The Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography - Hardcover

Cherry, Kelly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807116203 ISBN 13: 9780807116203

Publisher: LSU Press, 1991

Synopsis

In January, 1965, in the café of the Hotel Metropol, in Moscow, the young American poet Kelly Cherry met the young Latvian composer Imant Kalnin. They fell in love―and began an alliance of the heart and mind sustained over twenty-five years in the face of threats from the Central Committee, surveillance by the KGB, confiscation of mail by censors, and eve “disinformation.” Their passionate friendship, growing out of a recognition of each other’s artistic destiny, also survived the hazards of other relationships―romantic and familial―and the professional demands of two careers, and sheer distance. There was more at stake here than just love. Or maybe just love is exactly what this romance was about: the deeply felt attempt to learn whether and why and how to love justly. What can love mean, when the world in which it is expressed and experienced is corrupt?

In The Exiled Heart, Kelly Cherry takes on that profound question, seeking answers to it at every level―theological, political, artistic, personal. In this book that is in the great tradition of Dostoevsky and Anna Akhmatova and at the same time startlingly original and American, she translates experience into a work of classic dimensions. Interpreting in extraordinary prose her firsthand encounters with Latvia and Latvians, describing a weekend at an underground hotel in Leningrad, or recounting misadventures with the Soviet consulate in London (the same cast kept changing characters), she pursues a philosophical quest. The Exiled Heart is a nonfiction narrative journey that, of necessity, makes metaphorical excursions into philosophical territory as Cherry reflects on the nature of justice, the idea of utopia, morality in art, the meaning of despair, the problem of suffering, the possibility of forgiveness. As the author explains in the first chapter, “I didn’t know, in 1965, where that train was taking me: to Moscow, I thought, but equally to my heart and my conscience. This book is a kind of log, a moral travelogue if you will, of a course that was set then and there, deep into heartland.”

These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written side trips broaden an autobiographical story into a tale of political exile and personal covenant that is almost a paradigm for the history of the Cold War and for the faith in the future that has always led people and nations to strive for independence. Beginning with a girl and a boy in a Moscow café, in the end this stunning book is about nothing less that the soul’s search for freedom.

About this title

About the Author

Kelly Cherry is the author of over twenty-five books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, ten chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. She is Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She and her husband live in Virginia.

Reviews

In 1965, Cherry, an American novelist and poet ( My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers) , met Imant Kalman, a married, Latvian composer, in a Moscow hotel lobby and fell in love at first sight. Their romance lasted for almost 25 years, but Communist bureaucracy and intimidation effectively kept them apart and prevented their marriage. Cherry charts the frustrations of their long-distance courtship, nourished chiefly by communications smuggled out of the Soviet Union and by glimmers of hope for the finalization of Imant's divorce. She describes their reunions, one in 1975, another in the late '80s; attests to her growing appreciation of Latvian culture; and accepts Kalman's marriage to another woman. The memoir drifts into philosophic and poetic inquiries that readers will find less wrenching than the tortuous twists of Cherry's abortive love affair.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cherry describes her two short visits to the Soviet Union in 1965 and 1975, her relationship with Imant Kalnin, a Latvian composer, and her subsequent unsuccessful five-year struggle with duplicitous Soviet officials, who intercepted most of the couple's letters, to be allowed to return to Latvia to marry Kalnin. This is a moving story of lovers separated by politics and bureaucracy that will appeal to many readers, but Cherry's habit of describing a country she has not seen since 1975 in the present tense seems unfair reporting, and her extremely bitter tone is somewhat off-putting. Moreover, much of the writing is embarrassingly self-indulgent and cliched, and, in the meditative sections on topics like love and pain, incomprehensible.
-Judy Mimken, Cardi nal Stritch Coll., Milwaukee
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807116203
• ISBN 13: 9780807116203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268