Dictionary of Literary Influences

Braque, Georges

with the writings of Karl Marx while still at school, quoting from the Communist Manifesto in the small pieces he started to write and publish from the age of 14. While in Oslo, he collaborated in the first translation of Marx’s Das Kapital into Norwegian, though the work failed to make him a convert to dogmatic Marxism. An avid reader throughout his life, he held on to his favorite subjects of history, politics, biographies—preferably of statesmen whose lives could offer him inspiration, for instance of Walter Rathenau, Gustav Stresemann, even Konrad Adenauer and Otto von Bismarck—and semi-documentary novels, generally speaking books dealing with political and social matters that were uppermost in his mind.

Brandt was married three times and had four children, a daughter with his first, three sons with his second wife. He died of cancer in his house in Unkel near Bonn in October 1992.

Archives

Willy-Brandt-Archiv im Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn.

Printed Sources

Binder, David. The Other German: Willy Brandt’s Life and Times (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Book Co., 1975).

Brandt, Willy. Erinnerungen (Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989), transl. as My Life in Politics (London, New York: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).

———. Mein Weg nach Berlin. Aufgezeichnet von Leo Lania (München: Kindler, 1960), transl. as My Road to Berlin (London: Peter Davies, 1960).

Marshall, Barbara. Willy Brandt: eine politische Biographie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993), transl. as Willy Brandt: A Political Biography (London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

Prittie, Terence. Willy Brandt: Portrait of a Statesman (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).

Angela Schwarz

BRAQUE, GEORGES (1882–1963)

Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine near Paris and moved to Le Havre at the age of eight, where he studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Upon graduation, Braque worked as a house painter and faux finisher until he was called to perform one year of obligatory military service in 1901. The following year, Braque traveled to Paris to study painting at the Academie Humbert and attended the Fauvist exhibition of 1905 where he viewed the colorful and emotive work of Henri Matisse and André Derain. Braque exhibited at the 1906 Salon des Independants and the Salon d’Automne of 1907 and met Pablo Picasso during his first one-man exhibition at Kahnweiler’s Gallery in Paris. The following year the two artists began a collaboration that would lead to the development of analytical and, later, synthetic cubism. In works such as Violin and Pitcher (1910), Braque neutralized the color of his subject matter and divided it into complex patterns of faceted forms to reflect a variety of possible viewpoints. He also incorporated collage into his paintings, pasting pieces of newspaper and wood grained and patterned paper onto the surfaces of canvasses such as Fruit Dish and Glass (1912). In 1914 Braque enlisted in the French army, and obtained a severe head wound at

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Carency, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and made a chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. Three years later he resumed his artistic career, remaining steadfast to the principles of cubism, which he found to be an infinitely flexible and variable means of expression. Braque won First Prize at both the Carnegie International Exhibition of 1937 and the 1948 Venice Biennale, and in 1961 he was the first artist to be honored with a one-man exhibition at the Louvre.

Unlike a variety of artists of his era, Braque did not bind surrealist concepts to his artistic production and abandoned the model for freely invented signs and symbols that poets such as Pierre Reverdy utilized in their literature. While a great deal of Braque’s paintings and papiers collés demonstrate relationships between images that reflect psychological meaning, this meaning was never arrived at with the aid of the artist’s subconscious. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Braque believed that to have an aim was to be in a position of servitude, and he approached his work with a spirit of freedom and experimentation. In this way he shared the belief that all art surrendered to predestination, as espoused by his friend, the poet Francis Ponge. In developing cubism, Braque was influenced by many of the same authors who had made their marks on Paul Cézanne and the Fauvist painters, such as Henri Bergson. In works such as Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson expressed his essential belief that painting need not represent the natural. Following this thought, Braque not only broke with traditional representation of subject matter, but with how mass, distance, and color had formerly been depicted as well. Braque’s simplicity and conservatism was fostered by the artist’s frequent referencing of D. T. Suzuki’s Essais sur le Bouddhisme Zen, which he acquired during his period of recuperation throughout the First World War. Braque was also a regular reader of Greek mythology, including Hesiod’s Theogony, which he illustrated with a series of etchings.

Archives

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW210148-A.

The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections, control no. CJPA86-A133.

Printed Sources

Clement, Russell T. Georges Braque (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994). Wilkin, Karen. Georges Braque (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991). Zurcher, Bernard. Georges Braque, Life and Work (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

Gregory L. Schnurr

BRAUDEL, FERNAND (1902–1985)

Fernand Braudel, eminent historian of the Mediterranean and of the material life of early modern Europe, was born in Lumeville, a small village in eastern France, although he grew up largely in the countryside outside Paris. He graduated from the Sorbonne and became a schoolteacher in French Algeria. At this time the official French school curriculum permitted no deviation from great events and figures, and, as Braudel himself states, the young historian did not think beyond these terms. However, the influential Annales school, a group of French historians dedi-

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cated to stressing the importance of social, geographic, and economic forces in history, began to change his thinking. Braudel gradually conceived of a history of the Mediterranean which would owe less to political events and statesmen than to the land and people. Braudel left Algeria and held teaching positions in Brazil and Paris while developing this thesis and remaining in contact with Annales school historians (the name Annales comes from the title of a journal devoted to social and economic history).

During World War II, Braudel served as an officer in the French army. He was captured by the Germans and spent the years 1940–45 as a prisoner of war. It was during this time that Braudel wrote, from memory, what was to become his masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.

After the war, Braudel submitted his manuscript to the Sorbonne, which granted him the docteur des lettres degree. La Mediterranée et le monde mediterraneen à l’epoque de Philippe II appeared in France in 1949.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Braudel assumed leadership of the Annales school from his mentor Lucien Febvre (1878–1956). In 1966 a second edition of La Mediterranée appeared in France, solidifying its stature as a classic. In 1972, The Mediterranean was translated into English, formalizing Braudel’s international historical reputation. Braudel’s other great work, the multivolume The Structure of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible appeared in French in 1979 and was translated into English in 1982. Structure echoed Mediterranean in painting the geographical and material life of the world’s history between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Braudel died in 1985.

Fernand Braudel’s influences have been discussed both by Braudel himself and observers. Braudel invokes Henri Berr, a French professor of history responsible for an earlier journal similar to the later Annales. Of course, the most direct influences were the founders of the Annales school, Febvre and Marc Bloch (Bloch was killed by German forces during the war). Febvre’s chief works are A Geographical Introduction to History (1922), Martin Luther (1928), and The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (1958). Marc Bloch wrote The Royal Touch (1924), French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (1931), and Feudal Society

(1939–40). Both Febvre and Bloch wrote numerous scholarly articles that appeared in the Annales and elsewhere.

The Annales school itself was an evolved synthesis that drew on the work of previous intellectuals. Chief among these were Fustel de Coulanges (The Ancient City, 1864), François Simiand, and the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, author of The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide: A Study in Sociolog y (1897), and Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).

Archives

Not available.

Printed Sources

Braudel, Fernand. “Personal Testimony,” Journal of Modern History 4 (Dec. 1972), 448–67. Braudel, Paule. “Les origins intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel: Un Temoignage,” Annales:

Economies, Societes, Civilisations 47, 1 (1992), 237–44.

Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

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Daix, Pierre. Braudel (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).

Hexter, J. H. “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien . . . ,” Journal of Modern History 4 (Dec. 1972), 480–539.

Siegel, Martin. “Henri Berr’s Revue de Synthèse Historique,” History and Theory 9, 3 (1970), 322–34.

Trevor-Roper, H. R. “Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean,” Journal of Modern History 4 (Dec. 1972), 468–79.

Charles Allan

BRAUN, WERNHER VON (1912–1977)

Wernher von Braun was born in Wirsitz, Germany, the second of three sons to Magnus von Braun, an Imperial administrator, and Emmy von Quistorp. The latter awakened Wernher’s interest in the sciences, even giving him a telescope for his Lutheran confirmation. Transferred on account of poor grades from the French gymnasium (high school) in Berlin to the Hermann-Lietz boarding school near Weimar and later to its Spiekeroog site on the North Sea, von Braun came under the spell of the rocket fad that gripped Germany in the 1920s. He later studied at the University of Berlin. While completing his dissertation in physics he was hired by the army weapons laboratory in 1932. There, von Braun worked on a series of rocket projects which culminated in the development of the A-4 ballistic missile (also known as V2) during World War II. In the meantime, he joined the SS in 1940. Surrendering to American troops in 1945, von Braun came to the United States with other German scientists under Project Paperclip. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955. He served as technical director for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, later the George C. Marshall Flight Center. In this position, he directed the development of several launchers, including the Saturn moon rocket project. In 1970, he was named NASA Deputy Associate Administrator in charge of planning, but he resigned in 1972 when the space budgets were cut back. He then joined Fairchild Industries. He died of cancer five years later.

Although he experienced a classical education, von Braun’s interest in the sciences affected his readings. In 1963, he recalled reading avidly the major sciencefiction classics, including Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, and German science-fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (in honor of which von Braun and his fellow enthusiasts of the German Society for Space Travel named their 1931 test rocket “The Repulsor”). He also read the popular works by Max Vallier, who tested Fritz von Opel’s rocket car, and of Willy Ley, a journalist fascinated with rocketry and space travel.

In 1925, while practicing astronomy in his spare school time, von Braun saw an ad for a book about space travel and ordered it. Written by Transylvanian mathematician Hermann Oberth, Die Rackete zu den Planetenraumen (“The Rocket into Interplanetary Space”) theorized about the science necessary for rocket flight. Oberth’s book was the first that showed von Braun how rocketry might become a means of space travel. Frustrated with the mathematics that filled much of the book, he began to focus his studies on calculus and trigonometry and read astronomy classics by Johannes Kepler and French astronomer Camille Flammarion, whom von Braun cited in a high school paper.

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Archives

Bundesarchiv Koblenz, papers of Magnus von Braun, correspondence with his sons. Deutsches Museum, Munich, Peenemünde Archive.

Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville Alabama, von Braun papers (unordered). University of Alabama at Huntsville Library, Willy Ley collection.

National Archives and Records Administration, Berlin Document Center records, Project Paperclip records.

Printed Sources

Braun, Magnus von. Von Ostpreussen bis Texas (Stollhamm: Rauschenbusch, 1955).

Braun, Wernher von, and Frederick I. Ordway. History of Rocketry and Space Travel (New York: Crowell, 1966).

———. The Rocket’s Red Glare (New York: Doubleday, 1976).

Neufeld, Michael J. The Rocket and the Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

———.“Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology: The Rocketry and Spaceflight Fad in Germany, 1923–1933,” Technolog y and Culture 31, 4 (1990), 725–52.

———.“Wernher von Braun, the SS and Concentration Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political, and Criminal Responsibility,” German Studies Review 25, 1 (Feb. 2002), 57–78.

Stuhlinger, Ernst, and Frederick I. Ordway. Wernher von Braun, Crusader for Space (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1994).

Guillaume de Syon

BRECHT, BERTOLT EUGEN FRIEDRICH (1898–1956)

Berthold (originally) Brecht was born in Augsburg in 1898. In 1904 he entered the grammar school, then in 1908, the Städtisches Realgymnasium in Augsburg. At the age of 16, Brecht started to publish poems and short stories. In 1917 he enrolled at the University of Munich to study medicine but exmatriculated in 1921. During the 1920s Brecht studied Marxism in evening courses. From that point on, Marxist viewpoints became more prominent in his plays.

Brecht’s notion of theater was coined mainly by the attempt to eliminate the identification with figures and plot, to avoid mere entertainment and to promote a political consciousness and commitment. For him, theater was a pedagogic discipline that should be conducive for political enlightenment and activation of the proletarian masses. His theory of theater is based on Friedrich Schiller’s idealistic notion of the theater as a medium of education and humanistic refinement. Beyond that, Brecht’s poetry has become as highly esteemed as his dramatic works.

Brecht’s first play, Baal (1918), was conceived as a counterpart to Hanns Johst’s conventional play Der Einsame (1918), whereas the image of Baal, a young poet, was influenced by François Villon and Arthur Rimbaud. Both poets served as a model in Brecht’s early dramatic and poetic writings. His new conception of political theater was coined early in his life. Already his second play, Trommeln in der Nacht (1919), influenced by Georg Büchner and Frank Wedekind, is characterized by the audience’s reduced identification with the the action on stage, effects of dramatic alienation, popular language, and increased application of mimic art and pantomime. Further early one-act plays such as Lux in Tenebris, Er treibt den Teufel aus, and Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit are influenced by the comedian Karl Valentin’s laconic irony and sense of the absurd. Brecht gained to a large extent from east Asian authors and dramatic tradition. His plays Der Jasager und der Neinsager (1930) and

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Die Maßnahme (1930), for instance, are based on the play Taniko by the Japanese author Zenchiku (1405–68). Further prose works (e.g., Die höflichen Chinesen) and poems (e.g., Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Taoteking auf dem Weg des Laotse in die Emigration) demonstrate Brecht’s interest in Asian literature.

Brecht adapted a number of foreign-language plays, such as Christopher Marlowe’s The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward II, King of England and works by William Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Molière. Brecht’s most popular adaptation is John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which he made into his Dreigroschenoper (1929), with music by Kurt Weill. Brecht himself once stated that he copied Japanese, hellenistic, and Elizabethan drama.

Archives

Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv der Akademie der Künste der DDR, Berlin. Letters, books, newspaper clippings, films, photographs.

Institut für Literaturwissenschaft, University of Karlsruhe. Primary and secondary literature.

Printed Sources

Ewen, Frederic. Bertolt Brecht. His Life, His Art and His Time (New York: Citadel Press, 1992).

Fuegi, John. Bertolt Brecht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Jameson, Frederic. Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998).

Lee, Sang-Kyong. Nô und europäisches Theater (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 1983). Mittenzwei, Werner. Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht oder Der Umgang mit den Welträtseln, 2 vols.

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987).

Willet, John. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (London: Methuen, 1977).

Ernst Grabovszki

BRETON, ANDRÉ (1896–1966)

A very handsome man who couldn’t accept concessions or compromises, French author André Breton was born in Tinchebray (Orne) on February 18, 1896, the son of a clerk at the local police station who later became a shopkeeper in a crystal manufactory in Pantin, near Paris. André Breton spent his early childhood with his grandfather in Saint-Brieuc, on the Brittany coast (until 1900) and went to the Collège Chaptal in Paris from 1907 to 1914. He got a religious education from his mother but lost faith before his teens. While he studied medicine and neurology (from 1915), he worked as a hospital attendant in Nantes and Verdun and later in Paris during World War I. Breton published his first articles in 1919; he also worked for a short period in 1920 as an assistant for Marcel Proust. The next year, he was librarian in Paris for collector Jacques Doucet and remained in that post until 1924. Breton was a member of the Dada movement between 1920 and 1923; he was interested in communism between 1925 and 1935, but he soon was disgusted by Stalinism and politics in general. André Breton is known as the founder in 1923 and leader of the mouvement surréaliste, which had many followers including important French writers (Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret), artists (director Luis Bunuel and photographer Man Ray), and painters (Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Max Ernst). In 1924, Breton published the

Manifeste du surréalisme, followed by Second Manifeste du surréalisme in 1929. All members of the group wrote in select avant-garde journals, such as La révolution

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surréaliste. Even though the movement faded in the late 1930s, the surrealist influence was very strong in Europe, even in Mai 68. During World War II, Breton spent five years in the Americas: Martinique, Haiti, Canada (Gaspésie) and mainly New York City, where he worked for a French radio station. Back in France in 1946, he remained active and productive, writing books and giving papers until his death in 1966.

It is difficult to indicate specific literary influences for a man who was a constant reader from his early childhood. André Breton admitted he was shocked upon first reading Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry in 1914; during that early period, he also read poets he admired, such as Paul Valéry, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Saint-Pol Roux, and Paul Fort. His strongest literary impression was in 1916, when he became aware of Sigmund Freud’s interpretations of the meaning of dreams and his discovery of the unconscious mind; that inspired him to experiment with a totally new method of creation, the écriture automatique (automatic writing), a process he used first with Philippe Soupault for their common book, Les Champs magnétiques (1919). Other surrealist authors such as Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and Antonin Artaud used that same approach in order to find a free way to write without any kind of censorship. Among Breton’s main influences were unknown authors that he considered precursors of surrealism, such as the Comte de Lautréamont (born Isidore Ducasse), who wrote Les Chants de Maldoror (a book Breton discovered in 1918), and poet Raymond Roussel, who wrote a strange novel, Impressions d’Afrique. André Breton hated consecrated writers such as Anatole France and François Mauriac but admitted he owed a debt to audacious French authors like the Marquis de Sade and Guillaume Apollinaire (whom Breton met in 1916). He also was inspired by Leon Trotsky’s enthusiastic book about Lenin; that idealized energy gave Breton the strength to write his most beautiful book, Nadja, a fascinating autobiographical story about astonishing coincidences and his love for a mysterious woman, written in 1927. Among many books, Breton also published in 1938 an Anthologie de l’humour noir, banned in France in 1940. Breton’s influence is clear on authors like Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Alain RobbeGrillet, and other French writers of the nouveau roman and the theater of the absurd.

Archives

Fonds Breton, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, 8 et 10 Place du Panthéon, Paris, France. Manuscripts, correspondence, personal archives, annotated books.

Printed Sources

Balakian, Anna, and Rudolph E. Kuenzli. André Breton Today (New York: Wethis Locker and Owens, 1989).

Breton, André. Antholog y of Black Humor, Mark Polizzotti (trans.), (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997).

———.Mad Love, Mary A. Caws (trans.), (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

———.Manifestoes of Surrealism, Helen R. Lane (trans.), Richard Seaver (trans.), (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).

———.Nadja, Richard Howard (trans.), (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1976).

———.What Is Surrealism?: Selected Writings, Franklin Rosemont (ed.), (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1985).

Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields: Facsimile of the Manuscript [1919] (Paris: Éditions Lachenal et Ritter, 1988).

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Breton, André, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Éluard. Automatic Message: The Magnetic Fields and The Immaculate Conception, David Gascoyne (trans.), Antony Melville (trans.), (London, Serpent’s Tail, 1998).

Gracq, Julien. André Breton. Quelques aspects de l’écrivain (Paris: Éditions José Corti, 1948). Raymond, Marcel. De Baudelaire au surréalisme [1933] (Paris: José Corti, 1972). Sheringham, Michael. André Breton: a Bibliography (London: Grant & Cutler, 1972; new ed.,

1992, with Elza Adamowicz). Extensive list of books, articles, tracts by André Breton.

Yves Laberge

BRITTEN, BENJAMIN (1913–1976)

Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England. Educated locally, he studied piano early, followed by private instruction in the viola. Beginning to write music as a child, he impressed British composer Frank Bridge with several of his compositions and subsequently became his private pupil. After two years at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, he entered the Royal College of Music (London) in 1930 where he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin. At a rehearsal for a broadcast performance of his early choral work, A Boy Was Born (1933), he met tenor Peter Pears. So began a lifelong personal and professional relationship in which Pears became the appointed soloist in many of Britten’s song, choral, and operatic premieres. In 1935, while working for the GPO Film Unit, he met the poet W. H. Auden. Matching Auden’s social criticism with Britten’s satirical and virtuoso musical style, their collaboration, beginning with the orchestral song cycle, Our Hunting Fathers (1936), proved to be a highly creative one. While living in the United States during the early war years, he came across an article by E. M. Forster (The Listener, May 29, 1941) on the Suffolk poet George Crabbe. His poem The Borough, especially its section on Peter Grimes, moved the composer to write his first and most enduring opera. The premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945 was an immediate success and established Britten as a formidable musical dramatist. Generally considered as his nation’s greatest composer since Henry Purcell (1659–1695), Britten’s world reputation centered on his operatic output and, to some extent, his choral and vocal music for solo voice. His best-known instrumental composition is Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1946).

Britten’s most distinctive work was influenced by language and the texts he found among poets and librettists. Superb poetry meant a great deal to him. His library at Aldeburgh contained a rich compendium of anthologies and individual poets’ works. As a frequent traveler, he was never without his favorite anthology, Horace Gregory’s 1943 volume, The Triumph of Life, Poems of Consolations (Ford 1994, xii). Britten said that the person most responsible for his love of poetry was Auden, and it was he, as well as Pears, who suggested most of the texts for Britten’s vocal works (Ford 1994, xiv).

He drew upon some of the world’s giant literary figures for inspiring the libretti for many of his finest operas. Among them are Herman Melville for Billy Budd (1951), Henry James for The Turn of the Screw (1954), William Shakespeare for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Thomas Mann for A Death in Venice (1973). The composer expressed a lifelong admiration for the novels of Charles Dickens and even thought of turning David Copperfield into an opera but found the overall structure nearly impossible to master (Mitchell and Reed 1998, II, 233–4).

If Auden spoke of Britten’s “extraordinary musical sensibility in relation to the English language,” the composer’s setting of French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Les

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Illuminations (1939) captured the beauty of the rise and flow of another language as well (Ford 1994, xiii). While visiting Japan in 1956 he saw a Noh play and was immediately impressed by Japanese classical drama and its close general affinities with English medieval morality plays (Mellers 1992, 42–45). Out of this fascination Britten would later write his quasi-operatic parables Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966), and The Prodigal Son (1968).

Britten’s willingness to combine literary texts—the searing poems of Wilfred Owen, a young English soldier who fell during World War I, with the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead—produced his most powerful work, the War Requiem, which premiered on May 30, 1962 at the consecration of the restored Coventry Cathedral. The church had been destroyed during World War II and Britten wrote the piece as a prayer for peace. It was an immediate success and furthered the composer’s public recognition.

Only toward the end of Britten’s life was his long and strong attraction to T. S. Eliot’s poetry finally realized with his Canticle IV: Journey of the Magi (1971). After Britten’s heart surgery in 1973, Eliot was one of the few poets he was able to read.

Archives

The Britten–Pears Library, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, United Kingdom: Correspondence to and from Britten, literary works, including those of W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Wilfred Owen, and others.

Printed Works

Carpenter, H. Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).

Ford, Boris (ed.). Benjamin Britten’s Poets: The Poetry He Set to Music (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1994).

Mellers, Wilfrid. “Letters from a Life,” New Republic, Jan. 20, 1992, 42–45.

Mitchell, Donald. Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1981).

Mitchell, Donald, and P. Reed (eds.). Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 2 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 1991, 1998).

Geoffrey S. Cahn

BRODSKY, JOSEPH ALEKSANDROVICH (1940–1996)

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad, died in Brooklyn, and is buried in Venice, Italy. Brodsky received his unremarkable early education from public schools in Leningrad but read voraciously throughout his life. He left school at the age of 15 and took a series of odd jobs that allowed him time to write. In 1964 Brodsky was arrested and charged with “parasitism” for writing poetry without being a member of the Soviet Writers’ Union. He served 18 months of his five-year sentence. During this time, his first collection of verse came out in the West. According to his friend Lev Loseff, Brodsky was arrested because he continued the work of the Russian modernists—Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak— and successfully managed to transplant “Western-European metaphysical poetics to Russian soil” (Loseff 1990, 35). Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky settled in the United States, where he taught, toured, and published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and essays. Brodsky received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992.

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Living between two cultures, Brodsky’s literary influences reflect his life’s circumstances. Russian writers and poets shaped his style, and Anglophone modernists helped him develop his mature voice. Brodsky considered his contemporaries Boris Slutsky and Yevgeny Rein his early mentors. Rein advised him to use nouns more than any other part of speech (Bethea 1994, 32). From Slutsky he learned how to use language from all strata of society, which gave his poetry a “potential absurdist streak.” (Bethea 1994, 30). Brodsky also drew from the talents of previous generations. He developed his restrained tone and stylistic complexity from the nine- teenth-century poet Evgeny Baratynsky (Polukhina 1989, 7). His early baroque tendencies can be traced from seventeenth-century poetry and Russian classicists like Antioch Kantemir and Gavrila Derzhavin (Volkov 1998, 14). In the 1960s, he studied the Russian religious philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, read the Bible and Mikhail Dostoyevsky, which gave his poetry its philosophical bent (Volkov 1998, 13). After his forced emigration, Brodsky translated George Herbert, John Donne, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Stoppard (Volkov 1998, 14). This work increased his love for the English metaphysical poets and anglophone modernists. In conversations with Solomon Volkov, Brodsky admitted that he belonged to Anna Akhmatova’s circle but that Tsvetaeva had a greater influence on his poetry; he greatly admired her complex syntax (Volkov 1998, 39). In his Nobel Lecture, Brodsky expressed his debt to his favorite poets: Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, and W. H. Auden (Brodsky 1990, 1). He admitted that in his better moments he considered himself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individually (Brodsky 1990, 2).

Archives

The Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Printed Sources

Bethea, David M. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Brodsky, Joseph. “Nobel Lecture, 1987.” In Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (eds.),

Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics (London: Macmillan, 1990).

Loseff, Lev. “Politics/Poetics.” In Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (eds.), Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics (London: Macmillan, 1990).

MacFadyen, David. Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2000). Excellent discussion of literary influences.

Polukhina, Valentina. Joseph Brodsky. A Poet for Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Volkov, Solomon. Conversations with Joseph Brodsky. A Poet’s Journey through the Twentieth Century. Marian Schwartz (trans.), (New York: The Free Press, 1998). Includes Brodsky’s own admissions of influence.

Erika Haber

BROOKE, RUPERT (1887–1915)

Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, England, and educated in classics at Rugby School, where his father was a housemaster, and at King’s College, Cambridge (1906–10). His interest in Greek and Latin literature faded during his undergraduate years, and he turned instead to earlier English drama, especially Christopher

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