Overview
Beginning in present day St. Petersburg, this novel explores the landscape of 20th century Russian literature through imagined encounters with the great writers of Russia's literary past. With poet Marina Tsvetaeva as the guide, meet the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Joseph Brodsky, whose worlds are interspersed with original poems, new translations of Russian poems, and striking images of Stalinist propaganda. This book reconstructs the tragic lives of many Russian writers, often Jewish, during the long period of Soviet terror and re-establishes them at the heart of the European literary tradition.Reviews
"All poets are Jews, said Marina Tsvetaeva. Elaine Feinstein . . . has a wonderful wiry lyricism of her own, influenced both by Russian poetry and by Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets. She has written here a unique blend of poetry, history, and personal memoir, a descent into the heartbreaking and ground breaking vistas of Russian Jewry, and Russian literary figures of the twentieth century. The poets of genius whom she did not know alive, she knows equally intimately in the best way in which one poet knows another—by learning, reading, studying, translating. The book opens with her memories of renting a flat in a rundown quarter of Peters City in 2005—and also with Marina Tsetaeva accepting, as Virgil accepted for Dante, the role of guide to the underworld of colourful and talented figures Feinstein has known in her rich literary life, both in Russia, London and Cambridge." —Ruth Padel, author, Tigers in Red WeatherAuthor Biography
Elaine Feinstein is the author of more than 30 books, including After Pushkin, Gold and Daylight, and Talking to the Dead.
