Short and Sweet

Seated at his desk in his Brooklyn apartment, Joseph Brodsky suffered a fatal heart attack on Jan. 28, 1996. A few months earlier he had granted one of his last interviews to The Argoist, an arts journal in England. Here’s an exchange from that interview, as reprinted in Joseph Brodsky: Conversations:

“A.: You glibly put [Mikhail] Sholokov’s Nobel Prize (1965) down to `a huge shipbuilding order placed in Sweden’ (Less Than One). How credible do you find the `All Literature Is Politics’ argument.

“J.B.: It’s bullshit.”