Brodsky Was Put on Trial for Being a Poet
Quick answer: In 1964 Joseph Brodsky was tried in Leningrad for social parasitism because poetry was not a job. The story of the trial, the exile and the Nobel after it.
Leningrad, early 1964. A twenty three year old with red hair stands in a courtroom, charged with the Soviet offence of social parasitism: living without officially recognized work. The defendant is Joseph Brodsky, and his occupation, he says, is poet and translator. The judge wants to know who assigned him that role. Who recognized him as a poet? Who enrolled him in the ranks of poets? His answer, taken down by a journalist in the room, became one of the most quoted moments in twentieth century literary history: no one, he said, and asked in return who had enrolled him in the ranks of the human race. Pressed on where the ability came from, he said he thought it came from God.
The court was not moved. Brodsky got the maximum: five years of internal exile with compulsory labour. He was, by the state's official reckoning, a drone, a parasite, a young man with no profession. Twenty three years later he had the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the transcript of that hearing had done as much as any poem to make his name.
A drone, according to the state
Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and survived the siege as an infant. He left school at fifteen and worked through a string of jobs: milling machine operator at a factory, assistant in a hospital morgue, labourer on geological expeditions to the far north and east. All the while he was reading omnivorously, teaching himself Polish and English to read poets in the original, and writing. By his early twenties his poems were circulating in samizdat, the informal typescript network, and the young Akhmatova had taken him into her circle, recognizing what he was before any institution did.
None of that counted. He was not a member of the Writers' Union, so his writing was officially not work. In November 1963 a Leningrad newspaper ran a denunciation describing him as a literary drone, and the machinery moved from there: arrest in February 1964, a pair of hearings, and a verdict that had been decided before anyone spoke.
The transcript that escaped the courtroom
What the authorities did not plan for was Frida Vigdorova, a journalist and schoolteacher who sat in the courtroom writing down the exchanges verbatim until she was ordered to stop. Her transcript, passed from hand to hand and smuggled abroad, turned a routine act of intimidation into an international embarrassment. Read cold, the document is almost comic: the state solemnly attempting to establish whether writing poetry requires a diploma, and a young man answering, without any apparent strategy, that he thought it came from God.
The trial made Brodsky famous in exactly the way the regime least wanted. Prominent Soviet cultural figures, among them Akhmatova, Chukovskaya, Marshak and the composer Shostakovich, pressed for his release, and voices abroad, including Jean Paul Sartre, added weight. Akhmatova's wry remark from this period is widely reported: what a biography they are making for our redhead. She meant that the persecution itself was manufacturing a legend, and she was right.
Eighteen months of frozen farmwork
Brodsky served his exile in Norenskaya, a tiny village in the Arkhangelsk region of the Russian north, shovelling manure, cutting wood and hauling stones for a state farm. He also, by his own later accounts, read and wrote with a freedom he had never had: a cottage, kerosene light, and an anthology of English poetry through which he worked line by line. His encounter with W. H. Auden's poems in that village bent the course of his writing life. He later spoke of the period, in widely reported comments, as one of the better times of his life, which should be read as character rather than as a review of forced labour.
The campaign on his behalf worked. His sentence was commuted, and he returned to Leningrad in late 1965 after about eighteen months. He kept writing and translating, still mostly unpublishable at home, increasingly published and translated abroad. The state had lost the argument but not the power, and for seven more years it tolerated him with visible irritation.
Put on a plane
In May 1972 the irritation ended. Brodsky was summoned, pressured to emigrate, and on 4 June 1972 put on a plane to Vienna with a single suitcase. He never saw his parents again; they applied repeatedly for permission to visit him and were refused, a grief he later set down in his essay about their Leningrad room and a half. In Austria he was met by the American publisher Carl Proffer, and within days he was face to face with Auden himself, who took the young exile under his wing, helped with money and introductions, and eased his landing in the West.
Brodsky became poet in residence at the University of Michigan, learned to write prose, and eventually poems, in English, and built a second life as teacher and essayist. The Nobel Prize came in 1987, when he was forty seven, a stateless Russian poet honoured in a language borrowed mid life. In 1991 the United States made him its Poet Laureate. He died in New York in January 1996 and is buried in Venice, the city he had returned to winter after winter and written about all his exiled life. He never went back to Russia.
What a working writer can take from it
The courtroom exchange endures because every writer has faced a domestic version of the judge's question. Who enrolled you among the poets? Nobody, ever, is the honest answer. There is no institution that issues the licence: not a degree, not a first publication, not a union card. Brodsky's refusal to accept the premise, politely, without heroics, is the usable part of the story. You appoint yourself, and then you make the appointment true by working. He had been making it true in factory shifts and morgue corridors for years before any authority weighed in.
The other lesson is about credentials versus evidence. Brodsky had no diploma and the wrong biography, and what settled the question in the end was simply the poems, accumulating year over year wherever they were allowed to exist. Working writers can spare themselves a great deal of anguish by tracking evidence instead of status: poems finished, poems sent, poems read by strangers. Contests are one honest ledger among several; part of why Writory scores every entry between the 1st and the 25th and returns results on the 30th is so that the question of whether you are a poet gets answered by readers rather than by a title.
What poets can take from this
- Stop waiting to be enrolled among the poets; no credential exists, so the appointment is yours to make and the work makes it real.
- Hold a day job without shame, since Brodsky's factory and morgue years fed the poems rather than preventing them.
- Learn from poets outside your language, even through translation; a chance anthology of English verse redirected Brodsky's whole life.
- Keep a ledger of evidence, poems finished and sent, rather than a ledger of titles and memberships.
- When institutions dismiss your work, let the work answer over time instead of arguing your case in their language.
- Read one Brodsky essay alongside his poems, because his prose teaches how a poet's mind builds an argument.
Try it yourself
Write a poem structured as an interrogation: an official voice asks a question, and the answers keep sliding out of the official categories. Somewhere in it, the question 'who gave you permission?' must be asked and never properly answered.
Questions
What was Joseph Brodsky actually charged with?
Social parasitism, the Soviet offence of living without officially recognized employment. Because he was not a member of the Writers' Union, his poetry and translation work did not count as a job. In March 1964 he was sentenced to five years of internal exile with compulsory labour, of which he served about eighteen months in the Arkhangelsk region.
What did Brodsky say at his trial?
Asked who had enrolled him in the ranks of poets, he answered that no one had, and asked who had enrolled him in the ranks of the human race. Asked where his ability came from, he said he thought it came from God. Journalist Frida Vigdorova's verbatim transcript spread through samizdat and abroad, making the trial internationally famous.
Did Brodsky ever return to Russia?
No. Expelled in June 1972, he settled in the United States, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as US Poet Laureate in 1991, but never revisited Russia even after the Soviet Union fell. He died in New York in 1996 and is buried in Venice.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.