This book’s title, Radi Rechi Rodnoi, Slovesnosti (For the sake of my native speech, of belles-letteres), comes from a Joseph Brodsky poem “1972” written in the aftermath of his forced departure from the Soviet Union and subsequent settling in the United States of America in July 1972. Summing up his life experience up until that point, Brodsky’s lyrical hero posits that his main motivation had been the desire to contribute to Russian poetry and language rather than the pursuit of personal glory. The prize for this effort back home, however, was state persecution, harassment, and exile. Conversely, during the subsequent two decades in the west, Brodsky’s artistic efforts reaped very different dividends, such as the Nobel Prize and American Poet Laureateship. While both the punishment at home and the accolades in the west were influenced, in one way or another, by politics, now that the dust has settled, Andrei Ranchin knowledgeably takes stock of Brodsky’s artistic contribution through a strictly philological analysis in a collection of articles, which offer a thorough and expert assessment of Brodsky’s poetics.

The book is divided into four parts. The first focuses on the philosophical background of Brodsky’s poetry, which, according to Ranchin, lies in the ideas of Platonism and existentialism (8); it analyzes the specificity of Brodsky’s lyrical hero; unearths poetic connections between Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova; defines Brodsky’s “poetic idiolect” (8), and examines the images of St. Petersburg and Venice in Brodsky’s poetry. The second part is dedicated to a close reading of Brodsky’s most “unclear and mysterious” poems (8). The third includes Ranchin’s reviews of the recent monographs on Brodsky published in Russia, while the fourth consists of Ranchin’s short memoir of the late Valentina Polukhina (1936–2022), the pioneer of Brodsky studies in the UK, promoter of Brodsky scholarship worldwide, and Ranchin’s patron and friend.

While we already have a wealth of commentary on some of these topics, for instance, on Brodsky and the influence of Akhmatova by Tomas Venclova and Denis Akhapkin, Ranchin brings a unique perspective to the conversation. The articles collected here are of high scholarly quality and ambitious in scope. While any attempt to present a coherent philosophical doctrine of Brodsky—a capricious poet who cherished his unpredictability—represents a daunting task, Ranchin’s result is thought provoking (17–46; 47–83). Ranchin continually reminds one of the intellectually stimulating power of Brodsky’s poetry, especially, in the felicitous short essay “Avtorskaya metafora” (Auctorial Metaphor, 121–28), which compares Brodsky’s metaphors with those of his predecessors Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, especially nicely analyzing Pasternak’s poem “Definition of Poetry” (126). Ranchin’s discussion of the abstract quality of Brodsky’s metaphors (125) makes one think of T. S. Eliot’s lectures on The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1993). One regrets, however, that the author does not include here any discussion of English poetry even though much has been written, including by himself, about the influence of John Donne and the English metaphysical poets on Brodsky’s work, which might have boosted Ranchin’s argument that Brodsky is a “poet of thought” (100, 128). Similarly, a comparison with Thomas Hardy might have helped shed new light on Brodsky’s poems about the afterlife (105). One also notes that the list of Brodsky scholars publishing in Russian acknowledged here is much longer than that of western ones. Perhaps this is a coincidence, but one wonders, rightly, or perhaps wrongly, whether this does not reflect a larger trend in Russian scholarship today compelled to insulate itself from the rest of the world. One certainly detects sadness in Ranchin’s remarks about his Brodsky-inspired visit to Venice (178) or his trip to England in 1995 (466) as being probably his last ones. Even more ominous is Ranchin’s commentary to Brodsky’s poem “Vizantiiskoe” (Byzantine, 1994) featuring “an imaginary country, reminiscent of Russia” whose “depersonalized totalitarian world (a symbolic ‘Byzantium’)—represents partly our present and certainly our future” (106). In such an increasingly insular world, while there still remains room for subtlety and micro analysis, there is regrettably less and less room for a larger picture; more of the past and less of the present, which Brodsky partly prophesized in his poems. These regrettable circumstances are bound to have impact on scholarship. Ranchin’s book, however, remains a very valuable, profound, and original contribution to the study of Brodsky’s poetics.