Customer Reviews

The Russian Jerusalem

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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.