Marina Tsvetaeva (1882-1941) is the least read of the four great modern Russian poets (Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam), her poems (translated here by Peter Norman) and fine theoretical prose as subject to drowning in the tempestuous waves of her life-history as anything else she held closest to her. Tsvetaeva knew everyone, loved everyone, idealized everyone (though married to poet Sergei Efron, her affairs were bisexual, transcontinental, discretionless)—and suffered poverty and scorn in the service of her genius. Lacking the outward gravitas of her peer poets, she was scandal incarnate—she makes George Sand seem like Emily Dickinson- -but with that quality came a gift for essentialism that in this poetic century perhaps is matched only by Rilke's; her love affairs were more acts of insanely pure idealization than genuine passions for an other. She lived out of Russia during much of the Twenties and Thirties; and then, against her better sense, went back—only to have her long-suffering, saintly husband and daughter promptly arrested and sent to perish in the gulag. Somehow, though, Tsvetaeva managed to continue with her art until her saddest of ends: a penniless suicide as the German Army approached. Schweitzer, a Mayakovsky archivist in Moscow before emigrating in 1978, has not a little of her subject's verve, valor, and hardheadedness: She scoffs, dismisses, clucks, repeats, wearies, worries, and wears down: that a nobody's-fool Russian woman of impossible stamina wrote this book would be guessable blind. But the book is chiefly indispensable for the whole picture of modern Russian literature it encompasses—analytical, social, and sexual. Sometimes a slog, but worth it. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: June 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-27945-4
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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