Joseph Brodsky - Venice, Italy
Posted by: 
hykesj
N 45° 26.853 E 012° 20.928
33T E 292679 N 5036088
Grave marker of Nobel Prize-winning Russian American poet, Joseph Brodsky in Venice’s San Michele cemetery.
Waymark Code: WM18RJB
Location: Veneto, Italy
Date Posted: 09/18/2023
Views: 1
[JOSEPH BRODSKY in Russian]
24.V.1940 - 28.I.1996
JOSEPH BRODSKY
So reads Joseph Brodsky’s grave marker: his name in Russian and English and the dates of his birth and death (24-May-1940 - 28-Jan-1996).
Joseph Brodsky was born into a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad (formerly and now again St. Petersburg) in 1940. After bouncing around from job to job he felt a calling to poetry and with some help and encouragement from other poets, began to publish some anthologies. Though apolitical in nature, his work was nevertheless denounced as ‘anti-Soviet’ and he eventually was arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor. After a year and a half, and a lot of pressure on the Soviet government, his sentence was commuted but only a few years later he was banished from the Soviet Union for good.
Brodsky arrived in the United States in 1972 and began working for the University of Michigan. He would go on to teach at many other schools including, Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University among others. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in 1991, was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Today he is known mostly for his poetry and critical essays, but he also wrote a couple of plays and dabbled in prose.
After a somewhat rough life involving penal servitude and years of heavy smoking, Joseph Brodsky died in 1996 of a heart attack at the relatively young age of 55. He had left no explicit instructions as to where he should be buried, so his wife chose Venice as his final resting place. Over the years, Joseph Brodsky grew to admire Venice and spent such time as he could there. He once described Venice as his version of paradise.
"…And with the bulb turned on
I knew that I was leaving you alone
there, in the darkness, in the dream, where calmly
you waited till I might return,
not trying to reproach or scold me
for the unnatural hiatus. For
darkness restores what light cannot repair…"
- Excerpt from “On Love” by Joseph Brodsky
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