Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky biography
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Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky biography
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Famous: Poet, Essayist, Playwright, Translator, Nobel Prize Winner
Country: USSR, USA
Category: Writers
Zodiac Sign: Gemini
Date of birth: May 24, 1940.
Date of death: January 28, 1996.
Biography added: April 2, 2014.
Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky (May 24, 1940, Leningrad — January 28, 1996, New York), was a Russian poet, novelist, essayist, translator, author of plays; he also wrote in English.
In 1972, Joseph Brodsky emigrated to the United States.
In poems (collections "Stop in the desert", 1967, "The End of the Beautiful Era", "Part of Speech", both 1972, "Urania", 1987), the understanding of the world as a single metaphysical and cultural whole.
The distinctive features of the style are rigidity and hidden pathos, irony and fracture (early Brodsky), meditativeness, realized through an appeal to complicated associative images, cultural reminiscences (sometimes leading to the tightness of the poetic space).
Essays, short stories, plays, translations.
Nobel Prize (1987), Knight of the Legion of Honor (1987), winner of the Oxford Honori Causa Prize.
Why did you lie?
And why my hearing
no longer distinguishes lies from the truth,
and it requires some new words,
unknown to you deaf, strangers,
but to be uttered by those who can,
as before, only with your voice.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
The significance of the work of Joseph Brodsky
Striving for bilingualism, Joseph Brodsky also wrote essays, literary criticism, and poems in English.
Brodsky managed to expand the possibilities of the Russian poetic language.
The poet's artistic world is universal.
In his style, they see the influence of Baroque, neoclassicism, acmeism, English metaphysical poetry, underground, postmodernism.
The very existence of this person has become the embodiment of intellectual and moral opposition to lies, cultural degradation.
Initially, because of the process of "parasitism", Brodsky became a kind of a household name of an independent artist who resisted the generally accepted hypocrisy and violence both at home and outside it.
Until 1987, in the USSR, he was actually a poet for "initiates": keeping his poems at home was not only considered reprehensible, but was punishable, nevertheless, his poems were distributed in a way tested in Soviet times — with the help of Samizdat.
International fame came to the poet after the publication of his first collection in the West in 1965.
In the USSR, until 1987, Joseph Brodsky was practically not published.
Some of Brodsky's lines are well known as aphorisms of the formula: "Death is what happens to others" or " But until my mouth is filled with clay, only gratitude will come out of it."
The world of Brodsky's creations reflected the consciousness of a significant intellectual group of immigrants from Russia, and in general, people of the" exodus", living on the verge of two worlds, in the words of V. Uflyand, "Brodsky humanity": these new wanderers, as if continuing the fate of romantic wanderers, are like a kind of connective tissue of different cultures, languages, worldviews, perhaps on the way to a universal person of the future.
I'm sorry
for the sublime syllable:
the time of alarms does not end,
but the winters are ending.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
The early years of Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky was born in an ordinary intelligent family.
His father, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky, graduated from the geographical faculty of Leningrad University and the School of Red Journalists.
He spent the entire war as a photojournalist (from 1940 in Finland to 1948 in China).
In 1950, as part of the" purge " of the officer corps from persons of Jewish nationality, he was demobilized, interrupted by small notes and photographed for departmental multi runs.
Mother, Maria Moiseevna Volpert, worked as an accountant all her life.
As a teenager, Joseph Brodsky left school after the 8th grade; as later, he could not put up with state imposed hypocrisy, evil; not that he fought against them, but he was eliminated from participation ("I am not a soloist, but I am alien to the ensemble.
/ Taking the mouthpiece out of my pipe, I burn my uniform and break my saber").
At the age of 15, Brodsky joined the factory.
I have changed many professions: he worked both in the morgue and in geological parties.
He was engaged in self education, studied English and Polish.
Since 1957, he began to write poems, performed their reading in public.
Contemporaries remembered his innovative poems in terms of content and intonation of "singing" ("The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad...").
The first translation works of Brodsky belong to the early 1960s.
Winter is an honest time of the year.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
Anna Akhmatova highly appreciated the talent of the young poet, became one of his spiritual mentors.
Brodsky, rejected by official circles, becomes famous in literary circles, among the intellectual underground; but he never belongs to any group, is not associated with dissidence.
Large (poems "Guest", "Petersburg Novel", "Procession", "Zofia", "Hills", "Isaac and Abraham") and small forms equally attract the poet.
On huge poetic spaces, Joseph Brodsky works out a sophisticated mastery of the means of modern poetry (virtuosity in metrics, rhythm, rhyme) with the structural refinement, external restraint, and irony characteristic of the St. Petersburg style.
Brodsky wrote: "God is in each of us" and was proud that he actually re introduced the word soul into Russian poetry.
Independence, the then unheard of spirit of freedom and the appeal to biblical values, despite the absence of "anti Soviet" in his work, attract the negative attention of the authorities to him.
Several times, starting in 1959, Brodsky was interrogated by the KGB.
Court.
The Exile of Joseph Brodsky
The poet was supported by casual earnings; his friends also supported him.
Until 1972, only 11 of his poems were published in his homeland in the third issue of the Moscow Samizdat hectographed magazine "Syntax" and local Leningrad newspapers, as well as translation works under the surname of Brodsky or under a pseudonym.
Because you become that,
what you look at, what you see up close.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
Joseph Brodsky traveled a lot around the country with geologists and friends, saw the former USSR.
The free "extra legal" existence was overshadowed by three short term arrests (one in the case of Shakhmatov Ukhtomsky about the hijacking of an airplane).
In the 1960s, there was a tense struggle between the authorities and the intelligentsia, and Brodsky, unwittingly, found himself in the center of this confrontation.
At the end of 1963, he took refuge in Moscow; he tried to "hide" in a psychiatric hospital, but escaped from there.
Brodsky was arrested in Leningrad on February 12, 1964.
The poet was "chosen" as the central figure for the demonstration trial on charges of parasitism.
Symptomatic articles appeared in the press: "A near literary drone", "A parasite is paid tribute to".
Brodsky was found sane after being forcibly placed in a hospital for a forensic psychiatric examination.
On March 13, 1964, the trial of the poet took place, the course of which was recorded by Frida Vigdorova(thanks to her recordings, the trial of Brodsky became the property of the world community).
Akhmatova, Marshak, Shostakovich, Sartre stood up for the poet.
Akhmatova's words about the trial: "What a biography is being made for our redhead!" turned out to be prophetic.
Light the candle
on the edge of darkness.
I want to see it
what you feel.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
The trial of Brodsky made his name universally famous and even a household name.
The simple and courageous words uttered by him were picked up and retold like a legend.
Brodsky was sentenced to a five year exile in the Arkhangelsk region ("with mandatory involvement in physical labor").
He stayed in the village of Norenskaya from the spring of 1964 to the fall of 1965.
Thanks to the protests of the world community, the poet was released early.
His talent and spirit are in exile ("the main thing is not to change...
I have accelerated too far, and I will never stop until I die").we got stronger and reached a new level.
Joseph Brodsky studied world literature, English poetry in the originals, wrote a lot.
In addition to a large body of scattered poems, the cycle "Songs of a Happy Winter", poems and "big poems" (the main ones, according to the poet's definition), such as "Farewell Ode", "Winter has come and everyone who could fly...", "A letter in a bottle", "New stanzas for August", "Two hours in a tank", are mainly created here.
However, all this was published later, abroad.
Going out into the courtyard of the odd October,
cringing, you round the number to "oh, you fuck".
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
First publications.
After the link
Brodsky, who returned from exile to Leningrad, was not re registered in the "one and a half rooms" that his parents occupied in a communal apartment.
Only after repeated petitions (Dmitry Shostakovich also worked for him) was Brodsky allowed to settle in his hometown legally.
The poet continued to work, but still his poems could not appear in official publications.
Funds for life were provided only by transfers, supported by friends and acquaintances.
The growing sense of alienation, humiliation and despair of "lack of demand" was naturally reflected in his work: in the poems "Speech about spilled milk", " Goodbye, Mademoiselle Veronica "(1967), Stanzas (1968)," The End of the Beautiful Era "(1969)," Autumn drives me out of the park "(1970)," Letter to General Z.", in the poem about the life and death of the best part of the soul in the madhouse of the surrounding reality" Gorchakov and Gorbunov " (1968).
With the publication of poems abroad (collections of "Poems and Poems".
Washington New York, 1965; "A Stop in the Desert".
New York, 1970) the situation of Joseph Brodsky in the USSR is complicated.
The theme of loss becomes end to end: the first poem in the Collection of his works in 1957 is called " Goodbye..."; numerous poems "on the death of the poet", starting with "In memory of Baratynsky" (1961), "On the death of Robert Frost" (1963), "...T. S. Eliot" (1965); philosophical elegies epitaphs — "In Memory of T. V.", poems about separation, like "Singing without music", "Bobo's Funeral", "I visited the ashes", "1972".
Endowed with the gift of seeing life in everything, he was acutely aware of the tragic "finiteness" of existence.
It is not by chance that the collection of 1964-1971 was named after the poem "The End of the Beautiful Era" (Ardis, 1977).
Mainly from the works of this time, Brodsky himself compiled a unique book of lyrics addressed to one addressee, " New Stanzas for August.
Poems to M. B.".
Life is probably not that long,
to postpone the worst in a long box.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
The main body of Brodsky's poems, written before his departure, was published abroad (since 1965).
Thanks to the efforts of friends and researchers (primarily V. Maramzin and M. Meilakh), a four volume collection of his works was compiled in Russia, even before 1972, which was not allowed to be published in the official press (the fifth volume is not completed) with comments on texts and variants.
During this period, the defining features of Brodsky's style were formed: highly concentrated content in a perfect poetic form; a tragic method of cognition and artistic reflection; innovative metaphorics; intellectualism of poetry, philosophy, references to literature and related arts (cinema, architecture, painting, music).
Brodsky can be considered a classic of Russian verse.
The range of topics of his work is wide, and in the variety of genre directions and angles, it seems that only the engagement and conformism of "Soviet poetry"are absent.
With the end of the political "thaw", the poet's position in the Brezhnev era became more and more hopeless, more dangerous; he was pushed more and more persistently to emigrate.
Just before leaving, summarizing the results, Joseph Brodsky creates several top works of his philosophical lyrics: "Candlemas", "Letters to a Roman friend","Butterfly".
He did not want to leave Russia; however, he had no other choice.
In a letter to Brezhnev, imbued with confidence in returning to his homeland, he writes: "in the flesh or on paper:...even if my people do not need my body, my soul will still be useful to them...".
I'm sitting by the window, hugging my knees,
In the company of his own heavy shadow.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
Emigration.
1972-1979
On June 4, 1972, the emigrant period of the poet's life and work began, which gave new incentives to poetic creativity.
Joseph Brodsky first landed in Vienna.
He was met by an old friend, publisher Karl Proffer, who for many years headed the publishing house "Ardis".
Brodsky's meeting with W. H. Auden became a milestone for the Russian poet.
In the same year, Brodsky settled in the United States, got a job for the first time — he taught at various universities (such as the University of Michigan, South Hadley Mount Holyoke College, Ann Arbor, etc.).
New collections of the poet are published, containing not only what has already been created, but the first translations of his poems into English (Selected Poems.
New York, 1973) and new essays (Part of Speech.
Poems 1972-76.
Ardis, 1977; A Part of Speech, N. Y. Farror, Straus Giroux, 1980, New Stanzas for August.
Poems to M. B. 1962-82.
Ardis, 1983).
The fact that these poems were published, of course, is a great role of the publishing house "Ardis".
In 1978, Joseph Brodsky underwent his first heart surgery, after which new poems did not appear for a whole year.
The periods of youthful, absorbing everything valuable from the poetic treasury, "romanticism", and the verbose poetic flow "baroque in the context of neoclassicism" are left behind.
For a poet, life outside the elements of his native language (even if outwardly much more prosperous) is always a tragedy.
New qualities corrode and at the same time enrich Brodsky's manner: it is a concentrated figurative emblematics, a complex metaphor, manifested primarily in the cycle "Part of speech": "From nowhere with love, nadtsaty Mart... facial features, frankly speaking , I canot remember already, not yours, but / and no one's best friend...".
You sleep better in a wooden city,
because I'm already dreaming only of what happened.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
Since the late 1970s, Joseph Brodsky has been mastering new genres for himself: essay studies and literary criticism, he begins to write in English — the first collection of his prose was the American critics ' award winning Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986).
In such essays as "Less than One" (which gave the name to the entire collection), "In one and a half rooms", the poet, starting from his autobiography, creates a portrait of a generation.
He is published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, participates in conferences, symposiums, travels a lot around the world, which is reflected in the expansion of the "geography" of his work, imbued with the joy of exploring new horizons, the bitterness of nostalgia, the search for the meaning of existence, on the verge of non existence and freedom: "Rotterdam Diary", "Lithuanian Nocturne", "Laguna" (1973), "Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart", "Thames in Chelsea" (1974), "Cod Cape Lullaby", "Mexican Divertissement" (1975), "December in Florence" (1976), "Fifth Anniversary", "San Pietro", "In England" (1977).
The path to world fame
The poet feels the fortieth anniversary as an important milestone; in the final "I entered a cage instead of a wild animal..." he confirms the stoic, courageous acceptance of the entire experience of the life lived, with its losses, blows.
In 1980, Joseph Brodsky received American citizenship.
Since the early 1980s, he has become not only a significant figure of the Russian poetic abroad, but increasingly, thanks to English language prose, a world famous writer.
Convinced of the great purifying, creative power of poetry, Brodsky fights for " collections of poems to lie by the bed next to aspirin and the Bible."
The day is over.
And from the point of view of the day
it was really over.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
With the moral and artistic power of his work, Joseph Brodsky opposes the world's Evil (according to some researchers, "Language", "Time" and "Evil" are the main themes of the poet).
The invasions of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan become occasions for allegorical violent poetic protests, full of shame and rage poems of 1968 and epic "Poems about the Winter Campaign of 1980".
But Brodsky is still attracted to philosophical lyrics: "Roman Elegies" (1981), "Venetian Stanzas" (1982), "Sitting in the Shade" (1983), "In the Mountains", "At the Karl Weylink Exhibition" (1984), "The Fly" (1985), "Edification", "Aria", "Dedicated to the Chair" (1987), "New Life", "Centaurs" (1988).
The vocabulary of Joseph Brodsky is constantly being enriched, this period is characterized by a kind of amalgam of colloquial, bureaucratic," thug"," high " styles, the convergence of language layers at a new level: archaisms, dialectisms, camp slang, special scientific terms.
This polyphony reflects the content ambivalence, paradoxicity, semantic richness ("Representation", 1986).
Brodsky's poetic speech is characterized by allegory, metaphorical richness, genre diversity: from poems "in case", miniatures, to giant epic canvases, various forms of the novel in verse and poems,"big poems".
The collection of poems to one addressee — "New Stanzas for August" - expanded the scale of lyrical poetry.
He becomes a true master of stylizations, literary translation (works of English metaphysical poets, K. Cavafy, U. Saba, C. Milos ).
To leave love on a bright sunny day, irrevocably.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
The poet Joseph Brodsky remains true to his world and his leading themes.
"The autumn cry of a hawk", rising above the ordinary to the upper valleys and paying for it with glaciation and death, "answers" the early "Great Elegy to John Donne".
The theme of constant separation continues "On the death of a friend";
"In memory of Gennady Shmakov", "In Memory of my father", the Christmas cycle, stretching through the years, continues in "Lagoon", "Flight to Egypt"; features of Baroque poetry are also evident in the later poems, philosophical, eschatological intonation sounds in "Notes of a fern", "Clouds", "Fin de siecle", "View from a hill", "Portrait of a tragedy" (1988-1992); philosophical dualism and fantastic irony of the play "Marble" develops the problems of "Gorchakov and Gorbunov".
Brodsky's mother and father, who for many years had been trying to get permission to travel abroad without receiving it, die in Leningrad without seeing their son.
The death of parents for the poet is a blow to childhood and the basics of life, a blow to the main tool of the poet, his native speech, the Russian language.
The tragic image of a language distorted by reality — as a metaphor for a damaged mirror becomes one of the most important in the poet's late work.
1987 became a" turning point "for the poet, when widespread recognition and world fame came (L. Losev called it a "holiday of justice"), and even the poet's "literary return" to his homeland began, with the first publication of his poems in the "New World".
In the same year, 1987, Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
At the award ceremony, he delivered his brilliant "Nobel Lecture", in which, in particular, he honed the concept of language priority: "Perhaps the most sacred thing that we have is our language...".
What destroys all dynasties is the number of heirs with a lack of thrones.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
Since the mid 1980s, Brodsky's work has become the subject of fascinating study: works on his poetics have been published.
T. Venclova comes to the conclusion that Brodsky's speech is a way to overcome the inferiority and fragmentation of the world, the opening of space "up": "this is a genuine crossing of the border, an exit from the absurdity of the fallen world, an entry into a meaningful time"; he identifies "time, city, emptiness" as "the main components of the world text of Brodsky" and makes the assumption that the main theme of the poet is "being and /or/ nothing".
In the same years, Joseph Brodsky collects a plentiful harvest of numerous awards, but, first of all, as an English language author.
He was awarded the title of "Poet Laureate of the USA" 1991-1992.
The last years of Brodsky's life
In the early 1990s, Joseph Brodsky underwent a second heart operation, a third was coming.
However, he continued to teach, wrote poetry and prose ("As long as there is such a language as Russian, poetry is inevitable").
The last years of his short life are marked by a rise in the intensity of creativity.
Collections of Brodsky's works begin to be published in Russia: the first of them are "Edification" (1990)," Autumn Cry of a Hawk "(1990)," Poems " (1990).
Following the growing popularity, the awareness of the meaning and influence of Brodsky's poetics is growing.
He brought to Russian poetry the expressive qualities of English, classical Latin poetry.
In art criticism, analysis of fine literature, Brodsky is interesting as a researcher of poetics, psychology, aesthetics of creativity (works about Tsvetaeva, Platonov, Mandelstam, Auden, Frost, Akhmatova, Cavafy, Montal and others).
Love is stronger than separation, but separation is longer than love.
Brodsky, Joseph Alexandrovich
Along with lyrics, "travel notes", ancient, biblical themes, elegies, "dialogues" with great writers of the past and present, a penchant for philosophy, irony and sarcasm, for Brodsky, according to the observations of researchers, the problems of "Time", "Language", "Death"are end to end.
The last works are filled with the sad moods of the Stoic poet about the "results" of being.
Creativity appears as the main goal of the universe, overcoming dumbness, silence and emptiness.
Poetry as the highest expression of language is the opposition of "nothing".
According to the will of Brodsky, his last poetic book "Landscape with a flood" ends with a poem with the lines: "I was accused of everything, except for the weather...
General, maybe, non existence, the armor appreciates the attempts to turn it into a sieve and will thank me for opening it."
The poet Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky died suddenly in New York on January 28, 1996, before he reached the age of 56.
Brodsky's death, despite the fact that it was known about his deteriorating health, shocked people on both sides of the ocean.
He was buried in Venice.
He has a daughter in the United States, who was born in 1992, and a son in St. Petersburg (born in 1967).
Russian Russian poets were invited to visit the Russian Academy in Rome for a few months, one of the poet's last initiatives was the creation of a Russian Academy in Rome, where Russian poets could come for a few months.
The first guest of the academy in 2000 was Timur Kibirov.
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Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky quotes …
The world will remain the same.
Yes.
It will remain the same, dazzlingly snowy and doubtfully tender.
The world will remain false.
The world will remain eternal, perhaps comprehensible, but still infinite.
And, therefore, there will be no sense from believing in yourself and in God.
And, therefore, only the Illusion and the road remained.
And the sunsets will be above the earth.
And be above the land of the dawns…
Fertilize it for the soldiers.
Approve it to the poets.
Every grave is the end of the earth.
Only the fish in the seas know the price of freedom.
There are only two truly exciting topics worthy of serious discussion: gossip and metaphysics.
A person is used to asking himself: who am I?
There, a scientist, an American, a driver, a Jew, an immigrant…
And you should always ask yourself: am I not shit?
All quotes by Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky Number of views: 4938
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