Poet Joseph Brodsky: Nobel Prize in Literature

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:53

Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky is a Russian and American poet, playwright and essayist. Exiled from the USSR, he received the Nobel Prize in the year when an active phase of reforms began in the Soviet Union, glasnost was proclaimed, non-state forms of management appeared, and relations with the United States improved markedly.

Double Rewards

The Swedish Academy, in its official statement, called his essays and poems, thanks to which he became famous, an example of a comprehensive writing, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic power.

In its press release, the Academy paid tribute to Brodsky's heroic devotion to his art, noting that a young Leningrad underground poet, under the pretext of parasitism, was sentenced to camp work in the Far North, and then deprived of citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 year. At the time of the Nobel Prize, Brodsky lived in New York and taught part of the time at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Laureate, having learned about the award duringlunch in London with British novelist John Le Carré, said he was doubly proud as a Russian and as an American.

Out of politics

The 47-year-old poet and essayist expressed hope that due to the new policy of glasnost and openness, he will have the opportunity to see his 20-year-old son Andrei, who lives in Leningrad. According to him, the situation in the country has improved significantly compared to 15 years ago, but he received the prize for literature, not politics.

In announcing the award of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky, Professor Stuart Allen, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, emphasized that this was not a political signal to the Soviet Union, in which Brodsky's work remained banned. But one of the 5 members of the selection committee, Goran Malmqvist of Stockholm University, pointedly disagreed. Professor Allen said that he did not know how the Soviet political leadership would react, and this did not bother him much. According to him, it can show rejection, as in the case of Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, but it would be stupid to do this, because this is a very, very good poet who grew up and began writing in Russia.

Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov said the tastes of the Nobel Committee were sometimes strange and added that he would prefer Trinidadian-born novelist Naipaul to receive the award.

In what year did Brodsky receive the Nobel Prize?

18members of the Swedish Academy, according to various sources, selected the winner with an undeniable international artistic reputation and the prospect of many years of creativity. The last criterion has become a necessary measure, since the Academy has previously been the subject of ridicule due to the choice of elderly and unknown Nobel Prize nominees.

Brodsky became the second youngest laureate in the field of literature. Albert Camus was 44 years old when he received this award in 1957. In 1987, the prize had a monetary value of about US$330,000. The official presentation of the Nobel Prize winners of all directions took place on December 10.

Although details of the discussion of the nominees were not disclosed, a member of the Academy confirmed that Brodsky was a finalist in 1986, when Nigerian poet Wole Shoyinka won. The following year, according to some reports, he outstripped such contenders as Naipaul, the Mexican critic and poet Octavio Paz, and the respectable Spanish poet Camilo José Chela, born in 1916.

Enthusiastic welcome

The Swedish Academy appears to have achieved its goal of avoiding the sarcasm that accompanied, for example, the 1984 decision to give the prize to the 83-year-old Czechoslovak poet Jaroslav Seifert. The reaction of the critical and academic communities to the award of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky was enthusiastic.

There are always a small number of writers who will forever be part of literature, and he is one of them, according to writer and critic Susan Sontag. According to herIn my opinion, not every great writer receives a Nobel Prize, and not every Nobel Prize is awarded to a great writer, but this is an example when a really serious, perfect, outstanding writer became the winner.

And Yale University Associate Professor of Russian Literature Susan Amert named the winner the best Russian poet.

The Nobel Prize of Joseph Brodsky was announced traditionally. As the clock struck 13, Professor Allen entered the crowded boardroom of the Exchange building in the Old City. Pressing his back against the door, his face trembling with excitement, he announced Brodsky's name. The ensuing general approval indicated that those present followed the work of the author.

Divine gift

A biographical note distributed to journalists says that poetry for Brodsky is a divine gift. It noted the radiant intensity of his language and his amazing mastery of the English idiom in a collection of poems published in 1986 as A History of the Twentieth Century. This book and the 1986 collection of essays Less than One provided Brodsky's nomination with a strong chance of winning. But the poetry on which he built his reputation was first published in the West in 1967 in Russian and subsequently translated into English by the author and his friends.

During the ceremony, Brodsky said that he did not change the language - he uses English because he likes it, and still writes good old poetry in Russian.

Traditions of Mandelstam and Akhmatova

Nobel Prize winner Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad. Leaving school at the age of 15, he worked as an assistant prosector, stoker and sailor. He taught in Polish and English, wrote poetry and developed his gift for dramatic reading, which is said to border on musical performances.

Philologists attribute it to the Russian modernist tradition of Osip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin's death camp, and Anna Akhmatova, an influential representative of Russian poetry, who shortly before her death led the campaign that resulted in Brodsky's release in 1965. His English-language sources of inspiration ranged from John Donne to the contemporaries of Auden and Robert Lowell.

Literary Police

The poetry of Joseph Brodsky, with haunting images of wandering, loss and the search for freedom, was not political, not the work of an anarchist or even an active dissident. He was a dissident of the spirit, protesting against the gray life in the Soviet Union and its materialistic dogmas.

But in a country where poetry and other literature were officially subject to the state, where poetry was forced to hard labor in the quarries of socialist realism, a ban on the publication of Brodsky's works was inevitable, but thanks to "Samizdat" he became more and more popular and should had to face the literary police.

In 1963, Brodsky was condemned by the Leningrad newspaper, in which his poetry was calledpornographic and anti-Soviet. He was interrogated, his work was confiscated, he was placed in a psychiatric facility twice. Finally, he was arrested and brought to trial. Then even thoughts could not arise that he would receive the Nobel Prize.

In what year was Brodsky convicted?

Failing to convict the poet for the content of his works, in 1964 the authorities charged him with parasitism. They called Brodsky a false poet in corduroy pants who had not fulfilled his constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland. The trial was conducted in secret, although his recording was smuggled out and made Brodsky popular in the West, who suddenly found a new symbol of artistic dissent in a totalitarian society. The poet was found guilty and sentenced to 5 years of forced labor in a labor camp in the Far North.

But against the backdrop of protests by writers at home and abroad, 18 months later, the Soviet authorities commuted the sentence, and he returned to his native Leningrad. Over the next 7 years, Brodsky continued to write, many of his works were translated into German, French and English and published abroad, and his popularity continued to grow, especially in the West.

Deportation

The poet was increasingly persecuted for his Jewish nationality and poetry. He was denied permission to travel abroad for a writers' conference. Finally, in 1972, he was stripped of his citizenship, taken to the airport, and kicked out ofcountries. His parents remained in the USSR.

Auden and Lowell became Brodsky's friends and sponsors after he came to the West. They were drawn to him by the conviction, often expressed by fans, that he was "the right one".

With the help of Professor Karl Proffer and the poet Auden, whom Brodsky met in Vienna upon his arrival from the USSR, the poet settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he became a member of the University of Michigan Creative People Program. He later moved to New York where he taught at Queens College, Mount Holyoke College and other institutions. He traveled extensively, but never returned to his homeland even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He became a United States citizen in 1977.

Meanwhile, his poems, plays, essays and criticism have appeared on the pages of many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Book Review and other magazines. For their anthologies, Brodsky received the 1981 McCarter and 1986 National Book Critics Circle awards, an honorary doctorate in literature from Oxford University, and 1987 was the year of the Joseph Brodsky Nobel Prize.

The best contemporary poet

According to Thomas Venclof, assistant professor of Russian literature at Yale University, who had met Brodsky 20 years earlier, his rise was meteoric - from the first verses, everyone was convinced that he was the best contemporary Russian poet.

Michael Scammell, head of Russian literature at Cornell University, called himthe best living Russian writer. According to him, Brodsky belongs to the great tradition of twentieth-century poetry represented by Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Pasternak. The author of the biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn also added that Brodsky has a really deep and global view of humanity, and he is busy with the fate of human civilization.

Defender of freedom and human rights

Although Brodsky preferred to be known as a poet rather than as a critic of the USSR, he was an outstanding supporter of human rights and freedom of the press. One of his most powerful essays concerned the Soviet authorities' refusal to allow him to visit his parents in Leningrad before his mother, a translator, died in 1983 and his father, a photographer, died in 1984.

The year of Brodsky's Nobel Prize marked the beginning of a thaw in the land, which, according to the poet's friends, he still passionately loved. The Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir, in which the poet first published his epigram to Akhmatova's poem in 1963, asked permission to publish some of the laureate's poems.

Joseph Brodsky died on January 28, 1996 in Brooklyn and was buried in Venice.