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Moscow Memoirs: Memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Literary Russia Under Stalin
by: Emma Gerstein
Product Information
Condition: New
Binding: Hardcover
Author: Emma Gerstein
Publisher: Overlook Hardcover (September 2004)
ISBN: 1585675954
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Friend and confidante to Soviet Russia's two greatest poets, Osip Mandelstam (whom she met in 1928) and Anna Akhmatova, Gerstein shared in the glories as well as the sufferings of the Russian literati of the thirties. Her memoir, which appeared in 1998 near the end of her very long life, presents a no-holds-barred counterpoint to the reverent account offered by Mandelstam's widow Nadezhda in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Gerstein's need to have the last word on what really transpired becomes wearisome at times, but she makes up for it with vivid details of literary camaraderie, arrests, labor camps, illicit love affairs, tragic exiles, and texts so inflammatory they were committed to memory, never to paper. Gerstein is an invaluable witness to a schizophrenic era whose gifted poets were treasured--and persecuted--by Stalin. A talented writer in her own right, she approaches life's daily grind under the great Soviet experiment with a sense of satire and 'comic absurdity...worthy of Gogol,' in the words of reviewer Gunlög E. Anderson.
Friend and confidante to Soviet Russia's two greatest poets, Osip Mandelstam (whom she met in 1928) and Anna Akhmatova, Gerstein shared in the glories as well as the sufferings of the Russian literati of the thirties. Her memoir, which appeared in 1998 near the end of her very long life, presents a no-holds-barred counterpoint to the reverent account offered by Mandelstam's widow Nadezhda in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Gerstein's need to have the last word on what really transpired becomes wearisome at times, but she makes up for it with vivid details of literary camaraderie, arrests, labor camps, illicit love affairs, tragic exiles, and texts so inflammatory they were committed to memory, never to paper. Gerstein is an invaluable witness to a schizophrenic era whose gifted poets were treasured--and persecuted--by Stalin. A talented writer in her own right, she approaches life's daily grind under the great Soviet experiment with a sense of satire and 'comic absurdity...worthy of Gogol,' in the words of reviewer Gunlög E. Anderson.
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