On 22 October 1987 Joseph [Iosif] Brodsky, born in Leningrad in 1940, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After being sentenced to five years in internal exile for ‘social parasitism’ he lived in the Arkhangelsk region of Northern Russia from March 1964 until November 1965. He left the Soviet Union in June 1972. Brodsky never returned to Russia. He died in the United States in 1996. In 1997 a plaque was placed on the house where he had lived in St. Petersburg, with his portrait in relief and the words “In this house from 1940 to 1972 lived the great Russian poet, Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky”.
