Brodsky's year of birth. Brodsky Joseph - biography. Children's years, the poet's family

   Brodsky Joseph Alexandrovich was born on May 24, 1940 in the city of Leningrad. Joseph Brodsky - Russian and American poet, essayist, playwright, translator, 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and US poet and laureate in 1991-1992. Joseph Brodsky wrote his poems mainly in Russian, and essays in English.

Biography of Joseph Brodsky

The father of Joseph Brodsky - Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky - was the captain of the Navy of the USSR. Born in 1903, died in 1984. He was also a military photojournalist. After the war, Alexander Brodsky entered the service of the photo laboratory of the Naval Museum, then worked as a photographer and journalist in the city newspapers of Leningrad. The mother of Joseph Brodsky - Maria Moiseevna Volpert - was an accountant, was born in 1905, died in 1983.

The early childhood of Joseph Brodsky passed during the war, the blockade of Leningrad and post-war poverty. In 1955, Joseph Brodsky dropped out of school and went to work at the Arsenal plant. He wanted to financially support the family, since his father was not around at this time. For some time he worked in a morgue, then as a stoker in a boiler room, a sailor in a lighthouse, and also as a worker in geological expeditions of NIIGA. In the summer of 1961, Brodsky suffered a first nervous breakdown, and he returned home to Leningrad.

In 1962, the young Joseph Brodsky met the young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova, the daughter of the artist. Marianna Basmanova, who had the initials “M. B. ”, many of his works were devoted. October 8, 1967 the couple had a son - Andrei Osipovich Basmanov.

On February 18, 1964, the court decided to send Brodsky to a forced examination. So, in a psychiatric hospital No. 2 in Leningrad, Joseph Brodsky spent three weeks and recalled the period as the worst time in his life. On March 13, 1964, at the second court hearing, Brodsky was sent to five years in a remote area for forced labor. But later Brodsky called this time the happiest in his life, since there he had the opportunity to study English poetry.

The trial of the poet became one of the factors that led to the emergence of a human rights movement in the USSR, as well as to increased attention abroad to the situation in the field of human rights in the USSR. With the active participation of the poetess Anna Akhmatova, a defensive campaign was going on for Joseph Brodsky. In September 1965, under pressure from the Soviet and world public, including after appealing to the Soviet government, Jean-Paul Sartre and many other foreign writers, the poet was reduced to exile, and Brodsky was able to return home to Leningrad.

In October 1965, Korney Chukovsky and Boris Vakhtin recommended that Joseph Brodsky join the Translation Group at the Leningrad branch of the USSR Writers Union. Brodsky followed the advice, which allowed him to avoid new accusations of parasitism in the future, but the KGB did not disregard his so-called “old client”. This was also influenced by the fact that Brodsky became a very popular poet among foreign journalists. But of course, they did not give him permission to leave the authorities. Meanwhile, beyond the borders of the Soviet space, Brodsky's work continues to go out in publications in both Russian and English, Polish and Italian. In 1971, Joseph Brodsky was elected a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

On May 10, 1972, Brodsky was summoned to the OVIR (Department of Visas and Registration) and faced with a choice: immediate emigration or prisons and mental hospitals. By that time, he had already had to lie twice on the so-called “examination” in psychiatric hospitals, which, according to Brodsky, was worse than prison and exile. He decides to leave. On June 4, 1972, the poet, deprived of Soviet citizenship, flew from Leningrad along the route prescribed by Jewish emigration: to Vienna.

In July 1972, Brodsky moved to the United States and began teaching as a guest poet at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. From that moment, Brodsky leads the life of a university teacher, holding over the next 24 years professorships in total at six American and British universities, including Columbia and New York. Joseph Brodsky taught the history of Russian literature, Russian and world poetry, the theory of poetry, gave lectures and poetry at international literary festivals and forums, in libraries and universities in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, France, Sweden and Italy.

Every year the poet's health deteriorated. Brodsky suffered four heart attacks - in 1976, 1985 and 1994. His parents applied for permission to see their son twelve times, the congressmen and prominent figures of the US culture addressed the USSR government with the same request, but even after Joseph Brodsky underwent open heart surgery in 1978 and needed to be cared for, he parents were denied an exit visa. They never saw their son again. Brodsky's mother died in 1983, and a little more than a year later his father died. Both times Brodsky was not allowed to attend the funeral.

In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat, a Russian maternal. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born.

On January 27, 1996 in New York, Brodsky was preparing to go to South Headley, as the spring semester began on Monday. Wishing his wife good night, the poet went up to his office to work a little. In the morning, on the floor in the office, his wife found him. Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky died on the night of the 27th to the 28th of January 1996, four months before his 56th birthday. The cause of death was a sudden cardiac arrest.

Brodsky was temporarily buried in the cemetery at the Holy Trinity Church, on the banks of the Hudson River, where the body was stored until June 21, 1997. But according to Maria, Brodsky’s widow, one of the poet’s friends expressed the idea of \u200b\u200ba funeral in Venice. This is the city that, apart from Leningrad, Joseph loved most. June 21, 1997 at the San Michele cemetery in Venice, the reburial of the body of Joseph Brodsky took place. The resting place was marked with a wooden cross named Joseph Brodsky. A few years later, a tombstone was erected on the poet’s grave by the artist Vladimir Radunsky. On the back of the monument you can see an inscription in Latin: Letum non omnia finit - Not everything ends with death.

Creativity of Joseph Brodsky

According to Joseph Brodsky himself, he began to write poetry at the age of eighteen, but there are several poems dated 1956-1957. Marina Tsvetaeva, Eugene Baratynsky and Osip Mandelstam very much influenced the poet's work. Brodsky's first published poem was The Ballad of a Little Tug, which was published in the children's magazine Bonfire (No. 11, 1962). Brodsky's poems and their translations were published outside the USSR since 1964, when his name became widely known thanks to the publication of a record of the trial of the poet. Since his arrival in the West, his poetry has regularly appeared on the pages of publications of Russian emigration.

Venice and Brodsky

“She is so beautiful that you understand: you are not able to find in your life - and all the more you are not able to create yourself - anything that can be compared with this beauty. Venice is inaccessible. If there is a reincarnation, I would like to live my next life in Venice - to be there a cat, whatever, even a rat, but always in Venice ”- this is how the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote about Venice. According to him, in 1970 he had a real “idea-fix”. He dreamed of going to Venice, relocating, renting an entire floor in an old palazzo on the banks of a canal, sitting and writing, and throwing cigarette butts into the water and listening to them hiss.

Walks in Venice Brodsky: on the map   marked places where he lived and loved to be.

Where did Brodsky live in Venice? The first habitat of the poet in Venice was the Pension "Akkademia". He, by the way, is available today - about 170-200 euros is the number. In general, for the poet, Venice is primarily a place where "created by the hands of man can be much more beautiful than man himself." Writer and journalist Peter Weil, a friend of Joseph Brodsky, said that the last year did not go without a trip to Italy, sometimes he went there several times a year. Joseph Brodsky was very fond of winter Venice, when there are few tourists, but at the same time he always loved to watch people.

Brodsky has written a lot of poems about Italy: of the most famous - “Lagoon,“ Piazza Mattei ”,“ Embankment of the incurable ”,“ Dedicated to Marcus Aurelius ”. Stories about the “Embankment of the Incurable” need to be given special attention. More than five centuries ago, from the side of the Judecca Canal, there were hospital buildings where people lived terminally ill with the plague. They were brought to the embankment so that they could finally breathe air and say goodbye to this world. This embankment was called - Embankment incurable. True, it occurred to Joseph Brodsky to slightly correct this name poetically, and therefore she became the Embankment of the incurable. The hospital building now houses the Academy of Fine Arts.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Brodsky

For the first time, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Joseph Brodsky met in 1974 in New York. Their acquaintance turned into a strong friendship. As soon as Mikhail Baryshnikov ended up in America, Joseph Brodsky became the closest person to him. It turned out that in Russia they all the time were somewhere nearby, but did not intersect. And when both lived in Leningrad, it turned out that they even looked after the same girl and could very well meet in some house or with common friends, but life turned out in such a way that they only met in America.

Mikhail Baryshnikov spoke of Brodsky as follows: “Of course, Joseph influenced me. He helped me just figure out some life situations. He showed me the decision making mechanism. How to do something, based on what considerations, from what ethical standards. I always take his advice, try on how he would do it. ”

Joseph Brodsky said of Baryshnikov like this: "Pure metaphysics of the body." And he wrote on a book donated to Mikhail Baryshnikov:

   “And yet I will not make a hand
   What he can do is with his foot! ”

Together with Joseph Brodsky, they opened the Russian Samovar restaurant. In it, guests can still meet and dine with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Joseph Brodsky died on the birthday of Mikhail Baryshnikov - January 27. Baryshnikov flew to a friend’s funeral in Venice. And once he even said that he believed that Joseph Brodsky still helps him live.

Personal life

In 1962, young Joseph Brodsky met the young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova, the daughter of the artist. Marianna Basmanova, who had the initials “M. B. ”, many of his works were devoted. October 8, 1967 their son was born - Andrei Osipovich Basmanov. In 1990, Joseph Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat, a Russian mother. In 1993, their daughter Anna was born.

... June 22, 1941 in the afternoon there was an emergency issue of "Leningrad Truth." Of course, he was different from the usual morning peaceful release, not only in content. He was distinguished by the fact that the journalists realized the whole depth of the danger that came to our land, and tried to convey this alarm to readers. The editors of Leningradskaya Pravda created a military department uniting qualified, mobile journalists.

On June 22, 1941, in the House of Photographers, on Liteiny, 61, almost all of the city’s photo correspondents gathered for a rally, who adopted the resolution: “consider all Leningrad photo correspondents mobilized.”

Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky also became mobilized from the first days of the war.

A Izvestia photojournalist, LenTASS, he went through with his "watering can" (as German and German-made film and camera companies used to call it) three wars: Finnish, German, Japanese.

Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky, as a photographer and journalist, brought surprisingly vivid pictures of naval life to the editorial office of the Leningrad newspapers Sovetskaya Baltika, Sailor of the Baltic, North-West Vodnik. He painted with the light of his old "watering can" black-and-white compositions of sea and river life, ships and strong people with an iron character and an elusive little laugh in kind eyes. It could be seen on the embankments, near bridges, where ships moored from the Baltic and Ladoga moored at the mouth of the Okhta River, where river ships were being repaired. We see captains, mechanics, radio operators, sailors, pilots in his photographs.

Tall, slender, outwardly unhurried, but mobile in work, this person was able to quickly win people over.

A. I. Brodsky spoke originally about front-line freight trains, front-line villages somewhere near the river on the Leningrad Front, about the firing positions of Sevastopol, about the liberated Romanian port city of Constanta.

With a special paternal feeling, A.I. Brodsky liked to show one photograph: he is wearing a gray cap, his hands in his pockets, a kind smiley face, next to his son is Joseph, in a checkered cap, a jacket fastened with one button, a light sweater, a shirt with a tie, unsmiling lips stubbornly compressed.

In the picture:

Photojournalist A.I. Brodsky always professionally approached any editorial assignment. Most often he worked as a non-specular camera, but which enabled him to “build” the format of a future photograph when shooting, to see the main thing, the whole, and to highlight details. Probably, these individual qualities of the photo master: attention to the main thing and to details, to composition, the ability to see the inner world of his hero in one character trait or another, passed into the work of his son, poet Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky.

Peering at the photographs taken during the years of the siege by his father, the poet Joseph Brodsky noted that his father “made the best of the photographs I saw of the besieged city and participated in breaking the siege”.

Photographs by A. I. Brodsky were published in army, navy, Leningrad, and all-Union newspapers, in the journal Leningrad (in the photo essay The Baltic Young People (No. 1, 1942), in the essay by A. L. Kron “Underwater”, in the photo essay “The Order Carrier Crew” (No. 3, 1942), in the photo-report “In Fights for the City of Lenin” (No. 4-5, 1942) and other publications.

The photographs of A. I. Brodsky about Leningrad, about the siege of time, about the creators of Leningrad who restored the city destroyed by the war are another source for studying the history, culture, and life of the townspeople.

Albert Izmailov

2) A. Brodsky and students of the faculty of photography;

Photo from the archive of Vladimir Nikitin

Military photojournalist Alexander Brodsky returned from the war in 1948 and went to work at the photo laboratory of the Naval Museum. In 1950, he was demobilized, after which he worked as a photographer and journalist in several Leningrad newspapers. He was the creator, and then headed the legendary faculty of photo correspondents of the Union of Journalists. Father of the poet Joseph Brodsky.

Title photo:A.I. Brodsky (right) with his son I.A. Brodsky on the balcony of his apartment (24 Pestelya St.), 1970

Photo from the funds of the Central State Archive of Film and Photo Documents of St. Petersburg - from the book by A. Izmaylova “Leningrad sounds in us with Brodsky’s poems” (St. Petersburg, Polygraph LLC, 2011)

1940 May 24 - was born in Leningrad. Father, Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky, is a military photojournalist, and his mother, Maria Moiseevna, is a housewife.

1942 - after the winter under siege, Maria Moiseevna and Joseph left for evacuation to Cherepovets, returned to Leningrad in 1944.

1947   - enters school No. 203 on Kirochnaya street, 8. In 1950 he moved to school No. 196 on Mokhovaya street, in 1953 he went to the 7th grade of school No. 181 in Solyaniy Lane and remained the following year for the second year. In 1954, he applied to the Second Baltic School (Maritime School), but was not accepted. Goes to school No. 276 on Obvodny Canal, house No. 154, where he continued his studies in the 7th grade.

1955   - leaves the 8th grade of secondary school No. 276, enrolling as a milling apprentice at the Arsenal plant. Changes many jobs.
  The family gets "one and a half rooms" in the House of Muruzi.

1957   - Worker in geological expeditions of NIIGA: in 1957 and 1958 - on the White Sea, in 1959 and 1961 - in Eastern Siberia and Northern Yakutia, on the Anabar Shield.

1959   - gets acquainted with Eugene Rein, Anatoly Naiman, Vladimir Uflyand, Bulat Okudzhava, Sergey Dovlatov.

1960 , February 14 - the first major public appearance at the "tournament of poets" in the Leningrad Palace of Culture. Gorky with the participation of A. S. Kushner, G. Ya. Gorbovsky, V. A. Sosnory. Reading the poem "Jewish cemetery" caused a scandal.
  December - during a trip to Samarkand, Brodsky and his friend, former pilot Oleg Shakhmatov, considered a plan to hijack an aircraft in order to fly abroad.

1961 , summer - returns from a geological expedition in Yakutia to Leningrad.
  August - in the village of Komarovo near Leningrad, Eugene Rein introduces Brodsky to Anna Akhmatova.

1962   - the poem "From the outskirts to the center." It starts with Pushkin's reminiscence ("... Once again I visited / That corner of the earth ..."). But the object of Brodsky’s image is Leningrad, which is completely different from Pushkin’s Petersburg or even Dostoevsky’s Petersburg: not the city of Nevsky Prospekt or even houses, Kolomna, but the terrain of the outskirts, factories and factories, which simply did not exist in the nineteenth century, was not a city.
   Twenty-two-year-old Brodsky meets a young artist Marina (Marianna) Basmanova, daughter of the artist P. I. Basmanov. Since that time, Marianne Basmanova, hidden under the initials "M. B. ”, many works of the poet were devoted. Poems on M. B. “, occupy a central place in Brodsky’s lyrics.

1965 October - Brodsky, on the recommendation of Korney Chukovsky and Boris Vakhtin, was admitted to the Translators' Group at the Leningrad branch of the USSR Writers Union, which made it possible to avoid new accusations of parasitism in the future.
Publication in New York of the collection "Poems and Poems."
  end of the year - Brodsky hands over the manuscript of his book Winter Mail (verses 1962–1965) to the Leningrad branch of the publishing house Soviet Writer. A year later, the manuscript was returned by the publisher.

1966–1967   - 4 poems of the poet appeared in the Soviet press (not counting publications in children's magazines), after which a period of public dumbness began.

1970   - “Stop in the desert” is published in New York - Brodsky’s first book compiled under his control.

1971   - Brodsky was elected a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

1972 June 4 - forced departure to emigration.
  end of June - with Wisten Hugh Oden (Anglo-American poet) Brodsky takes part in the International Poetry Festival in London.
  July - moves to the USA and accepts the post of “poet-in-residence” at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he teaches, with interruptions, until 1980.

1977   - collection "Part of speech. Poems 1972-1976".
  Brodsky accepts American citizenship.

1982   - From this year until the end of her life she has been teaching spring semesters at a consortium of “five colleges”.

1986   - The publication of essays written in English in the book Less Than One.

1987   - The Nobel Prize for Literature. In the “Nobel Lecture” (1987), he remembered his predecessors who could also have appeared on this platform: Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963), Anna Akhmatova, Anglo-American poet Uisten Oden (1907–1973) : “I called only five - those whose work and whose destinies are dear to me, if only because, if they weren’t, I would have cost little as a person and as a writer: in any case, I would not have stood here today.”
  The beginning of Brodsky's publications in the USSR.

1991–1992 - The title of US poet laureate.

1990s- Four books of Brodsky’s new poems are published: Notes of the Fern, Cappadocia, In the Environs of Atlantis, and published in Ardis after the poet’s death, which became the final collection of The Landscape with the Flood.

1995 - Brodsky was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg. But he did not return to his homeland: "The best part of me is already there - my poems."

He was a photojournalist of an army newspaper, ended the war with the rank of captain of the third rank and then worked in the photo department of the Naval Museum, mother Maria Volpert worked as an accountant.

In 1955, after finishing seven classes and starting the eighth, Joseph Brodsky dropped out of school and entered the Arsenal plant as a milling apprentice.

This decision was connected both with problems at school and with Brodsky’s desire to financially support his family. I tried unsuccessfully to enter the school of submariners. At the age of 16, he decided to become a doctor, worked for a month as an assistant to the prosector in the morgue at the regional hospital, anatomized corpses, but in the end abandoned his medical career.

After that, in geological parties. From 1956 to 1963, he changed 13 jobs, where in total there were two years eight months.

Since 1957, Brodsky began to write poetry, spoke with their reading in public. Since the 1960s, he began to engage in translations.

The poet's talent was appreciated by the famous Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova. Brodsky, rejected by official circles, gained fame in literary circles, among the intellectual underground, but he never belonged to any group, was not associated with dissidentism.

Until 1972, only 11 of his poems were published in the USSR in the third issue of the Moscow samizdat hectographed syntax journal and local Leningrad newspapers, as well as translation works under his own name or under a pseudonym.

On February 12, 1964, the poet was arrested in Leningrad on charges of parasitism. March 13, a trial was held over Brodsky. Anna Akhmatova, writer Samuel Marshak, composer Dmitry Shostakovich, and also the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stood up for the poet. Brodsky was sentenced to five years in exile in the Arkhangelsk region "with mandatory involvement in physical labor."

Returning from exile, he lived in Leningrad. The poet continued to work, but still his poems could not appear in official publications. Means for life were provided by transfers, supported by friends and acquaintances. Basically, from the works of this time, Brodsky himself compiled a unique, addressed to the same addressee book of lyrics "New Stanzas in August. Poems to M. B."

In May 1972, the poet was summoned to the OVIR with an ultimatum proposal to emigrate to Israel, and Brodsky decided to leave abroad. In June, he went to Vienna, in July - to the United States.

His first position is a professor at the University of Michigan. He then moved to New York and taught at Columbia University, the colleges of New York and New England.

The poet published his works - the cycle "Songs of a Happy Winter", the collections "Stop in the Desert" (1967), "The End of the Beautiful Era" and "Part of the Speech" (both - 1972), "Urania" (1987), the poem "Guest", Petersburg novel, Procession, Zofya, Hills, Isaac and Abraham, Gorchakov and Gorbunov and others. He created essays, stories, plays, translations.

He is in exile. In English, Brodsky published five poetry books during his lifetime. The first, Elegy to John Donne, released in 1967 in England, was composed of poems until 1964 without the knowledge and participation of the poet. His first English book was Selected Poems (Selected Poems, 1973), translated by George Klein, reproducing two-thirds of the contents of Desert Stops.

Later, A Part of Speech ("Part of Speech", 1980), To Urania ("Towards Urania", 1988), So Forth ("So on", 1996) were published. The first collection of his prose in English was Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986), recognized as the best literary and critical book of the year in the United States. In 1995, an essay book On Grief and Reason (On Sorrow and Reason) was published.

Brodsky was published in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, participated in conferences, symposia, traveled extensively around the world, which was reflected in his work - in the works "Rotterdam Diary", "Lithuanian Nocturne", "Lagoon" (1973) , “Twenty Sonnets to Mary Stuart”, “Thames in Chelsea” (1974), “Lullaby of the Cod Cape”, “Mexican Divertissement” (1975), “December in Florence” (1976), “Fifth Anniversary”, “San Pietro” "," In England "(1977).

In 1978, Brodsky became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts, from which he left in protest against the election of Evgeny Yevtushenko as an honorary member of the academy.

In December 1987, Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for comprehensive creativity, saturated with clarity of thought and passion of poetry."

In 1991-1992, Brodsky received the title of poet and laureate of the Library of Congress of the United States.

Since the late 1980s, Brodsky’s work has gradually returned to his homeland, but he himself has consistently rejected offers even to temporarily come to Russia. At the same time, in exile, he actively supported and promoted Russian culture.

In 1995, Brodsky was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.

Marked by a rise in the intensity of the poet's work, he wrote and translated more than a hundred poems, a play, and about ten large essays.

Brodsky’s collections of works began to be published in Russia, the first of which were Edification, The Autumn Cry of the Hawk and Poems, published in 1990.

The poet's health was constantly deteriorating. Back in 1976, he suffered an extensive heart attack. In December 1978, Brodsky underwent the first heart operation, in December 1985 - the second, which was preceded by two more heart attacks. Doctors talked about the third operation, and later about heart transplantation, frankly warning that in these cases there is a high risk of death.

On the night of January 28, 1996, Joseph Brodsky died of a heart attack in New York. On February 1, he was temporarily buried in a marble wall in a cemetery at Trinity Church on 153rd Street in Manhattan. A few months later, according to the last will of the poet, his ashes were buried in the cemetery of the island of San Michele in Venice.

Brodsky's latest collection, Flood Landscape, came out in 1996 after his death.

The poet was married to Maria Sozzani, an Italian aristocrat (on the maternal side of Russian origin). In 1993, the daughter Anna was born in the family.

In St. Petersburg, he left his son Andrei Basmanov (born in 1967).

Brodsky’s widow Maria heads the Joseph Brodsky Scholarship Fund, established in 1996 to provide writers, composers, architects and artists from Russia with the opportunity to intern and work in Rome.

In the village of Norinsky Konosha district of the Arkhangelsk region, where the poet was serving his exile, the first museum in the world of Joseph Brodsky opened.

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the poet’s birth, in May 2015, Joseph Brodsky Memorial Museum-Apartment, a branch of the Anna Akhmatova’s State Literary and Memorial Museum in the Fountain House, will open in St. Petersburg.

Brodsky is going to the USA, already knowing what he will teach. Friend and publisher Karl Proffer promised him a place at the Department of Slavic Languages \u200b\u200band Literature at the University of Michigan. Joseph hoped to learn a language in the first year, but he had to go out to students in September.

Joseph Brodsky and his friend Derek Walcott - poet, teacher and Nobel Prize winner in literature
  © Photo by Bengt Yangfeldt

Such a teacher has not yet been seen here - Brodsky could light a cigarette in the middle of a lecture, tell a joke or suddenly get angry. “He was not a soft teacher. It was not holy simplicity. He caused us terrible suffering, ”recalls Sven Birkits, a student at the University of Michigan in 1968-1973.

Then there was a move to South Headley, Massachusetts. Joseph Brodsky became a teacher of the famous Five Colleges. But the main place of work was Mount Holyoke, an educational institution for girls. Here the writer worked until the end of his life.

Edwina Cruz, professor emeritus at Mount Holyoke College, recalls: “He tried so hard to tell students that he never fit into the curriculum. A few days before the exam began, students came to his house, and he told everything that he did not have time, already at home. ”

In total, Brodsky will teach at six universities. For 24 years spent in the West after leaving the USSR, he gives lectures and poems in libraries, educational institutions and forums.

“He had something that the Americans did not have. He perceived life tragically, and this left an imprint on everything that he did. This did not happen at the lectures of other teachers, ”Vijay Seshadri, a student at Columbia University in 1972-1977, recalls about his famous teacher.

Mount Holioca Dean Joseph Ellis, beckoning Brodsky from Michigan, promised that the annual salary was 4 times more than before: “I just decided that he was the greatest poet of his time.”