Less Than One

This is the masterful collection of essays that propelled Brodsky—heretofore known more for his poetry and translations than for his literary criticism—into the forefront of the "Third Wave" of Russian emigre writers. His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, and Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy, and Montale, are as brilliant as they are compelling. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, consumed this language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. Less Than One, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, also opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essays.