A window to a dazzling lost age.
Thoroughly engaging biography of the gloriously knotty Russian poet, by British poet, novelist and biographer Feinstein (Pushkin, 1999, etc.).
The author’s previous research into the life and work of Marina Tsvetayeva, for A Captive Lion (1987), provided a natural segue into her study of Akhmatova’s long, tortured career. The poet emerges here as romantically capricious yet deeply pious, fiercely dedicated to her craft and to mentors such as Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Blok and Boris Pasternak. Akhmatova essentially refashioned herself a bohemian from aristocratic roots in Tsarskoye Selo, summer home to the tsars. She was devoted all her life to her kindly, beautiful mother. Her handsome, philandering father disapproved of poetry, so Anna Andreevna Gorenko took Akhmatova as a pen name. She believed from an early age that omens portended a remarkable destiny for her. Tall, elegant and thin, she married the wealthy poet Nikolay Gumilyov, an editor of the influential literary journal Apollon, mostly in order to flee the provinces and establish herself in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg. Her first volumes, Evening and Rosary, established her status at the Stray Dog Café, a legendary Petersburg hangout for intellectuals and artists. A dizzying number of dire affairs ensued, as well as two more damaging marriages. It all served as fuel for Akhmatova’s creative fire, though the wild euphoria of revolution was followed by the embittering disillusionment of civil war and famine. Always in frail health, she refused to go into exile even as numerous friends, longtime lover and art critic Nikolay Punin and her sadly neglected son Lev Gumilyov were imprisoned, tortured and worse. Her work was disparaged as too decadent, too religious and too sentimental, but she endured, surviving the revolution and Soviet terror to secure a triumphant legacy. Feinstein’s magisterial translations of Akhmatova’s poetry further enrich this portrait of a mythic personality as vulnerable as she was implacable.
A window to a dazzling lost age.Pub Date: March 20, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4089-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
