ABSTRACT
The period from the end of World War Two to the present may be divided into four segments according to the political factors that shaped the creative lives of most Russian authors then active: late Stalinism (1945-53); post-Stalinism (1953-68); the decline of Soviet power (1968-91); and the post-Soviet period. The first was the most barren in the entire history of modern Russian literature. The second and third witnessed a flowering of poetry that continued into the fourth. If one poet has to be chosen as pre-eminent during this half century, then that poet must inevitably be Joseph [Iosif] Brodsky (1940-96), the most outstanding individual among an exceptionally talented generation born in Russia between 1935 and 1941. These writers came to consciousness just in time for de-Stalinization, and eventually faced the same hard choices as their intellectual grandfathers: to stay in Russia and participate, to stay and try not to participate, or to leave. Brodsky gave his first public reading in Leningrad in February 1960, was arrested and sent into internal exile in 1965, and left Russia for the USA in 1972, never to return. His mature work, all of which had been published abroad, was first made available to the general readership in Russia in 1987, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize. As these landmarks suggest, Brodsky did not attain his pre-eminence because he exemplified, in life or art, the principal characteristics that the majority of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries shared.
