Volkov, Solomon

New York. 1998. February 1998. Free Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 068483572x. Photographs by Marianna Volkov. Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. 306 pages. hardcover. Jacket Design By Mary Ann Smith. Jacket Photograph By Reuters/Skingley/Archive Photos. Author Photograph By Marianna Volkov. keywords: Poetry Translated Russia Autobiography. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Solomon Volkov's first tape-recorded interview with Brodsky took place in 1978, beginning a series of garrulous, sometimes heated conversations that would continue noisily in Brodsky's Greenwich Village apartment for the next fifteen years. Throughout these selections from that voluminous record, Volkov demonstrates his exceptional aptitude for drawing out eloquence, intimate detail, and the essential vision of the artist with whom he converses. This book is built on a friendship between two widely traveled Russians who, in sharing stories, come to understand how much and how little art can do for a tortured world. Recounting his childhood in war-ravaged Leningrad, boyish adventures in his hometown, life as an underground poet, standing trial as a ‘parasite' in Khrushchev's Russia (which he has never previously discussed in detail), enforced stays in mental institutions, and imprisonment in the icy north, Brodsky also describes hilarious attempts by the KGB to recruit him as an informer, his fateful letter to Brezhnev, and his consequent expulsion from the USSR. Special chapters of poignant reminiscence are devoted to Brodsky's two enduring friends and mentors: W. H. Auden and Anna Akhmatova. He also discusses, with cracking insight, his most profound influences: Robert Frost and Marina Tsvetaeva, the great Russian feminist poet. Brodsky describes his post-Russian life in New York and reveals for the first time his active participation in one of the cold war's most noted cultural confrontations - the famous defection of the Bolshoi Ballet star Alexander Godunov. In this and all his tales recounted here, we meet a Brodsky his readers have not heard before, both contentious and gracious, breaking all the rules, never succumbing to the straitjacketing of literary or political cliques in New York or anywhere else. inventory #24762 ISBN: 068483572x.