News at Eleven: When [Joseph] Brodsky is sent to do

hard labour [Lev] Loseff is at pains to note that although the conditions of his transit were appalling, he served his sentence in a rural outpost, finding his own work, able to write and think, and possessing more living space than he could have imagined in the communal flats of Leningrad. He wryly counterpoints the reality with J.M. Coetzee's uninformed musings on the young Russian poet in a labour camp, eating fish heads and patching his boots with rags.

None of this is to belittle Brodsky's hardships, but Loseff is determined that we should know the reality and not the myth. We should concentrate on Brodsky the poet, not Brodsky the abstract martyr.

from The Irish Times: A brotherly account of Joseph Brodsky

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