Brodsky, Joseph (Vol. 100) - Tatyana Tolstaya (essay date 29 February 1996)
Tatyana Tolstaya (essay date 29 February 1996)
SOURCE: "On Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, February 29, 1996, pp. 7, 53.
[Tolstaya is a Russian writer. In the following tribule, she discusses Brodsky's impact on Russian writers and literature, stating "Russian literature … has lost the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century."]
When the last things are taken out of a house, a strange, resonant echo settles in, your voice bounces off the walls and returns to you. There's the din of loneliness, a draft of emptiness, a loss of orientation and a nauseating sense of freedom: everything's allowed and nothing matters, there's no response other than the weakly rhymed tap of your own footsteps. This is how Russian literature feels now: just four years short of millennium's end, it has lost the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century, and can expect no other....
[The entire page is 2468 words long]
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