ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 29, 1996 TAG: 9601290051
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
A RUSSIAN IN EXILE, he became U.S. poet laureate and credited American poetry with helping him survive years of Soviet persecution.
Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, a Russian exile who became poet laureate of the United States, died in his sleep Sunday. He was 55.
The poet's wife, Maria Brodsky, called police to their Brooklyn home after she was unable to wake her husband, said Deputy Commissioner Tom Kelly. Brodsky was pronounced dead of an apparent heart attack, Kelly said.
``He was the only Russian poet who enjoyed the right to be called a `great' in his lifetime,'' Yevgeny Kiselyov, host of the Russian weekly news program Itogi, told his viewers.
Brodsky wrote both in his native Russian and in English. Besides poetry, he wrote plays, essays and criticism.
He once said American poetry had helped him survive years of persecution in the Soviet Union and ``made me an American long before I arrived on these shores.''
Brodsky, who was Jewish, stayed in conflict with the Soviet authorities. In 1964, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in the Arctic Circle region of Arkhangelsk on what Kiselyov described as ``the absurd charge'' of parasitism.
His sentence was commuted in 1965, but the persecution continued. Soviet authorities refused to grant him visas to attend several international poetry forums and, in 1972, forced him into exile.
He settled in the United States, where he was befriended by poet W.H. Auden, and became an American citizen in 1980. Life in the United States, which made him its poet laureate in 1991, was ``terribly good to me,'' Brodsky once said. ``In plain terms, I was more free.''
In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
``A big step for me and a small step for mankind,'' Brodsky joked after learning he had won.
Brodsky began writing poetry in 1955, when he was 15. His work was pervaded by the haunting themes of exile and loss.
The son of a naval officer, he was born in St. Petersburg. In one poem, he wrote of his desire to return there someday, to ``die on Vasilievsky Island.'' But Brodsky never returned to his homeland, even after the collapse of the Soviet regime.
The rumpled, chain-smoking Brodsky dreamed of making poetry accessible to everyone, saying books of poetry should be sold in supermarkets and left in hotel rooms.
``Poetry is perhaps the only insurance we've got against the vulgarity of the human heart,'' he said.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Brodsky's honors include the 1981 MacArthur Award, the 1986 National Book Award and an honorary doctorate of literature from Oxford.
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Joseph Brodsky often spoke of the freedom he foundby CNBin the United States.