From London Brodsky set off for Michigan, where he had a job waiting for him and where he settled in surprisingly quickly. The key to his speedy assimilation was the stoicism with which he adapted to exile. He liked to describe America drolly as merely “a continuation of space,” and having been no stranger to alienation in Russia, he adapted to his new homeland with apparent ease, defining himself laconically as “a Jew, a Russian poet, an American citizen.” In fact, he became almost as patriotic about America as about Russia, and stoutly defended his new country against its critics. His path was eased by the large number of academic admirers he acquired, who spread the word about his poetry, collaborated with him in translations, and helped him to obtain a series of college positions as a professor or a poet-in-residence. In fairly quick order Brodsky established himself as a major poet and public intellectual, and eventually scaled the heights of the American literary and cultural world, winning almost every scholarship and literary prize possible. In 1987 he was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature, and four years later became the Poet Laureate of America, while being showered with honorary doctorates and honors in America and abroad. In 1990, late in life, he married a beautiful and cultivated young Italian woman of Russian descent named Maria Sozzani, with whom he had a daughter Anna, and seems to have enjoyed a brief period of calm domesticity in America and Italy before he died, after a series of heart attacks, at the tragically young age of fifty-five.

THE BREVITY OF THIS summary of Brodsky’s twenty-four years in America reflects a notable and decidedly odd feature of Loseff’s biography, namely the meagerness of its later chapters. Loseff devotes only two full chapters to Brodsky’s American years, compared with seven on his thirty-two years in the Soviet Union. This is disconcerting, to say the least, and the effect is magnified by Loseff’s decision to keep the poet’s Russianness at the center of his narrative even in this new environment. Loseff (who lived in America at the same time as Brodsky) readily admits the unusual ease with which Brodsky adopted alien American ideas about personal freedom and taking responsibility for one’s own material and spiritual existence, but he is at pains to underline how unusual it was for a Russian émigré to respond this way, and continues to intersperse the sparse biographical facts with lengthy commentaries on Brodsky’s new Russian poems. Even a subsection labeled “Brodsky in New York” is devoted mostly to the poet’s relations (good and bad) with other Russians in the emigration. As gossip and a reflection of Loseff’s own experiences after he arrived in America, these pages are fun to read if you know the characters involved, but I wonder how much an American audience will get out of them.

A partial explanation of this severe limitation of Loseff’s book is to be found in the small matter in the front, where we learn that it was originally written for a Russian audience as part of a venerable series called “The Lives of Famous People,” whose editors evidently had little interest in Brodsky’s life outside the homeland. It would have been helpful for the publishers to have made this more clear, and they might also have prevailed on Loseff to expand his American chapters. Moreover, the Russian series is not only venerable, it also venerates its subjects rather more than is customary in Western biographies; and while Loseff’s concentration on the poetry is at first refreshing, his lopsided method leads to distortions that can be highly misleading. The “central event” of Brodsky’s affair with Basmanova and the birth of their son gets half a page, even in the Russian section, with only a fleeting reference to Brodsky’s attempted suicide, compared with four pages on the poems dedicated to Basmanova. As for Kuznetsova and her daughter, they are not mentioned at all.

A perhaps more weighty explanation is hinted at in Loseff’s eccentric statement that he is not qualified to write a biography of Brodsky “because Joseph was a close friend of mine for more than thirty years.” What would Boswell have made of such a statement? It appears to be an indirect way of alluding to Brodsky’s strenuous strictures against a proper biography. “A writer’s biography is in his twists of language,” he wrote in his great essay “Less than One,” and to a would-be biographer he protested that “A poet is not a man of action.... If you are of a mind to write a biography of a poet, you have to write a biography of his verses.” To his will Brodsky appended the following injunction: “The estate will authorize no biographies or publication of letters or diaries [after my death] ... My friends and relatives are asked not to cooperate with unauthorized publication of biographies, biographical investigations, diaries, or letters.” Shelley, Byron, Hardy, James, Auden, and any number of illustrious predecessors would have agreed with him, but Loseff gets in a small dig by way of muffled revenge: in his lifetime Brodsky loved to read—what else?—biographies of famous poets.