Joseph Brodsky's Life

Joseph Brodsky is a Russian-American poet born May 24th 1940.

He was born in Leningrad, Russia when the Soviet Union was in power. He and his family lived in poverty and nearly died of starvation during Joseph's early years. He held a variety of jobs during his teenage life. He worked in a morgue, in hospitals, a ship's boiler room, and went on geological expeditions.

In 1955, Joseph started writing political poetry for an underground journal called Sintaksis.

In 1960, he met another political poet, Anna Akhmatova, who influenced his work greatly.

He met Marina Basmanova in 1962 in St. Petersburg. They were partners and had a son, but were never married due to restrictions set by the Soviet Union.

In 1963, a Soviet newspaper called Joseph's poetry "pornographic and anti-Soviet". In retaliation for his anti-government poetry, Joseph was put in a mental institution and eventually arrested. He was sent to prison for parasitism and became a symbol of artistic dissidence for all of Russia.

In 1972, Brodsky came to the United States. With some help from other US poets, he started teaching at the University of Michigan. He taught and spoke at many other school in the states.

In 1987, Joseph won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was given this award for his "all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."

In 1991, Joseph became the Poet Laureate of the United States. 

On January 28th, 1996, Joseph died of a heart attack while in his New York City apartment. He was 55 years old.