http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374528381/?tag=2022091-20
( In this brief, intense, gem-like book, equal parts exte...)
In this brief, intense, gem-like book, equal parts extended autobiographical essay and prose poem, Brodsky turns his eye to the seductive and enigmatic city of Venice. A mosaic of 48 short chapters?each recalling a specific episode from one of his many visits there (Brodsky spent his winters in Venice for nearly 20 years)?Watermark associatively and brilliantly evokes one city's architectural and atmospheric character. In doing so, the book also reveals a subject?and an author?readers have never before seen.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374523827/?tag=2022091-20
Born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1940. His father was an officer in the old Soviet Navy. They lived in communal apartments, in poverty, marginalized by their Jewish status. In early childhood Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad where he and his parents nearly died of starvation; one aunt did die of hunger.
When he left school, Joseph began an intensive program of self education, reading widely and studying English and Polish. As a young student Brodsky was "an unruly child" known for his misbehavior during classes. He tried to enter the School of Submariners without success.
He went on to work as a milling machine operator. Later, having decided to become a physician, he worked at the morgue at the Kresty Prison, cutting and sewing bodies. He subsequently held a variety of jobs in hospitals, in a ship's boiler room, and on geological expeditions.
He translated into Russian the work of John Donne, the 17th-century English poet, and Czeslaw Milosz, a modern Polish poet. He also wrote his own poetry, which impressed Anna Akhmatova, one of the country's leading literary figures.
The court sentenced him to five years on a prison farm. For his "parasitism" Brodsky was sentenced to five years hard labor and served 18 months on a farm in the village of Norenskaya, in the Archangelsk region, 350 miles from Leningrad. Brodsky's sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by prominent Soviet and foreign cultural figures, including Evgeny Evtushenko, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as Akhmatova.
His books in English include Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems (1967; selected, introduced, and translated by Nicholas Bethell); Selected Poems (1973; translated by George L. Kline); and Verses on the Winter Campaign 1980 (1981; translated by Alan Meyers).
In 1972 the authorities suggested he emigrate to Israel. After stopping in Vienna, he went on to the United States, where he took up a series of academic posts at the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and Mount Holyoke College.
Brodsky's poems and translations were also circulated outsidethe boundaries of what was then the Soviet Union.
He became an American citizen in 1977.
Brodsky went on to become a Visiting Professor at Queens College (1973–74), Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University, later returning to the University of Michigan (1974–80). He was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature and Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, brought there by poet and historian Peter Viereck. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on 23 May 1979.
A London Times Literary Supplement review of his poetry emphasized its "religious, intimate, depressed, sometimes confused, sometimes martyr-conscious, sometimes elitist" nature.
Olga Carlisle, in her book Poets on Street Corners (1968), wrote, "Not long ago while in Moscow I heard Brodsky's voice on tape, reading his 'The Great Elegy for John Donne. '
The voice was extremely youthful and frenzied with anguish.
The poet was reciting the elegy's detailed catalogue of household objects in a breathless, rhetorical manner, in the tradition of the poets of the Revolutionary generation….
There was a touch of Surrealism to this work - a new, Soviet kind of Surrealism - in the intrusion of everyday detail into the poem. "
In an interview he was asked: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?" "I'm Jewish; a Russian poet, an English essayist – and, of course, an American citizen", he responded.
Brodsky's essays on Robert Frost were published in Homage to Frost, after his death.
He was a greatly honored professor, was on first name terms with the heads of many large publishing houses, and connected to the significant figures of American literary life. Brodsky is perhaps most known for his poetry collections A Part of Speech (1977) and To Urania (1988) and the essay collection Less Than One (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 1979 Italy bestowed him the Mondello Prize.
In 1987 he received both a Guggenheim fellowship and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was also a recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence.
In 1986, his collection of essays Less Than One won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism and he was given an honorary doctorate of literature from Oxford University.
( In this brief, intense, gem-like book, equal parts exte...)
His powerful, highly individualistic writing troubled the Communist political and literary establishments, and he was arrested in 1964 for being a "vagrant" and "parasite" devoted to translating and writing poetry instead of to useful work.
A recurring theme in Brodsky's writing is the relationship between the poet and society. In particular, Brodsky emphasized the power of literature to positively affect its audience and to develop the language and culture in which it is situated. He suggested that the Western literary tradition was in part responsible for the world having overcome the catastrophes of the 20th century, such as Nazism, Communism and the World Wars. He regarded poetry as "language's highest degree of maturity", and wanted everyone to be susceptible to it.
He was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Marina Basmanova and Brodsky started a relationship; however, Brodsky's then close friend and fellow poet Dmitri Bobyshev was in love with Basmanova. Brodsky dedicated much love poetry to Marina Basmanova.
Their son Andrei was bor on the 8 October 1967. Andrei was registered under Basmanova's surname because Brodsky did not want his son to suffer from political attacks that he endured.
Andrei married in the 1990s and had three children, all of whom were recognized and supported by Brodsky as his grandchildren
In 1990, while teaching literature in France, Brodsky married a young student, Maria Sozzani, who has a Russian-Italian background; they had one daughter, Anna.
