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Biography
Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940, Leningrad — January 28, 1996, New York) was a Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright, translator, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, poet laureate of the United States 1991-1992.
Joseph Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad, in the clinic of Professor Tur on the Vyborg side.
Father Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky (1903-1984) was a military photojournalist, in 1950, as part of the purge of the officer corps from Jews, he was demobilized, after that he worked as a photographer and journalist in several Leningrad newspapers.
Mother Maria Moiseevna Volpert (1905-1983) was an accountant.
Joseph's early childhood falls on the years of war, the blockade, post war poverty and crowding, and passed without a father
In 1942, after the siege winter, Maria Moiseevna and Joseph went to Cherepovets for evacuation.
According to unconfirmed information in Cherepovets, Brodsky was baptized by a woman who looked after him.
In 1944, according to family memories, Joseph learned by heart the first poem by Pushkin.
Brodsky's aesthetic views were formed in Leningrad in the forties and fifties.
Neoclassical architecture, which was severely damaged during the bombing, the endless prospects of the St. Petersburg suburbs, water, the multiplicity of reflections — the motives associated with these childhood and youth impressions are invariably present in his work.
In 1955, at the age of less than sixteen, after finishing seven grades and starting the eighth, Brodsky left school and entered the Arsenal factory as an apprentice milling machine operator.
This decision was connected both with problems at school and with Brodsky's desire to financially support the family He tried unsuccessfully to enter the school of submariners.
At the age of 16, he caught fire with the idea of becoming a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant dissector in the morgue at the regional hospital, anatomized corpses, but eventually abandoned a medical career.
In addition, for five years after leaving school, Brodsky worked as a stoker in a boiler room, a sailor at a lighthouse, a worker in five geological expeditions.
At the same time, he read a lot and chaotically — first of all poetry and philosophically religious literature, he began to study English and Polish.
In 1959, he met Evgeny Rein, Anatoly Naiman, Vladimir Uflyand, Bulat Okudzhava.
On February 14, 1960, the first major public performance took place at the "tournament of poets" in the Gorky Leningrad Palace of Culture with the participation of A. S. Kushner, G. Ya.
Gorbovsky, V. A. Sosnora.
The reading of the poem "The Jewish Cemetery" caused a scandal.
In August 1960, in Komarov, Yevgeny Rein introduces Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova.
In 1962, during a trip to Pskov, he met N. Y. Mandelstam, and in 1963, at Akhmatova's, he met Lidia Chukovskaya.
In 1962, Brodsky met a young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova.
The first poems dedicated to "M. B."
- "I hugged these shoulders and looked...", "No longing, no love, no sadness...", "A Riddle to an angel" are dated the same year.
They finally broke up in 1968 after the birth of a common son, Andrey Basmanov.
According to his own words, Brodsky began writing poetry at the age of eighteen, but there are several poems dated 1956-1957.
One of the decisive pushes was the acquaintance with the poetry of Boris Slutsky.
"Pilgrims", "Monument to Pushkin", "Christmas Romance" are the most famous of Brodsky's early poems.
Many of them are characterized by pronounced musicality, for example, in the poems "From the outskirts to the center" and "I am the son of the suburb, the son of the suburb, the son of the suburb..." you can see rhythmic elements of jazz improvisations.
Tsvetaeva and Baratynsky, and a few years later — Mandelstam, became, according to Brodsky himself, the defining influences.
Among his contemporaries Evgeny Rein, Vladimir Uflyand, Stanislav Krasovitsky.
Later, Brodsky called Auden and Tsvetaeva the greatest poets, followed by Cavafy and Frost, Rilke, Pasternak, Mandelstam and Akhmatova closed the personal canon of the poet.
In 1961, Rein introduced Brodsky personally to the latter.
Joseph becomes one of the"Akhmatova orphans".
In 1963, the newspaper "Evening Leningrad" published an article "Near literary Drone", signed by Lerner, Medvedev and Ionin.
In the article, Brodsky was branded for a "parasitic lifestyle".
Of the poetic quotations attributed by the authors to Brodsky, two are taken from Bobyshev's poems, and the third, from Brodsky's poem "The Procession", represented the endings of six lines, from which the first halves are cut off.
Another poem was distorted by the authors of the feuilleton as follows: the first line "Love your friends' homeland through the passage" and the last "Pity someone else's homeland through the passage" were combined into one, "I love someone else's homeland".
It was obvious that the article was a signal for the persecution and, possibly, the arrest of Brodsky.
Nevertheless, according to Brodsky, more than slander, the subsequent arrest, trial, sentence, his thoughts were occupied at that time by the break with Marina Basmanova.
During this period, there is a suicide attempt.
On January 8, 1964, Vecherniy Leningrad published a selection of readers ' letters demanding that the "parasite Brodsky" be punished.
On February 13, 1964, Brodsky was arrested on charges of parasitism.
On February 14, he had his first heart attack in his cell.
Since that time, Brodsky constantly suffered from angina pectoris, which always reminded him of mortality (without preventing him from remaining a heavy smoker).
In many ways, this is why "Hello, my aging!" at the age of 33 and "What can I say about life?
What turned out to be a long " in 40: this is not a pose; with his diagnosis, the poet really was not sure that he would live to see this birthday.
Two sessions of the Brodsky trial were recorded by Frida Vigdorova and made up the contents of the "White Book" distributed in samizdat.
All the prosecution witnesses began their testimony with the words: "I donot know Brodsky personally...", echoing the exemplary wording of Pasternak's harassment: "I havenot read Pasternak's novel, but I condemn it!..".
On March 13, 1964, at the second court session, Brodsky was sentenced to the maximum possible punishment under the decree on "parasitism" — five years of forced labor in a remote area.
He was exiled to the Konoshsky district of the Arkhangelsk region and settled in the village of Norenskaya.
In an interview with Volkov, Brodsky called this time the happiest in his life.
In August and September, several of Joseph's poems were published in the Konosh district newspaper "Appeal".
The trial of the poet raised the human rights movement in the USSR and abroad.
The transcript of Frida Vigdorova was published in several influential foreign media: "New Leader", "Encounter", "Figaro Litteraire".
At the end of 1964, letters in defense of Brodsky were sent by D. D. Shostakovich, S. Ya.
Marshak, K. I. Chukovsky, K. G. Paustovsky, A. T. Tvardovsky, Yu.P. German.
After a year and a half, the punishment was canceled under pressure from the world community (in particular, after an appeal to the Soviet government by Jean Paul Sartre and a number of other foreign writers).
In September 1965, on the recommendation of Chukovsky and Boris Vakhtin, he was accepted into the professional group of writers at the Leningrad branch of the USSR Writers ' Union, which allowed him to avoid charges of parasitism in the future.
In 1965, a large selection of Brodsky's poems and a transcript of the trial were published in the almanac "Airways IV" (New York).
In his interviews, Brodsky resisted the image of a fighter against the Soviet government imposed on him — especially by the American intelligentsia.
He made statements like: "I was lucky in every way.
Other people got much more, it was much harder than me."
And even: "...I think that I deserve all this at all."
On May 12, 1972, Brodsky was called to the OVIR of the Leningrad police and was given a choice: emigration or "hot days", that is, prisons and mental hospitals.
By that time, Brodsky had already twice had to spend several weeks in psychiatric hospitals, which was much more terrible for him than prison and exile.
Having chosen emigration, the poet tried to delay the day of departure as much as possible, but, perhaps, in connection with Nixon's visit to the USSR, the authorities wanted to send him away as soon as possible.
On June 4, Brodsky flew from Leningrad to Vienna.
There, in Austria, he was introduced to W.
At the invitation of which he participated for the first time in the International Poetry Festival (Poetry International) in London in July 1972.
Subsequently, Brodsky regretted that he did not speak English well enough, so his contribution to the conversation with Auden was reduced to the same type of questions.
On the same visit, the poet also meets Isaiah Berlin.
Russian Russian literature A month after that, he began working as a visiting professor at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor: he taught the history of Russian literature, Russian poetry of the XX century, the theory of verse.
In 1981, he moved to New York.
Brodsky, who did not even graduate from school, worked in a total of six American and British universities, including Columbia and NYU.
Continuing to write in English, "in order to be closer (...) to Auden," he received wide recognition in scientific and literary circles in the United States and Great Britain, was awarded the Legion of Honor in France.
He was engaged in literary translations into Russian (in particular, he translated Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead") and into English — poems by a colleague in exile, Nabokov.
In 1986, Brodsky's collection of essays "Less than one" ("Less than one"), written in English it was recognized as the best literary critical book of the year in the United States.
In 1987, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to him for "comprehensive creativity, saturated with purity of thought and brightness of poetry".
Russian Russian poet and English essayist In Stockholm, when asked by an interviewer whether he considers himself a Russian or an American, Brodsky replied: "I am a Jew, a Russian poet and an English essayist."
Brodsky was also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, the National Book Award and was elected a poet laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress.
Brodsky's parents applied twelve times to be allowed to see their son (together or separately), but even after Brodsky underwent open heart surgery in 1978 and an official letter from the clinic asking them to allow their parents to come to the United States to care for their sick son, they were refused.
Brodsky's mother died in 1983, and his father died a little more than a year later.
Both times Brodsky was not allowed to come to the funeral.
In 1986, "Performance" was written.
The parents are dedicated to "The thought of you is removed, like a demoted servant..." (1985)
, "In memory of my father: Astralia" (1989), the essay "One and a half rooms" (1985).
With the beginning of perestroika, Brodsky's poems, literary and journalistic articles about the poet began to be published in the USSR.
In the 1990s, books began to be published.
In 1995, Brodsky was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.
Invitations to the homeland followed.
Brodsky postponed his arrival: he was embarrassed by the publicity of such an event, honoring, and the attention of the press that would accompany his visit.
One of the last arguments was: "The best part of me is already there — my poems."
The motive of return and non return is present in his poems of the 1990s, in particular, in the poems " Letter to the Oasis "(1991)," Ithaca "(1993)," We lived in a city the color of petrified vodka... " (1994), and in the last two — as if the return really happened.
In 1990, Brodsky married the Russian Italian translator Maria Sozzani.
He spoke English with their common daughter.
Brodsky died in his sleep from a heart attack on the night of January 28, 1996 in New York.
He was buried in one of the most beloved cities — Venice in the cemetery of the island of San Michele.
In 2004, a close friend of Brodsky, the Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott wrote a poem "The Prodigal", in which Brodsky is repeatedly mentioned.
In November 2005, the first monument to I. A. Brodsky in Russia was erected in the courtyard of the Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg University according to the project of K. Simun.
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