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Joseph Brodsky, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian-Jewish poet, writer, director, and translator, was arrested and prosecuted by the Soviet regime before emigrating.
Born Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia), he survived the Nazi siege of the city during WWII. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a professional photographer for newspapers and magazines, while his mother, Maria Volpert, worked as an interpreter. Brodsky grew up in a highly intellectual environment and studied languages to access banned Western literature.
An independent thinker with original perspectives, Brodsky inevitably clashed with the Soviet system. Disillusioned by Soviet propaganda and the omnipresence of Lenin’s portraits at school, he dropped out at 15 as an act of defiance. He held various jobs, including sanitary work in the morgue at the "Kresty" prison, where he would later be incarcerated. From age 16, he wrote poetry and translated literature. In 1961, he met prominent Russian poet Anna Akhmatova at her dacha in Komarovo, a pivotal encounter that deeply influenced his poetic career. Akhmatova and her circle nurtured young talent and praised Brodsky’s work as “enchanting,” encouraging him to continue writing. Around this time, he also met his first love, artist Marianna Basmanova, who inspired a poetry collection dedicated to "M. B." However, his joy was shadowed by Soviet secret police attention.
Brodsky faced persecution after attempting to publish his poem "Isaac and Avraam," inspired by the Old Testament, in 1963. He was arrested for an underground publication and charged with "social parasitism" in 1964. His trial was meant to intimidate intellectuals amid the return of strict censorship under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The judge declared Brodsky was not an officially recognized poet and that his work did not contribute to Communist construction. He was sentenced to five years of hard labor and exiled to the remote village of Norenskaya in Arkhangelsk region. There, he was visited by several Russian intellectuals, and Marianna Basmanova joined him, living in exile for months. In 1965, she gave birth to their son, Andrei. Due to Soviet obstruction, their relationship could not be officially registered, so the child was registered under Marianna’s name for safety.
The unjust trial and exile sparked protests from prominent figures such as Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Following these protests, Brodsky’s sentence was reduced. He returned to Leningrad in 1965, though his poetry remained censored. That year, his first poetry collection was published in the United States. Meanwhile, Soviet authorities forcibly confined him to a mental institution, where he endured treatment involving cold, wet sheets. On June 4, 1972, Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union. After brief stops in Vienna and London, he settled in the United States, working as a visiting professor at various universities. In 1978, Yale University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. In 1979, he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, he received the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” award.
While in America, Brodsky sought to bring his parents to live with him, submitting numerous official requests, all denied by Soviet authorities. His parents died in the USSR without seeing him again. In the 1980s, he published a collection of love poems dedicated to Marianna Basmanova, featuring verses titled "M. B." He hoped to reunite with her and their son, Andrei, but neither could leave the Soviet Union. In 1990, he married Maria Sozzani, a student at the Sorbonne of Russian-Italian descent, and they had a daughter. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Brodsky finally reunited with his son Andrei in New York, spending several months together; by then, Andrei had a wife and three children living in Russia.
Joseph Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. Beyond writing, he founded a popular Russian restaurant in New York and produced a documentary film about Venice, his favorite city. Brodsky passed away from a heart attack on January 28, 1996, and was buried on the island of San Michele in Venice, near the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev.
