Exiled Soviet Poet Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
By HOWELL RAINES

TOCKHOLM, Oct. 22 -- Joseph Brodsky, an exiled Soviet-born poet who writes in Russian and English, won the Nobel Prize in Literature today.

The Swedish Academy in its formal announcement cited both Mr. Brodsky's essays and the poetry for which he is better known in honoring him ''for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.''

In its press release, the academy also paid tribute to Mr. Brodsky's heroic commitment to his art, noting that as a young underground poet in Leningrad he was imprisoned in an Arctic work camp for ''parasitism,'' and was later deported from the Soviet Union in 1972. He now lives in New York and teaches for part of the year at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

''I'm sort of doubly proud as a Russian and as an American,'' Mr. Brodsky said today after learning of the award while lunching in London with John le Carre, the British novelist.

Hopes to See Son

The 47-year-old poet and essayist expressed the hope that the award, coupled with the new policy of glasnost, or openness, might create an opportunity for him to see his 20-year-old son, Andrei, who lives in Leningrad.

''Obviously the whole situation in the country has considerably improved compared with what I left 15 years ago,'' he said with a laugh, ''but I got the prize for literature, not politics.''

In announcing the selection, Prof. Sture Allen, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, insisted there was no political message in it for the Soviet Union, where Mr. Brodsky's works are banned. But a member of the five-person selection committee, Goran Malmqvist of Stockholm University, struck a defiant note.

Professor Allen said he didn't know what the Soviet political leadership would say, ''but that is something we don't bother about.''

''They may raise their eyebrows as they did with Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, but they would be silly to do so because here is a very, very fine writer who was brought up and started writing in Russia,'' he said.

Another Opinion From Soviet

Today in Moscow, Gennadi I. Gerasimov, a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, said ''the tastes of the Nobel Prize committee are somewhat strange sometime,'' and added that he would have preferred V. S. Naipaul, the novelist born in Trinidad, as a winner.

The 18-member Swedish Academy was said by a variety of sources to be determined this year to select a laureate who had an international reputation, indisputable artistic standing and productive years still ahead. The academy has been the subject of ridicule here for choosing a series of laureates who were elderly or obscure.

Mr. Brodsky is the second youngest person to win the literature prize. Albert Camus was 44 when he won in 1957. This year's prize carries a cash award of about $330,000. The formal presentation for Nobel laureates from all fields is Dec. 10.

Although the deliberations are secret, an academy member confirmed that Mr. Brodsky was a finalist last year when Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian poet, won. This year, according to some accounts, Mr. Brodsky won out over a list of finalists including Mr. Naipaul, Octavio Paz, a Mexican critic and poet, and the reputed runner-up, Camilo Jose Cela, a Spanish poet born in 1916.

A Rapturous Reception

Today, the Swedish Academy seemed to have achieved its goal of avoiding the sarcastic response that has greeted selections such as that in 1984 of Jaroslav Seifert, an 83-year-old Czechoslovak poet. The reaction to Mr. Brodsky's selection from the critical and academic communities was rapturous.

''He is the best living Russian poet,'' said Susan Amert, an assistant professor of Russian literature at Yale University.

''There are a small number of writers at any given moment who are going to be part of literature and he's one of them,'' said the writer and critic Susan Sontag. ''Not every great writer gets a Nobel Prize and not every Nobel Prize goes to a great writer. This is an example of the Nobel Prize going to a really serious, committed, great writer.''

Mr. Brodsky's award was announced here in the traditional way. As a clock chimed the hour at 1 P.M., Professor Allen stepped into a crowded meeting room in the stock-exchange building in the Old Town. His back pressed against the door and his face trembling slightly with excitement, he said Mr. Brodsky's name and a cheer went up, indicative of the following the author has among the literati here.

'A Divine Gift'

''For Brodsky, poetry is a divine gift,'' said the biographical statement distributed to reporters. It noted the ''luminous intensity'' of his language and his ''quite amazing mastery of the English idiom'' in a collection of poems published in 1986, ''History of the Twentieth Century.''

That collection and a 1986 essay collection, ''Less Than One,'' also in English, served to cement Mr. Brodsky's claim. But the poetry on which he built his reputation, first published in the West in 1967, is written in Russian and translated by him and friends into English.

''I haven't shifted language,'' Mr. Brodsky said today. ''I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.''

Born into a Jewish family in Leningrad on May 24, 1940, Mr. Brodsky dropped out of school at 15 and worked as a laborer and, at sea, as a stoker. He was also teaching himself Polish and English, writing poetry and developing his gift for dramatic recitations that are described as verging on musical performances.

Scholars place him in the Russian modernist tradition of Osip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin's death camps, and Anna Akhmatova, a towering figure in Russian poetry who led the campaign that got Mr. Brodsky released from prison in 1965 shortly before her death. In English, his influences range from John Donne to the modern poets W. H. Auden and Robert Lowell.

Advocate of Human Rights

Auden and Lowell both became friends and sponsors after Mr. Brodsky arrived in the West - drawn to him by the conviction, often expressed by admirers, that Mr. Brodsky was ''the real thing.''

''His rise was meteoric. Beginning from the first poems, everybody was sure that this is the best Russian poet living,'' said Tomas Venclova, an assistant professor of Russian literature at Yale, who met Mr. Brodsky 20 years ago.

Michael Scammell, the chairman of the department of Russian literature at Cornell University, said: ''He's the best living Russian writer, bar none. He is in the great tradition of 20th-century poetry, represented by Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Pasternak.''

Professor Scammell, the author of a biography of Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, added that Mr. Brodsky has ''a truly profound and global view of the human situation.''

''He's preoccupied with the fate of civilization in our time.''

While Mr. Brodsky prefers to be known as a poet rather than as a critic of the Soviet Union, he has been a prominent advocate of human-rights causes and press freedom. One of his most powerful essays deals with the Soviet authorities' refusal to let him visit his parents in Leningrad before his mother, a translator, died in 1983, and his father, a photographer, died in 1984.

Today, there was the first hint of a thawing attitude toward Mr. Brodsky in the land that, according to friends, he still loves passionately. Mr. Gerasimov and the publisher Roger Straus confirmed that the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir was seeking permission to publish some of Mr. Brodsky's poems.

He first saw print in that journal in 1963 when it published his epigram to a poem by Miss Akhmatova. P