Ioseph Alexandrovich
Brodskiy
1940-1996
Ioseph Alexandrovich Brodskiy was an outstanding poet, essayist, translator and teacher. He was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad. In his youth, he tried more than 10 professions. He read a lot, he was engaged in self-education. So, from the age of fifteen, I.A. Brodskiy had to go to work at the factory. He also had the opportunity to work in the morgue, took part in geological expeditions. His main teacher on the way to poetry was Anna Akhmatova, who skillfully combined both Pushkin’s traditions and the achievements of the Silver Age. Under her influence, the ethics and manner of I.A. Brodskiy’s poetry were formed. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, he studied foreign languages (English and Polish), attended lectures at the Faculty of Philology of LSU. In 1959, he got acquainted with a collection of poems by E.A. Baratynskiy, after which he finally strengthens his desire to become a poet: “I had nothing to read, and when I found this book and read it, then I understood everything what to do…” Brodskiy’s lyrics absorb the basic principles of “metaphysical” thinking: the rejection of the cult of the experiences of the lyrical “I” in poetry, the “dry” masculine intellectuality, the dramatic and personal situation of the lyrical monologue, often – with a tense sense of the interlocutor, conversational tone, the use of “non-ethical” vocabulary (colloquialisms, vulgarisms, scientific, technical concepts), the construction of the text as a series of proofs in favor of any statement. I.A. Brodskiy published many of his works abroad — the cycle “Songs of a Happy Winter”, collections “Stop in the Desert” (1967), “The End of the Beautiful Epoch” and “Part of Speech” (both 1972), “Urania” (1987), poems “Guest”, “Petersburg Novel”, “Procession”, “Zofia”, “Hills”, “Isaac and Abraham”, “Gorchakov and Gorbunov” and others. He also created numerous essays, plays, and translations. In 1987, I.A. Brodskiy was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The monument to the poet I.A. Brodskiy was erected in 2011 in Moscow on Novinsky Boulevard near the building of the US Embassy. The authors of the monument are sculptor Georgy Frangulyan and architect Sergey Skuratov.
Address: Moscow, Povarskaya str., 33
