Customer Reviews

Moscow Memoirs: MEMORIES OF ANNA AKHMATOVA, OSIP MANDELSTAM, AND LITERARY RUSSIA UNDER STALIN

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This is a revealing book; most books about Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Nadezhda Mandelstam, concentrate on the intellectual aspects of their work, as well as their creative process. What makes this book different is that it gets into their daily lives and personalities and surrounds that with the politics (artistic as well as governmental) of the time in which they lived. Gerstein's depictions are graphically detailed and get into the nugget of each personality. These are real, living, breathing human beings. I highly recommend it.

As a Mandelstam fanatic who has read Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam's classic two volumes of memoirs numerous times, I found this memoir enormously rewarding, as a complementary source. Ever since reading Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya's first volume of her Akhmatova memoirs (which for me are unparalleled in conveying a picture of the 'real' Akhmatova), I have looked for precisely this type of memoir--the more details, the more quirky, subjective touches, the better. I applaud Emma Gerstein for balancing the focus perfectly between self-revelation versus descriptions of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and other creative geniuses of Soviet Russia. I would not want to read a memoir that contained nothing of the author's viewpoint, history, etc., but neither would I want something too self-absorbed. I unreservedly recommend this book for anyone interested in either Mandelstam or Akhmatova. The writing is excellent, the sensibility so engaging and prepossessing as to make me sorry that I never had the privilege of knowing the author.

This is a very weak book when compared to Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs of the same period and personalities. Gerstein is not a gifted writer, so one must wade through a great deal of boring material to find something of interest.