Less Than One; Selected Essays

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good/Very good. William Diepraam (Author photo). [10], 501, [1] pages. Underlining and marks on pages 153, 159,187, and on page 279, and possibly elsewhere. Small ink mark on bottom edge. Less Than One is, in the broadest sense, an intellectual autobiography. The volume includes Brodsy's remarkable essays on poetry and poetics. In his considerations of the work of Russian writers such as Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mendelstam, as well as Western poets such as Auden, Montale, Cavafy, and Derek Walcott, Brodsky has produced compelling, luminous accounts of twentieth-century poetry. In "Catastrophes in the Air," Brodsky addresses the history and future of Russian prose, providing an original description of the life and death of a literary tradition. Inevitably, this book is also about politics. And in such essays as "On Tyranny" and "Flight from Byzantium," Brodsky offers profound meditations on history and the modern age. Finally. the book is a personal memoir. In the title essay and "In a Room and a Half," the piece which ends the book, Brodsky has written a eulogy to his native city and to the memory of his parents. In 1986, his collection of essays, Less Than One, won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism and he was given an honorary doctorate of literature from Oxford University. Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (24 May 1940 - 28 January 1996) was a Russian poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad in 1940, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled ("strongly advised" to emigrate) from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the United States with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at Mount Holyoke College, and at universities including Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991. According to Professor Andrey Ranchin of Moscow State University: "Brodsky is the only modern Russian poet whose body of work has already been awarded the honorary title of a canonized classic... Brodsky's literary canonization is an exceptional phenomenon. No other contemporary Russian writer has been honored as the hero of such a number of memoir texts; no other has had so many conferences devoted to them". In 1963, Brodsky's poetry was denounced by a Leningrad newspaper as "pornographic and anti-Soviet". His papers were confiscated, he was interrogated, twice put in a mental institution and then arrested. He was charged with social parasitism by the Soviet authorities in a trial in 1964, finding that his series of odd jobs and role as a poet were not a sufficient contribution to society. Brodsky became a cause célèbre in the West also, when a secret transcription of trial minutes was smuggled out of the country, making him a symbol of artistic resistance in a totalitarian society. On 4 June 1972,Soviet authorities put him on a plane for Vienna, Austria. He never returned to Russia. In Austria, he met Carl Ray Proffer and W. H. Auden, who facilitated Brodsky's transit to the United States and proved influential to Brodsky's career. Proffer, of the University of Michigan and one of the co-founders of Ardis Publishers, became Brodsky's Russian publisher from this point on.