Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova [Paperback]

Elaine Feinstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2007

In this definitive biography of the legendary Russian poet, Elaine Feinstein draws on a wealth of newly available material–including memoirs, letters, journals, and interviews with surviving friends and family–to produce a revelatory portrait of both the artist and the woman.Anna Akhmatova rose to fame in the years before World War I, but she would pay a heavy price for the political and personal passions that informed her brilliant poetry. In Anna of All the Russias we see Akhmatova's work banned from 1925 until 1940 and again after World War II. We see her steadfast opposition to Stalin, even while her son was held in the Gulag. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich, and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression. And we see how, through everything, Akhmatova continued to write, her poetry giving voice to the Russian people by whom she was, and still is, deeply loved.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By the time the famed Russian poet Anna Akhmatova died in 1966, at the age of 77, she had witnessed the colossal changes that overtook Russia, from the last days of the czarist regime through revolution to Stalin's Terror and subsequent Soviet rule. Though born into a comfortable situation, she often lived in abject poverty and relied on the mercy of friends when governmental whim forced her poetry out of circulation. Feinstein, a poet, translator and biographer of Pushkin and Ted Hughes, has produced a thorough, workmanlike biography that runs more to giving times and dates than truly bringing this extraordinary woman to life. Feinstein gives enough (at times too many) details to hint at the complexity and contradictions that made up Akhmatova's character, but never delves deeply enough for a fully fleshed portrait. And while Akhmatova's poetry was intensely personal throughout her long career, Feinstein seems more interested in asserting which of her many lovers and acquaintances Akhmatova wrote about than in assessing the poems' power as works of art that transmuted the regular round of human life as well as the horrors of 20th-century Russia into poetry still revered by Russians today. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Mar. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

Anna Akhmatova was born in 1889 near the Black Sea, the moody, headstrong daughter of a naval engineer. Her childhood was marked by the death of a younger sister and by her parents' disastrous marriage, which perhaps influenced her own complicated love life. Feinstein's book draws heavily on previous accounts and, in packed, breathless prose, examines the poet's every journey and peccadillo, first against the glittering background of pre-revolutionary Russia, then in the depths of the years under Stalin, when she became the voice of a people's suffering. Akhmatova emerges in glimpses—reciting Verlaine under a black umbrella with Modigliani, who sketched her nude; arriving, poverty-stricken, at the Mandelstams' flat in 1934, with a broken suitcase; drinking tea with a young Joseph Brodsky in the early nineteen-sixties—but Feinstein never really succeeds in capturing the personality that remains so immediate in the poems.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400033780
• ISBN-13: 978-1400033782
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #74,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An illuminating and highly readable biography, April 10, 2007

By 

Marcus Adams (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova (Paperback)

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

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Slow but enjoyable, November 17, 2006

By 

Piro - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova (Hardcover)

I particularly liked Feinstein's biography of Akhmatova, although is a slow read, it introduces the reader to the human Akhmatova, with all her qualities and imperfections. Her generosity as a friend, her passion for poetry, her frail relationship with her son, the failed marriages and dire love affairs, the everyday struggle for existence and all of these aspects reflected in her poetry. There are many interesting facts about her life like her meeting with Isaiah Berlin and the emotional and political consequence that followed, her marriage to the eccentric Vladimir Shilejko and her strange relationship with Lydia Chukovskaya all of which give a new and complete portrait of Akhmatova as a poet and a soviet citizen.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Strong in Certain Details but Lacking in Cohesion, February 3, 2010

By 

Tebes "Buchlieber" (Niagara Region, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova (Paperback)

Feinstein has researched and written an admirable biography. She selects her details, writes about Anna Akhmatova with detached compassion and rarely if ever allows judgment to haunt her biography. Her research is overwhelming at times and even though the reader can sense her dedication, the work lacks a cohesive element. While Feinstein lists events, actions and reactions to various controversial situations in Akhmatova's life (her marriage and divorce to her husbands, Mandelstam's arrest and exile, her troubled relationship to her son), there is no real strong sense of understanding nor an attempt at psychology. Feinstein records but rarely offers an interpretation.

Every life retold is a story. Akhmatova's life began in comfort and ease but degraded through the Soviet years. She suffered creative suppression under Stalin, constantly burned certain poems and articles that might jeopardize her freedom and the freedom of those around her. She suffered loss and pain when her lover and son were sent to prison.

Feinstein's biography doesn't truly give the reader a feeling of what this remarkable and strong woman went through. We get snippets here and there. We read about this illness and that loss but there is no emotional grounding. The details pile on and the chapters go by but we don't get a sense of a life lived. By the time you finish this book, you'll have read through a list of years, impressions from various journals and eye-witness accounts but again, without some sincere attempt at coalescing and putting Akhmatova's life into a narrative framework, the biography feels more like journalism.

This book is at best a great introduction but not a comprehensive analysis of Akhmatova's great stature in Russian history and literature.