The American Brodsky: A Research Overview ALEXANDRA BERLINA University of Erfurt, Germany A Russian-American poet and essayist, a Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky is hardly present on the map of American studies. The following overview attempts to provide materials for remedying this oversight. After all, though the overwhelming majority of Brodsky scholars are Slavists, valuable work on Brodsky in an American context has been done, and a substantial part of it has been published in English. After a short biographical excursion, the materials are assembled according to the following categories: "Brodsky in America," "Brodsky and American Literature," "Brodsky as an American Poet," and "Brodsky's Self-Translations into English." In 2016, twenty years after his death in New York, the time seems ripe for a reconsideration. Long before becoming known as Joseph Brodsky (1940-96), the Iosif Brodskii was enamored with American poetry and cherished mantic image of the United States as a country of freedom. By 1987 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he had been an American zen for ten years. In 1991, he was named the Poet Laureate of the U States. He took the honor very seriously, attempting to initiate a scale program of acquainting as many people as possible with Ame poetry by distributing anthologies to hotels (to be put on the night of every room along with the Bible), to airports and supermarkets displayed prominently and sold cheaply), and elsewhere. He taught at several American universities including Yale and Mich influencing young writers and scholars. He wrote in English; self-t tions came first, then original essays and poems. The chronolog rangement of his Collected Poems in English (2000) clearly sho progress from co-translation to self-translation and writing in Engl his essays—those collected in Less Than One (1986) and On Grie Reason (1995), as well as the book-length meditation Watermark {1 were written in his adopted language, and many of his texts are d RESOURCES FOR AMERICAN LITERARY STUDY, Vol. 38,2015. Copyright © 2016 AMS Press, Inc. DOI 10.7756/rals.038.008.195-211 Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/rals/article-pdf/doi/10.5325/resoamerlitestud.38.2015.0195/1463418/resoamerlitestud_38_2015_195.pdf by guest on 07 February 2022