Leo Robson

Brodsky Before Brodsky

A Room and a Half

By

130 mins; starring Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy, Artem Smola, Evgeniy Ogandzhanyan, Alisa Freindlikh, Sergei Yursky order from our bookshop

Joseph Brodsky was generous in his praise of those poets he saw as predecessors – most notably, Donne, Pushkin and Auden (‘the greatest mind of the twentieth century’). And in the fourteen years since his death, aged fifty-five, he has received grateful tribute in his turn. A varied group of poets, including Derek Walcott, Adam Zagajewski and Paul Muldoon, have commemorated Brodsky in verse. There have been memoirs by the academics Ludmila Shtern and Daniel Weissbort; another, by James L Rice, is on its way. As is the real prize: Jane Ann Miller’s translation of the biography by Brodsky’s close friend and industrious admirer, the late Lev Loseff.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    Follow Us