Article: Obituary: Joseph Brodsky

In 1987 Joseph Brodsky, then 47, became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It had been widely expected, honouring a poet who, born in one culture, had become a master of another.

Brodsky was an only child, born in Leningrad in 1940. His father, Alexander Brodsky, was serving as a naval officer - he only met him once before the age of eight: his mother, Maria Volpert, worked as a secretary, well below her intellectual capacity. In 1949, Brodsky's father was dismissed from the navy during a wave of anti-Semitism, and could only eke out a piecemeal career as a photojournalist. Brodsky would write about the "forty square metres" in which the family lived in the ...

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