Contents -- Preface -- Note on Translations and Sources -- CHAPTER ONE -- Home -- Parents -- First impressions (war) -- Heredity -- The lessons of the city -- School days -- Outskirts -- Real education -- Brodsky as Jew -- CHAPTER TWO -- First jobs -- Expeditions -- Social status -- Early reading -- Winds from the West -- Modernism -- Poetry -- Leningrad poetry, late 1950s -- Brodsky's early verse -- Persecution-prosecution -- Umansky and his circle -- Incident in Samarkand -- CHAPTER THREE -- The beginnings of a style -- Boris Slutsky: meter, rhyme, composition, intonation -- Leningrad literary circles -- Evgeniy Rein: the art of the elegy -- Akhmatova -- Marina Basmanova and New Stanzas to Augusta -- CHAPTER FOUR -- Annus mirabilis, 1964-1965: ideology -- Persecution in Leningrad -- Kanatchikov Dacha and "Songs of a Happy Winter" -- Arrest and preliminary hearing -- Pryazhka -- The trial -- Support for Brodsky and international fame -- Prison -- CHAPTER FIVE -- Annus mirabilis, 1964-1965: exile to Norenskaya -- Brodsky and Basmanova -- Anglo-American poetry -- Epiphany in Norenskaya -- Back from exile -- CHAPTER SIX -- After exile: 1965-1972 -- Attempts at publishing a book -- A Halt in the Desert -- Long poems (1): "Isaac and Abraham" -- Long poems (2): "Gorbunov and Gorchakov" -- Leaving the USSR -- CHAPTER SEVEN -- The world according to Brodsky -- Poetry and politics -- Motherland: us and them -- Brodsky's Asia -- Questions of faith -- The world according to Brodsky (conclusion) -- Existentialism -- CHAPTER EIGHT -- Arrival in the West: Auden -- Brodsky in America -- Carl Proffer and Ardis -- The End of a Beautiful Era and A Part of Speech: a philosophy of prosody -- The End of a Beautiful Era and A Part of Speech: publication -- Brodsky the professor -- Brodsky in New York -- Travels -- Friends and foes -- Nonmeetings: Brodsky and Nabokov.

Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn speak to America -- Afghanistan and Poland -- Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn -- CHAPTER NINE -- Fame and fortune -- The politics and morals of the American campus -- Brodsky and the erotic -- Urania -- Brodsky in English -- Essays -- The Nobel Prize -- CHAPTER TEN -- Changes at home -- Democracy! -- Busy years: 1990-1995 -- Illness -- "Being-toward-death" -- Death -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.