SOURCE: "On Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, February 29, 1996, pp. 7, 53.

Tolstaya is a Russian writer. In the following tribule, she discusses Brodsky's impact on Russian writers and literature, stating "Russian literature … has lost the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century."

When the last things are taken out of a house, a strange, resonant echo settles in, your voice bounces off the walls and returns to you. There's the din of loneliness, a draft of emptiness, a loss of orientation and a nauseating sense of freedom: everything's allowed and nothing matters, there's no response other than the weakly rhymed tap of your own footsteps. This is how Russian literature feels now: just four years short of millennium's end, it has lost the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century, and can expect no other. Joseph Brodsky...