Authors

Eugenia Kelbert Rudan¹;  ¹ UEA (East Centre, Co-Director), UK

Discussion

The talk is based on research conducted in collaboration with Maya Kucherskaya and examines the hitherto unstudied creative tasks of Joseph Brodsky, which he offered to his American students. Each of the tasks is a detailed instruction on how to write a poem on a certain topic or/and in a certain genre. This analysis of the assignments’ structure aims to distill several foundational principles of Brodsky’s poetics and demonstrate their place within his vision and practice as a poet and teacher. It ultimately demonstrates the relevance of Brodsky’s pedagogical approach to his creative method. This includes insights into the poet’s private systematization behind his poetry and into key aspects of Brodsky’s evolution and bilingualism that have been otherwise inaccessible to researchers.