Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83759 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
"She does make Akhmatova seem alive."

Review
"She does make Akhmatova seem alive." (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )

"the image she paints of her subject, the faded aristocrat scrabbling for food, warmth and cigarettes in post-revolution Russia is immensely powerful, and her admiration for the poet shines through." (SUNDAY TIMES )

"Elaine Feinstein, with much detail, tells the story again, offering her own translations of some of Akhmatova's verse." (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

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.