Recounting his childhood in war-ravaged Leningrad, boyish adventures in his hometown, life as an underground poet, standing trial as a \"parasite\" in Khrushchev's Russia (which he has never previously discussed in detail), enforced stays in mental institutions, and imprisonment in the icy north, Brodsky also describes hilarious attempts by the KGB to recruit him as an informer, his fateful letter to Brezhnev, and his informer, his fateful letter to Brezhnev, and his consequent expulsion from the USSR. Special chapters of poignant reminiscence are devoted to Brodsky's two enduring friends and mentors: W. H. Auden and Anna Akhmatova. He also discusses, with cracking insight, his most profound influences: Robert Frost and Marina Tsvetaeva, the great Russian feminist poet. Brodsky describes his post-Russian life in New York and reveals for the first time his active participation in one of the cold war's most noted cultural confrontations - the famous defection of the Bolshoi Ballet star Alexander Godunov. In this and all his tales recounted here, we meet a Brodsky his readers have not heard before, both contentious and gracious, breaking all the rules, never succumbing to the straitjacketing of literary or political cliques in New York or anywhere else. In these raw Russian conversations, superbly translated by Marian Schwartz, is the journey of a poet-hero around the world and through this century's most troubling and sensational times.