Joseph Brodsky Biography

Joseph Brodsky

(Joseph or Iosif Alexándrovich Brodsky; Leningrad, 1940-New York, 1996) Russian poet and essayist.He is considered the greatest poet born in Soviet times and, perhaps with the sole exception of B.Pasternak and A.Akhmatova, the most important in the Russian language of the second half of the 20th century.

Brodsky's legendary scholarship, the self-learning to which he submitted throughout his life and his inspired dialogues with the "poetic shadows" of his own culture and of the universal, are linked to an overflowing energy, a lavish prosodic and strophic inventiveness, as well as his excellence of style and generosity of spirit.This author became, like Akhmatova, his "poetic godmother" and discoverer, in the cultural memory of his generation and, by chance, the greatest gift that Russia made to the West.

Thanks to him, the Soviet poets learned to be "Russian" again, cosmopolitan, genuinely modern and, in a way, even postmodern.His poetic interlocutors (Homer, Virgil, Horace, Dante, T.S.Eliot, W.H.Auden), are among the most distinguished of the Western tradition, what he called the "society of dead poets." His ability to construct lyric poems endowed with precise polyphony is unparalleled among the creators of his generation and constitutes one of the most relevant successes of his work.

Of his initial work, it is worth highlighting the books Verses y poemas (1965) and Parada en el Desierto (1970), which appeared published for the first time In New York.Deprived of recognition in his country and after being sentenced to forced labor accused of "social parasitism", he was forced to emigrate from Russia in 1972.After a short period in Europe, he moved to the United States, whose citizenship he acquired in 1977 and where he combined his poetic work with literature classes at various North American universities.

His knowledge of English poetry, and his deep-rooted sense of isolation and melancholy, led him to cultivate a poetry of nocturnal meditation, such as the long poem Elegy to John Donne ( 1967).From his period in exile, which constitutes most of his life, it is worth highlighting the poetry books The end of the beautiful era (1976), Part of the prayer (1977 ), In England (1977), New stays in Augusta (1983), Urania (1987) and Landscape with flood (1996).His poetics, obsessed with the contradictions between space, time and the senses, is one of the most relevant of the 20th century, and earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.

From a Jewish family, Connoisseur of several languages, such as English and Spanish, he was a member of the section of translators of the Union of Writers of Saint Petersburg, calling himself "poet-translator".He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.He also published two plays and a large number of essays collected in various volumes, including Del dolor y la razon (1995).At his express wish, his ashes were sent to Venice.

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