"Conversations with Brodsky" is a uniquely significant book for Russian literary culture. In his own foreword, Volkov writes about the exotic nature of this genre for Russia, though the importance of it is obvious. The only direct equivalent known to the author of these pages is the extensive recordings of conversations with Pasternak—a brilliant work by Alexander Konstantinovich Gladkov. But, as we will see, it is fundamentally different from the "Conversations."