The Russian Jerusalem - Softcover

Feinstein, Elaine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857549104 ISBN 13: 9781857549102

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd., 2008

Synopsis

Beginning in present day St. Petersburg, this novel explores the landscape of 20th century Russian literature through imagined encounters with the great writers of Russia's literary past. With poet Marina Tsvetaeva as the guide, meet the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Joseph Brodsky, whose worlds are interspersed with original poems, new translations of Russian poems, and striking images of Stalinist propaganda. This book reconstructs the tragic lives of many Russian writers, often Jewish, during the long period of Soviet terror and re-establishes them at the heart of the European literary tradition.

About this title

About the Author:

Elaine Feinstein is the author of more than 30 books, including After Pushkin, Gold and Daylight, and Talking to the Dead.

Review:

'This is an astonishing, evocative, terrifying book. The writer moveslike a ghost amongst the dead of Russia's Silver Age, poets all, asthey lived, wrote, hoped and died through Stalin's purges of thethirties. They spring from the grave to charm and plead with us, astheir author - herself of Russian descent, and one the finest of ourliving poets - restores them to folk memory. The writing's vigorous yetexquisite - the story is gripping. This drastic, dreadful time in worldaffairs should not be forgotten and now won't be. One is, quite simply,grateful.' - FAY WELDON. 'In this fascinating, lyrical meditation on literature, politics, suffering and friendship, Elaine Feinstein - a biographer of poets and a poet of the first rank herself - takes us on a richly imagined journey through a lost literary archipelago, and reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror. Combining family history, travels through modern Russia and very personal encounters with famous ghosts, Feinstein evokes, throughpoetry and prose, both the inferno of cruelty and persecutions, and a golden Jerusalem of creativity, talent and intense literary bonds. This is a moving, original work, for which Feinstein has created a selection of poems worthy of the predecessors she admires.' - EVA HOFFMAN.'All poets are Jews, said Marina Tsvetaeva. Elaine Feinstein, Britain's most distinguished Jewish poet, was her first translator into English and has a wonderful wiry lyricism of her own, influenced both by Russian poetry and by Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets. She has written here a unique blend of poetry, history and personal memoir, a descent into the heartbreaking and ground breaking vistas of Russian Jewry, and Russian literary figures of the twentieth century. The poets of genius whom she did not know alive, she knows equally intimately in the best way in which one poet knows another - by learning, reading, studying, translating. The book opens with her memories of renting a flat in a rundown quarter of St Petersberg in 2005, and also with Marina Tsetaeva accepting, as Virgil accepted for Dante, the role of guide to the underworld of colourful and talented figures Feinstein has known in her rich literary life, both in Russia, London and Cambridge.' - RUTH PADEL.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1857549104
• ISBN 13: 9781857549102
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124