Joseph Brodsky: The Soviet Years. A Literary Biography

Joseph Brodsky's forced departure from the Soviet Union in 1972 divided both his life and his literary career into two distinct chapters. Gleb Morev's biography focuses on the formative Soviet period, when Brodsky established himself as a poet, developed his intellectual and ethical outlook, and defined the literary project that would later make him one of the twentieth century's most influential writers.
The book reconstructs the pivotal episodes of Brodsky's life in the 1960s and early 1970s, from his alleged plan to escape the Soviet Union by hijacking an airplane and his notorious trial for "social parasitism" to his exile in the Arkhangelsk region and eventual emigration. Rather than simply recounting these well-known events, Morev subjects them to careful documentary analysis and fresh historical interpretation.
Drawing on a wealth of archival sources and placing Brodsky's life within the broader cultural and political landscape of the late Soviet era, Morev explores what made the poet's artistic and ethical vision so distinctive and so radically at odds with the Soviet system. The result is both a literary biography and a portrait of an intellectual whose work and life were inseparable from the historical tensions of his time.

Gleb Morev. Joseph Brodsky: The Soviet Years. A Literary Biography. — Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2026.
Publisher's page