Rules of Style: Joseph Brodsky
A Russian-American poet and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on isolation, freedom and political beliefs.
In 1972 Joseph Brodsky was forced to leave USSR and had to settle down in the United States. In his exile he hadn’t stopped writing poems and essays about his motherland and about fellow poets who remained back home.
In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He ended his Nobel Lecture with words “One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line”
He died in Brooklyn, New York in 1996 at the age of only 56. He was buried in Venice, Italy next to the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, Russian art-critic Sergei Dyagilev and Ezra Pound.
Brodsky’s two volumes of essays titled ‘Less than one’ and ‘On Grief and Reason’ are two of my favourite books. I have decided to share with you my favorite quotes and maxims by him to mark Brodsky’s 80th anniversary. I hope they’ll help you during these uncertain times we live in.
A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.
Life is a game with many rules but no referee.
I don’t rightly know what’s worse, burning books or not reading them.
