Brodsky joseph biography

Joseph Brodsky(1940-1996) was born in Leningrad in 1940. Lacking direction in the rigid school system, he quit school around age fifteen, he then took menial jobs in Leningrad, traveled around Russia with geological expeditions.

Within those early years he taught himself English and Polish, translating into Russian the works of John Donne, the 17th-century English poet, and Czeslaw Milosz, a modern Polish poet.

Brodsky joseph biography wikipedia

He also started writing poems and appeared at public readings around Leningrad. As Brodsky’s close friend and a perceptive scholar Leo Loseff suggested in retrospect, Brodsky’s early experiences became the primary source of his recurring themes of loneliness and alienation as well as exile and loss — literal and metaphorical (Loseff 2010: 46).

In 1961, Brodsky was introduced to Anna Akhmatova who became his mentor for a few years before she died in 1966.

In 1964, Soviet authorities persecuted Joseph Brodsky for “malic