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.

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.

A searingly personal memoir of the great Russian poet by his American friend and publisher, containing much previously unknown material about how Brodsky left Russia and how he made his way in the new world, and how, during the cold war, Americans played a crucial role in his fate.

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

Joseph Brodsky and Collaborative Self-Translation is the first in-depth archival study to scrutinize the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky's self-translation practices during the period of his exile to the USA in 1972-1996. The book draws on a large amount of previously unpublished archival material, including the poet's manuscripts in Russian and English, draft translations, notes, comments in the margins and correspondence with his translators, editors and friends. Rulyova's approach to the study of self-translation is informed by 'social turn' in translation studies. She focuses on the process of text production, the agents and institutions involved, translation practices and the role played by translators and publishers in the production of the text.

"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.

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.