Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #416958 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

THE INDEPENDENT
"explains Akhmatova's aesthetic in simple but effective terms."

Review
"eminently readable... Akhmatova is a figure that Russians return to again and again, the better to understand their own history. Feinstein has done English-speaking readers a great favour by making Akhmatova's life story, and therefore her poetry, more accessible to us that ever before." "Feinstein has done English-speaking readers a great favour by making Akhmatova's life story, and therefore her poetry, more accesible to us than ever before." (Anne Applebaum SPECTATOR )

"Her biographer needs... adriotness to make space in one book for all the components of her complicated life and to find the right focus for such a diffuse and frequently interrupted career... at its centre is the compelling figure of Akhmatova herself... Not an easy person then, but a grand one, and a great poet." (Lucy Hughes-Hallett SUNDAY TIMES )

"Elaine Feinstein's new life of one of the 20th century's greatest lyric poets is based on a wealth of documentary evidence and interviews with member sof Akhmatova's circle. Feinstein paints a vivid portrait of the woman whose dignity and authority led Marina Tsvetaeva to christen her Anna of All the Russias." (LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS )

"Elaine Feinstein has managed to write a biography that is both scholarly and emotive. The versions of the poems that she uses are all her own and this sustains a sense of Anna of All the Russias as written form the inside of it's subject's imagination." (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )

"Elaine Feinstein's achievement is to show us the life of an extraordinary woman in gleaming fragments, and to demonstrate, through so many witnesses, how she was worshipped." (NEAL ASCHERSON OBSERVER )

"admiring but unsparing... [Akhmatova] is like Shakespeare and Burns in a fundamental way; she belongs to the whole human race." (ROBERT SERVICE MAIL ON SUNDAY )

"Feinstein is splendidly qualified to add to the story.. In addition, her final sections here, called Aftermaths and Epilogue, provide a fresh, informative glimpse of how Akhatova is seen now, how she has fared in the thicket of memoirs and revisions which have emerged in the last few decades. And how a new post-Soviet Russia has come to terms with her stature.... The poems themselves are offered with with a clear and clean eloquence. Akhmatova's luck has held." (EAVAN BOLAND IRISH TIMES )

"fine biography... She is a natural subject for Feinstein to have chosen after her recent biography of Pushkin." (IAIN FINLAYSON THE TIMES )

"Elaine Feinstein's Anna of all the Russias is as absorbine and comprehensive as was her biography of Pushkin, and as great a revelation of a poet's life." (JOHN BAYLEY LITERARY REVIEW )

"This volume is a magnificent achievement for Elaine Feinstein... indispensable." (GLOBE AND MAIL )

"explains Akhmatova's aesthetic in simple but effective terms." (THE INDEPENDENT )

Anne Applebaum, SPECTATOR
"eminently readable... Akhmatova is a figure that Russians return to again and again, the better to understand their own history. Feinstein has done English-speaking readers a great favour by making Akhmatova's life story, and therefore her poetry, more accessible to us that ever before."
"Feinstein has done English-speaking readers a great favour by making Akhmatova's life story, and therefore her poetry, more accesible to us than ever before."

Customer Reviews

An illuminating and highly readable biography
Elaine Feinstein's engrossing biography of Anna Akhmatova - one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century - makes the woman, her work and her world vividly alive. In chronicling this extraordinarily dramatic life, Feinstein makes use of a broad range of new material, including letters, journals and memoirs, and interviews Akhmatova's surviving friends and relatives.

Feinstein follows Akhmatova from her privileged Russian youth to her free-spirited early adulthood and her first, unhappy marriage to the poet Nikolay Gumilyov. The 1920s were years of starvation in Russia, but for Akhmatova they were also a period of great creativity and many love affairs, some painful, others more fulfilling. In a key encounter, Akhmatova met and fell in love with a married art historian, Vladimir Punin, and lived with him in his apartment, where his unhappy wife and young daughter had to remain.

During this time, Akhmatova's son, Lev, from her first marriage, suddenly re-entered her life. Feinstein gives a heartbreaking account of her relationship with Lev, who was exiled in Siberia for many years. (Despite Akhmatova's many pleas to the Soviet authorities on his behalf, Lev was not rehabilitated until 1956.)

Akhmatova's works were banned in the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1940, but despite ill health and further turmoil, her inner toughness enabled her to continue to write poetry of genius. She remained in Leningrad when the Nazis invaded and then was airlifted out to Tashkent, where she spent the war years.

This immensely readable and profoundly touching study shows how, despite her many hardships, Akhmatova was prepared to give her unstinting support to friends such as Mandelstam, Pasternak and Shostakovich who were victimised by the Stalin regime. And Feinstein sheds invaluable light on the uniqueness of the poems which gave a voice to the people of Russia and which still evoke intense love and admiration for Akhmatova to this day.

Marcus Adams

touching the heart
awesome biography i've ever read in life. it takes us to the world of anna akhmatova, the great poetess who stood against stalins dictatorship and become the inspiration of millions of russians craving for democracy.

Fabulous
I have almost finished this book and will be sad when I have. I have just returned from St Petersburg (Leningrad) and reading this has really made my visit come alive. I shall return.