Joseph Brodsky's greatness as a poet has to do with his expectation that life measure up to the demands of art and not vice versa. These conversations show that his friendship has an equally heightening and challenging effect upon his gifted contemporaries. Brodsky emerges as a kind of one-man ozone layer, protecting and enhancing the possibility of poetic life in our times. The conversations are really full of life and attest greatly to Joseph's high powers - to Joseph's high powers. This book is the first of its kind.It is a fascinating record of 20 conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel Prize-winner for Literature. It combines biographical details with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalin Russia. As a poet, essayist, and playwright Brodsky is widely known and read in the English-speaking world: in 1991, he succeeded Mark Strand as Poet Laureate of the United States.This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry. It is highly readable and contains well-researched, reliable source material. It also includes Brodsky's views, some previously unpublished, on poetry and language. Every interviewed poet demonstrates an excellent knowledge of Brodsky's work and gives rich and imaginative interpretations of his major themes. Professor Polukhina sensitively contextualises this wide-ranging account of Brodsky's work. The second edition of this volume has been enlarged with two previously unpublished interviews.

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is the only Russian poet who has been taken seriously by Russian leaders: Khrushchev sent him to the Gulag (1964), Brezhnev exiled him (1972), Gorbachev paid him a visit in the Library of Congress (1992), and Chernomyrdin demanded that his body be returned to Russia (1996). He is the most important poet Russia has produced in the second part of the twentieth century. Nobody after Pushkin has done as much as Brodsky for Russian poetry, introducing many features of English and American poetics, a new linguistic substratum to Russian poetry, new genres, and a new mentality. He replaced the hot-blooded, hysterical note of Russian poetry with a rational approach to the most profound problems of our time. His tragic perception of the world combines with skilfully camouflaged irony, self-deprecation, and technical virtuosity.Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature Valentina Polukhina, who knew Brodsky well over a long period, has been studying and writing about him for at least 30 years. Her second volume of interviews draws on eye-witness accounts of his friends, publishers, editors, translators, and fellow poets. It is a series of important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. This collection of 40 interviews illuminates a peculiarly intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene.

In the new second volume of "Brodsky Through They eyes of His Contemporaries," the collection of interviews features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky's friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others. This collection of 40 interviews illuminates an intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene. Continuing the discussion begun in the first volume, this series of interviews contains important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. The interviews are published together with many unique photographs from the private archives of the author and the interviewees.

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries combines biographical details about Joseph Brodsky with a collection of interviews that illuminate an intriguing contemporary phenomenon, along with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalinist Russia. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry. Presented in two volumes, this is the second edition of a work first published in 1992; this edition is enlarged with new interviews and a series of previously unpublished unique photographs from the personal archives of the author and the interviewees. Volume I offers a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas Venclova, Viktor Krivulin, Alexander Kushner, and Elena Shvarts. Volume II features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky's friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky has in recent years commanded increasing attention among both Russian specialists and a wider audience interested in modern culture. In 1987 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book, the first in English to be devoted entirely to him, presents a sustained and comprehensive analysis of his work to date, and offers an interpretation of his major themes: love, faith, creation, time, exile and empire. Individual poems are closely scrutinised to show the complexity and sophistication of Brodsky's ideas about perennial human problems, and the ways in which his language conveys his perception of certain values. Valentina Polukhina locates Brodsky in relation to other Russian writers from Derzhavin to Akhmatova, as well as drawing comparisons between his work and poetry in English. She also provides a comprehensive bibliography. Her book constitutes a timely study of the poetry and poetics, style and ideas of one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

In a recent article in "Novy Mir," the critic Dmitry Polishchuk writes: "The 25-35-year-old generation is now experiencing an efflorescence--a new type of poetic vision, with a distinct poetic language, a new kind of baroque; with novel structures, combining the far-fetched, the heterogeneous, the incompatible, in a poetics of contrast." This is particularly true of women's writing, which transcends post-modernist or Western feminist tendencies. This collection looks not only at those living and working in Moscow or Petersburg, but also at those authors writing throughout the whole of Russia.

Valentina Polukhina (Emeritus Professor of Russian Literature, Keele University) is the leading Brodsky scholar in the West, and has edited four collections of poetry in translation.