By meticulously tracing renowned Russian poet Akhmatova's tortuous life, this extraordinarily detailed biography builds up a panoramic view of Soviet cultural history. Reeder (Russian Literature and Culture/Univ. of Marburg, Germany) edited the acclaimed bilingual edition of Akhmatova's collected poetry published by Zephyr Press in 1990. Here she offers a historical chronicle rather than a psychological analysis of Akhmatova (18891966) or a reinterpretation of her poetry. Glossing over the poet's childhood, Reeder plunges into a lively account of avant-garde St. Petersburg in the decadent years preceding the Russian Revolution; Akhmatova, departing from the reigning symbolist aesthetic, pioneered the modernist style of ``Acmeism,'' which stressed everyday language and experience. After the revolution, Akhmatova, often poverty-stricken and at odds with the emerging regime, kept a low profile. Symbols and allegories—more often than not prophetic, Reeder contends—would reemerge in Akhmatova's work as she struggled to express her alienation from Soviet rule and at the same time keep her citizenship and her life- -a task at which most of her fellow writers were less successful than she. Reeder depicts a long series of state crimes, from the murders of Akhmatova's first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, and her close friend Osip Mandelstam to the hounding of Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky, even after the supposed ``thaw'' of the Khrushchev years. Reeder interprets Akhmatova's poems and those of her contemporaries almost exclusively in light of political and literary history, and the parade of crises and geniuses that she presents becomes so dense at times that it obscures the depth of the verses that she liberally quotes—and by extension of the poets themselves. But this very density is what will make Reeder's biography not only the starting point for all future engagements with Akhmatova's life and work but more generally a key source for scholars exploring the thorny entanglement of politics and art in 20th- century Russia. (32 pages of photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11241-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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