Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, by Solomon Volkov

Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century
By Solomon Volkov
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Free Press, 1998; paperback ed., 2002

From his imprisonment in the Soviet Union and subsequent flight to the United States to a new beginning and international fame, Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky was one of the most fascinating literary figures of modern times. Through his recorded conversations with Brodsky, cultural critic Solomon Volkov has recreated the poet's journey through the 20th century.

Review

In 1964, at the age of 23, Joseph Brodsky was brought to trial in the Soviet Union on charges of ''social parasitism.'' Sentenced to five years at hard labor in a remote village near the White Sea, he spent his days shoveling manure; he also wrote some of his greatest poems. Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and lived in New York City until he died of a heart attack in 1996. Based on a series of conversations with Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel laureate in literature, between 1978 and 1992, Solomon Volkov's ''Conversations With Joseph Brodsky,'' well translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, traces that dramatic trajectory. ''Brodsky thrived on paradox, ambiguity and contrariness,'' Volkov, who has written books on Balanchine and Shostakovich, says. ''Here was a man in constant Socratic dialogue with himself . . . and glad to have a sparring partner.'' Brodsky was a fascinating conversationalist, whether talking (however impatiently) about his own life, his vital role in the defection of the ballet star Alexander Godunov (an especially riveting chapter), his favorite poets (Robert Frost, Marina Tsvetayeva, Constantine Cavafy and W. H. Auden), his beloved Venice or his friendship with Anna Akhmatova. -- Robin Lippincott, New York Times, March 8, 1998

Review

The Russian-born, Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, was as provocative as he was talented. In these conversations with Volkov, author of previous interview volumes with violinist Nathan Milstein, choreographer George Balanchine and, more controversially, with composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Brodsky evinces both talent and idiosyncrasy. Divided into chapters on important subjects in Brodsky's writing life, these lively talks, creditably translated by Schwartz, represent a dozen years of intermittent chats, up to 1992. There are some problems: a few chapters, presented as continuous dialogues, span nearly a decade, and Volkov doesn't press Brodsky on, for example, his machinations on behalf of buddies or on the gaudy crucifixes that the Jewish-born Brodsky took to wearing. Instead, Brodsky is given free rein to speak with an intensity that regularly gave his interlocutors nosebleeds. He eccentrically overrates the faded turn-of-the-century French novelist Henri de Regnier, but dismisses Nabokov. He oddly prefers Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to Andrei Voznesensky on the grounds that the former admits to being a "big self-promotion factory." And there is no mention at all of Brodsky's friend, the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. In his later years, Brodsky made an exaggerated claim to being a writer of English, a language he never mastered as memorably as Russian. Happily, this solid book of talks shows Brodsky at his conversational, and very Russian, best. – Publishers Weekly, 1998

Review

Volkov, author of St. Petersburg (1995), began his focused dialogue with Brodsky in 1978, just after the poet underwent his first open-heart surgery at age 38. In his introduction, Volkov shares his hope that this volume will serve as a "kind of Baedeker" to the late Nobel laureate's life and art (it does), then offers a rather startling portrait of Brodsky as an "animal of poetry," a lone wolf to be exact, who was not only brilliant but hypnotic and, at times, menacing. Brodsky's mind, Volkov claims, was "essentially dialogic," a statement proved true in the revelatory conversations that follow. All of their energetic discussions are of keen interest, but it is Brodsky's forthright descriptions--the first ever for public consumption--of his detention in a mental asylum, exile in the North, and expulsion from Russia that leap off the page. At one point, Volkov challenges Brodsky's matter-of-fact approach to discussing these traumas, and Brodsky retorts, "I refuse to dramatize all this!" That's because all the drama and all the fire of his experiences are found in his majestic poetry. What is preserved here is the power and complexity of the man himself. -- Donna Seaman