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  Speaking for Language J.M. Coetzee February 1, 1996 issue Reviewed: On Grief and Reason: Essays by Joseph Brodsky Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 412 pp., $24.00 Joseph Brodsky; drawing by David Levine Buy Print In 1986 Joseph Brodsky published  Less than One , a book of essays. Some of the essays were translated from the Russian; others he wrote directly in English, showing that his command of the language was growing to be near-native. In two cases, writing in English had a symbolic importance to Brodsky: in a heartfelt homage to W. H. Auden, who greatly helped him after he was forced to leave Russia in 1972, and whom he regards as the greatest poet in English of the century; and in a memoir of his parents, whom he had to leave behind in Leningrad, and who, despite repeated petitions to the authorities, were never granted permission to visit him. He chose English, he says, to honor them in a language of freedom. Less than One  is a powerful book in its own right, worthy to...

  WHOSE SIDE WAS SHOSTAKOVICH ON? by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, March 20, 2000 RUINED CHOIRS How did Shostakovich's music survive Stalin's Russia? BY ALEX ROSS On a January evening in 1936, Joseph Stalin entered a box at the Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow. His custom was to take a seat in the back, just before the curtain rose. He had become interested that month in new operas by Soviet composers: a week earlier, he had seen Ivan Dzerzhinsky's "The Quiet Don," and liked it enough to summon the composer for a conversation. On this night, the Bolshoi was presenting "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," a dark, violent, sexually explicit opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. Stalin enjoyed himself less. After the third act-in which tsarist policemen are depicted as buffoons who arrest people on hastily fabricated pretexts-the Leader conspicuously walked out. Shostakovich, who had been expecting the same reception that Stalin gave to Dzerzhinsky, went away feeling, he said, "...