Brodsky and Miłosz Take Manhattan

Over one hundred representatives of the New York cultural elite took part in a literary evening last Saturday on the occasion of the American publication of a book by Irena Grudzińska-Gross, entitled "Fellowship of Poets." This book by the Slavic literature professor at Princeton, published by the prestigious Yale University Press, is a reworked version of a book published three years ago by Znak Publishers - "Miłosz i Brodski. Pole magnetyczne" [Miłosz and Brodsky. Magnetic Fields].

During the meeting at the Russian Samovar restaurant, the favorite New York haunt of the Russian poet and exile (who passed away 14 years ago), poems by Miłosz (in Polish and in English) and by Brodsky (in Russian and in English) were read and recited by Adam Michnik and Ann Kjellberg, whom Brodski entrusted to be caretaker of his legacy.

This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in America and Nobel Prize laureates in literature. To create this truly original work, Irena Grudzinska Gross draws from poems, essays, letters, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky.

The dual portrait of these poets and the elucidation of their attitudes toward religion, history, memory, and language throw a new light on the upheavals of the twentieth-century. Gross also incorporates notes on both poets’ relationships to other key literary figures, such as W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, Robert Haas, and Derek Walcott.