 | Joseph Brodsky |
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and poet laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992.
The archive includes more than 6,000 pages of autograph and typed manuscripts, in both Russian and English. The evolution of Brodsky's poems and prose works is further documented by thousands of additional pages of photocopied typescripts and proof containing variants, corrections and annotations. Another thousand pages of rare samizdat [underground publications] document the clandestine circulation of Brodsky's writing in the Soviet Union, while a series of notebooks and diaries covers the American phase of his career.
With the papers come hundreds of letters to and from Brodsky, including missives from such correspondents as writers Peter Viereck, Czeslaw Milosz and Stephen Spender. Scores of annotated books from Brodsky's library, thousands of photographs, and a large collection of video and audiotapes are also part of the Brodsky archive. A small percentage of these materials has been sealed for 25 years.
Upon awarding Brodsky the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, the Swedish Academy noted: "For Brodsky, poetry is a divine gift. The religious dimension that one meets in his work is of a nature that adheres to no creed. Metaphysical and ethical questions are paramount."
The academy's citation continued: "The east-west background -- literary, geographical, linguistic -- has greatly influenced Brodsky's writing. It has given it an unusual wealth of themes and manifold perspectives. Together with the writer's profound insight into the literature of earlier epochs it has also conjured up a grand historical vision."
Among Brodsky's other awards was an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale in 1978. In 1979 he was made a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, and in 1981 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius" award.
Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940. As a young man, he mastered both Polish and English in order to translate the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and John Donne. He began writing poetry at age 18 and was soon recognized by Anna Akhmatova, with whom he studied, as one of the most gifted lyric poets of his generation. In 1964 Brodsky was put on trial in Leningrad for "social parasitism" and sentenced to five years of hard labor, of which he served 18 months in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. Exiled from his native country in 1972, he emigrated to the United States, where he first served as poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan. From 1990 until 1996, Brodsky taught at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachuesetts, as the Five College Professor of Literature. He died in 1996.
Brodsky's poetry collections include "Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems," "A Part of Speech," "To Urania," "Selected Poems," "So Forth" and "Collected Poems in English." Among his prose works are "Less Than One," a volume of essays on politics and the arts that won the National Book Critic's Award for Criticism; "Watermark," a volume of essays about Venice; and "On Grief and Reason."
At the Beinecke Library, the Brodsky papers join a rapidly growing collection of Slavic literature, which includes papers of the Russian-born writer Nina Berberova and of Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Another important Yale connection is the poet Tomas Venclova, a Yale faculty member since 1980 and Brodsky's Lithuanian translator. The friendship between Brodsky and Venclova, which began before either emigrated, continued in the United States, where they are often associated in political and literary causes with Czeslaw Milosz. The three writers -- Milosz, Brodsky and Venclova -- appeared together in Venclova's poetry collection "Winter Dialogue," which contains an introduction written by Brodsky just before his death and a long dialogue between Milosz and Venclova about the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.
T H I S
Library acquires papers of
famed poet Joseph Brodsky
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