SOURCE: Scammell, Michael. “Interview with Joseph Brodsky.” In An Embarrassment of Tyrannies: Twenty-Five Years of Index on Censorship, edited by W. L. Webb and Rose Bell, pp. 51-7. London: Victor Gollancz, 1997.

In the following interview, conducted in 1972, British journalist and translator Scammel speaks with Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet who was sentenced to hard labor by the Soviet government before being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972.

[Scammell]: Joseph, when did you start writing poetry?

[Brodsky]: When I was 18.

Was your work ever published in the Soviet Union?

Yes, when I was 26 I had two poems published in the literary almanac, Young Leningrad. That was in 1966.

And how many poems have you had published since then in the Soviet Union?

Two.

When did it become clear to you that your poems were not going to be published generally in the Soviet Union and what was the effect of...