Brodsky Among Us

“[Ellendea Proffer Teasely’s] memoir of Joseph Brodsky, with its concise and penetrating character portrayals, and the depiction of the poet’s journey from fifteen year-old school dropout to Nobel Prize winning poet, is itself a work of poetry and deserves to be included in both undergraduate and graduate programs of Russian literature.” —Marya Zeigler, Department of Defense, Slavic and East European Journal Vol. 62.3

Irena Grudzinska Gross:

[Ellendea] Proffer Teasley’s memoir is an excellent primary source for information about Brodsky’s character and personality, his exile and journey to the United States, his adaptation to this new culture and his attitudes toward it, his relationship with writers and intellectuals in America, and his undiminished opposition to and hostility towards the Soviet Union.

Cynthia L. Haven:
"Ellendea Proffer Teasley, in her short new memoir [Brodsky among Us] offers a different view of the poet. It’s an iconoclastic and spellbinding portrait, some of it revelatory. Teasley’s Brodsky is both darker and brighter than the one we thought we knew, and he is the stronger for it, as a poet and a person...Brodsky Among Us appears to have been written in a single exhalation of memory; it is frank, personal, loving, and addictive: a minor masterpiece of memoir, and an important world-historical record."

Anna Narinskaia, Kommersant Daily:
"If this book did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. But the problem is that very few people would be able to invent it—that is, to write it this way: without teary-eyed delight or spiteful score-settling, without petty fights with either the dead or the living, and at the same time with a full understanding of the caliber and distinctiveness of its “hero.” … What is this book actually about? It is about a young American—educated, a lover of literature, open to the world—who came to Russia in the late nineteen-sixties. About how she and her husband met a poet whose gift was obvious, sharp, and charming. About how that man then—before their eyes and with their help—took off on a dizzying path. And this, oddly enough, is a rather difficult story to tell."

Artem Pudov, Nezavisimaia gazeta:
"Brodsky Among Us, by Ellendea Proffer Teasley, the co-founder of the legendary American publishing house Ardis in a translation by the well-known Viktor Golyshev, has already caused a sensation…. [In this memoir] Teasley cuts against the Brodsky cult, the transformation of his poetry and prose into objects of mindless adoration. Her memoir is a call to return the human face to the image of a literary colossus…. Brodsky Among Us allows one to see this celebrity outside of his usual context, and this sharp “shift of vision” is what is truly in order to read Joseph Brodsky’s poetry."

Marat Grinberg, Commentary:
"…Ellendea Proffer Teasley’s memoir of the poet, which became a sensation when it was first published in Russian three years ago, provides a penetrating and at times deeply moving account of both the myth and the man behind the work. She renders the Brodsky she knew not just as a great poet and deeply imperfect human being, but also as a political thinker who was uncompromising and unforgiving in his beliefs."