The Roman Elegy of Joseph Brodsky (2020)

The Roman Elegy of Joseph Brodsky (2020) – Documentary | 60 min

In the Eternal City, Joseph Brodsky found inspiration, introspection, and artistic solitude. The Roman Elegy of Joseph Brodsky offers a fresh perspective on the poet’s creative process through rare interviews with Italian, American, and Russian acquaintances who knew him during his residency at the American Academy in Rome. Featuring exclusive archival materials—including never-before-seen autographs, sound recordings and photographs—the film illuminates Brodsky’s deep connection to Rome, where he spent two years, far longer than in Venice, the city so often linked to his legacy. This documentary captures the rhythms of a poet in exile, navigating the intersections of history, memory, and artistic devotion.

Please note that this event will be delivered in Russian.

Image credit: Photograph J. Brodsky in Rome, 1981. Photograph by A. Alleva

About the speaker:

Yuri Leving (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University) specializes in contemporary Russian literature and film, Eastern European cinema, the visual arts, and digital humanities. He has published 11 monographs and nine edited collections, including Nabokov in Motion (2022), A Revolution of the Visible (2018), Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies (2013), Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl – Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), Anatomy of a Short Story (2012), and Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel (2011).

Leving has held prestigious research fellowships, including an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship at Heidelberg University and an affiliation with the American Academy in Rome. Since 2007, he has served as the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal. In recognition of his scholarly contributions, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) awarded him the 2017 Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship award, and he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2023.

In addition to his academic work, Leving has directed and produced three documentaries on Brodsky, Nabokov, and, most recently, Akhmatova’s Orphans. Disassembly (2024).