Joseph Brodsky, one of the most prominent contemporary American poets, is also among the finest living poets in the Russian language. Nevertheless, his poetry and the crucial bilingual dimension of his poetic world are still insufficiently understood by Western audiences. David Bethea's book responds by addressing several issues: How did the Russian-born Brodsky arrive at his present status as international man of letters and American poet laureate? What sort of implied reader is necessary to understand this poet, who is both steeped in the Russian tradition from Skovoroda to Tsvetaeva and yet capable of speaking in the ("anglicized russophone") cadences of Donne, Auden, and Lowell? Has Brodsky been created by this experience, or has he fashioned this self as a necessary precondition for writing poetry in the first place? Bethea suggests that the key to Brodsky, perhaps the last of the great Russian poets in the "bardic" mode, is in his relation to other, or the Other. Brodsky's master trope turns out to be what Bethea terms "triangular vision", the tendency to mediate a prior model (Dante) with a closer model (Mandelstam) in the creation of a palimpsest-like text in which the poet is implicated as a triangulated hybrid of these earlier incarnations. In separate chapters and through a series of carefully contextualized readings, Brodsky is compared and contrasted to his favorite models: Donne, Auden, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva. A final chapter analyzes Brodsky's fundamental differences with Nabokov, the only Russian exile of Brodsky's stature to rival him as a bilingual phenomenon. Various critical paradigms, including Said's "Orientalism", Kristeva's "foreigner" and"semiotic"/"symbolic" orders, Bloom's "anxiety to influence", Gilman's "Jewish self-hatred", Tomashevsky's "biographical legend", and Lipking's "the life of the poet" are used throughout the study as foils to Brodsky's thinking. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, the work of a distinguished Slavist and critic, will be of interest to all those who value poetry and who see its practice and study as legitimate interlocutors in postmodern discourse.

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most prominent contemporary American poets, is also among the finest living poets in the Russian language. Nevertheless, his poetry and the crucial bilingual dimension of his poetic world are still insufficiently understood by Western audiences. How did the Russian-born Brodsky arrive at his present status as an international man of letters and American poet laureate? Has he been created by his bilingual experience, or has he fashioned the bilingual self as a necessary precondition for writing poetry in the first place? Here David Bethea suggests that the key to Brodsky, perhaps the last of the great Russian poets in the "bardic" mode, is in his relation to others, or the Other. Brodsky's master trope turns out to be "triangular vision," the tendency to mediate a prior model (Dante) with a closer model (Mandelstam) in the creation of a palimpsest-like text in which the poet is implicated as a triangulated hybrid of these earlier incarnations. In pursuing this theme, Bethea compares and contrasts Brodsky to the poet's favorite models--Donne, Auden, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva--and analyzes his fundamental differences with Nabokov, the only Russian exile of Brodsky's stature to rival him as a bilingual phenomenon. Various critical paradigms are used throughout the study as foils to Brodsky's thinking. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Includes essays on Russian writers, Western poets, politics, and the author's native city, Leningrad.

"On Grief and Reason c"ollects the essays Joseph Brodsky wrote between his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and his death in January 1996. The volume includes his Nobel lecture; essays on the condition of exile, the nature of history, the art of reading, and the notion of the poet as an inveterate DonGiovanni; his "Immodest Proposal" for the future of poetry, written when he was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States; a consideration of the poetry of Robert Frost; Brodsky's searching estimations of Hardy, Horace, and Rilke; and an affecting memoir of Stephen Spender.

Biography -- Literary Criticism Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared emigre into, as he himself termed it, "a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen." In interviews from 1972 to 1995, Joseph Brodsky: Conversations covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. Brodsky's poetry earned him a Nobel, and his essays won him awards and international acclaim. This volume shows that there was a third medium, in addition to poetry and essays, in which Brodsky excelled--the interview. Although he said that "in principle prose is simply spilling some beans, which poetry sort of contains in a tight pod," he nevertheless emerges as an extraordinary and inventive conversationalist. This volume includes not only his notable interviews that helped consolidate Brodsky's international reputation but also early and hard-to-find interviews in journals that have since disappeared. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Cortland Review, and Stanford Magazine. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Washington Post, and the Georgia Review.

With nearly 200 poems, several of them never before published in book form, this is the essential volume of the Nobel Laureate's work.

In December 1987 a group of published novelists, poets, and journalists met in Vienna to participate in the Wheatland Conference on Literature. The writers presented papers addressing their common experience--that of being exiled. Each explored different facets of the condition of exile, providing answers to questions such as: What do exiled writers have in common? What is the exile's obligation to colleagues and readers in the country of origin? Is the effect of changing languages one of enrichment or impoverishment? How does the new society treat the emigre? Following each essay is a peer discussion of the topic addressed. The volume includes writers whose origins lie in Central Europe, South Africa, Israel, Cuba, Chile, Somalia, and Turkey. Through their testimony of the creative process in exile, we gain insight into the forces which affect the creative process as a whole. Contributors. William Gass, Yury Miloslavsky, Jan Vladislav, Jiri Grusa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Horst Bienek, Edward Limonov, Nedim Gursel, Nuruddin Farah, Jaroslav Vejvoda, Anton Shammas, Joseph Brodsky, Wojciech Karpinski, Thomas Venclova, Yuri Druzhnikov

The work of Joseph Brodsky (1940-;1996), one of Russia';s great modern poets, has been the subject of much study and debate. His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America';s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky';s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky';s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet';s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.

Brodsky describes his post-Russian life in New York and reveals for the first time his active participation in one of the cold war's most noted cultural confrontations - the famous defection of the Bolshoi Ballet star Alexander Godunov. In this and all his tales recounted here, we meet a Brodsky his readers have not heard before, both contentious and gracious, breaking all the rules, never succumbing to the straitjacketing of literary or political cliques in New York or anywhere else. In these raw Russian conversations, superbly translated by Marian Schwartz, is the journey of a poet-hero around the world and through this century's most troubling and sensational times.

Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the steam out of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the team of Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar. He was but a dot, and a dot was the star. --from "Star of the Nativity" Joseph Brodsky, who jokingly referred to himself as "a Christian by correspondence," endeavored from the time he "first took to writing poems seriously," to write a poem for every Christmas. He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention. In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.