Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky (Russian: Иосиф Александрович Бродский; English: Joseph Brodsky; May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996) was a Soviet-American Jewish poet and essayist. Brodsky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1940. He was imprisoned many times. In 1964, he was prosecuted for being a "social parasite" and sentenced to five years in prison. He was exiled to the north. In 1972, the Soviet authorities informed him that he was "strongly advised" to leave the Soviet Union and be deported. Settled in America with the help of Westin Hugh Auden and other supporters. He later taught at Mount Holyoke College and at schools such as Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and the University of Michigan. Brodsky read all the famous Russian poems, inherited the excellent tradition of classicism, and was deeply influenced by Western modernist poetry, becoming "a master of constantly updating expression techniques." In 1987, when he was 47 years old, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year, becoming another young winner after Camus for his "all-encompassing authorship, full of clear thought and poetic intensity", "superb", "beautiful rhythm", "as rich as a symphony" and "heroic dedication to art". In 1991, he became the United States Poet Laureate. Professor Andrei Rankin of Moscow State University said: "Brodsky is the only modern Russian poet whose works have been considered classics... Brodsky's literary canonization is an exceptional phenomenon. No other contemporary Russian writer is revered as a hero to the author of so many memoirs, and no other conference is devoted to them."