[In the obituary below, McFadden provides an overview of Brodsky's life and career.]

Joseph Brodsky, the persecuted Russian poet who settled in the United States in the early 1970's, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and became his adopted country's poet laureate, died yesterday at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He was 55.

The cause was believed to be a heart attack, said Roger Straus, Mr. Brodsky's friend and publisher. Mr. Brodsky had open-heart surgery in 1979 and later had two bypass operations, and had been in frail health for many years.

The poetry of Joseph Brodsky, with its haunting images of wandering and loss and the human search for freedom, was not political, and certainly not the work of an anarchist or even of an active dissident. If anything, his was a dissent of the spirit, protesting the drabness of life in the Soviet Union and its pervasive materialist dogmas.

But in a land of poets where poetry and other literature was officially subservient to the state, where verses were marshaled like so many laborers to the quarries of Socialist Realism, it was perhaps inevitable that Mr. Brodsky's work—unpublished except in underground forums, but increasingly popular—should have run afoul of the literary police.

He was first denounced in 1963 by a Leningrad newspaper, which called his poetry "pornographic and anti-Soviet." He was interrogated, his papers were seized, and he was twice put in a mental institution. Finally he was arrested and brought to trial.

Unable to fault him on his poetry's content, the authorities indicted him in 1984 on a charge of "parasitism." They called him "a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers" who failed to fulfill his "constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland."

The trial was held in secret, though a transcript was smuggled out and became a cause célèbre in the West, which was suddenly aware of a new symbol of artistic dissent in a totalitarian society. Mr. Brodsky was found guilty and sentenced to five years in an Arctic labor camp.

But amid protests from writers at home and abroad, the Soviet authorities commuted his sentence after 18 months, and he returned to his native Leningrad. Over the next seven years he continued to write, with many of his works translated into German, French and English and published abroad, and his stature and popularity continued to grow, particularly in the West.

But he was increasingly harassed for being Jewish as well as for his poetry. He was denied permission to travel abroad to writers' conferences. Finally, in 1972, he was issued a visa, taken to the airport and expelled. He left his parents behind.

With the help of W. H. Auden, who befriended him, he settled in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he became a poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan. He later moved to New York, teaching at Queens College, Mount Holyoke College and other schools. He traveled widely, though never back to his homeland, even after the collapse of the Soviet Government. He became a United States citizen in 1977.

Meanwhile, his poems, plays, essays and criticisms appeared in many forums, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and other magazines. They were anthologized in books in a growing canon that garnered the 1981 MacArthur Award, the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award, an honorary doctorate of literature from Oxford University and, in 1987, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy, which awards the prestigious prize, said he had been honored for the body of his work and "for all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity." It also called his writing "rich and intensely vital," characterized by "great breadth in time and space."

In 1991, the United States added to his honors, naming him poet laureate. The rumpled, chain-smoking Mr. Brodsky had for 15 years been the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass., and had been scheduled to return there today to begin the spring semester.

Joseph Ellis, a former faculty dean who brought Mr. Brodsky to the college in the early 1980s, recalled yesterday how his friend often was seen speeding around the campus in an old Mercedes. He would interrupt conversations with students and colleagues to jot down notes on bits of paper he carried in his pocket. "He thought out loud in front of his students in a way that was inspirational," Mr. Ellis said.

Mr. Brodsky, who wrote in English as well as in Russian, though his poems were composed in Russian and self-translated, was a disciple of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whom he called "the keening muse." He was also strongly influenced by the English poet John Donne, as well as Mr. Auden, who died in 1973. One volume of Mr. Brodsky's poetry, Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems, was published in London in 1967. His Selected Poems had a foreword by Mr. Auden.

But Mr. Brodsky was best known for three books published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux: a volume of poetry called A Part of Speech (1977); a book of essays, Less Than One (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a book of poems, To Urania (1988). Other recent works include a play in three acts called Marbles (1989) and a book of prose, Watermark (1992).

Mr. Straus remembered Mr. Brodsky as "very warm, very caring, very willing to give his friendship," especially to young writers and other exiles, some of whom he championed selflessly.

Robert Silvers, co-editor of The New York Review of Books, also spoke in glowing terms of Mr. Brodsky and his work. "It was astonishing that a Russian poet should have emerged as also one of the most powerful writers in the English language in just these years of exile," he said.

In Russia, Yevgeny Kiselyov, host of the weekly news program Itogi, told the nation's television viewers: "He was the only Russian poet who enjoyed the right to be called 'great' in his lifetime."

It was also reported in Moscow that Gleb Uspensky, a senior editor and co-publisher of the Russian publishing house Vagrius, had met Mr. Brodsky in New York last fall and asked him to return to Russia for a tour as part of a deal to republish some of his works in Russian. Mr. Uspensky was quoted as saying that Mr. Brodsky seemed interested, but was torn by the prospect and did not agree.

Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky—whose first name is sometimes given as Josip or Iosif—was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940, to Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky, a commercial photographer, whose status as a Jew kept him often out of work, and Maria M. Volpert Brodsky, who was linguistically gifted and often supported the family.

The redheaded boy spent his early years living in a communal apartment shared with other families. His parents gave him a Russified, assimilated upbringing, and he himself made little of his religious lineage, but as he later recalled, his teachers were anti-Semitic and treated him negatively.

However, he was something of a spiritual dissenter, even as a boy. "I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice … but because of his omnipresent images," he recalled.

He quit school at the age of 15 and began working in what proved to be a series of jobs, including laborer, metal worker and hospital morgue attendant. Literature provided an alternative to the drabness of his life. He learned Polish so he could translate the works of Polish poets like Czeslaw Milosz, and English so he could translate Donne.

Beginning in 1955, he began to write poems, many of which appeared on mimeographed sheets, known as samizdat, and were circulated among friends. Others were published by a fringe group of young writers and artists in the underground journal Sintaksis.

He began joining street-corner recitations, rendering his poems in a voice that was soft yet dramatic, reflecting the weariness and vibrancy in his verses. "He recited as if in a trance," one friend recalled. "His verbal and musical intensity had a magical effect." As his popularity began to grow, he also made enemies among older, more entrenched Leningrad writers.

In 1963, after a Leningrad newspaper denounced the 23-year-old poet as "a drone" and "a literary parasite," harassments began in a pattern that seemed to confirm that they had official backing. These led to a trial that began in February 1964. A transcript sent to the West contained this colloquy:

Judge: What is your profession?

Brodsky: Translator and poet.

Judge: Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?

Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?

Found guilty and given a sentence of five years, Mr. Brodsky was sent to a labor camp near Arkhangelsk where he chopped wood, hauled manure and crushed rocks for 18 months. At night, in his bunk, he read an anthology of English and American poetry.

After his release and return to Leningrad, the harassment resumed, but so did his work, and some of it began appearing in the West. Verses and Poems was published by the Inter-Language Literary Associates in Washington in 1965. Elegy to John Donne and Other Poems was published in London in 1967 by Longmans Green, and A Stop In the Desert was issued in 1970 by Chekhov Publishing in New York.

Despite his growing stature, however, he was denied permission to attend writers' conferences abroad. In 1971, he received two invitations to immigrate to Israel. In May 1972, he was summoned to the Ministry of the Interior and asked why he had not accepted. He said he had no wish to leave his country.

Within 10 days, authorities invaded his apartment, seized his papers, took him to the airport and put him on a plane for Vienna. In Austria, he met Mr. Auden, who arranged for his transit to the United States. After a year at Michigan as poet-in-residence, he taught at Queens College (1973–74), returned to the University of Michigan (1974–80) and then accepted a chair at Mount Holyoke.

Mr. Straus recalled that he was with Mr. Brodsky in London when they learned about the Nobel Prize. "He was overjoyed," Mr. Straus recalled. "It was fairly amazing that Joseph should win at that young age." But publicly, Mr. Brodsky made light of it. "A big step for me, a small step for mankind," he joked.

In naming him United States poet laureate in 1991, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said Mr. Brodsky "has the open-ended interest of American life that immigrants have. This is a reminder that so much of American creativity is from people not born in America."

Mr. Brodsky is survived by his wife, Maria, and his daughter, Anna, who were with him when he died.