Late in ''A Room and a Half,'' a rich, heady fictionalized biography of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, the middle-aged Brodsky ruefully reflects in a voice-over about how children are in a desperate hurry to leave the nest. ''And one day a man realizes that the nest is gone,'' muses the poet (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy, the oldest of three...

THE MAGICAL CHORUS A History of Russian Culture From Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. By Solomon Volkov. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. Illustrated. 333 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30. On March 2, Russians went to the polls and dutifully voted for Dmitri Medvedev, the presidential candidate handpicked by Vladimir Putin, just as they'd once voted for the...

The day the persecuted Russian poet Joseph Brodsky went into exile, a recording of Mozart's Divertimento in D (K. 136) was on his record player, according to the program book for the concert by the Chamber Orchestra Kremlin at Weill Recital Hall on Tuesday evening. The orchestra's bristling performance of the work (written when Mozart was a...
Joseph Brodsky (Iosif Aleksandrovitj Brodskij) (24. maj 1940 Leningrad, Sovjetunionen – 28. januar 1996 Brooklyn Heights, USA) var en russiskfødt amerikansk forfatter og digter, der kom til USA i 1972 i ufrivilligt eksil fra Sovjetunionen. Han blev tildelt Nobelprisen i litteratur i 1987, og han var Poet Laureate i USA i 1991 og 1992.