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Joseph Brodsky Nobel Prize lecture

  Joseph Brodsky Nobel Prize lecture   Navigate to:    Summary -- Facts -- Biographical -- Bibliography -- Nobel Prize lecture -- Banquet speech -- Prose -- Poetry -- Nobel diploma -- Article -- Other resources  Press release  Award ceremony speech English Russian (pdf) Nobel Lecture December 8, 1987 (Translation) I For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and who went in this preference rather far – far from his motherland to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny – for such a person to find himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience. This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address ‘urbi et orbi’, as...
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‘The Post-Communist Nightmare'

  ‘The Post-Communist Nightmare’: An Exchange Joseph Brodsky , translated from the Czech by  Paul Wilson , reply by  Václav Havel February 17, 1994 issue Dear Mr. President : I’ve decided to write this letter to you because we have something in common: we both are writers. In this line of work, one weighs words more carefully, I believe, than elsewhere before committing them to paper or, for that matter, to the microphone. Even when one finds oneself engaged in a public affair, one tries to do one’s best to avoid catchwords, Latinate expressions, all manner of jargon. In a dialogue, of course, or with two or more interlocutors around, that’s difficult, and may even strike them as pretentiousness. But in a soliloquy or in a monologue it is, I think, attainable, though of course one always tailors one’s diction to one’s audience. We have something else in common, Mr. President, and that is our past in our respective police states. To put it less grandly: our prisons, that s...
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