The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin - Hardcover

Dalos, Gyorgy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374167273 ISBN 13: 9780374167271

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, working in Russia for the British Foreign Office, met Anna Akhmatova almost by chance in what was then Leningrad. The brief time they spent together one long November evening was a transformng experience for both, and has become a cardinal moment in modern literary history.

For Akhmatova, Berlin was a "guest from the future," her ideal reader outside the nightmare of Soviet life and a link with a lost Russian world; he became a figure in her cryptic masterpiece "Poem without a Hero." For Berlin, this "most memorable" meeting with the beautiful poet of genius was a spur to his ideas on liberty and on history. But there were tragic consequences: the Soviet authorities thought Berlin was a British spy, Akhmatova became a suspected enemy, and until her death in 1966 the KGB persecuted her family. Though Akhmatova was convinced that she and Berlin had inadvertently started the Cold War, she remembered him gratefully and he inspired some of her finest poems.
György Dalos--who inteviewed Berlin and many others who knew Akhmatova well, and who examined hitherto-secret KGB and Poliburo files--tells the inside story of how Stalin and other Soviet leaders dealt with Akhmatova. He ends with the touching story of her posthumous rehabilitation, when Russians astronomers discovered a new star and name it after her.

About this title

About the Author

György Dalos, born in Budapest in 1943, was banned for "anti-state activities" and then joined Hungary's democratic opposition. A novelist and literary critic, he now lives and works in Berlin, where he has served as director of the Institute for Hungarian Culture.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0374167273
• ISBN 13: 9780374167271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256