A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet with Daria S. Smirnova (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

October 9, 2026

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Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991–92, remains the only foreign-born poet to hold that American office. Yet when Daria S. Smirnova first encountered his work as a high school student in Russia, she had no idea he also wrote poetry in English. “None of us actually discussed,” she recalls, “even talking with philologists and my teachers of literature… that he actually also wrote poetry in English.” That omission became the seed of her new book, A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet (Academic Studies Press, 2025), which repositions Brodsky not merely as a Russian émigré writer but as a poet who actively made himself bilingual—and in doing so, tried to reshape both traditions he inhabited.

Who Brodsky Was, and Why the Biography Overshadows the Work

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Introduction & Guest Background** - Host Amber Nickel introduces Daria S. Smirnova, author of *A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet* (2025).
2 (01:21) **Who Was Joseph Brodsky?** - Daria provides an overview of Brodsky’s identity and significance as a bilingual poet.
3 (05:23) **The Archive Journey & Project Genesis** - Daria describes how her project evolved from a dissertation, shaped by access to archives in the US and Russia.
4 (11:40) **Why Bilingualism Matters** - Daria explains the theoretical framework and importance of understanding Brodsky’s bilingualism.
5 (15:53) **Brodsky in Russian and English Traditions** - Daria discusses how Brodsky fits into both literary traditions and how this changes our understanding of his work.
6 (22:45) **Contemporaries vs. Daria’s Approach to Self-Translations** - Daria explains how Brodsky’s self-translations were received and what her new analysis contributes.
7 (32:56) **The “Room” Trope: Literal and Intellectual** - Daria explains the central metaphor of the room in Brodsky’s life and work.

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Show Notes

A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet (Academic Studies Press, 2025) makes the original and persuasive claim that Brodsky’s force as a transnational poet derives paradoxically from an inward-looking stance that privileges “the trope of the room” and a practice of self-translation that is faithful to his own internal poetics rather than the poetic norms of the target tradition. The resulting bilingual poetics is one that, though not universally accepted by English readers, ultimately had a profound effect on the Anglo-American literary tradition and anticipated certain foreignizing tendencies that have become central to translation studies and theories of transnationalism. No less powerful than the book’s thesis is the elegant analyses, which encompass Brodsky’s Russian poetry, his translations from Russian to English, and his English-language essays.

Daria Smirnova holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and a degree in Linguistics from Russia. Inspired by years of traveling between languages and cultures, her research explores literary translation, bilingualism, and transmediation. Daria's current archival research examines the role of translation in shaping literary canons.

Amber Nickell is Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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