Beginning in present day St. Petersburg, this novel explores the landscape of 20th century Russian literature through imagined encounters with the great writers of Russia's literary past. With poet Marina Tsvetaeva as the guide, meet the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Joseph Brodsky, whose worlds are interspersed with original poems, new translations of Russian poems, and striking images of Stalinist propaganda. This book reconstructs the tragic lives of many Russian writers, often Jewish, during the long period of Soviet terror and re-establishes them at the heart of the European literary tradition.
The Russian Jerusalem: A Novel
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Editorial Reviews
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'This is an astonishing, evocative, terrifying book. The writer moveslike a ghost amongst the dead of Russia's Silver Age, poets all, asthey lived, wrote, hoped and died through Stalin's purges of thethirties. They spring from the grave to charm and plead with us, astheir author - herself of Russian descent, and one the finest of ourliving poets - restores them to folk memory. The writing's vigorous yetexquisite - the story is gripping. This drastic, dreadful time in worldaffairs should not be forgotten and now won't be. One is, quite simply,grateful.' - FAY WELDON. 'In this fascinating, lyrical meditation on literature, politics, suffering and friendship, Elaine Feinstein - a biographer of poets and a poet of the first rank herself - takes us on a richly imagined journey through a lost literary archipelago, and reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror. Combining family history, travels through modern Russia and very personal encounters with famous ghosts, Feinstein evokes, throughpoetry and prose, both the inferno of cruelty and persecutions, and a golden Jerusalem of creativity, talent and intense literary bonds. This is a moving, original work, for which Feinstein has created a selection of poems worthy of the predecessors she admires.' - EVA HOFFMAN.'All poets are Jews, said Marina Tsvetaeva. Elaine Feinstein, Britain's most distinguished Jewish poet, was her first translator into English and has a wonderful wiry lyricism of her own, influenced both by Russian poetry and by Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets. She has written here a unique blend of poetry, history and personal memoir, a descent into the heartbreaking and ground breaking vistas of Russian Jewry, and Russian literary figures of the twentieth century. The poets of genius whom she did not know alive, she knows equally intimately in the best way in which one poet knows another - by learning, reading, studying, translating. The book opens with her memories of renting a flat in a rundown quarter of St Petersberg in 2005, and also with Marina Tsetaeva accepting, as Virgil accepted for Dante, the role of guide to the underworld of colourful and talented figures Feinstein has known in her rich literary life, both in Russia, London and Cambridge.' - RUTH PADEL.
About the Author
Elaine Feinstein is the author of more than 30 books, including After Pushkin, Gold and Daylight, and Talking to the Dead.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The kind of book that lingers,
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This review is from: The Russian Jerusalem (Paperback)
The narrative here is seamless and quiet, quiet in contrast to the lives it deals with and the events surrounding those lives. It reads like a personal history of many of the great names of Twentieth Century
Russian literature, Pasternak, Ahkmatova, Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Joseph Brodsky, a history whose impetus is great affection for its subjects and an intricate reading of their works. Feinstein creates the atmosphere of Revolutionary Russia in an impressionistic style, never dwelling in lurid detail on purges, arrests, exiles and murders; instead, she provides little details that illuminate the big picture of terror on the lives of the poets. The book's section 15, entitled 'Peredelkino, May 1939', discussing the arrest and incarceration of Issac Babel, is typical of Feinstein's skill with telling detail and how she lets the history of the times permeate without bludgeoning the reader with all too familiar events. We read the section and 'get it', feel the dread and isolation without editorial or sermon. The entire book covers its subjects like a soft shroud, not a rain of nails. It's been two months since I finished this good little book and it it stays with me. I have a feeling it will for long time.
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