Table of contents:
2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
Before leaving the room, consider if other people are interested in talking to you. A list of books with which, in Brodsky's opinion, every person should familiarize themselves will help to maintain an intellectual conversation.
Brodsky studied only 7 classes in high school, and he became unbearably bored. He quit his studies and went to work at the factory. There he also did not last long, only six months. Then there was work at the lighthouse, in the crystallographic laboratory, in the morgue. For some time he worked as a laborer on a geological expedition and as a stoker in a bathhouse.
When Joseph Alexandrovich emigrated to the United States, despite the lack of special education, he immediately received an invitation to teach at five American colleges. He conducted classes in an unusual way: there were no lectures or seminars. He talked with his students and talked about his favorite writers. At the same time, he constantly drank coffee and smoked a lot.
Despite the lack of higher education, Brodsky read a lot. Therefore, he was surprised that students studying literature could not boast of the same. One day Brodsky sat down at a typewriter and made a list of books that everyone should read. Today we publish photographs of these recordings and the list of works itself with links to resources where you can purchase them.
1. "Bhagavad Gita" (buy on Litres.ru →).
2. "Mahabharata" ().
3. "The Epic of Gilgamesh" (buy at Labirint.ru →).
4. Old Testament ().
5. Homer, Iliad, Odyssey ().
6. Herodotus, "History" ().
7. Sophocles, plays ().
8. Aeschylus, plays (buy at Labirint.ru →).
9. Euripides, plays: "Hippolytus", "Bacchae", "Electra", "The Phoenicians" ().
10. Thucydides, "History of the Peloponnesian War" ().
11. Plato, "Dialogues" ().
12. Aristotle, "Poetics", "Physics", "Ethics", "On the Soul" ().
13. Alexandrian poetry ().
14. Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things" (buy at Labirint.ru →).
15. Plutarch, Comparative Biographies ().
16. Virgil, "Aeneid", "Bucolics", "Georgics" ().
17. Tacitus, "Annals" (buy on Labirint.ru →).
18. Ovid, "Metamorphoses", "Heroids", "Science of Love" (buy on Litres.ru →).
19. New Testament ().
20. Suetonius, "The Life of the Twelve Caesars" (buy at Litres.ru →).
21. Marcus Aurelius ().
22. Catullus ().
23. Horace ().
24 … Epictetus ().
25. Aristophanes ().
26. Elian, "Colorful stories", "On the nature of animals" ().
27. Apollodorus, "Argonautica" ().
28. Michael Psell, "Chronography" ().
29. Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ().
30. Plotinus, "The Enneads" ().
31. Eusebius of Caesarea (Pamphilus), "Church History" ().
32. Boethius, Consolation in Philosophy ().
33. Pliny the Younger, "Letters" ().
34. Byzantine poetic novels.
35. Heraclitus of Ephesus, "Fragments" (,).
36. Augustine, "Confession" (,).
37. Thomas Aquinas, "The Summa of Theology" (,).
38. "Flowers of St. Francis" (,).
39. Niccolo Machiavelli, "Sovereign" (,).
40. Dante, "The Divine Comedy" (,).
41. Franco Sacchetti, short stories (,).
42. Icelandic sagas (,).
43. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V (,).
44. Rabelais (,).
45. Bacon (,).
46. Martin Luther (,).
47. Calvin ().
48. Montaigne, "Experiments" ().
49 … Cervantes, "Don Quixote" (,).
50. Descartes (,).
51. "Song of Roland" ().
52. "Beowulf" ().
53. Benvenuto Cellini (,).
54. Henry Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams" (,).
55. Hobbes, "Leviathan" (,).
56. Pascal, "Thoughts" (,).
57. Milton, “Paradise Lost” (,).
58. John Donne (,).
59. Andrew Marvell ().
60. George Herbert ().
61. Spinoza, "Treatises" ().
62. Stendhal, "Parma Cloister", "Red and Black", "The Life of Henri Brulard" (,).
63. Swift, "Gulliver's Journey" (,).
64. Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy ().
65. Chauderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons ().
66. Montesquieu, "Persian Letters" (,).
67. Locke, "Two Treatises on Government" (,).
68. Adam Smith, “Welfare of Nations” (,).
69. Leibniz, "Discourse on Metaphysics" ().
70. Hume ().
71. "Notes of the Federalist" ().
72. Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason" (,).
73. Kierkegaard, "Fear and Awe", "Either-or", "Philosophical Crumbs" (,).
74. Dostoevsky, "Notes from the Underground", "Demons" (,).
75. Goethe, "Faust", "Italian Journey" (,).
76. Tocqueville, Democracy in America ().
77. De Custine, "The Journey of Our Days" (,).
78. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis ().
79. Prescott, “The Conquest of Mexico. Conquest of Peru ().
80. Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude ().
81. Karl Popper, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (,).
82. Elias Canetti, Mass and Power ().
Recommended poetry
English, American: Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Wisten Hugh Auden, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop.
German: Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Peter Huchel, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gottfried Benn.
Spanish: Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Octavio Paz.
Polish: Leopold Staff, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Wislava Szymborska.
French: Guillaume Apollinaire, Jules Superviel, Pierre Reverdy, Blaise Sandrard, Max Jacob, Francis Jamm, Andre Frenot, Paul Eluard, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaud.
Greek: Constantin Kavafis, Yorgos Seferis, Yannis Ritsos.
Dutch: Martinus Nijhof ("Avatar").
Portuguese: Fernando Pessoa, Carlos Drummond de Andrad.
Swedish: Gunnar Ekelef, Harry Martinson, Werner Aspenstrom, Tumas Tranströmer.
Russian: Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Vladislav Khodasevich, Viktor Khlebnikov, Nikolai Klyuev, Nikolai Zabolotsky.
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