Julian Pokay

This project juxtaposes the works of the Russian poets Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) and the less well-known Leonid Aronzon (1939–1970) in an attempt to examine their poetic dialogue and determine the stages of the poets’ brief friendship. In so doing, Julian Pokay looks at Russian poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, written in Leningrad, and focuses on the Thaw generation as well as the Leningrad underground movement. Furthermore, he challenges the notion of binary oppositions by way of analyzing the group dynamics of artistic networks and collaborative circles in that period.