For his efforts to be free, poet was imprisoned
CARRIE SEIDMAN, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
The year after Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, the Germans began their 900-day siege of his home, Leningrad. The early rhythms and sounds of his infant life were those of turmoil and strife, perhaps…
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Sarasota Herald-Tribune
The year after Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, the Germans began their 900-day siege of his home, Leningrad. The early rhythms and sounds of his infant life were those of turmoil and strife, perhaps a premonition of what was to come.

Thus begins "Joseph Brodsky: In a Prison of Latitudes," Jan Andrews' documentary about the Soviet poet who was persecuted for his refusal to lend his writing to glorification of the state and eventually exiled, living out the remainder of his life in the United States.

Andrews knew little of Brodsky's life or work when she stumbled on his story while researching another project in Russia. The film tells Brodsky's wrenching tale, alternating black and white historical footage with color scenes from the present day, and commentary from friends and colleagues with the poet himself reading from his work through the years.

A restless only child who left school at 15, the young Brodsky worked at a series of blue-collar jobs and read his first book of poetry while laboring in Siberia. Though his early poetry was apolitical and he was not an activist, he still drew the attention of the KGB for his unrelenting efforts to be "a free person in an unfree society" as one of his friends in the film recalls.

He was first put on trial in 1963 and sent to a Moscow mental hospital. His second trial, which was "like Kafka's" according to the film, ended with a sentence of five years of hard labor on a collective farm. He served for 18 months in the Arctic region 350 miles from Leningrad, where his parents, to whom he was devoted and with whom he had lived in a one-room flat, remained.

After his release, the political persecution and challenges to his sanity continued, ultimately resulting in his exile from the country in 1972.

"Being sent into exile is like being put into a capsule and shot into space," he said in a BBC interview at the time, "and the capsule becomes your language."

He lived out the remainder of his life in New York's Greenwich Village, teaching at several universities and spending winters in Venice, a town that reminded him of his homeland. The Soviets forbade him to visit his parents and he never saw them again, nor did he return to his homeland even after the Soviet Union's collapse.

In 1987, Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize; in 1991 he was named the poet laureate of the U.S., succeeding Mark Strand. In the film Strand recalls that one of Brodsky's proudest moments as laureate was to learn that the anthologies of poetry he had directed to be placed in hotel rooms alongside the typical Gideon's Bibles were being regularly stolen.

Brodsky died in 1996 and was initially buried in New York, then re-buried in his beloved Venice, Italy, a year later. The film concludes with his own summation:

"All my poems are about the same thing: about time. What time does to man."

He was 56.