Less Than One

Less Than One gathers essays rather than telling a single story, and its real subject across all of them is what it costs, and what it clarifies, to think and write seriously under a government determined not to let you. Joseph Brodsky writes here about his own postwar childhood in Leningrad, rendered in exact, physical sensory memory rather than nostalgia, and about the writers who shaped him: close, personal essays on Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, whom he knew, and critical pieces on Dostoyevsky, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Platonov and W. H. Auden, whose poetry he came to only as an adult and whose influence he treats with the same seriousness he gives his own Russian tradition. He argues throughout, and returns to the point more than once, that poetry has always preceded prose historically, that even a novelist as prose driven as Dostoyevsky drew directly on the poetic tradition of Pushkin before him.

Brodsky wrote most of the collection in English, a language he had adopted only as an adult after his 1972 expulsion from the Soviet Union, and the prose carries a slightly unusual cadence because of it, occasionally informal in ways a native speaker's would not be, which several readers have taken as part of the book's particular texture rather than a flaw in it. He gives real attention to writers outside the Russian canon too, Constantine Cavafy and Eugenio Montale among them, treating world poetry as one continuous conversation rather than a set of separate national traditions.

Reading it means moving between memoir and literary argument without much warning, since Brodsky rarely separates the two cleanly, and the effect is a portrait of a mind formed under one language and one political system and then rebuilt, deliberately and by force of will, inside another. It suits a reader more interested in how a serious critic actually thinks than in a conventional autobiography, since the personal material here mostly arrives in service of the ideas rather than the other way around.