Joseph Brodsky - Career and Family - America

America

After a short stay in Vienna, Brodsky settled in Ann Arbor, with the help of poet Auden and Proffer and became poet in residence at the University of Michigan for a year. Brodsky went on to become a Visiting Professor at Queens College (1973–74), Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University, later returning to the University of Michigan (1974–80). He was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature and Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, brought there by poet and historian Peter Viereck. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on 23 May 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He moved to New York's Greenwich Village in 1980 and In 1981, Brodsky received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award. He was also a recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. In 1986, his collection of essays Less Than One won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism and he was given an honorary doctorate of literature from Oxford University.

In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth Russian-born writer to do so. In an interview he was asked: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?" He responded: "I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an English essayist". The Academy stated that they had awarded the prize for his "all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity." It also called his writing "rich and intensely vital," characterized by "great breadth in time and space." It was "a big step for me, a small step for mankind," he joked. The prize coincided with the first legal publication in Russia of Brodsky's poetry as an exile.

In 1991, Brodsky became Poet Laureate of the United States. The Librarian of Congress said that Brodsky had "the open-ended interest of American life that immigrants have. This is a reminder that so much of American creativity is from people not born in America". His inauguration address was printed in Poetry Review. Brodsky held an honorary degree from the University of Silesia in Poland and was an honorary member of the International Academy of Science. In 1995, Gleb Uspensky, a senior editor at the Russian publishing house Vagrius, asked Brodsky to return to Russia for a tour but he could not agree. For the last ten years of his life, Brodsky was under considerable pressure from those that regarded him as a "fortune maker". He was a greatly honored professor, was on first name terms with the heads of many large publishing houses, and connected to the significant figures of American literary life. His friend Ludmila Shtern wrote that many Russian intellectuals in both Russia and America assumed his influence was unlimited, that a nod from him could secure them a book contract, a teaching post or a grant, that it was in his gift to assure a glittering career. A helping hand or a rejection of a petition for help could create a storm in Russian literary circles, which Shtern suggests became very personal at times. His position as a lauded émigré and Nobel Prize winner won him enemies and stoked resentment, the politics of which, she writes, made him feel "deathly tired" of it all towards the end.

In 1990, while teaching literature in France, Brodsky married a young student, Maria Sozzani, who has a Russian-Italian background; they had one daughter, Anna.

Marina Basmanova lived in fear of the Soviet authorities, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; only after this was their son Andrei Basmanov allowed to join his father in New York. In the 1990s, Brodsky invited Andrei to visit him in New York for three months, and they maintained a father-son relationship until Brodsky's death. Andrei married in the 1990s and had three children, all of whom were recognized and supported by Brodsky as his grandchildren; Marina Basmanova, Andrei, and Brodsky's grandchildren all live in Saint Petersburg. Andrei gave readings of his father's poetry in a documentary about Brodsky. The film contains Brodsky's poems dedicated to Marina Basmanova and written between 1961 and 1982.

Brodsky died of a heart attack aged 55, in his New York City apartment on January 28, 1996. He had had open-heart surgery in 1979 and later two bypass operations, remaining in frail health since that time. He was buried in the Episcopalian section at Isola di San Michele cemetery in Venice, Italy. In 1997, a plaque was placed on his house in St Petersburg (Leningrad) with his portrait in relief, and the words "In this house from 1940 to 1972 lived the great Russian poet Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky". Brodsky's close friend, the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, memorialized him in his collection The Prodigal (2004).