Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky left school at the age of fifteen, and worked in many professions, including factory worker, morgue worker, and ship’s boiler, as well as assisting on geological expeditions. During his early years, Brodsky studied foreign languages (English and Polish). His first foray into poetry occurred in 1957 when Brodsky became acquainted with the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who praised the creativity of the budding poet. In the 1960s Brodsky worked on translating, into Russian, poetry of Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Polish, Serbian-Croatian, and Spanish origins. His translations opened the works of authors such as Tom Stoppard, Thomas Wentslowa, Wisten Oden, and Cheslaw Milosh to Russian readers; John Donne, Andrew Marwell, and Ewrypid were newly translated.
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On February 12, 1964, Brodsky was arrested and charged with parasitism and sentenced to five years deportation. In 1965, after serving eighteen months in a labor camp in northern Russia, protests in the USSR and abroad prompted his return from exile.
During the summer of 1972, Brodsky emigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1980. Before his departure from the Soviet Union, he published eleven poems during the period from 1962 to 1972.
By the 1960s Brodsky was still relatively unknown in the West. “Cause of Brodsky” found scant exposure on the pages of the emigrant press (Russkaya mysl, Grani, Wozdushnye Puti, Posev, etc.). Brodsky’s first collection of poems was released by the Ardis publishing house in 1972. Throughout the 1970s Brodsky collaborated as a literary critic and essay writer in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and gained a wider readership in the United States.
Brodsky taught at several colleges and universities, including Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College. In 1987 he won the Nobel prize for literature. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992.
Brodsky died in 1996 of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; INTELLIGENTSIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bethea, David M. (1994). Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Loseff, Lev. (1991). “Home and Abroad in the Works of Brodskii.” In Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Russian Emigre Writing, ed. Arnold McMillin. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press with the SSEES University of London. Loseff, Lev, and Polukhina, Valentina, eds. (1990). Brod-sky’s Poetics and Aesthetics. London: Macmillan. Polukhina, Valentina. (1989). Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Polukhina, Valentina. (1992). Brodsky through the Eyes of His Contemporaries. London: Macmillan Press. Polukhina, Valentina. (1944). “The Myth of the Poet and the Poet of the Myth: Russian Poets on Brodsky.” In Russian Writers on Russian Writers, ed. Faith Wigzell. Oxford: Berg.
(1669-1735), one of Peter the Great’s closest advisers.
A man of many m?tiers, James David Bruce (“Yakov Vilimovich Bruce”) served Russia over the course of his lifetime as general, statesman, diplomat, and scholar. Bruce participated in both the Crimean and Azov expeditions. In 1698 he traveled to Great Britain, where he studied several subjects, including Isaac Newton’s then-avant-garde philosophy of optics (i.e., that light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays) and gravity (i.e., that celestial bodies follow the laws of dynamics and universal gravitation). Upon return to Russia, Bruce enthusiastically established the first observatory in his native country.
In 1700, at the age of thirty-one, Bruce achieved the rank of major general and commanded forces in the Great Northern War against Sweden. After a humiliating defeat by the Swedes near Narva on November 19, 1700, after which Peter reputedly wept, Peter vowed to improve his army and defeat Sweden in the future. He concluded that a modern army needed a disciplined infantry equipped with the latest artillery (rifles). This infantry was supposed to advance while firing and then charge with fixed bayonets. (The Russian army had consisted mostly of cavalry, its officer corps composed of foreign mercenaries.)
Bruce was one of the new trainers Peter employed to improve the quality of the Russian army. On July 8, 1709, Russian artillery defeated Charles’s army and sent it into retreat. That year Bruce was awarded the Order of St. Andrew for his decisive role in reforming artillery as master of ordnance in the Great Northern War. In 1712 and 1713 Bruce headed the allied artillery of Russia, Denmark, and Poland-Saxony in Pomerania and Holstein. In 1717 he became a senator and president of Colleges of Mines and Manufacture. He was also placed in charge of Moscow print and St. Petersburg mint. As first minister plenipotentiary at the Aland and Nystad congresses, Bruce negotiated and signed the Russian peace treaty with Sweden in 1721, the same year he became count of the Russian Empire. He retired in 1726 with the rank of field marshal.
Bruce corresponded with Jacobite kinsmen and took pride in his Scottish ancestry. He owned a library of books in fourteen languages and was known by many as the most enlightened man in Russia.
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See also: GREAT NORTHERN WAR; PETER I
Chambers, Robert, and Thomson, Thomas. (1996). The Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press. Fedosov, Dmitry. (1996). The Caledonian Connection: Scotland-Russia Ties, Middle Ages to Early Twentieth Century. Old Aberdeen, Scotland: Centre for Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. Fedosov, Dmitry. (1992). “The First Russian Bruces.” In The Scottish Soldier Abroad, ed. Grant G. Simpson. Edinburgh, Scotland: John Donald.
cavalry) until his death. A consummate cavalryman and a flexible military professional, Brusilov saw his primary career obligation as patriotic service to his country, whether tsarist or revolutionary. See also: FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS; WORLD WAR I
Wildman, Allan K. (1980). The End of the Russian Imperial Army. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
BRUSILOV, ALEXEI ALEXEYEVICH
(1853-1926), Russian and Soviet military figure, World War I field commander.
Born in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Alexei Alexeyevich Brusilov entered military service in 1871, graduated from the Corps of Pages in 1872, and completed the Cavalry Officers School in 1883. As a dragoon officer during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, he fought with distinction in the Trans-Caucasus. Between 1883 and 1906 he served continuously at the Cavalry School, eventually becoming its commandant. Although he did not attend the General Staff Academy or serve in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), he rose during the period from 1906 to 1914 to repeated command assignments, including two postings as a corps commander. At the outset of World War I his Eighth Army won important successes during its advance into Galicia and the Carpathians. Between May and July of 1916, Brusilov’s Southwestern Front conducted one of the most significant ground offensives of World War I, in which his troops broke through the Austro-Hungarian defenses to occupy broad expanses of Volynia, Galicia, and Bukovina.
As supreme commander (May-July 1917) of the Russian armies after the February Revolution, Brusilov presided over the ill-fated summer offensive of 1917. After the October Revolution, unlike many of his colleagues, he refused to join the counterrevolutionary cause. Instead, at the outset of the war with Poland in 1920, he entered the Red Army, serving the new Soviet regime in various military capacities (including inspector general of
BRYUSOV, VALERY YAKOVLEVICH
(1873-1924), poet, novelist, playwright, critic, translator.
