Description
Book SynopsisJoseph 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 internati
Trade ReviewWinner of the 1996 Literary Scholarship Award, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages "A sympathetic, inward account of its subject, showing the grandeur, yet modesty, of Brodsky's stance, and finnishing with a suggestive afterword on the future for a bardic veiw of poetry and an umpoetic world ... [Bethea] does justice to a phenomenally giffted writer who is one of the voices most worth listening to as our millennium slips away."--Times Literary Supplement
Table of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsA Note on the TransliterationPrincipal Abbreviations1Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile: A Polemical Introduction32Brodsky's Triangular Vision: Exile as Palimpsest483The Flea and the Butterfly: John Donne and the Case for Brodsky as Russian Metaphysical744Exile, Elegy, and "Auden-ticity" in Brodsky's "Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot"1205Judaism and Christianity in Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Brodsky: Exile and "Creative Destiny"1406"This Sex Which Is Not One" versus This Poet Which Is "Less Than One": Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, and Exilic Desire1747Exile as Pupation: Genre and Bilingualism in the Works of Nabokov and Brodsky214Afterword252Notes255Works Cited299Index313
