From the time Baryshnikov arrived in the U.S., he found in the Nobel-winning poet and essayist “a kind of older brother, and he needed one. Though a number of people were very kind to him, he did not, at this early point, have close friends in the United States, and he was slow in making them, because he had no time to study English. With Brodsky he could speak in Russian, and they had a city, a government – in some measure, a history – in common.”