There is no biography of Joseph Brodsky, despite the quite natural interest of readers in his personality and fate. The book “Joseph Brodsky through the eyes of his contemporaries (1996–2005)” to a certain extent fills this gap in the history of culture of the 20th century. The reader sees the poet through his eyes friends, translators, publishers from Russia, USA, England, France, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Israel. As a result, a broad picture of the life of Joseph Brodsky in different periods is created. The reader gets an idea of the personality of one of the most striking and mysterious figures of the last decades of Russian and world culture.

Valentina Polukhina is a professor at the University of Keele (England), a specialist in the field of modern Russian poetry, the author of a number of works on the work of Joseph Brodsky “Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time” (CUP, 1999), “Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries” (London: Macmilan, 1992) (extended Russian versions: “Brodsky through the eyes of his contemporaries” (St. Petersburg: Zvezda Magazine) , 1997) and “Brodsky’s Tropes Dictionary” (together with Yulia Pärli; Tartu, 1995)). Editor (together with Lev Losev) of collections of articles: “Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics” (London: Macmilan, 1999) (Russian version: “How Brodsky’s poem works” (M.: NLO, 2002)). As a guest editor of the magazine “Russian Literure” (Amsterdam), she prepared two special issues dedicated to Brodsky: “Brodsky Genres” (1995), “Brodsky as a Critic” (2000). Compiler of the “Big Book of Brodsky Interviews” (Moscow: Zakharov, 2000, 3rd ed. - 2005), bilingual collections of poems by Olga Sedakova (1994), Oleg Prokofiev (1995), D. A. Pirogov (1995), Evgeniy Reina (2001).