Joseph Brodsky - biography. Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky. Biographical information Brodsky years of life and death

When talking about the great poets of the 20th century, one cannot fail to mention the work of Joseph Brodsky. He is a very significant figure in the world of poetry. Brodsky had a difficult biography - persecution, misunderstanding, trial and exile. This prompted the author to leave for the USA, where he received public recognition.

Dissident poet Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad. The boy's father worked as a war photographer, his mother as an accountant. When the “purge” of Jews took place among the officers in 1950, my father went to work as a photojournalist for a newspaper.

Joseph's childhood coincided with war, the siege of Leningrad, and famine. The family survived, like hundreds of thousands of people. In 1942, Joseph’s mother took him and evacuated to Cherepovets. They returned to Leningrad after the war.

Brodsky dropped out of school as soon as he entered the 8th grade. He wanted to help his family financially, so he went to work at a factory as an assistant milling machine operator. Then Joseph wanted to become a guide, but it didn’t work out. At one time he had a burning desire to become a doctor and even went to work in a morgue, but soon changed his mind. Over the course of several years, Joseph Brodsky changed many professions: all this time he voraciously read poetry, philosophical treatises, studied foreign languages, and even planned to hijack a plane with his friends to escape from the Soviet Union. True, things did not go further than plans.

Literature

Brodsky said that he began writing poetry at the age of 18, although there are several poems written at the age of 16-17. In the early period of his work, he wrote “A Christmas Romance”, “Monument to Pushkin”, “From the Outskirts to the Center” and other poems. Subsequently, the author’s style was strongly influenced by poetry, and they became the young man’s personal canon.

Brodsky met Akhmatova in 1961. She never doubted the talent of the young poet and supported Joseph’s work, believing in success. Brodsky himself was not particularly impressed by Anna Andreevna’s poems, but he admired the scale of the personality of the Soviet poetess.

The first work that alerted the Soviet Power dates back to 1958. The poem was called "Pilgrims". Next he wrote “Loneliness”. There Brodsky tried to rethink what was happening to him and how to get out of the current situation, when newspapers and magazines closed their doors to the poet.

In January 1964, the same “Evening Leningrad” published letters from “indignant citizens” demanding that the poet be punished, and on February 13, the writer was arrested for parasitism. The next day he suffered a heart attack in his cell. Brodsky’s thoughts of that period are clearly discernible in the poems “Hello, my aging” and “What can I say about life?”

The persecution that began placed a heavy burden on the poet. The situation worsened due to a breakdown in relations with his beloved Marina Basmanova. As a result, Brodsky attempted to die, but was unsuccessful.

The persecution continued until May 1972, when Brodsky was given a choice - a psychiatric hospital or emigration. Joseph Alexandrovich had already been to a mental hospital, and, as he said, it was much worse than prison. Brodsky chose emigration. In 1977, the poet accepted American citizenship.

Before leaving his native country, the poet tried to stay in Russia. He sent a letter himself asking for permission to live in the country at least as a translator. But the future Nobel laureate was never heard.

Joseph Brodsky participated in the International Poetry Festival in London. Then he taught the history of Russian literature and poetry at the University of Michigan, Columbia and New York University. At the same time, he wrote essays in English and translated poetry into English. Brodsky's collection Less Than One was published in 1986, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In the period 1985-1989, the poet wrote “In Memory of the Father,” “Performance” and the essay “A Room and a Half.” These poems and prose contain all the pain of a person who was not allowed to see his parents off on their last journey.

When perestroika began in the USSR, Iosif Aleksandrovich’s poems were actively published in literary magazines and newspapers. In 1990, the poet’s books began to be published in the Soviet Union. Brodsky received invitations from his homeland more than once, but constantly delayed this visit - he did not want the attention of the press and publicity. The difficulty of returning is reflected in the poems “Ithaca”, “Letter to the Oasis” and others.

Personal life

Joseph Brodsky's first great love was the artist Marina Basmanova, whom he met in 1962. They dated for a long time, then lived together. In 1968, Marina and Joseph had a son, Andrei, but with the birth of the child, the relationship worsened. They separated that same year.

In 1990, he met Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat with Russian roots on her mother’s side. That same year, Brodsky married her, and three years later their daughter Anna was born. Unfortunately, Joseph Brodsky was not destined to see his daughter grow up.

The poet is known as a famous smoker. Despite undergoing four heart surgeries, he never quit smoking. Doctors strongly advised Brodsky to give up the addiction, to which he replied: “Life is wonderful precisely because there are no guarantees, none ever.”

Joseph Brodsky also loved cats. He claimed that these creatures do not have a single ugly movement. In many photos, the creator is photographed with a cat in his arms.

With the support of the writer, the Russian Samovar restaurant opened in New York. The co-owners of the establishment were Roman Kaplan and. Joseph Brodsky invested part of the money from the Nobel Prize into this project. The restaurant has become a landmark of “Russian” New York.

Death

He suffered from angina pectoris even before emigration. The poet's health was unstable. In 1978, he underwent heart surgery, and the American clinic sent an official letter to the USSR asking that Joseph’s parents be allowed to travel to care for their son. The parents themselves submitted a petition 12 times, but each time they were refused. From 1964 to 1994, Brodsky suffered 4 heart attacks, and he never saw his parents again. The writer's mother died in 1983, and a year later his father passed away. The Soviet authorities refused his request to come to the funeral. The death of his parents undermined the poet's health.

On the evening of January 27, 1996, Joseph Brodsky folded his briefcase, wished his wife good night and went up to his office - he had to work before the start of the spring semester. On the morning of January 28, 1996, the wife found her husband without any signs of life. Doctors declared death from a heart attack.

Two weeks before his death, the poet bought himself a place in a cemetery in New York, not far from Broadway. There he was buried, fulfilling the last will of the dissident poet, who loved his homeland until his last breath.

In June 1997, the body of Joseph Brodsky was reburied in Venice at the San Michele cemetery.

In 2005, the first monument to the poet was opened in St. Petersburg.

Bibliography

• 1965 – “Poems and Poems”
• 1982 – “Roman Elegies”
• 1984 – “Marble”
• 1987 – “Urania”
• 1988 – “Stop in the Desert”
• 1990 – “Fern Notes”
• 1991 – “Poems”
• 1993 – “Cappadocia. Poetry"
• 1995 – “In the vicinity of Atlantis. New poems"
• 1992-1995 – “Works of Joseph Brodsky”

BRODSKY JOSEPH ALEXANDROVICH

(b. 1940 – d. 1996)

Poet, Nobel Prize winner (1987). Collections of poems “Stop in the Desert”, “The End of the Belle Epoque”, “Part of Speech”, “Urania”, “New Stanzas for Augusta”, “Landscape with Flood”, “Change of the Empire”, “Hills. Great poems and poems”, “In the vicinity of Antarctica”, “New poems”; books and essays “On Sorrow and Reason”, “Less than One”; play "Marble".

Joseph Brodsky is often called the last poet of the Silver Age, although perhaps he is generally the last great Russian poet of the past century. The concept of the Silver Age refers not so much to time as to the level of culture. Brodsky was a man of the highest culture, perfectly mastered several languages, had an excellent knowledge of world poetry, and was familiar with the best poets of his time. Following his predecessors, the great poets of the Golden Age, he managed to create his own poetry, coming from the very depths of consciousness, his own figurative language.

Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad, in the family of a modest Soviet employee who held the position of photojournalist in the Baltic Fleet magazine. When the child was one year old, the Great Patriotic War began. Brodsky later said about the blockade of Leningrad that he was too young to understand what was happening, he knew only from the stories of adults that hunger and bombing were constant companions of Leningraders. And his mother recalled how more than once she had to carry her little son to a shelter in a laundry basket.

Life after the war was not much happier. The family lived in a tiny room in an old communal apartment in poverty and fear of the Stalinist regime. The only consolation were books; they, according to the poet, “kept us in absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin and Beria."

Joseph left school at the age of fifteen, having completed only eight classes, in order to start earning money. After an unsuccessful attempt to enter the naval school, he changed several jobs. He was a milling operator at a factory, a stoker in a boiler room, a lighthouse keeper, and thought about becoming a doctor, for which he even got a job as a morgue orderly. The romance of wandering took him on a trip around the country as part of a geological expedition, with which Brodsky visited Siberia, Yakutia, the Far East and the Tien Shan. From an early age, he did not seek prosperity, adhering to his formula: “a person should not make a feast out of his suffering.” This is probably why Brodsky bore the burden of independent life, and then difficult trials, easily and almost carefree. Moreover, in these conditions he found time for self-education, read a lot, and studied languages.

At the age of sixteen, Joseph wrote his first poems, which attracted the attention of friends and acquaintances. The poems were not published, but the young poet had the opportunity to speak with them in front of a large student audience, who enthusiastically received every line.

The year 1960 became for the 20-year-old poet the time of acquaintance with many famous Leningrad poets: D. Bobyshev, A. Naiman, E. Rein. Many years later Brodsky would call the latter his teacher. In the same year, he met Anna Akhmatova, who dedicated one of her quatrains to him:

I won’t pay for mine anymore,

But I wouldn’t see it on earth

Golden Badge of Failure

On a still serene brow.

Akhmatova, who treated the young poet with admiration and tenderness, predicted a glorious fate and a difficult life for him in the 1960s. Brodsky felt great support from Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, the widow of his beloved poet. One of the poet’s acquaintances, Y. Gordin, recalled: “The defining feature of Joseph in those days was perfect naturalness, organic behavior. He never aspired to spiritual leadership, but he understood his possibilities and place quite early.”

The poet spent a year and a half in the village of Norenskoye, Arkhangelsk region, after which he was released early due, as the authorities explained, to the excessive severity of the sentence.

In 1965–1972, Brodsky lived in Leningrad, occasionally publishing his poems and translations in periodicals. The book prepared for publication was rejected by publishers, but his poems were published in the emigrant magazines “Grani”, “New Journal”, as well as in the almanac “Airways”. In 1965, the collection “Poems and Poems,” compiled without the poet’s participation, was published in New York. The first collection, “Stopping in the Desert,” compiled by the poet himself and published in New York in 1970, became the final collection of Brodsky’s early work.

The difficult situation that developed around Brodsky due to his foreign publications forced him to emigrate to the United States in the summer of 1972. Living in New York, he writes poetry and prose in English and Russian, and teaches poetry at various American universities: Michigan, Columbia, New York.

From a biographical point of view, the book “New Stanzas for Augusta” is interesting, consisting of 60 poems and subtitled “Poems for M.B., 1962–1982.” For twenty years, the same woman was the addressee of the poet’s love lyrics - a rather rare case in the history of Russian poetry.

The collection of essays “Less Than One,” recognized in 1986 as the best literary critical book in the United States, caused a great stir among the literary community.

In 1987, Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his speech when presenting the award, he spoke about his understanding of the essence of a poet and poetry: “Whoever writes a poem writes it, first of all, because versification is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, and attitude. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer able to refuse to repeat this experience; he becomes dependent on this process, just as one becomes dependent on drugs and alcohol. A person who is in such a dependence on language, I believe, is called a poet.”

Pragmatic America also recognized the talent of the Russian poet: in 1991, Joseph Brodsky took the position of poet laureate of the US Library of Congress.

Recalling his years in Russia, Brodsky once remarked: “In my homeland, a citizen can only be a slave or an enemy. I was neither one nor the other. Since the authorities did not know what to do with this third category, they expelled me.” A spiritual connection with his homeland was important to him. He kept Boris Pasternak's tie as a relic; he even wanted to wear it to the Nobel Prize ceremony, but protocol rules did not allow it. Nevertheless, Brodsky still came with Pasternak’s tie in his pocket.

After perestroika, Brodsky was invited to Russia more than once, but he never came to his homeland, which rejected him. “You can’t step into the same river twice, even if it’s the Neva,” he said. And in one of the interviews, the poet clarified his position: “I don’t want to see what the city of Leningrad, where I was born, has become, I don’t want to see signs in English, I don’t want to return to the country in which I lived and which no longer exists. You know, when you are thrown out of the country, it’s one thing, you have to come to terms with it, but when your Fatherland ceases to exist, it drives you crazy.”

Although open in his communication with friends and fellow writers, Brodsky, nevertheless, carefully hid the details of his personal life from outsiders. It is only known that in September 1990, his marriage took place with Maria Sozoni, an Italian of Russian origin from an old noble family. In June 1993, they had a daughter, who was named Anna in honor of Akhmatova.

It seemed that fame and family well-being would become a source of new energy for the poet, but years of ordeal, moral trauma, and a break with his homeland could not but affect Brodsky’s health. In the 1990s, he underwent three heart surgeries and, according to friends, refused a fourth. This was the case when the mind could no longer help the body.

Joseph Brodsky died on the night of January 27-28, 1996 from a heart attack at his home in New York. He died in his sleep, as the righteous die, people believe. According to the poet's wishes, his ashes were buried in Venice at the San Michele cemetery.

Brodsky seemed to have foreseen his fate, writing several years before his death: “The century will soon end, but I will end first.” The fact that his prophecy came true is little surprising - poets, apparently, have been given such a gift from above. More importantly, Brodsky became the last in a line of Russian geniuses who have the right to make such prophecies.

JOSEPH BRODSKY College Park, 1979 DY. You have been interviewed so many times that I am afraid that I cannot avoid repeating myself. IB. Nothing, don't be afraid... DG. On the other hand, you don’t want to miss something important. Evgeny Rein, according to you, once advised you to minimize

BRODSKY JOSEPH BRODSKY JOSEPH (poet; died on January 28, 1996 at the age of 56). Brodsky had a weak heart (he tore it back in the 60s, while in exile). In 1981, in America, he underwent surgery - bypass surgery - and doctors recommended that the poet take more care