Joseph Brodsky’s List of 83 Books You Should Read to Have an Intelligent Conversation

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 1955, a mere two months into eighth grade, a 15-year-old teenag­er dropped out of a Leningrad school. He had already repeat­ed sev­enth grade; the thought of anoth­er bor­ing year was unbear­able. He wan­dered into work at a fac­to­ry, but only last­ed six months. For the next sev­en years, he drift­ed in and out of menial jobs at a light­house, a crys­tal­log­ra­phy lab, and a morgue. For a time, he worked as a man­u­al labor­er on geo­log­i­cal expe­di­tions and as a stok­er at a pub­lic bath­house. Still, it wasn’t a whol­ly inaus­pi­cious start—by the end of his life, he had taught at Yale, Colum­bia, Cam­bridge, Michi­gan, and Mount Holyoke. He had also been award­ed the Nobel Prize for lit­er­a­ture.

Despite spurn­ing his own for­mal edu­ca­tion, Russ­ian poet and Sovi­et dis­si­dent Joseph Brod­sky imme­di­ate­ly rose to the high­est aca­d­e­m­ic ech­e­lon when he arrived in Amer­i­ca in 1972. By all accounts, the auto­di­dact held his class­es to a high stan­dard, fre­quent­ly dis­miss­ing any stu­dent argu­ments about lit­er­ary great­ness unless they cen­tered on Milosz, Low­ell, or Auden.

Mon­i­ca Par­tridge, a for­mer stu­dent in his class, told Open Cul­ture, “I took a poet­ry class with [Joseph Brod­sky] at Mount Holyoke Col­lege my fresh­man year… It was all 19th [cen­tu­ry] Russ­ian poet­ry, and he would give us four pages of poems to mem­o­rize overnight. We would have to come in the next [morn­ing] and tran­scribe the poems we had mem­o­rized. Very Russ­ian.”

No less impres­sive was the list of books that Brod­sky dis­trib­uted to Partridge’s class.

1.   Bha­gavad Gita
2.   Mahab­hara­ta
3.   Gil­gamesh
4.   The Old Tes­ta­ment
5.   Homer: Ili­ad, Odyssey
6.   Herodotus: His­to­ries
7.   Sopho­cles: Plays
8.   Aeschy­lus: Plays
9.   Euripi­des: Plays (Hip­poly­tus, The Bachantes, Elec­tra, The Phoeni­cian Women)
10. Thucy­dides: The Pelo­pon­nesian War
11. Pla­to: Dia­logues
12. Aris­to­tle: Poet­ics, Physics, Ethics, De Ani­ma
13. Alexan­dri­an Poet­ry: The Greek Anthol­o­gy
14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
15. Plutarch: Lives [pre­sum­ably Par­al­lel Lives]
16. Vir­gil: Aeneid, Bucol­ics, Geor­gics
17. Tac­i­tus: Annals
18. Ovid: Meta­mor­phoses, Hero­ides, Amores
19. The New Tes­ta­ment
20. Sue­to­nius: The Twelve Cae­sars
21. Mar­cus Aure­lius: Med­i­ta­tions
22. Cat­ul­lus: Poems
23. Horace: Poems
24. Epicte­tus: Dis­cours­es
25. Aristo­phanes: Plays
26. Claudius Aelianus: His­tor­i­cal Mis­cel­lany, On the Nature of Ani­mals
27. Apol­lo­nius Rhodius: Arg­onau­ti­ca
28. Michael Psel­lus: Four­teen Byzan­tine Rulers
29. Edward Gib­bon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
30. Plot­i­nus: The Enneads
31. Euse­bius: Eccle­si­as­ti­cal His­to­ry
32. Boethius: Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy
33. Pliny the Younger: Let­ters
34. Byzan­tine verse romances
35. Her­a­cli­tus: Frag­ments
36. St. Augus­tine: Con­fes­sions
37. Thomas Aquinas: Sum­ma The­o­log­i­ca
38. St. Fran­cis of Assisi: The Lit­tle Flow­ers
39. Nic­colò Machi­avel­li: The Prince
40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Com­e­dy (Tr. By John Cia­r­di)
41. Fran­co Sac­chet­ti: Nov­el­le
42. Ice­landic sagas
43. William Shake­speare (Antho­ny and Cleopa­tra, Ham­let, Mac­beth, Hen­ry V)
44. François Rabelais
45. Fran­cis Bacon
46. Mar­tin Luther: Select­ed Works
47. John Calvin:  Insti­tu­tio Chris­tianae reli­gio­n­is
48. Michel de Mon­taigne: Essays
49. Miguel de Cer­vantes: Don Quixote
50. René Descartes: Dis­cours­es
51. Song of Roland
52. Beowulf
53. Ben­venu­to Celli­ni
54. Hen­ry Adams: Edu­ca­tion of Hen­ry Adams
55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan
56. Blaise Pas­cal: Pen­sées
57. John Mil­ton: Par­adise Lost
58. John Donne
59. Andrew Mar­vell
60. George Her­bert
61. Richard Crashaw
62. Baruch Spin­oza: Trea­tis­es
63. Stend­hal: Char­ter­house of Par­ma, Red and Black, The Life of Hen­ry Bru­lard 
64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Trav­els
65. Lau­rence Sterne: Tris­tram Shandy
66. Choder­los de Lac­los: Les Liaisons Dan­gereuses
67.  Baron de Mon­tesquieu: Per­sian Let­ters
68. John Locke: Sec­ond Trea­tise on Gov­ern­ment
69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
70. Got­tfried Wil­helm Leib­niz: Dis­course on Meta­physics
71. David Hume: Every­thing
72. The Fed­er­al­ist Papers
73. Immanuel Kant: Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son
74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trem­bling, Either/Or, Philo­soph­i­cal Frag­ments
75. Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky: Notes From the Under­ground, The Pos­sessed
76. Alex­is de Toc­queville: Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca
77. Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe: Faust, Ital­ian Jour­ney
78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Mar­quis de Cus­tine: Empire of the Czar: A Jour­ney Through Eter­nal Rus­sia
79. Eric Auer­bach: Mime­sis
80. William H. Prescott: Con­quest of Mex­i­co
81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Soli­tude
82. Sir Karl Pop­per: The Log­ic of Sci­en­tif­ic Dis­cov­ery, The Open Soci­ety and Its Ene­mies
83. Elias Canet­ti: Crowds and Pow­er

“Short­ly after the class began, he passed out a hand­writ­ten list of books that he said every per­son should have read in order to have a basic con­ver­sa­tion,” Par­tridge writes on the Brod­sky Read­ing Group blog.  “At the time I was think­ing, ‘Con­ver­sa­tion about what?’ I knew I’d nev­er be able to have a con­ver­sa­tion with him, because I nev­er thought I’d ever get through the list. Now that I’ve had a lit­tle liv­ing, I under­stand what he was talk­ing about. Intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion is good. In fact, maybe we all need a lit­tle more.”

In addi­tion to the poet­’s 1988 Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan com­mence­ment address that we post­ed last week, we bring you Joseph Brodsky’s req­ui­site read­ing list, anno­tat­ed with the poet’s hand­writ­ten notes.

Note: You can click each image to read them in a larg­er for­mat.

Get read­ing, friends.

Via Brod­sky Read­ing Group, and with the deep­est grat­i­tude to Mon­i­ca Par­tridge, who pro­vid­ed pho­tographs of the orig­i­nal. Props go to Stan­ford for the typed out list of books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Ernest Hemingway’s List for a Young Writer

Carl Sagan’s Under­grad Read­ing List: 40 Essen­tial Texts for a Well-Round­ed Thinker

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence write. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.