In 1955, a mere two months into eighth grade, a 15-year-old teenager dropped out of a Leningrad school. He had already repeated seventh grade; the thought of another boring year was unbearable. He wandered into work at a factory, but only lasted six months. For the next seven years, he drifted in and out of menial jobs at a lighthouse, a crystallography lab, and a morgue. For a time, he worked as a manual laborer on geological expeditions and as a stoker at a public bathhouse. Still, it wasn’t a wholly inauspicious start—by the end of his life, he had taught at Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, Michigan, and Mount Holyoke. He had also been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Despite spurning his own formal education, Russian poet and Soviet dissident Joseph Brodsky immediately rose to the highest academic echelon when he arrived in America in 1972. By all accounts, the autodidact held his classes to a high standard, frequently dismissing any student arguments about literary greatness unless they centered on Milosz, Lowell, or Auden.

Monica Partridge, a former student in his class, told Open Culture, “I took a poetry class with [Joseph Brodsky] at Mount Holyoke College my freshman year… It was all 19th [century] Russian poetry, and he would give us four pages of poems to memorize overnight. We would have to come in the next [morning] and transcribe the poems we had memorized. Very Russian.”

No less impressive was the list of books that Brodsky distributed to Partridge’s class.

1. Bhagavad Gita

2. Mahabharata

3. Gilgamesh

4. The Old Testament

5. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey

6. Herodotus: Histories

7. Sophocles: Plays

8. Aeschylus: Plays

9. Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)

10. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War

11. Plato: Dialogues

12. Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima

13. Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology

14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

15. Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]

16. Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics

17. Tacitus: Annals

18. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores

19. The New Testament

20. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars

21. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

22. Catullus: Poems

23. Horace: Poems

24. Epictetus: Discourses

25. Aristophanes: Plays

26. Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals

27. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica

28. Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers

29. Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

30. Plotinus: The Enneads

31. Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History

32. Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy

33. Pliny the Younger: Letters

34. Byzantine verse romances

35. Heraclitus: Fragments

36. St. Augustine: Confessions

37. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica

38. St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers

39. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince

40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)

41. Franco Sacchetti: Novelle

42. Icelandic sagas

43. William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)

44. François Rabelais

45. Francis Bacon

46. Martin Luther: Selected Works

47. John Calvin: Institutio Christianae religionis

48. Michel de Montaigne: Essays

49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

50. René Descartes: Discourses

51. Song of Roland

52. Beowulf

53. Benvenuto Cellini

54. Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams

55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan

56. Blaise Pascal: Pensées

57. John Milton: Paradise Lost

58. John Donne

59. Andrew Marvell

60. George Herbert

61. Richard Crashaw

62. Baruch Spinoza: Treatises

63. Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard

64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

65. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy

66. Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses

67. Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters

68. John Locke: Second Treatise on Government

69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations

70. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics

71. David Hume: Everything

72. The Federalist Papers

73. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments

75. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed

76. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

77. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey

78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

79. Eric Auerbach: Mimesis

80. William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico

81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude

82. Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies

83. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power

“Shortly after the class began, he passed out a handwritten list of books that he said every person should have read in order to have a basic conversation,” Partridge writes on the Brodsky Reading Group blog. “At the time I was thinking, ‘Conversation about what?’ I knew I’d never be able to have a conversation with him, because I never thought I’d ever get through the list. Now that I’ve had a little living, I understand what he was talking about. Intelligent conversation is good. In fact, maybe we all need a little more.”

In addition to the poet's 1988 University of Michigan commencement address that we posted last week, we bring you Joseph Brodsky’s requisite reading list, annotated with the poet’s handwritten notes.

Note: You can click each image to read them in a larger format.

Get reading, friends.

Via Brodsky Reading Group, and with the deepest gratitude to Monica Partridge, who provided photographs of the original. Props go to Stanford for the typed out list of books.

Related Content:

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read

Ernest Hemingway’s List for a Young Writer

Carl Sagan’s Undergrad Reading List: 40 Essential Texts for a Well-Rounded Thinker

David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science write. Follow him at @iliablinderman.