Fascinating proof that being a writer’s wife is a profession in itself.
Intriguing collection of biographies of six extraordinary women who devoted their lives to their husbands’ art.
As Popoff (Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, 2010) demonstrates, the extreme difficulty of surviving as a writer in repressive Russia reflected the formidable characters of each of these women. They fiercely adhered to the Russian philosophy that their husbands’ careers took precedence over all—even, to a point, their children. Their husbands ignored everything: government, money, survival and even family, although perhaps not Mother Russia itself. Taking in turn the wives of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Mandelstam, Nabokov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, Popoff shows the nunlike devotion of these women. They took dictation, transcribed, suggested changes and even memorized their husbands’ works, and they sacrificed promising careers, gentle upbringings and even comfortable marriages to dedicate their entire being to the artists. Throughout their lives, they all suffered dictatorial suppression from the days of the revolution. Stories of papers hidden, lost and smuggled abroad indicate the massive difficulties of life in 20th-century Russia. Tolstoy decided to renounce his copyrights, forego all his properties and give everything to charity—except Yasnaya Polyana, the estate where he retired to write. At this point, his wife, Sophia, actually stood up to him. After 19 pregnancies, 3 miscarriages and 5 infant deaths, she still had children to feed and educate. While all the other wives silently suffered abject poverty, hunger and homelessness, Sophia would have none of it. For that, Tolstoy left rights to his work to another and to her only the estate. Even so, she worked the rest of her life to chronicle his works and organize his archive, devoting even her widowhood to promoting and preserving her husband’s legacy.
Fascinating proof that being a writer’s wife is a profession in itself.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-366-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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