Russian Literature XXXVII (1995) 203-226 North-Holland THE ANXIETY OF A DEDICATION: JOSEPHBRODSKY'S 'KVINTET/SEXTET' AND MARK STRAND JOHN GIVENS Man is what he reads, and poets even more so. (Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One, 58) [A] writer, exiled or not, never wants to appear influenced by his contemporaries. (Joseph Brodsky, 'The Condition We Call Exile', 18) In his 1987 Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky paradoxically claims to be "the sum total" of all the poets beloved by him (including, to name a few, Osip Mandel'~tam, Marina Cvetaeva, Robert Frost and W.H. Auden) while humbly admitting he is "invariably inferior to any one of them individually". Moreover, he goes to some bother to lay all credit for his own success at the feet of "these shades", adding that their number doubles thanks to the two cultures to which fate has "willed" him to belong (1990a: 1-2). However, while Brodsky's humble gesture towards his predecessors lends weight to his maxim that poets are what they read, it sheds little light on the two issues raised by such poetic homage: the question of influence and (because Brodsky now writes in two lan- guages) the problem of bilingualism. 0304-3479/95/$09.50 © 1995 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.