Joseph Brodsky

  b. 1940; d. 1996 | Russian poet

At The Bottom

— 1964

Brodsky and his family were poor and lived in a cramped one room apartment.

At the age of 24, a young, barely-published poet named Joseph Brodsky learned a brutal lesson about the willingness of the Soviet Union to tolerate artistic independence.  Brodsky had not been widely published, and (even worse from the perspective of the authorities) he shirked “useful work” in the pursuit of his art.  Born into a Jewish family in Leningrad at a time when anti-Semitism was rife throughout Soviet society, Brodsky and his family were poor and lived in a cramped one room apartment.  Brodsky left school at the age of 15 and embarked on a decade of completely unsuccessful efforts to find work he enjoyed.  He took jobs as a milling machine operator, a morgue attendant, as a boilerman on a Soviet ship, and as a hospital orderly.  He began writing poems as a teenager and taught himself what he wished to learn.  He read widely in philosophy, religion, and poetry, getting books wherever he could find them (including garbage dumpsters).  He began publishing poems in samizdat journals — underground, typewritten publications that usually expressed ideas not permitted in state-run media. His poetry had just begun to receive some critical attention when the Soviet authorities intervened and charged him with “having a worldview damaging to the state, decadence and modernism, failure to finish school, and social parasitism.”  At his trial, the judge asked him where he had received permission to become a poet.  Brodsky replied that his calling had come “from God.”  He was convicted of “social parasitism” and sentenced to five years of hard labor.