Joseph Brodsky — poet (nobel) with roots in the USSR
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was born in Leningrad on 24 May 1940 into a Jewish family; his father was a photographer in the Soviet Navy. As a small child he lived through the siege of Leningrad and nearly died of hunger. As a young man he worked at a series of odd jobs while writing and translating poetry.
In 1960 he met Anna Akhmatova, who recognised his gift, and poems such as The Jewish Cemetery near Leningrad began to circulate. In 1963 a Leningrad newspaper denounced his work, and in 1964 he was tried for "social parasitism", the court finding that his odd jobs and work as a poet and translator were not a sufficient contribution to society. The journalist Frida Vigdorova took notes of the hearing, including the judge's question about who had recognised him as a poet. He was sentenced to five years of internal exile with manual labour. Akhmatova, Dmitri Shostakovich, Korney Chukovsky, Samuil Marshak, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Jean-Paul Sartre were among those who protested, and after eighteen months on a farm in the village of Norenskaya, in the Arkhangelsk region, he returned to Leningrad in late 1965.
On 4 June 1972 he left the Soviet Union, having been told to emigrate. In Vienna he was met by the American Slavist Carl Proffer, whose Ardis press in Ann Arbor published his work in Russian, and in July he flew to the United States. He became poet in residence at the University of Michigan and later taught at Queens College and Columbia University, and was a visiting professor at Cambridge, wrote his essays increasingly in English and translated his own poems. He became an American citizen and received a MacArthur Fellowship.
In 1987 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the fifth Russian-born writer to do so, and in 1991-92 he served as Poet Laureate of the United States. He spent nineteen winters in Venice.
He died of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment on 28 January 1996, aged fifty-five. At his wish he was buried in Venice, on the cemetery island of San Michele, near the grave of Sergei Diaghilev.
"Left the USSR on 4 June 1972 after being told to emigrate; via Vienna to the United States, where he settled in Ann Arbor and later New York."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Leningrad (St Petersburg)
Born in Leningrad, USSR, on 24 May 1940 to Aleksandr Brodsky, a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy. At his 1964 trial for 'social parasitism' the judge asked: 'Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?' He was expelled from the USSR on 4 June 1972.
Leningrad (St Petersburg). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."