Customer Reviews

Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova

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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

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.

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.

Recently, in St. Petersburg, I was having dinner at a dacha in a lovely birch forest on the Gulf of Finland north of the city.In a nearby graveyard, in the dusk, a woman was sweeping leaves from a white marble slab above the body of Anna Akhmatova. Nearby lay some bouquets of fresh flowers. Akhmatova died in 1966; clearly her memory remains as fresh to her fellow Russians as those flowers.
In this excellent biography, Anna of all the Russians, Elaine Feinstein describes Akhmatova's work has having "a classical elegance drawn from Pushkin, and a passionate voice rising directly out of the drama of her own life. Many men fell in love with her beauty,yet all three of her marriages were miserably unhappy." she never bowed to the Soviet regime and so was not allowed to publish for 25 years, but became the voice of a whole people's suffering under Stalin.
Feinstein inserts just enough of Akhmatova's poetry to illustrate this beautifully written and impressively researched biography. There are some fine photos of the poet, her lovers and her troubled son.

I thoroughly enjoyed this biography of Anna Akhmatova although I think it was more effective at conveying the dramatic decades and events of Russian history that she was swept up in than in revealing the character of the poet herself. I certainly learned more about Akhmatova than I had previously known, and her poems have greater resonance for me after reading about her grueling struggles against censorship, Stalinist terror, famine and war.

I read Anna Akhmatova (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets), in which her poems are organized chronologically, alongside Feinstein's biography. Reading these two together really enhanced my appreciation of her poems. It also sent me on a lovely tangent looking up info about the challenges of translating poetry - an incredible art in itself! In many cases, I found Feinstein's translations of Akhmatova's poems more dazzling than those of D.M. Thomas's in the Everyman's edition.

In the end though, Akhmatova remains rather mysterious as an individual. It's hard to understand her motivations toward her work and in her friendships and many love affairs. This may be due to the necessary caution about personal expression dictated by the repressive society she lived in, where a "politically incorrect" comment or letter could get you exiled or even executed. (Her first husband and her great colleague, Osip Mandelstam, were executed; her son spent years in the gulag.) In such a paranoid atmosphere, she didn't dare keep detailed diaries and she frequently burned things she had written or correspondence others had sent to her, leaving less of a record for us to study. But Akhmatova was also aware of her own talent and "celebrity," and I got the impression that she actively cultivated an air of mystery about herself that might contribute to her posthumous status, which of course it has. Decades after her death, we remain awed by her haunting poetry and fascinated by the woman who produced it.

What a moving , inspiring biography this is !

A Must read.

If you are not acquainted with Anna Akhmatova

And the astonishing artistic creativity in Russia

that miraculously abided

thru unimaginable tumolt and oppression.
This book will do the trick!
Part of this miracle:

how passionate and tender their support towards each other amidst.

What beauty endured.

Amazing, complex and ardent characters in her circle described, too.

And they were real.

Perhaps

one accomplshment of this bio

is that it leaves one

humbeled yet sumptuously entertained in the midst..

My edition , dog eared by now.

What a fascinating woman and time in Russia.

You will fall in love.