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Solomon Volkov. Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet's Journey Through the Twentieth Century. Marian Schwartz, tr. Marianna Volkov, phot. New York. Free Press. 1998. xiii + 306 pages, ill. $25 ISBN 0-684-83572-X.
Over the course of fifteen years in New York, Joseph Brodsky had a large number of detailed conversations with his compatriot, the musician and author Solomon Volkov. Many of those exchanges have already been published in the emigre press, but in Conversations with Joseph Brodsky they are collected in their entirety for the first time, as a translation of the Russian-language original issued very recently by Slovo. The book resulting from these interviews covers salient aspects of the poet's experience in both Leningrad and the West: his youth in the Soviet Union, his trial and internal exile, his initial impressions of America and Italy, and the complexities of helping fellow emigres. Most of the text, however, is given over to extended discussion of several poets central in forging Brodsky's sensibility: Tsvetaeva, Frost, Auden, and Akhmatova.
Akhmatova is positioned at the end of the text, despite her early acquaintance with Brodsky; youthful memories of Leningrad frame the book, constituting both the opening and closing chapters. Given that within such a framework Volkov orders the other poets chronologically, as per the time of Brodsky's acquaintance with their work, it is strange to see the inteniews themselves undated. In the sections of the book that were published in the emigre press, Volkov admits to the splicing of several intern,iews into a larger whole. It is impossible to tell, therefore, whether all the observations on a given poet...