Less Than One

Nobel Prize in Literature 1987

American poet Josip Aleksanderovich Brodsky was born on May 25, 1940, in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), in the former Soviet Union. The son of a photographer, he abandoned his studies at the age of fifteen, revealing himself to be a rebellious and discontented young man. He then went through various professional situations, even working as a boiler stoker and geological prospector. He began writing poetry before he turned twenty. Although his works did not directly criticize the Soviet regime, they fell out of favor with the authorities, and therefore had to appear in clandestine pamphlet publications. However, he published his first book in 1963, a compilation of poems entitled Bolshaja Elegija Dzonu Donnu.
In March 1964, after being tried for "social parasitism," Brodsky served a sentence of exile with forced labor. Initially sentenced to five years, his sentence was commuted to two, thanks to petitions from prominent figures in the Russian cultural scene, such as Anna Akhmatova and Dmitri Shostakovich. During his stay in Archangel prison, he managed to send the manuscript of... Stikhotvoreniya i Poemi to friends who took it upon themselves to have it published through an American publisher in 1965.
In 1972 he was banned from the Soviet Union and, after passing through Austria and England, decided to emigrate to the United States of America. There he held teaching positions at several universities. In 1977 he adopted American citizenship.
Choosing English as his working language, he published, among other works, A Part Of Speech (1980), History Of The Twentieth Century (1986) and Less than one (1986). This last one, a collection of essays that appeared in periodicals with which Brodsky had collaborated, dealt with artistic and political themes. In one of them, the writer revolts against the fact that the Soviet authorities never gave his parents permission to visit him. In 1995, a new work emerged. In Grief and Reason, a compilation of essays in which Brodsky analyzes the rivalries between the Soviets and the Americans.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, Joseph Brodsky died in New York on January 28, 1996, from a heart attack.

Joseph Brodsky. In Infopédia. Porto: Porto Editora, 2003-2011.