Less Than One (Selected Essays) - 9780374539054

This collection of essays thrust Brodsky—previously known more for his poetry and translations—into the forefront of the “Third Wave” of Russian emigre writers. Originally published the year before Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Less than One includes intimate literary essays and autobiographic pieces that evoke the daily discomfort of living under tyranny. His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant; Seamus Heaney said of Brodsky’s treatment the famous Auden poem, “There will be no greater paean to poetry as the breath and finer spirit of all human knowledge than Brodsky’s line-by-line commentary on ‘September 1, 1939.’”

Less than One, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, was Brodsky’s first published work of prose, and “if there’s an essential essay collection . . . it’s this one” (The Guardian). This edition, re-issued to mark Brodsky’s 80th birthday, allows the reader to delve into the Nobel laureate’s mastery of language, both through his analysis of great works and his own brand of descriptive dissent, at a pivotal point in his career.