Less Than One: Selected Essays

by Joseph Brodsky

Overview

The collection of critical and autobiographical essays from Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Brodsky that catapulted the author—heretofore known more for his poetry and translations—into the forefront of the "Third Wave" of Russian émigré writers.

His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. Less Than One, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374539054
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Series:	FSG Classics
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	252,671
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) came to the United States in 1972, an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992. His books include Less Than One, On Grief and Reason, Selected Poems, and many others.

Table of Contents

Less Than One 3

The Keening Muse 34

Pendulums Song 53

A Guide to a Renamed City 69

In the Shadow of Dante 95

On Tyranny 113

The Child of Civilization 123

Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980): An Obituary 145

The Power of the Elements 157

The Sound of the Tide 164

A Poet and Prose 176

Footnote to a Poem 195

Catastrophes in the Air 268

On "September 1, 1939" W.H. Auden 304

To Please a Shadow 357

A Commencement Address 384

Flight from Byzantium 393

In a Room and a Half 447

Editorial Reviews

[E]vinces a supple, witty mastery of the English language...[P]rovides deeply illuminating insights into the Russian literary tradition, political climate, and modern poetry and poetics.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher