Flashes of Panic

I suspect that, due to the quote I’ve taken this weblog’s name from, I’m likely to wind up in the search results for people looking for winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I wrote my senior honors thesis on Joseph Brodsky’s prose essays, eight years ago at this point. The previous spring I had the rare and, as it turned out, fortunate priviledge to attend Brodsky’s 19^th Century Russian Poetry class at Mt. Holyoke College. That course counts, I think, among my most intellectually challenging (and, perhaps, interesting) among the thirty-one and two halves (never mind) I wound up taking.

I still pull out the thesis now and then, and I’m regularly surprised to find that it’s not utter crap, though I still suspect it is. A few months ago I backed it out of WordPerfect files into plain text with the intention of using it as a stage for learning XML, and perhaps I still will, someday, put it online, in the hopes that the acme of my relatively brief career as a Russian Literature scholar might be of use to someone else.

Brodsky, sadly, died at age 56 while I was midway through my writing. The class that I attended was his last. I never got my final paper back from him, nor do I know to this day what my grade was.

At any rate, those wishing to learn more about the poet and thinker who, according to this brief biography from the University of Michigan,

precisely articulated the point of view of the educated Homo sovieticus, whose savage irony was the last bastion against despair…

…might try a few of these links:

• The Joseph Brodsky museum in St. Petersburg
• Quotes and quotations (but not as good as the marginalia I wrote down during class…)
• Brodsky’s page at the Academy of American Poets
• The Nobel e-Museum’s page about the 1987 Prize for Literature (includes the acceptance speech, one of his greater essays)
• The quote from which this weblog gets its title can be found in the title essay of Brodsky’s first book of essays, Less Than One, which is almost undoubtedly available at your favorite bookstore, online or otherwise.