Soviet-American Poet and Essayist Wins Nobel Prize

STOCKHOLM —  The 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded here Thursday to Joseph Brodsky, a Russian-born poet and essayist who once served time in a Siberian labor camp before being exiled and becoming an American citizen in 1977.

At 47, Brodsky is one of the youngest writers ever to be given the world’s most prestigious literary award.

The citation by the Swedish Academy, which awards the annual prize, declared that he was selected “for all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.”

In the Soviet Union, Brodsky’s work was condemned as “pornographic and anti-Soviet” by officials who refused to publish it. Before being expelled from the Soviet Union, Brodsky served 18 months in a Siberian prison camp for “social parasitism.” He had twice been put in mental institutions before that.

In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov commented Thursday that “the tastes of the Nobel committee are somewhat strange sometimes, but tastes do differ.” He added, however, that “I was informed by the Novy Mir editorial staff that they had negotiations with the prize winner, and that they’re going to publish his works.”

Novy Mir is one of the Soviet Union’s top monthly literary journals. Next year it will publish for the first time in the Soviet Union the novel “Doctor Zhivago” by another winner of the Nobel Prize, Boris D. Pasternak. Pasternak, who won in 1958, was forced by the Soviet government to reject the prize.

Some Swedish literary sources suggested Thursday that, without intending any disparagement of Brodsky’s work, the Swedish Academy’s choice this year might have had political overtones, that the academy might have been deliberately singling out a Soviet dissident during Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign for glasnost , or openness.

But Secretary Sture Allen of the academy said the decision had nothing to do with politics.

Political Elements

“Politics do not play an important part in his literary work, although his biography contains some political elements,” Allen said.

Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and ended up at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he learned English and taught. He eventually settled in New York City’s Greenwich Village and teaches at various universities, writes poetry in Russian and translates his own poems into English.

Tones of Raillery

Critics consider Brodsky to be a modern master in the use of poetical forms of expression. His most recent volume, “History of the 20th Century,” (1986) is a series of poems written in tones of raillery and parody, and, according to the Swedish Academy, shows “a quite amazing mastery of the English idiom.”

He also writes essays in English, many of which were collected in his book “Less Than One,” which won the National Book Critics’ Circle award for criticism in 1986.

In English, Brodsky has been strongly influenced by the 16th-Century English poet John Donne. A more recent influence has been another British poet, W. H. Auden, who died in 1973. One volume of his poems is entitled, “Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems” and his “Selected Poems” has a foreword by Auden.

Brodsky has said that all literature is about how time affects people, and that poetry helps humanity withstand the pressure of existence. According to the Swedish Academy, his writing is “rich and intensely vital work” characterized by “great breadth in time and space.”

Lunching in London

Brodsky was in London supervising proofs of a new book of essays when he received the news about the Nobel on Thursday afternoon. He was lunching with English novelist John le Carre in a Chinese restaurant when a friend telephoned with the news. After double-checking the news on the British Broadcasting Corp., the poet ordered a whiskey to celebrate.

Later, in response to questions, Brodsky said of the prize: “I don’t really know what it means to me. What I hope it means to people is that they will get around to reading Russian poetry--mine as well as others.”

Despite 15 years in exile, Brodsky said he still felt “part of the Russian tradition,” adding that “the literature from which I come is rather large.

“One belong’s to one’s language as a writer,” he said.

Russian poetry, he added, “is in terrific shape.”

Then, in a play on astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous phrase on first stepping onto the moon, Brodsky said: “The prize was a big step for me and a small one for mankind.”

As to how he would use the award money, about $340,000, he joked, “To spend.”

Brodsky was born in Leningrad of Jewish parents. His father was a press photographer who had served in the Soviet navy during World War II. His mother was a translator.

Young Brodsky survived the fierce and bitter siege of Leningrad during the war and attended school there until he was 15. He then worked in factories, in a mill and in a morgue and as a seaman.

He studied philosophy and the history of religion on his own, as well as Russian and foreign literature.

In 1958, having made contact with literary circles in Leningrad, he began writing poetry. Part of the evidence that convicted him of parasitism in February, 1964 was changing jobs 13 times in eight years, but his real offense was being what was known as a “poet on street corners,” reciting his works and distributing them in copies, known as samizdat, passed hand to hand.

Sentenced to five years of hard labor in a gulag north of the Arctic Circle, his first collection of poems was published in the West in 1965.

As a result of pressure from intellectuals abroad and in the Soviet Union, Brodsky was released before serving his entire sentence, and allowed to return to Leningrad. There he continued to write many of the poems that were later published in the West.

During a period of detente, Brodsky was allowed to leave Russia and eventually settled in New York, teaching and lecturing at various universities.

In 1968, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Yale University, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brodsky is the fifth Soviet-born writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The others were Ivan A. Bunin, 1933, another Soviet emigre who was a French citizen when he won; Pasternak, 1958; Mikhail Sholokhov, 1965; and Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, 1970, who left the Soviet Union for the United States and Europe.

Brodsky is the ninth American citizen to win the award. The others were Sinclair Lewis, 1930; Eugene O’Neill, 1936; Pearl S. Buck, 1938; William Faulkner, 1949; Ernest Hemingway, 1954; John Steinbeck, 1962; Saul Bellow, 1976, and Polish-born Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978.

The poet T. S. Eliot, who won the award in 1948, was American born but a naturalized Briton.

Last year’s winner was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, the first African laureate.

Times Moscow Bureau Chief William J. Eaton contributed to this article.