Equal certainly to Eckermann's table talk with Goethe and Boswell's journals about Dr. Johnson, Chukovskaya's indispensable log of her friendship with the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova— an act of literary and personal fidelity accomplished under the most insanely difficult circumstances—is finally available here in translation, and few books are quite as illuminating both of horror and genius. Akhmatova and her friend had relatives (her first and second husbands, as well as a son in A.'s case; a husband in Chukovskaya's) lost and gone forever into the gulag at this time; however, by force of the poet's almost eerie regalness, the state literary culture was busily publishing her selected poetry. The surreal dissonance forms the fabric of Akhmatova's days. And while Chukovskaya's journals could only hint at—and never name outright- -the reason for both women's suffering, still, like a ghost, it plays behind every word. It underlies Akhmatova's agoraphobia and heart troubles, her personal disorderliness and neediness—as well as the indelible nature of the poetry. (The poems selected as illustration here may be the best English versions we have of this great poetry period; an extra boon.) But finally Akhmatova's brilliant and succinct words and talk are (as are all great poets') beside circumstance. ``Poverty has never hampered anybody. Neither has grief. Rembrandt painted all his best works in the last two years of his life, after having lost everybody around him: his wife, son, mother....No, grief doesn't interfere with work.'' Chukovskaya, as Akhmatova's copiest, even records when punctuation was changed in the great poems—and to read over her shoulder, as it were, about the poet's reactions is to take a short course in Russian verse history as well. Ultimately these journals cohere as great works of portraiture: a picture of one of the century's most toweringly moral artists, suffering at full tide, without a jot of self-pity.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-22342-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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