Less Than One: Selected Essays
A Literature, Russia, Biography book. Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light,...
Essayist and poet Joseph Brodsky was one of the most penetrating voices of the twentieth century. This prize-winning collection of his diverse essays includes uniquely powerful appreciations of great writers: on Dostoevsky and the development of Russian prose, on Auden and Akhmatova, Cavafy, Montale and Mandelstam. These are contrasted with his reflections on larger themes of tyranny and evil, and subtle evocations of...
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 512 pages
- ISBN: 9780141196510 / 141196513
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More About Less Than One: Selected Essays
The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, the common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body... Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination... Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays // I must admit that I feel somewhat uneasy talking about these things: because turning or not turning that other cheek is, after all, an extremely intimate affair. The encounter always occurs on a one-to-one basis. Its always your skin, your coat and cloak, and it is your limbs that will have to do the walking. To advise, let alone to urge, anyone about the use of these properties is, if not entirely wrong, indecent. All I aspire to do here is to erase from your minds a clich that harmed so many and yielded so little. I also would like to instill in you...
What a challenging read. There is no doubt that he is a good writer, just heavy to read and digest, especially as I picked this up right before I gave birth. Some of the essays were about poets I never heard of, so of course, it was hard to relate, know what he was talking about and it went over my head. I appreciated his interpretation... Real heroism. Brodsky's memoir-essays 'Less Than One' and 'A Room and a Half' are amazing accounts of his youthful struggle for independence and imaginative freedom in 50s and 60s Russia. He dislays Nabokov-level stoicism, humor and confidence amid tragedies that would have silenced or stupefied a being less spiritually committed to... A polymath remembers the one and half rooms in the communal apartment, the cruelty of apparatchiks, the poets who were devoured by Furies
