Anna of all the Russias: The Life of a Poet under Stalin - Hardcover

Feinstein, Elaine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297643096 ISBN 13: 9780297643098

Publisher: Orion, 2005

Synopsis

Anna Akhmatova is recognised as the greatest woman poet of Russian literature. Her work has a classical perfection, drawn from Pushkin, and a passionate voice, which rises directly out of the drama of her own life. Many men fell in love with her beauty, yet all three of her marriages were brutally unhappy. Her life has a particular resonance for women. She began writing at a time when 'to think of a woman as a poet was absurd,' as she remarked ironically. Her genius soared above any such category; yet the human price she had to pay for that triumph was as a wife and mother.
Her first husband was executed by the Bolsheviks; her only son spent sixteen years in the Gulag during Stalin's terror; her third husband died there. Although banned from publishing poetry for a quarter of a century this did not stop her writing in secret, which as Feinstein says 'gave voice to the suffering of the Russian people'.
Her stubborn loyalty to friends in danger - Shostakovich, Mandelstam, Pasternak and the playwright Bulgakov - showed a courage few possess, and she became an iconic figure for those whom the Soviet regime repressed. This heroic role was sustained through illness (she had TB for much of her adult life), poverty and a lifelong conflict between womanly affections and the demands of her art. Another great Russian poet of the twentieth century, Marina Tsvetayeva, called her 'Anna of all the Russias' as if she were a Tsarina.

About this title

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)

Book Description:

Life of the Russian poet who withstood Stalinism and became an inspiration to millions

About this edition

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0297643096
• ISBN 13: 9780297643098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352