Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). He studied at schools in Leningrad until he was 15. Brodsky started to write poetry from the late 1950s, earning a reputation as a free thinking writer. He taught himself Polish so that he could read poetry that had never been translated into Russian. Brodsky also demonstrated considerable talent in rendering Russian translations of poets and authors through Polish translations.

As a young man, Brodsky worked at many occupations, including a milling machine operator, stoker, and geologist-prospector. His poetry appeared in samizdat (a clandestine circulation) and was widely read.

Brodsky's reputation made him a target for the secret police and he was convicted as a "social parasite." He spent some time in Kresty, the most famous prison in the Soviet Union. In the official record he was characterized to be "less than one." It became the title for Brodsky's collection of essays, which was published in 1986. Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labour, but the sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests. The poet Anna Akhmatov was his close friend. During Brodsky's time in prison a collection of his poems was issued in 1965 by an American publisher. In 1972 Brodsky was forced to exile from the USSR. He went to Vienna, until he was able to emigrate to the U.S. There he worked as a visiting professor at several universities. In 1977 he became a U.S. citizen and in 1991-92 he was America's Poet Laureate. Brodsky died of a heart attack on Jan. 28, 1996, in New York.