Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate poet, critic, and translator, was born in Petrograd (formerly Leningrad) in 1940. His father, Alexander Brodsky, was a naval officer, but the Stalin regime discharged him prematurely because he was Jewish. In 1964, Brodsky was arrested for "social parasitism." Although he had occasionally worked in various professions until then, at that time, he wanted to focus solely on poetry. He had already been recognized by the great Anna Akhmatova, who went so far as to call him a "wunderkind" of Russian poetry. In the subsequent trial, he was sentenced to five years of compulsory labor in a corrective labor camp in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. Ultimately, he served only twenty months. In 1972, he went into exile, emigrating to the United States after a brief stay in Vienna and London, leaving behind his elderly parents and his illegitimate son. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. His work includes, among others, the poetry collections "A Part of Speech," "To Urania," "So Forth," the novel "Watermark" (translated by Margarita Mansola, Kastaniotis Editions, 1997), two essay collections, "On Grief and Reason" and "Less than One," as well as the travel book "Travel on Venice." He passed away in January 1996 at the age of 56.