Art, literature & culture

Birth of Joseph Brodsky

24 May 1940

Joseph Brodsky was born on 24 May 1940 in Saint Petersburg. A Russian-American poet and essayist, Brodsky was born in Leningrad and was tried in 1964 for social parasitism, a charge that sent him to internal exile in the far north. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in the United States, where he taught at the University of Michigan and other institutions, and wrote in both Russian and English. His poetry, with its metaphysical reflections on time and exile, and his essays, such as Less Than One, were widely praised. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as the US Poet Laureate in 1991.

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