Joseph Brodsky And Modern Russian Culture

This volume is a major contribution to the study of the life, work and standing of Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Nobel Prize Laureate and the best-known Russian poet of the second half of the twentieth century. This is the most significant book devoted to him in the last 25 years, and features work by many of the leading experts on him, both in Russia and the West. Every one of the chapters makes a real contribution to different aspects of Brodsky - the growth of interest in his work, his world view and political position, and the unique aspects of his poetics. Taken together, the sixteen chapters offer a rounded interpretation of his significance for Russian culture today.

This volume is a major contribution to the study of the life, work and standing of Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Nobel Prize Laureate and the best-known Russian poet of the second half of the twentieth century. This is the most significant book devoted to him in the last 25 years, and features work by many of the leading experts on him, both in Russia and the West. Every one of the chapters makes a real contribution to different aspects of Brodsky – the growth of interest in his work, his world view and political position, and the unique aspects of his poetics. Taken together, the sixteen chapters offer a rounded interpretation of his significance for Russian culture today.

Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image. Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.

MacFadyen focuses on Brodsky's poetic beginnings. Revising the typical, simplistic representation of the young Brodsky and his peers in Western criticism, he demonstrates that Brodsky and his acquaintances absorbed an amazingly wide range of texts, both old and new, and that they read contemporary American, French, German, and Polish literature. Through numerous interviews with Brodsky's contemporaries and vast archival research, MacFadyen offers a vital new slant on Brodsky's early verse, providing the first published translations of these poems and examining Brodsky's work in relation to a broad international spectrum of influences to reveal the art and craft of his poetry. Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse will appeal not only to those interested in Brodsky and the cultural influences that shaped his work and literature of the time but to those intrigued with Russian history and culture.

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.

This is an imaginative work of literary criticism. Thirteen scholars have selected a wide variety of Joseph Brodsky's poems written between 1970 and 1994 for detailed discussion in the context of his whole output. The choice of poems reflects Brodsky's diversity of themes and devices. Together they offer a perspective on one of the most original and profound modern poets. This collection should fulfil the often-expressed need for a comprehensive approach to the study of Brodsky's poetry, which is linguistically as well as intellectually demanding.

A fully updated new edition of this overview of contemporary Russia and the influence of its Soviet past.

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.

A critical overview of the work of Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), a major Russian (and then American) poet and essayist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. This comprehensive examination redefines his relevance with regard to the recent past, with an overview of some problems of post-Soviet aesthetics, and the future.

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