On December 13, U.S. Consul General Sheila Gwaltney opened a new exhibit at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg dedicated to the drawings of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky. Thanks to the financial support of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission as well as to Yale University, which provided additional items for the exhibit, residents of Russia’s “cultural capital” now have a chance to discover a new facet of Brodsky’s talent. In their remarks and interviews, the Consul General, Russian National Library staff, and Brodsky’s literary friends, described the famous poet– a local son of St. Petersburg who went on to become both a U.S. Poet Laureate as well as a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature—as one of the many points connecting U.S. and Russian cultures.
