Leo Robson
Brodsky Before Brodsky
A Room and a Half
By Andrey Khrzhanovskiy (Director)
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.
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