Russian Bookshelf: revising Joseph Brodsky's poems

January 30, 2013 Alexander Ganjushin

Do you want to get more familiar with the 

Russian literature? We are happy to offer 

you audio books from our Russian 

Bookshelf. Enjoy the listening!

The following poems were used in the 

recording: "A Song", "Tornfallet", "Belfast 

Tune". Music: Giovanni Battista Martini - 

Sonata III - Preludio

Today we are revising some Joseph 

Brodsky's poems.

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on 

May 24, 1940. 

He left school at the age of fifteen, taking 

jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler 

room, and a geological expedition. 

During this time Brodsky taught himself 

English and Polish and began writing poetry.

Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union 

in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-

year sentence in alabor camp in northern 

Russia. According to Brodsky, literature 

turned his life around. "I was a normal 

Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become 

a man of the system. But something 

turned me upside down: [Fyodor 

Dostoevsky's] Notes from the 

Underground. I realized what I am. That I 

am bad."

Before leaving the Soviet Union, Brodsky 

studied with the beloved Russian poet 

Anna Akhmatova. After his exile, he 

moved to America, where he made homes 

in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts. 

There, according to fellow poet Seamus 

Heaney, he lived "frugally, industriously, 

and in a certain amount of solitude."

Interesting fact: Joseph Brodsky opened the famous  restaurant  "Russian Samovar" in New York in partnership with a great entrepreneur Roman  Kaplan  and famous Russian ballet dancer Michael Baryshnikov, whose birthday we've celebrated on Sunday... The restaurant then already had an interesting history: Frank Sinatra owned the place in the past. He had many personal concerts there and often spent time with his friends at this restaurant. Keeping its charming tradition to be a favorite place for bohemian Russians, Samovar became a home for famous Russian poets and writers. For the last 15 years Russian Samovar has been a place for poetry reading. (from left to right: Brodsky, Baryshnikov, Rostropovich)

Celebrated as the greatest Russian poet of his 

generation, Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, as 

well as several collections of essays, and received the 

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. His first book of poetry 

in English translation appeared in 1973.

In addition to teaching positions at Columbia 

University

 and Mount Holyoke College, where he taught 

for fifteen years, Brodsky served as Poet Laureate of the 

United States from 1991 to 1992. In 1993, he joined with 

Andrew Carroll to found the American Poetry & Literacy 

Project, a not-for-profit organization devoted to making 

poetry a more central part of American culture, "as 

ubiquitous," in Brodsky's words, "as the nature that 

surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its 

similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars 

themselves." Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996, 

of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment.