Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky: The Poet Who Outlasted the Empire

"Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?" the Soviet judge demanded in 1964. The twenty-three-year-old defendant answered: "Nobody. Who enrolled me in the ranks of mankind?" Told that he had not finished school, he replied that he had not thought the matter was one of education — he had thought it came from God. The court sentenced him to five years of hard labour in the Arctic for social parasitism. Twenty-three years later the Swedish Academy gave the same man the Nobel Prize "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity," and in 1991 the United States made him its Poet Laureate.

Leningrad, and an Education He Assembled Himself

Iosif Brodsky was born on 24 May 1940 in Leningrad. He left school at fifteen and went to work — manual labour, then a stint as a merchant seaman — and wrote poetry in the gaps. His English he taught himself by translating Robert Frost and John Donne, which is a startling curriculum and shows in everything that followed. He began writing poems in earnest at eighteen.

Anna Akhmatova, the last great survivor of Russian modernism, recognised almost immediately what he was: the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. She called his verses enchanting. When the state came after him she offered the driest possible verdict on his persecutors: "What a biography they are creating for our redhead! You'd think he hired them."

The Trial and the North

The charges against him ran to anti-Soviet work, social parasitism and decadent poetry — three ways of saying that a man who wrote poems without state sanction had no legitimate place in the economy. He served his exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia from March 1964 to November 1965. International protest, including from figures of the stature of Shostakovich and Sartre, cut the five-year sentence to eighteen months.

He was expelled from the Soviet Union on 4 June 1972, forcibly expatriated without trial. After brief stops in Vienna and London he settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1977.

A Change of Empire

Brodsky refused to describe his relocation in the terms his hosts preferred. He called it a change of Empire, holding that political systems structurally resemble one another whatever their ideology, and that real displacement is psychological rather than geographic — a permanent movement away from the reality one has actually lived.

He taught: the University of Michigan, Queens College, Smith, Columbia, Cambridge, and finally as Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke. The honours accumulated — a Yale honorary doctorate in 1978, election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979, a MacArthur award in 1981, the National Book Award in 1986 for the essay collection *Less Than One*, the Nobel in 1987.

The books ran from *Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems* (1973–74) through *A Part of Speech* (1980), *Less Than One* (1986), *To Urania* (1988) and *Watermark* (1992). His collections published in the West were banned at home; the first authorised Soviet edition of his work appeared only after he had won the Nobel Prize.

What the Poems Are About

He was unusually direct about his own subject. "All my poems are more or less about the same thing — about Time." In his scheme time outranks space and functions as the fundamental antagonist of human beings, reducing everyone eventually to dust. Against it he set language, taking from W. H. Auden the proposition that time worships language, and concluding that the written word is the one thing capable of resisting temporal destruction. This is why his formalism was never decorative: meter, caesura and rhyme were instruments for holding time back, and he insisted on poetry's superiority over prose on exactly those grounds.

What he did to Russian poetry was to reopen it. He brought back metaphysical and Biblical registers the Soviet period had made unusable, and he fused eighteenth-century Russian ancestry — Derzhavin above all — with the Polish poets Gałczyński and Norwid and the English Metaphysicals, Donne, Herbert and Marvell. The result was a new ironic sensibility, dense with allusion, in a literature that had been starved of it. His major essays honoured his own line of descent: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva.

The Laureate

As U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991–92 he made a characteristically unsentimental proposal: put cheap poetry anthologies in hotels and airports, hospitals and supermarkets, wherever people are stuck waiting. It was implemented. His reasoning was that "poetry is not a form of entertainment... but our anthropological, genetic goal" — a claim about the species, not about taste.

He never went back to Russia. Not after the Soviet Union fell, not on a tourist visa, not on an official invitation. His stated position followed from his metaphysics: people move forward and away, never back, and his best self was already inside his poems. He died of a heart attack at his New York home on 28 January 1996, aged fifty-five.

Why Joseph Is Called a Genius

The core faculty is compositional intelligence operating at the level of the whole tradition. Brodsky did not merely write good poems; he re-plumbed Russian poetry, connecting a line that ran through Derzhavin to one that ran through Donne, and he did this without formal literary education, having left school at fifteen. He then repeated the trick in a second language, becoming a major English-language essayist with *Less Than One* and winning a National Book Award for it. Very few writers in any century have been genuinely first-rate in two languages, and the Swedish Academy's phrase — an all-embracing authorship — was a fair description of the reach.

Underneath the erudition sits a hard philosophical spine: a coherent, stated position about time, language and mortality that organises the whole body of work rather than decorating individual poems. He described the poet as "a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over," and he lived accordingly.

The honest counter-case has two parts. First, by the assessment of his own advocates, Brodsky never achieved in English poetry what he achieved in Russian — his self-translations and English verse are widely held to fall short of the originals, which means the bilingual claim is only half true. Second, his reputation in the West was inseparable from his biography as the persecuted dissident, and the trial transcript did more for his fame than any single poem; a reader who cannot access the Russian is partly taking the achievement on trust. And his convictions hardened into dogma: the insistence that poetry outranks prose, and that meter and rhyme are civilisational obligations rather than choices, is a position, not a proof. None of this touches the Russian work, which is where the case actually rests.

Legacy

Brodsky's life was the twentieth century's argument compressed into one biography: a state that criminalised a young man for writing poems, and a poet who outlived that state, took its adversary's citizenship, and went on writing in the language the state had tried to make him surrender. He left Russian poetry larger than he found it, and left an American public institution — poetry in the airport — as a parting joke that was entirely serious.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1987
• Rome Prize
• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Notable work: Gorbunov and Gorchakov
• Genres: poetry