Biographical Note
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Soviet Union, on May 24, 1940. He left school in 1955, held a variety of jobs, and began a program of self-education during which he taught himself Polish and English. By the late 1950s, Brodsky had started writing poetry and producing literary translations that were published in samizdat editions and in 1960 met the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who became Brodsky's mentor and advocate. In 1964, Brodsky was charged and convicted as a "social parasite" in a Soviet court and sentenced to five years in a labor camp in Siberia. Following protests by Akhmatova, Jean Paul-Sartre, and others, Brodsky's sentence was reduced, and in 1972, he was forced into exile from the USSR.
After his exile, Brodsky emigrated to the United States and in 1977 became an American citizen. In addition to teaching positions at Columbia University, New York, N.Y., and Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass., where he taught for fifteen years, Brodsky also served as a visiting professor at several other colleges and universities. In 1986 his collection of essays Less Than One was awarded the National Book Critics Award for Criticism, and in 1987, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, 1991-1992. Brodsky died on January 28, 1996, New York, N.Y.
Celebrated as one of the great Russian poets of his generation, Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, and several collections of essays, including Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems (1967), Selected Poems (1973), A Part of Speech(1980), To Urania (1988), Watermark (1992), and On Grief and Reason (1995), as well as the play Marbles (1989).