JOSEPH BRODSKY: A LITERARY LIFE
The Age
Saturday March 5, 2011
JOSEPH BRODSKY:A LITERARY LIFELev LoseffYale University Press, $49.95JOSEPH Brodsky, who was the last Russian to win the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1987, was born in 1940. His existence was precarious: he did not go to university and took one menial job after another. Not at all an unusual existence in the West, but the Soviet Union took a paternalistic, intrusive interest in the careers of its citizens, and when a local party hack decided to boost his own career by making a few examples, Brodsky's proto-slacker lifestyle had him charged with parasitism.He already had a reputation as a poet, and his case was publicised, so when he was finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1970, after periods in exile and in psychiatric hospitals, he fell on his feet: one of the very first people he met was W. H. Auden, and American academia had a place waiting for him. He never stopped travelling; his is the poetry of the exile, of the lone observer in the foreign city.It is debatable whether Brodsky is one of the lucky few among foreign poets Brecht, Akhmatova whose writing keeps in translation enough of the charge it had in the original. His essays, on the other hand, written in English and often published in The New York Review of Books, brought him a wider recognition than his verse alone. This thoughtful book by a friend of Brodsky's is indeed a literary life: it is as much a piece of criticism as it is a biography, and forgoes a lot of personal material in favour of Brodsky's political and intellectual situation.
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