A short life of the author
Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky (24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian-American poet and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and who is, by the consensus of serious readers, one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 — having been tried in a Leningrad court in 1964 for “social parasitism” (i.e., writing poetry instead of holding a state-approved job) — Brodsky settled in the United States, learned to write prose in English of staggering quality, and produced a body of work in both Russian and English that combines formal mastery, philosophical depth, and moral seriousness to a degree matched by very few poets of any era.
Life
Brodsky was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to a Jewish family. His father was a naval officer and photographer; his mother worked in an accounting office. He left school at fifteen and educated himself — voraciously, omnivorously — while working at a series of manual jobs: factory hand, morgue attendant, geological expedition member. He taught himself English and Polish, read Donne, Auden, Frost, and the Polish poets Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert, and began writing poetry that immediately attracted the attention of the Leningrad literary underground.
In 1964, he was tried for parasitism. The trial transcript — recorded by the journalist Frida Vigdorova and circulated in samizdat — became one of the most famous documents of Soviet literary persecution. The judge’s question “Who enrolled you among the ranks of poets?” and Brodsky’s answer “No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?” encapsulated the confrontation between totalitarian bureaucracy and individual conscience.
Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labour in the Arkhangelsk region. He served eighteen months before being released, partly due to international pressure from figures including Jean-Paul Sartre and Anna Akhmatova — who regarded Brodsky as the most important young Russian poet of his generation.
In 1972, the Soviet authorities gave Brodsky a choice: emigrate or face indefinite imprisonment. He left, first for Vienna, then for the United States, where he settled and taught at several universities, most prominently Mount Holyoke College.
The Poetry
Brodsky’s Russian poetry is characterised by its formal rigour — he is one of the great masters of Russian metre and rhyme — and by its intellectual scope. His subjects include time, empire, exile, language, architecture, and the relationship between the individual and the state. His long poems — “The Great Elegy for John Donne,” “Lullaby of Cape Cod,” “December in Florence,” “To Urania” — are among the finest sustained lyric achievements of the late twentieth century.
His English-language poems — composed directly in English rather than translated — are less formally accomplished but intellectually powerful. Brodsky insisted that poetry was the highest form of human expression and that it was more important than politics, economics, or ideology. “Aesthetics is the mother of ethics,” he wrote — a conviction that governed his life and work.
The Essays
Brodsky’s prose — written in English — is one of the great surprises of twentieth-century literature. Less Than One (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, collects essays on his Leningrad childhood (“Less Than One”), on Akhmatova, on Cavafy, on Auden (whom he idolised), and on literature, exile, and memory. The prose style — long, syntactically complex sentences that combine Russian discursiveness with English precision — is entirely original.
On Grief and Reason (1995) extends the achievement: it includes major essays on Frost (“On Grief and Reason”), on Hardy, on Rilke, and on the nature of evil. Watermark (1992) is a short, luminous book about Venice — a city Brodsky loved as the architectural equivalent of poetry.
Brodsky and Auden
Brodsky’s devotion to W.H. Auden was the central literary relationship of his life. He met Auden in Austria shortly after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, and Auden helped him settle in the West. Brodsky considered Auden the greatest English-language poet of the century — a judgement that was both an aesthetic conviction and a moral one: Auden represented the fusion of formal mastery, intellectual seriousness, and ethical engagement that Brodsky valued above all else. His essays on Auden — particularly “To Please a Shadow” in Less Than One — are among the finest critical prose about poetry ever written.
The influence ran deep. Brodsky’s English prose style owes something to Auden’s discursive, essayistic voice, and his conviction that form is itself a moral achievement — that writing well is an ethical act — is thoroughly Audenesque. When Brodsky died of a heart attack in 1996, at fifty-five, he was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice — near Stravinsky and Diaghilev, in the city he loved best.
Nobel Prize and Poet Laureate
Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” He served as United States Poet Laureate in 1991–1992, during which he campaigned for poetry to be made available in airports, supermarkets, and hotel rooms — places where people might encounter it by chance rather than seek it out.
Collecting Brodsky
English-language first editions include Selected Poems (1973, Penguin, with foreword by Auden) at $50–$150; A Part of Speech (1980, Farrar Straus) at $30–$80; Less Than One (1986, Farrar Straus) at $20–$60. Russian-language first editions — published in the émigré press — are scarce and sought by specialists. Signed copies are uncommon and command significant premiums.