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1940–1996 Russia
Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, usually anglicized as Joseph Brodsky) (24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian-American poet, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991–1992.
Russia Academics Essayists Nobel laureates Poets Also known as: Brodsky, Joseph
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10 quotes
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity.
A Commencement Address (1984)
It is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny.
As you pour yourself a scotch,
He’d be a ruin by now, both physically and mentally. Physically because of the bottle. . . . Mentally because of that mixture of impotence and cynicism that corrodes everyone there — the stronger you are the worse it is.
It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being.
Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)
For darkness restores what light cannot repair. There we are married, blest, we make once more the two-backed beast and children are the fair excuse of what we're naked for.
The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.
Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)
I wish you were here, dear,
You know, when you go outside on the streets after having spent the day writing, you feel like a foreign body, even in your own country. This sensation perhaps feels more natural when you are really outside your country.
This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed’s.
Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)
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