18 June 2004 10:53
YALE UNIVERSITY: Yale acquires Brodsky archive
New Haven, Conn. -- The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale has acquired the papers of the
Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1987 and the 1991-92 Poet Laureate of
the United States.
The archive includes more than 6,000 pages of manuscripts, in both Russian and English. The evolution of
Brodsky's writing is documented by thousands of additional pages of photocopied material containing variants,
corrections and annotations.
Another thousand pages 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, the correspondents including 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 archive.
Upon awarding Brodsky the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, the Swedish Academy noted: "The east-west
background-literary, geographical, linguistic-has greatly influenced Brodsky's writing.... Together with the
writer's profound insight into the literature of earlier epochs it has also conjured up a grand historical
vision." Brodsky received an honorary doctorate 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 Polish and English in order to translate the
poetry of Milosz and John Donne. He began writing poetry at age 18 and was soon recognized as one of the most gifted
lyric poets of his generation. In 1964 Brodsky was put on trial for "social parasitism" and sentenced to five
years of hard labor, of which he served 18 months. 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 to his death in 1996, Brodsky taught at Mount Holyoke College.
Brodsky's poetry collections include "Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems" (1967), "A Part of
Speech" (1980), "To Urania" (1988), "Selected Poems" (1992), "So Forth" (1996) and
"Collected Poems in English" (2000). Among his prose works are "Less Than One" (1986), a book of
essays that won a National Book Critic's Award; "Watermark" (1992), essays on Venice; and "On Grief
and Reason" (1995).
CONTACT: Dorie Baker Tel: +1 203 432 8553 e-mail: dorie.baker@yale.edu
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