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EDITOR'S NOTE: This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Joseph Brodsky (1940-96), who was tried in Leningrad in 1964 for crimes against the state.
Joseph Brodsky was a Russian poet and translator who lived in the U.S. after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. His publications include numerous books of poems and essays, among them A Part of Speech (1977) and To Urania (1988) and the essay collection Less Than One (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He wrote in both Russian and English, self-translating and working with poet-translators including W. H. Auden, Derek Walcott, and Anthony Hecht. In 1991, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Brodsky was at the beginning of his career when the Soviet authorities found him guilty of "social parasitism" and sentenced him to five years of exile and hard labor. The transcript of his hearings, bravely recorded by the journalist Frida Abramovna Vigdorova (1915-65), was first circulated in samizdat and then published in numerous periodicals in France, Germany, England, the U.S., and Poland.
Throughout much of her life, Vigdorova actively aided victims of oppression, and she dedicated her final years to seeking justice for Brodsky. A journalist and writer who graduated from Moscow Pedagogic Institute, she was the author of a number of bookson issues in education, including Diary of a Russian Schoolteacher. At the time of Brodsky's trial she was a correspondent for Literaturnaya gazeta [Literary Gazette], but the chief editor forbade her to attend; under the circumstances, she was determined to witness the trial independently and kept a record of the proceedings, despite admonishments from the judge and harassment from the volunteer militia in the courtroom.
After Brodsky was sentenced, Vigdorova continued petitioning for his release. His sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by prominent Soviet and international cultural figures, including Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Vigdorova herself had died of cancer on August 7, 1965, before her efforts had any measurable effect. Lev Loseff reports in his biography of Brodsky that the poet kept a photograph of her on the wall over his desk for many years, first in Russia, then in America.
Books in English that provide valuable context and...