Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky, 1988

Joseph Brodsky, 1972

Joseph Brodsky (born Iossif Alexandrowitsch Brodskij , Russian Иосиф Александрович Бродский ; born May 24, 1940 in Leningrad , †  January 28, 1996 in New York ) was a Russian-American poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature .

Life

Brodsky was born and raised in Leningrad to Jewish parents, which he reported on in his memories of Petersburg . Brodsky was an only child. His father was a photographer who also worked professionally on the Leningrad front during the war. After the war he served as a 3rd rank captain in the Navy. The mother Marija Moissejewna Wolpert worked as an interpreter during the war, helping to translate information from prisoners of war. In the post-war period she was employed as an accountant.

Joseph Brodsky got his first name after Josef Stalin . He left school in the ninth grade at the age of 15 and called early school leaving "his first act of free will". Subsequently he worked as a milling cutter, laboratory and factory worker, hospital employee and participant in geological expeditions, during which he got to know large parts of the Soviet Union between 1957 and 1960. He learned Polish and English in self-study and wrote his first poems in the late 1950s. He also worked on translations of foreign poems. From 1960 he was able to publish his own texts as well as translations in several magazines.

In November 1963, an article appeared in a Leningrad newspaper in which Brodsky was not only accused of parasiticism, but also alleged that he had planned to hijack an airplane to take it abroad. As a result, he was sentenced to five years of forced labor in 1964 for “parasitism”, but was released after only 18 months in the Arkhangelsk area .

On June 5, 1972, the authorities expelled Brodsky from the Soviet Union and, after all manuscripts had been confiscated from him, put him on a plane to Vienna . Brodsky arrived in Vienna “with a suitcase and 50 dollars in his pocket”. There the American poet WH Auden , who spent the summer months in Kirchstetten and "whose poetry Brodsky already admired in Leningrad", took him on. For the 32-year-old, “the adventure” USA began .

In 1977, Brodsky received US citizenship. With a few exceptions, he continued to write his poems in Russian, but he also wrote much-noticed essays in English. In 1981 he was a MacArthur Fellow . He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1976 and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1979 . He was a co-founder of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers . In 1987 Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although his poems have now also appeared in Russia, he did not want to return there. In 1996, Brodsky died of a heart attack in New York . His grave is on the cemetery island of San Michele in the Venice lagoon .

Joseph Brodsky Museum

On May 24, 2015, the Joseph Brodsky Museum opened for one day on the occasion of his 75th birthday in the apartment in Saint Petersburg where Joseph Brodsky lived in his youth . The restoration work is expected to continue for a few more years as 32 different types of mold have been discovered there.

There is a short essay by Brodsky in which he describes the living conditions in what was then the Kommunalka (shared apartment of several families). Brodsky lived in this apartment until 1972, the family had two rooms. A table and a typewriter have been preserved in the original furniture.

plant

In addition to his primarily lyrical work, a strongly essayistic novel stands out: The memories of Petersburg . As an exile in New York, he deals with the collective unconscious of the Russians. He writes about the evil with which one knows how to come to terms in Russia: "... Hello, I am the evil, how are you ..." As a child, Brodsky questioned socialist planning, met authoritarian teachers in his youth, then they just as authoritarian foremen in production and, less badly, the prison guards. Everyone has what it takes and anyone can be a victim in the next moment. He also takes up the topic of deeply rooted anti-Semitism, with which he had to struggle in elementary school; for example, he did not get a loan card for the school library. The shortage of living space, cramped spaces and the beauty of a city with its palaces are described. Brodsky's literary role models include Ossip Mandelstam , John Donne , Anna Akhmatova , Marina Tsvetaeva and WH Auden. Brodsky also translated poems. He wrote poetry in Russian and prose, essays and, more rarely, poetry in English.

Works (selection)

• Selected poems. Bechtle Verlag, Munich 1966
• An old architect in Rome. Poems. R. Piper Verlag, Munich 1978
• Roman elegies and other poems. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1985
• Memories of Leningrad. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1987. Title of the original edition: Less Than One: Selected Essays. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1986
• Escape from Byzantium. Essays. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1988
• Shores of the Lost. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1991
• To Urania. Poems. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1994
• Of pain and reason. About Hardy, Rilke, Frost and others. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1996
• Stop in the desert. Poems. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997
• The mortal poet. About literature, love affairs and boredom. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1998
• Christmas poems. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 2004
• Letter to the oasis. A hundred poems. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 2006

Literature on Joseph Brodsky (selection)

• Isolde Baumgärtner: Watermarks. Time and language in the lyric work of Iosif Brodsky. Böhlau, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-14106-6 .
• Alexandra Berlina: Brodsky Translating Brodsky . Bloomsbury, New York 2014 (Anna Balakian Prize 2013–2016)
• Alexandru Bulucz (ed.): The 32 mold species of Joseph Brodsky. 23 poems and 16 photos. mikrotext, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-944543-76-5 .
• Cynthia L. Haven (Ed.): Joseph Brodsky: Conversations. University Press of Mississippi, 2012, ISBN 1-57806-528-3 .
• Jens Herlth: A singer of broken lines. Iosif Brodskij's poetic self-creation. Böhlau, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-412-12704-3 .
• Lev V. Losev (Ed.): Brodsky's poetics and aesthetics . Macmillan, Basingstoke 1990. ISBN 0-333-48204-2 .
• Jürgen Klein , Venetian Moments. Shoebox House Verlag, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-941120-16-7 .
• Heinz Piontek : Let's discover the poet Brodsky . In: Heinz Piontek: Men who make poems. To the lyric today . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1970.
• Valentina Poluchina: Joseph Brodsky, a poet for our time. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989, ISBN 0-521-33484-5 .
• Jürgen Serke : The new exile. The exiled poets. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-25845-6 , pp. 239-257.
• Wiebke Wittschen: The poetic language draft in Iosif Brodskij. BIS-Verlag, Oldenburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8142-2056-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jürgen Serke: The new exile. The Exiled Poets , p. 247.
2. ↑ Jürgen Serke: The new exile. The Exiled Poets , pp. 252–253.
3. ↑ Музей Бродского в Петербурге откроется на один день. colta.ru, March 20, 2015, accessed August 8, 2015 . 
4. ↑ Создатели музея Бродского в Петербурге рассказали о сложностях с организацией пространства. interfax.ru, March 19, 2015, accessed August 8, 2015 . 
5. ↑ Poet Joseph Brodsky's flat opens as museum in Russia. (No longer available online.) France 24, 22 May 2015, archived from the original on 23 July 2015 ; Retrieved May 25, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ^ Joseph Brodsky: "Memories of Leningrad" (1986) , Der Umblätterer, July 9, 2012

Web links

Commons : Joseph Brodsky  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Joseph Brodsky in the catalog of the German National Library
• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the award ceremony in 1987 to Joseph Brodsky
• Further texts and information from the author and translator Ralph Dutli
• Horst Bienek : Poetry helps us to endure life better (on Joseph Brodsky's essay Escape from Byzantium ), in: Die Zeit , No. 41, October 7, 1988.
• Olga Martynova : a predator of poetry. (on Joseph Brodsky's poems), in: Die Zeit , No. 16, April 12, 2006.