her deep voice, talent, charm and natural flair, she was a “femme fatale.” She believed herself to be the most beautiful woman, and Brodsky believed himself to be the best poet – two strong characters collided and did not want to yield to each other. They seemed to quarrel and become reconciled “millions of times.” There were periods when they managed to separate and reunite 20 times in one year. Contemporaries recall, it was an “alloy” of love and hatred.
In 1963, the USSR launched a state program, cracking down on unofficial art. Brodsky was heavily attacked by official critics. Like other literary figures, he began to chafe under the scrupulously observed new restrictions, and was allowed neither to travel nor to give his usual poetry readings. Brodsky’s poems - mostly unpublished except in underground forums - became increasingly popular and ran afoul of the literary police.
This was the year Brodsky was first denounced in the newspaper “The Evening Leningrad,” which called his poetry “pornographic and anti-Soviet.”
Brodsky was in danger. To avoid arrest his friends persuaded him to escape to Moscow. But the poet did not stay there long, as he was told that Marina was being unfaithful to him. So he decided to return to Leningrad.
Before escaping to Moscow, Brodsky had asked his close friend and fellow poet, Dmitry Bobyshev, to look after Marina in his absence. But this “care” resulted in a love affair between Marina and Dmitry – a double betrayal which broke Brodsky’s heart.
Up until his death, Brodsky couldn’t stand anything connected with the Bobyshev name. If Brodsky learnt that one of his friends communicated with Bobyshev, it is said that he then broke the relationship with that friend.
On 13 February 1964 Brodsky was accused of publishing his poems underground. He was arrested on the streets of Leningrad and sent to “Kresty” prison to await his trial which took place on 13 March 1964 in Leningrad.
Unable to fault him on his poetry’s content, the authorities indicted him on a charge of “parasitism.” They called him “a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers” who failed to fulfill his “constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland.” Meanwhile Brodsky was sent to a mental institution, where his three week long treatment became a mere exercise in humiliation. Eventually the poet was found mentally sane and able to work. Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labor. He was exiled to the village of Norenskaya in the northern Arkhangelsk Region.
Marina Basmanova went to live with Brodsky in his exile for several months. She gave birth to their son, Andrey. But Marina and Brodsky never married. Moreover, Marina didn’t give the child Brodsky’s surname and prohibited Brodsky from seeing his son, who now lives with his wife and family in St. Petersburg. When Brodsky was alive, Andrey visited him in the U.S.
The unfair trial and exile of Joseph Brodsky caused protests from many prominent people both at home and abroad, such as Korney Chukovsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, Evgeny Yevtushenko, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and others. They signed a letter with a demand to release the poet. In 1965 Brodsky’s sentence was commuted and Dmitry Shostakovich helped him to return to Leningrad.
After his return to Leningrad the harassment resumed, but so did Brodsky’s work and some of it began to appear in the West – his first collection of poetry “Verses and Poems” was published in the U.S. in 1965. Over the next seven years he continued to write. Many of his poems were translated into German, French and English and published abroad. His stature and popularity continued to grow, particularly in the West.
In 1971 Brodsky received two invitations to immigrate to Israel. When he was summoned to the Soviet Ministry of the Interior and asked why he had not accepted, he said he had no wish to leave his country. Many contemporaries suggest that Brodsky didn’t want to go abroad because he kept on waiting for Marina to come back to him and to let him see his son Andrey. But she never did.
Eventually Brodsky made up his mind to leave. In 1972 he was issued a visa and expelled from his home country. But he did not go to Israel.
Karl Proffer, a philology scholar, invited Brodsky to become a poet in residence at Michigan University in the United States. Brodsky also received invitations from England and France, but in the end chose the U.S. “There was a certain point and charm in remaining in Europe, but then I would have had a feeling of ongoing life. So I thought that since my life was changing, let it be a total change,” Brodsky said, explaining his decision.
Brodsky died of a heart attack on 28 March 1996 in New York, at the age of 55, but was buried on the Island of San Michele, Venice, according to his will. His wife Maria works now in a publishing house in Italy and is one of the members of the Board of Directors of the Brodsky Fund. Each year on the 24th of May – Brodsky’s birthday – Maria goes to Venice…
As fate willed, Joseph Brodsky and the sea have always been inseparably linked - in Leningrad, in New-York and in Venice."
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In her personal memoir of Joseph Brodsky, his American friend and publisher Ellendea Proffer Teasley offers much previously unknown material about the great poet’s life in Leningrad, his leaving Russia and his career in the New World. Written in English, Teasley’s book had first come out in Russia to enjoy phenomenal reception and become a bestseller. In 2017 it was finally published in Boston by Academic Studies Press, in a book series on Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe. In her presentation, Dr. Teasley will discuss her book about Brodsky, how she wrote it, and how it was received first in Russia, Brodsky’s native country, and later in the US, his adopted country.
Dr. Ellendea Proffer Teasley co-founded Ardis Publishers and Russian Literature Triquarterly with Carl Proffer. She is the author and editor of various books, including Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography, Mikhail Bulgakov: Life & Work and, most recently, Brodsky Among Us. She is a MacArthur Fellow.
April 18, 2018
Speakers:
Ellendea Proffer Teasley, Author; Co-founder, Ardis Publishers and Russian Literature Triquarterly
Moderator: Maxim D. Shrayer, Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies, Boston College; Director, Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry; Center Associate, Davis Center
Cosponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. The Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry has been made possible with the generous support of Genesis Philanthropy Group. Additional support for this event provided by the Leon I. Mirell Fund."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FuBDigwrQw
Images:
1. Joseph Brodsky and his daughter Anna Alexandra Maria Sozztsani.
2. Poets Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky
3. Joseph Brodsky with a cat on his shoulder
4. Joseph Brodsky and Ellendea Proffer in St. Petersburg, 1970.
Background from [{https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/joseph-brodsky/]}
Prominent Russians: Joseph Brodsky
May 24, 1940 - March 28, 1996
Joseph Brodsky is considered one of the greatest poets to ever have lived. In his works, he shared his life with the reader - how he went to prison for his beliefs, how he loved two women (one who betrayed him for his friend), how his heart was breaking from a long separation with his son, how he was exiled from Russia (and yet later became a Nobel Laureate)…
In his poems Brodsky often compared different substances to the sea: himself, speech, but most often – time. His favorite formula was “fate is time with a mixture of geography” and he often spoke about “the city at the sea.” In Brodsky’s mind, water was the supreme element; and the sea his favorite form of water.
Three cities and their seas shared and shaped the poetry of Joseph Brodsky: St. Petersburg, New York and Venice.
“I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-grey breakers that always marched on in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan, flat voice that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all...”
The Baltic was his first sea.
Brodsky was born on 24 May 1940 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia where he survived the 900-day Nazi siege during the Second World War.
His father, Aleksandr Ivanovich Brodsky, was a professional photographer who worked for the main Soviet news agency “TASS,” and the newspaper “Izvestiya.” During the war his father was a press photographer for the army newspaper at the Leningrad front and after the war he served at the Leningrad Naval Museum. Brodsky’s mother, Maria Moiseyevna Volpert, was a professional interpreter who translated German during the war and afterwards worked as an accountant.
Joseph was an only child. When he was a boy, he dreamed of becoming a submariner. As a grown man, he considered the insignia of the Imperial Russian Navy (the St. Andrew’s banner) to be the most beautiful flag in the world. However when Brodsky was asked to recall his childhood, he rather reluctantly reflected: “Russians do not emphasize their childhood, at least I do not. It was just an ordinary childhood. I do not think that a child’s impressions need play a big role in the person’s further development.”
Relatively early in life Brodsky decided to become his own teacher. In 1955, at the age of 14, he gave up going to school. “It was a spontaneous move rather than a deliberate decision. One winter morning in the middle of a school lesson, for no obvious reason whatsoever, I left the classroom, clearly realizing that I would never return there,” Brodsky later wrote. It was in this year - at the age of 14 - that he began writing poems.
Upon leaving school he got a job as a metal worker in the “Arsenal” factory. His main goal at that time, however, was self education, mainly through reading. Brodsky recalled: “It was at first just an accrual of knowledge. Then it turned into the most important occupation to which everything could be sacrificed. Books became the main and the only reality.”
Brodsky often changed his jobs in an attempt to find a source of income which would spare him more time for reading and writing. Later, in a 1964 court hearing there were listed at least 13 trades which he had tried in less than a decade. These included stoker, photographer, interpreter, technician-geophysicist and even a sanitary job in the morgue at the “Kresty” prison, where he would be detained a few years later.
Brodsky joined a geological organization because it gave him the opportunity to attend university lectures as an external student. In 1959, during one of the group’s expeditions to Yakutsk, Brodsky bought a book of poems by Baratynsky in a local bookstore. Having read it once, he decided to devote most of his time to becoming a poet. “I had nothing to read. When I found this book and read it I understood what I should devote myself to. I became very excited… So, it is all Baratynsky’s fault,” Brodsky later recalled.
Brodsky burst upon the literary scene as a mature, audacious author. He differed from others in his openness, lyricism and abruptness. Many of his poems appeared on mimeographed sheets, known as samizdat, and were circulated among friends. For years he had been perfecting his skill by studying languages and the history of literature. He began joining street corner recitations and reading poems at literary soirees. “He recited as if in a trance,” one listener recalled, adding “his verbal and musical intensity had a magical effect.”
Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation.
It was either Dmitry Bobyshev or another friend, Evgeny Rein (both famous Russian poets), who introduced Brodsky to Akhmatova in 1961. The meeting was a turning point in Brodsky’s life as a poet - and as a man. Anna Akhmatova and her circle functioned as an unofficial incubator for talented youth. Anna praised Brodsky’s poetry as “enchanting,” and encouraged him to keep writing. He called her “the keening muse.”
During this time, in 1962, Joseph Brodsky met his first love, the artist Marina Basmanova. With her deep voice, talent, charm and natural flair, she was a “femme fatale.” She believed herself to be the most beautiful woman, and Brodsky believed himself to be the best poet – two strong characters collided and did not want to yield to each other. They seemed to quarrel and become reconciled “millions of times.” There were periods when they managed to separate and reunite 20 times in one year. Contemporaries recall, it was an “alloy” of love and hatred.
In 1963, the USSR launched a state program, cracking down on unofficial art. Brodsky was heavily attacked by official critics. Like other literary figures, he began to chafe under the scrupulously observed new restrictions, and was allowed neither to travel nor to give his usual poetry readings. Brodsky’s poems - mostly unpublished except in underground forums - became increasingly popular and ran afoul of the literary police.
This was the year Brodsky was first denounced in the newspaper “The Evening Leningrad,” which called his poetry “pornographic and anti-Soviet.”
Brodsky was in danger. To avoid arrest his friends persuaded him to escape to Moscow. But the poet did not stay there long, as he was told that Marina was being unfaithful to him. So he decided to return to Leningrad.
Before escaping to Moscow, Brodsky had asked his close friend and fellow poet, Dmitry Bobyshev, to look after Marina in his absence. But this “care” resulted in a love affair between Marina and Dmitry – a double betrayal which broke Brodsky’s heart.
Up until his death, Brodsky couldn’t stand anything connected with the Bobyshev name. If Brodsky learnt that one of his friends communicated with Bobyshev, it is said that he then broke the relationship with that friend.
On 13 February 1964 Brodsky was accused of publishing his poems underground. He was arrested on the streets of Leningrad and sent to “Kresty” prison to await his trial which took place on 13 March 1964 in Leningrad.
Unable to fault him on his poetry’s content, the authorities indicted him on a charge of “parasitism.” They called him “a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers” who failed to fulfill his “constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland.” Meanwhile Brodsky was sent to a mental institution, where his three week long treatment became a mere exercise in humiliation. Eventually the poet was found mentally sane and able to work. Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labor. He was exiled to the village of Norenskaya in the northern Arkhangelsk Region.
Marina Basmanova went to live with Brodsky in his exile for several months. She gave birth to their son, Andrey. But Marina and Brodsky never married. Moreover, Marina didn’t give the child Brodsky’s surname and prohibited Brodsky from seeing his son, who now lives with his wife and family in St. Petersburg. When Brodsky was alive, Andrey visited him in the U.S.
The unfair trial and exile of Joseph Brodsky caused protests from many prominent people both at home and abroad, such as Korney Chukovsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, Evgeny Yevtushenko, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and others. They signed a letter with a demand to release the poet. In 1965 Brodsky’s sentence was commuted and Dmitry Shostakovich helped him to return to Leningrad.
After his return to Leningrad the harassment resumed, but so did Brodsky’s work and some of it began to appear in the West – his first collection of poetry “Verses and Poems” was published in the U.S. in 1965. Over the next seven years he continued to write. Many of his poems were translated into German, French and English and published abroad. His stature and popularity continued to grow, particularly in the West.
In 1971 Brodsky received two invitations to immigrate to Israel. When he was summoned to the Soviet Ministry of the Interior and asked why he had not accepted, he said he had no wish to leave his country. Many contemporaries suggest that Brodsky didn’t want to go abroad because he kept on waiting for Marina to come back to him and to let him see his son Andrey. But she never did.
Eventually Brodsky made up his mind to leave. In 1972 he was issued a visa and expelled from his home country. But he did not go to Israel.
Karl Proffer, a philology scholar, invited Brodsky to become a poet in residence at Michigan University in the United States. Brodsky also received invitations from England and France, but in the end chose the U.S. “There was a certain point and charm in remaining in Europe, but then I would have had a feeling of ongoing life. So I thought that since my life was changing, let it be a total change,” Brodsky said, explaining his decision.
Brodsky died of a heart attack on 28 March 1996 in New York, at the age of 55, but was buried on the Island of San Michele, Venice, according to his will. His wife Maria works now in a publishing house in Italy and is one of the members of the Board of Directors of the Brodsky Fund. Each year on the 24th of May – Brodsky’s birthday – Maria goes to Venice…
As fate willed, Joseph Brodsky and the sea have always been inseparably linked - in Leningrad, in New-York and in Venice."
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LTC Stephen F.
Auro Pasqualini legge Canzone d'amore di Iosif Brodskij (1995)
Canzone d’amore Se tu stessi annegando, ti verrei in soccorso, ti darei una coperta e ti verserei un tè caldo.Se io fossi uno sceriffo, ti arresterei s...
Auro Pasqualini legge Canzone d'amore di Iosif Brodskij (1995)
Italian short film on the love of Joseph Brodsky and his wife Maria Sozzani.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkWjDvHwJgU
Images:
1. Joseph Brodsky and the love of his life, his wife Maria Sozzani
2. Brodsky during his lecture. Photo from the archives of the University of Michigan.
3. Joseph Brodsky and his wife Maria Sozzani.
4. Granddaughter of Brodsky Pelagia Basmanova
Background from {[https://www.forumdaily.com/en/iosif-brodskij-i-mariya-soccani-5-samyx-schastlivyx-amerikanskix-let-zhizni-poeta/]}
Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani: 5 of the happiest American years of the poet's life
Friends and relatives of the poet Joseph Brodsky stubbornly keep silence about his personal life. Maria Sotstsani is ready to discuss the work of her husband Brodsky, but she never supports the conversation about their family. Only one thing is known: Joseph Brodsky was very happy the last five years of his life, which he spent in the United States,
Emigration
4 June 1972, the plane took Joseph Brodsky to Vienna. He was deprived of his citizenship and forced to leave his homeland. In Vienna, Karl Proffer was waiting for him, who immediately voiced an invitation to work from the University of Michigan.
Brodsky was not at all inclined to make a sacrifice of himself. He spent some time in Europe, met with Western writers and went to the United States to begin work as a guest poet. Talented, received recognition of the world community, not even having a full secondary education, he became one of the most favorite lecturers of the university. And then he began to read his lectures in Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden, England, USA, Italy.
He did not study pedagogy and did not own any methods. But he entered the audience and began his constant dialogue about poetry, its meaning in life. As a result, a lecture, a seminar, a forum or just a meeting turned into an exciting poetic act.
True, often the manner of teaching shocked his colleagues, but they had to come to terms with the vagaries of genius. He could smoke during a lecture and drink coffee. Soon it was not surprising to anyone, it was even strange to imagine Brodsky without a cigarette.
His fame grew. It was already possible to talk not about what he did and what he wrote about, being a citizen of the Soviet Union, but about how much he had managed, having changed his citizenship.
Loneliness
The poet, who, shortly before emigration, suffered a heavy break from his beloved, and then turned out to be simply thrown out of his country, found solace in his work and teaching.
In 1976, he suffered a first heart attack, and in 1978, he had a heart surgery. Joseph Brodsky needed postoperative care and care for loved ones. But his parents were again and again denied the right to see his son. He was not allowed to feel the warmth of parental hands. Brodsky's father and mother died without seeing their son.
There was in his life a long and tragic love story with Marina Basmanova. In this relationship, as if incinerated himself. He could not forgive his lover neither her betrayal, nor his own loneliness.
Celebrating his fiftieth birthday in May 1990, Joseph Brodsky says: “God decided otherwise: I was destined to die single. The writer is a lone traveler. ” But this prophecy did not come true.
He was quite lonely and always stressed that loneliness allows him to create sharper and more productive. Perhaps that is why for a long time he did not make any serious relations with women. But then a beautiful Italian with Russian roots appeared in his life.
Maria Sozzani
They first met at the Sorbonne in January 1990. At the lecture of the poet Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate, flew Italian Maria Sozzani. Charming beauty, studying the history of Russian literature. Her mother comes from a Russian noble family, her father works in a high position in the Pirelli company.
It is unlikely that the poet then singled out Mary from the crowd, too many people attended his lectures. But he soon received a letter from her from Italy. And for several months, postal letters became a connecting thread between the great poet and a young Italian student.
Already in the summer, Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani leave for Sweden together. It was in Sweden that Brodsky very often visited. 1 September 1990 was a marriage of Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani, who was younger than the poet by almost 10 years 30, in the Stockholm City Hall. Bengdt Yangfeldt and his friend, a philologist-slavist and translator, helped his great poet to marry the wedding.
Family
The poet's marriage came as a surprise to both his friends and admirers of his talent. It was a very quick decision about the wedding. But Brodsky, as always, did not care about the opinions of others. For the first time in many years, he was finally, unconditionally happy. Many friends of the poet will say later that the life of Joseph Brodsky, married to Maria, turned out to be happier than all previous 50 years.
He was very gentle towards his wife, almost fatherly. If you look at the photos of Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani, it is impossible not to notice some kind of inner luminous glow of both.
On Christmas 1993 of the year, 25 of December a poem will appear, and many will wonder for a long time who is hiding behind the initials of the dedication. MB - this is how Brodsky always wrote verses dedicated to Marina Basmanova. But MB is the initials now his wife, Maria Brodskaya.
What is needed for a miracle? Sheepskin casing,
pinch today, a little bit yesterday,
and to handful tomorrow add to the peephole
A bit of space and sky piece.
And the miracle will happen ...
Poems dedicated to Marina were full of tragedy, expectations of something inevitable and terrible. And here there is a clear, open hope, waiting for a miracle. And the miracle really happened, however, a little earlier.
In the same year, 1993, Joseph and Maria gave birth to little Anna. The family spoke English, but Maria tried to teach her daughter Russian, so that she could later read the works of her great father in the original.
He loved his Nyusha immensely, spending every free minute with her. But 28 January 1996, the poet's heart stopped. He went up to his office to work, in the morning his wife found him dead ... And Nyusha will dictate letters to her mother for a long time and ask him to tie them to a ball that will fly to her father.
Today Anna Alexandra Maria Sozztsani, who has matured, gets acquainted with the work of her father and admits that for her this is communication with the closest person.
As he wrote ForumDaily Anna Alexandra Brodskaya-Sozzani lives in Italy, where she recently moved from England. The granddaughter of Brodsky Pelagia Basmanova, the daughter of Sergey's son from his first marriage, lives with his family in St. Petersburg, where he studies at the Interregional Institute of Economics and Law at the Faculty of Communicative Design. A student who is very similar to her grandmother, the poet's first love, dreams of opening her own branding agency.
Maria transported the body of her spouse to Venice. And she returned from America to her homeland, in Italy. Joseph Brodsky handed over his entire archive to the Russian National Library before the 1972 year, and shortly before his death, he left instructions to close access to personal records for exactly 50 years after his death. Literary heritage is open to study and research. The great poet wanted to be judged by his creativity, and not by the stories about his private life."
FYI LTC Hillary Luton SSG Diane R. SPC Diana D. SFC (Join to see) Sgt Kelli Mays PO3 Phyllis Maynard Maj Kim Patterson SPC Margaret Higgins SPC Nancy Greene SPC Chris Bayner-Cwik SP5 Jeannie Carle SSgt Marian Mitchell
Italian short film on the love of Joseph Brodsky and his wife Maria Sozzani.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkWjDvHwJgU
Images:
1. Joseph Brodsky and the love of his life, his wife Maria Sozzani
2. Brodsky during his lecture. Photo from the archives of the University of Michigan.
3. Joseph Brodsky and his wife Maria Sozzani.
4. Granddaughter of Brodsky Pelagia Basmanova
Background from {[https://www.forumdaily.com/en/iosif-brodskij-i-mariya-soccani-5-samyx-schastlivyx-amerikanskix-let-zhizni-poeta/]}
Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani: 5 of the happiest American years of the poet's life
Friends and relatives of the poet Joseph Brodsky stubbornly keep silence about his personal life. Maria Sotstsani is ready to discuss the work of her husband Brodsky, but she never supports the conversation about their family. Only one thing is known: Joseph Brodsky was very happy the last five years of his life, which he spent in the United States,
Emigration
4 June 1972, the plane took Joseph Brodsky to Vienna. He was deprived of his citizenship and forced to leave his homeland. In Vienna, Karl Proffer was waiting for him, who immediately voiced an invitation to work from the University of Michigan.
Brodsky was not at all inclined to make a sacrifice of himself. He spent some time in Europe, met with Western writers and went to the United States to begin work as a guest poet. Talented, received recognition of the world community, not even having a full secondary education, he became one of the most favorite lecturers of the university. And then he began to read his lectures in Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden, England, USA, Italy.
He did not study pedagogy and did not own any methods. But he entered the audience and began his constant dialogue about poetry, its meaning in life. As a result, a lecture, a seminar, a forum or just a meeting turned into an exciting poetic act.
True, often the manner of teaching shocked his colleagues, but they had to come to terms with the vagaries of genius. He could smoke during a lecture and drink coffee. Soon it was not surprising to anyone, it was even strange to imagine Brodsky without a cigarette.
His fame grew. It was already possible to talk not about what he did and what he wrote about, being a citizen of the Soviet Union, but about how much he had managed, having changed his citizenship.
Loneliness
The poet, who, shortly before emigration, suffered a heavy break from his beloved, and then turned out to be simply thrown out of his country, found solace in his work and teaching.
In 1976, he suffered a first heart attack, and in 1978, he had a heart surgery. Joseph Brodsky needed postoperative care and care for loved ones. But his parents were again and again denied the right to see his son. He was not allowed to feel the warmth of parental hands. Brodsky's father and mother died without seeing their son.
There was in his life a long and tragic love story with Marina Basmanova. In this relationship, as if incinerated himself. He could not forgive his lover neither her betrayal, nor his own loneliness.
Celebrating his fiftieth birthday in May 1990, Joseph Brodsky says: “God decided otherwise: I was destined to die single. The writer is a lone traveler. ” But this prophecy did not come true.
He was quite lonely and always stressed that loneliness allows him to create sharper and more productive. Perhaps that is why for a long time he did not make any serious relations with women. But then a beautiful Italian with Russian roots appeared in his life.
Maria Sozzani
They first met at the Sorbonne in January 1990. At the lecture of the poet Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate, flew Italian Maria Sozzani. Charming beauty, studying the history of Russian literature. Her mother comes from a Russian noble family, her father works in a high position in the Pirelli company.
It is unlikely that the poet then singled out Mary from the crowd, too many people attended his lectures. But he soon received a letter from her from Italy. And for several months, postal letters became a connecting thread between the great poet and a young Italian student.
Already in the summer, Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani leave for Sweden together. It was in Sweden that Brodsky very often visited. 1 September 1990 was a marriage of Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani, who was younger than the poet by almost 10 years 30, in the Stockholm City Hall. Bengdt Yangfeldt and his friend, a philologist-slavist and translator, helped his great poet to marry the wedding.
Family
The poet's marriage came as a surprise to both his friends and admirers of his talent. It was a very quick decision about the wedding. But Brodsky, as always, did not care about the opinions of others. For the first time in many years, he was finally, unconditionally happy. Many friends of the poet will say later that the life of Joseph Brodsky, married to Maria, turned out to be happier than all previous 50 years.
He was very gentle towards his wife, almost fatherly. If you look at the photos of Joseph Brodsky and Maria Sozzani, it is impossible not to notice some kind of inner luminous glow of both.
On Christmas 1993 of the year, 25 of December a poem will appear, and many will wonder for a long time who is hiding behind the initials of the dedication. MB - this is how Brodsky always wrote verses dedicated to Marina Basmanova. But MB is the initials now his wife, Maria Brodskaya.
What is needed for a miracle? Sheepskin casing,
pinch today, a little bit yesterday,
and to handful tomorrow add to the peephole
A bit of space and sky piece.
And the miracle will happen ...
Poems dedicated to Marina were full of tragedy, expectations of something inevitable and terrible. And here there is a clear, open hope, waiting for a miracle. And the miracle really happened, however, a little earlier.
In the same year, 1993, Joseph and Maria gave birth to little Anna. The family spoke English, but Maria tried to teach her daughter Russian, so that she could later read the works of her great father in the original.
He loved his Nyusha immensely, spending every free minute with her. But 28 January 1996, the poet's heart stopped. He went up to his office to work, in the morning his wife found him dead ... And Nyusha will dictate letters to her mother for a long time and ask him to tie them to a ball that will fly to her father.
Today Anna Alexandra Maria Sozztsani, who has matured, gets acquainted with the work of her father and admits that for her this is communication with the closest person.
As he wrote ForumDaily Anna Alexandra Brodskaya-Sozzani lives in Italy, where she recently moved from England. The granddaughter of Brodsky Pelagia Basmanova, the daughter of Sergey's son from his first marriage, lives with his family in St. Petersburg, where he studies at the Interregional Institute of Economics and Law at the Faculty of Communicative Design. A student who is very similar to her grandmother, the poet's first love, dreams of opening her own branding agency.
Maria transported the body of her spouse to Venice. And she returned from America to her homeland, in Italy. Joseph Brodsky handed over his entire archive to the Russian National Library before the 1972 year, and shortly before his death, he left instructions to close access to personal records for exactly 50 years after his death. Literary heritage is open to study and research. The great poet wanted to be judged by his creativity, and not by the stories about his private life."
FYI LTC Hillary Luton SSG Diane R. SPC Diana D. SFC (Join to see) Sgt Kelli Mays PO3 Phyllis Maynard Maj Kim Patterson SPC Margaret Higgins SPC Nancy Greene SPC Chris Bayner-Cwik SP5 Jeannie Carle SSgt Marian Mitchell
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LTC Stephen F. - I was amazed he became Poet Laureate of the United States. When asked once if he were a Russian or an American, he answered, "I'm Jewish; a Russian poet, an English essayist – and, of course, an American citizen"
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