{"product_id":"anna-of-all-the-russias-isbn-9781400033782","title":"Anna of All the Russias","description":"In this definitive biography of the legendary Russian poet, Elaine Feinstein draws on a wealth of newly available material–including memoirs, letters, journals, and interviews with surviving friends and family–to produce a revelatory portrait of both the artist and the woman.Anna Akhmatova rose to fame in the years before World War I, but she would pay a heavy price for the political and personal passions that informed her brilliant poetry. In \u003ci\u003eAnna of All the Russias \u003c\/i\u003ewe see Akhmatova's work banned from 1925 until 1940 and again after World War II. We see her steadfast opposition to Stalin, even while her son was held in the Gulag. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich, and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression. And we see how, through everything, Akhmatova continued to write, her poetry giving voice to the Russian people by whom she was, and still is, deeply loved.“Enthralling, anecdote-rich . . . Feinstein has written a highly engaging biography of this great poet and determined woman, a fine companion volume to her previous life of Marina Tsvetaeva. It makes a superb introduction to Akhmatova and her world.”–Michael Dirda, \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e“Rich, affectionate, unsparing”–John Leonard,\u003ci\u003e Harper’s Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e “Illuminating . . . Tantalizing glimpses of an extraordinary woman living in extraordinary times.” –Olga Grushin, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e“Feinstein never loses sight of her subject’s greatness . . . Akhmatova deserves the title \u003ci\u003eAnna of All the Russias\u003c\/i\u003e because she never forsook her country . . . Although ordinary Russians recognized an aristocrat in her rather aloof, imposing figure, her life and her poetry put her at one with her nation.”–Carl Rollyson, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Sun\u003c\/i\u003e“In the first biography in decades, Feinstein skillfully chronicles Akhmatova’s shockingly destitute life and untangles her snarled and painful relationships . . . Akhmatova’s soulful work spoke for the entire tyrannized country, and what distinguishes this judicious and riveting biography most are Feinstein’s translations of Akhmatova’s incandescent poems of ‘steely defiance.’”–\u003ci\u003e Booklist\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review“With her vivid, immensely readable biography, Elaine Feinstein gives us Akhmatova in all her profound, complicated and deeply moving glory.”–Douglas Smith, \u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e“As this eminently readable account makes apparent, no one was more aware of her symbolic value than Akhmatova herself. . . Feinstein deserves credit for refusing to idealize a woman whose words were powerful enough to potentially get her killed.\" –Megan O’Grady, \u003ci\u003eVogue\u003c\/i\u003e“A worthy and enjoyable biography. . . Feinstein weaves her poems through the text while providing great detail on the significant relationships of her life.” –\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e“Eminently readable… Akhmatova is a figure that Russians return to again and again, the better to understand their own history. Feinstein has done English-speaking readers a great favour by making Akhmatova’s life story, and therefore her poetry, more accessible to us than ever before.” –Anne Applebaum, \u003ci\u003eThe Spectator\u003c\/i\u003e“A brilliant new biography… [and a] compulsively readable account… Elaine Feinstein has managed to write a biography that is both scholarly and emotive... As a poet herself, Feinstein is adept at showing just why and how Akhmatova’s unique voice has intoxicated readers ever since.” –Olivia Cole, \u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e“Elaine Feinstein’s achievement is to show us the life of an extraordinary woman in gleaming fragments, and to demonstrate, through so many witnesses, how she was worshipped.” –Neal Ascherson, \u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e“Feinstein is splendidly qualified to add to the story . . . A fresh, informative glimpse of how Akhmatova is seen now, how she has fared in the thicket of memoirs and revisions which have emerged in the last few decades. And how a new post-Soviet Russia has come to terms with her stature . . . There is fresh information here. There is a strong vivid context provided for the poems. The poems themselves are offered with a clear and clean eloquence. Akhmatova’s luck has held.” –Eavan Boland, \u003ci\u003eThe Independent on Sunday\u003c\/i\u003e“Her biographer needs… adroitness to make space in one book for all the components of her complicated life and to find the right focus for such a diffuse and frequently interrupted career… at its centre is the compelling figure of Akhmatova herself… Not an easy person then, but a grand one, and a great poet.” –Lucy Hughes-Hallett, \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003eElaine Feinstein is a prizewinning poet and novelist and the author of highly praised biographies of Pushkin, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Ted Hughes. She lives in London.\u003cb\u003e    St. Petersburg     •     1913\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The whole mournful city was drifting\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Towards a destination nobody guessed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    —AKHMATOVA\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Let me begin in 1913. The dark and glittering verses which open   Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero circle about her memories of that year,   the final moments of a corrupt and glamorous world. In the poem,   Akhmatova is waiting for guests to celebrate New Year 1941. Candles   have been lit, wine and crystal set out when, instead of her expected   visitors, a sinister phantasmagoria of dead friends crowd in upon her,   dressed as mummers. Their presence calls up St. Petersburg as it once   was, when Akhmatova was twenty-four, a fashionable young woman already   famous as a poet, with the violent upheavals of the twentieth century   not yet under way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In 1913 St. Petersburg was an Imperial capital, with a black and yellow   flag flying over the Winter Palace, private carriages pulled  by thoroughbred horses with footmen in uniform who rode on  the running-boards. There were trams and trolleys and occasional motor   cars. Enticing shop windows on the Nevsky Prospekt had oysters from   Paris, lobsters from Ostend and “fruitcakes, smelling salts, Pears   soap, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers . . .  and football jerseys in the colours of Oxford and Cambridge.” On the   sunny side of Nevsky Prospekt bookstores sold the latest poetry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Built below sea level, at the edge of the Baltic, St. Petersburg was   always an unnatural city. Thousands of slave labourers died of disease   and hunger to realise Peter the Great’s grand design of a  window on the West. Even after he had declared St. Petersburg his new   capital, wolves boldly entered the city at night as late as 1712, and   occasionally devoured their prey in broad daylight. Floods  constantly overwhelmed the islands, and in 1721 Peter himself  was nearly drowned on Nevsky Prospekt. It is the city of Pushkin’s   “Bronze Horseman,” where a poor clerk’s lover is carried away by the   waters and Falconet’s grand statue of Peter pursues him when he dares   to protest. It was Gogol’s city of shadows and phantoms. The poverty   and squalor of the streets and squares still remained much as in   Dostoevsky’s nightmare vision.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Akhmatova called St. Petersburg her cradle, even though she was not   born there. In her autobiographical jottings, she describes childhood   streets filled with organ-grinders, Tatar ragmen and tinsmiths, the   houses painted different shades of red, front entrances scented with   the perfume of ladies and the cigarettes of passing gentlemen, back   staircases smelling of coffee, bliny, mushrooms and, frequently, cats.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1913 was the Jubilee of three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty, and   in February all the main streets of the city were decorated, statues   garlanded and portraits of a long line of tsars pasted to the front of   buildings. Everything was done to impress foreign and provincial   visitors. Electricity illuminated the Winter Palace, the golden spire   of the Admiralty arch, other columns, arches and double-headed eagles.   The rich dressed with flamboyance. At one opera house, in 1913, for a   performance of Glinka’s patriotic A Life for the Tsar, the boxes blazed   with jewels and tiaras. For the nobility, most of whom lived on or near   the Nevsky Prospekt, there were balls and banquets. Everywhere military   music celebrated the absolute rule of Nicholas II, and the magnificence   of his empire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the February day which inaugurated the Jubilee celebrations, the   Imperial family drove in an open carriage towards Kazan Cathedral. To   protect the Tsar on his first public appearance since the revolution in   1905, one battalion of horse guards rode in front of his carriage and   another behind. Imperial Guards lined the route. Tourists from all over   the empire, and foreign dignitaries from the rest of Europe, were   staggered by the splendour of the occasion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Behind these central areas, St. Petersburg remained a city of filth and   disease. Many factories were allowed to discharge their waste into the   rivers and canals. With a cholera outbreak on average once every three   years, the death rate was the highest of any capital city in Europe.   Water had to be fetched in buckets and boiled before it was safe, but   thirsty workers gave little attention to this and the general domestic   water supply was a breeding-ground for typhus as well as cholera.   London had eradicated similar problems in the nineteenth century by   building a new system of sewers. No attempt was made to improve the   situation in St. Petersburg until 1917.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nicholas thought of himself as divinely appointed and the many peasants   who still wrote directly to him for help saw him as a father who felt   compassion for their difficulties. Over Nicholas’ vast empire, however,   the memory of 1905 remained raw. Reprisals had included executions of   suspected radicals and mass violence against ethnic minorities,   particularly Jews, incited by the Tsar’s Prime\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Minister, Stolypin. The ruling authorities remained suspicious of Poles   and Jews, who were always regarded as likely revolutionaries, and   indeed 1913 was the year of the Beilis trial, with its medieval   trumped-up charge of child murder against a totally innocent Jew.   Nevertheless, in 1913 Nicholas was confirmed in his delusion that his   people loved him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of the skills required to run a country in pre-revolutionary ferment,   it has to be said Nicholas had none. He was a shy man and had always   been treated like a child by his family. He danced gracefully, rode   well and spoke good English but his agonised cry when his father died   at forty-nine was entirely appropriate: “What is going to happen to me   and all of Russia? I was not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to   become one.” Nor was his Empress a popular\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    figure. She did not enjoy public occasions, and found the Jubilee   celebrations a strain, even withdrawing from a gala performance at\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    the Maryinsky Theatre. She had acceded to the Russian throne at   twenty-two and, although regarded as German by the Russians, she was in   fact English. She ordered factory-produced furniture from the London   department store Maples for the Winter Palace, where it looked out of   place alongside the classic Empire style. She and Nicholas used   domestic English endearments for one another such as “lovey” and   “wifey.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Empress wanted desperately to give Russia a son, but she had four   daughters before producing the Tsarevich Alex, who was soon discovered   to suffer from haemophilia. This is what brought the strange figure of   Rasputin into her life, since he did seem to possess some unexplained   powers to stop the child bleeding—even, in one well-attested case,   through the power of a telegram, the so-called “Spala miracle.” As an   influential presence at court, Rasputin enjoyed gifts, bribes and   sexual favours. Though it was said he had shrivelled private parts, he   spent days in bathhouses and brothels with prostitutes. Rumours about   his behaviour widely increased the unpopularity of the royal family.   Nicholas, however, would not remove him from court while the Empress   continued to put her faith in him as the only healer for her son.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No visitor would have recognised that “the moon was growing cold over   the silver age.” It was a year of extraordinary cultural ferment.   Nineteen-thirteen saw the serialisation of the first parts of Andrey   Bely’s St. Petersburg, Russia’s most significant modernist novel, and   the publication of Maxim Gorky’s celebrated autobiographical trilogy.   There were three opera companies, and at the Maryinsky it was virtually   impossible to get tickets when Fyodor Chaliapin was singing. On   Wednesdays and Sundays there were performances of ballet, where Anna   Pavlova and Vaclav Nijinsky could be seen, sometimes in the modernist   choreography of Fokine. St. Petersburg enjoyed a great range of   theatre, from the Imperially subsidised and traditional Alexandrinsky   to the modernist experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Numerous foreign   films could be seen in cinemas all over St. Petersburg, while the most   popular Russian film actress of the time was Vera Kholodnaya, adored in   films that usually took the theme of love unrequited or humiliated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    All the avant-garde movements which were to make themselves felt in the   arts took their shape between 1908 and 1913. Futurism drew on street   theatre, performance poetry and bizarre costume, and was powerful in   the visual arts. Whether poets used classical forms or not, they were   instinctively opposed to the values of the society around them. Few of   them were committed to political ways of changing that society, but   Russian poets before 1913 felt that poetry might make anything happen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Below street level on Mikhailovskaya Square, at the corner of   Italyanskaya Street, lay the legendary cellar of “The Stray Dog,” owned   by the actor Boris Pronin. To reach the Stray Dog you had to descend a   narrow stone staircase and enter a doorway so low that a man had to   take off his top hat. All the windows of the café were blocked up, as   if to keep out the everyday world, and the walls and ceilings of low,   curving plaster were painted with flowers and birds in brilliant   colours by the artist Sergey Sudeikin. A group of bohemian artists   gathered there after the theatres closed and often stayed talking until   dawn. The clientele took pleasure in chilled Chablis, and anglophiles   among them preferred the taste of white bulka to black Russian khleb.*   It was a crowded room—very stuffy and not always merry, a society   turned in on itself, almost as if unaware of what was happening in the   streets above.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In 1913, the Stray Dog was one of the few places in the nightlife of   St. Petersburg where literary and artistic people, often with little   money, could find themselves welcome. Unlike La Coupole or Les Deux   Magots, the Stray Dog did not function as an ordinary café: it was more   like a club, with serious lectures, art exhibits and musical evenings.   Guests had to sign in a thick volume bound in pigskin. Among the   regulars were composers, painters, scholars and occasional foreign   visitors such as Richard Strauss and the Italian Futurist Filippo   Marinetti. Writers and artists were admitted free of charge, while   ordinary punters, dismissively nicknamed “pharmacists,” had to pay a   hefty 25 roubles a head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    They were glad to pay. Where else could they see the prima ballerina   Tamara Karsavina on a giant mirror performing numbers choreographed by   Fokine, or watch Vladimir Mayakovsky in the pose of a wounded gladiator   lying in his famous striped shirt on a huge Turkish drum and   triumphantly striking it at the appearance of each bizarrely arrayed   comrade in futurism!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By 4 a.m. at the Stray Dog there would be tobacco fumes, empty bottles   and only a few tables at the side still occupied. In an early poem,   Akhmatova described the heady yet oppressive atmosphere:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We are all boozers here, and sleep around.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Together we make up a desolate crowd.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Even the painted birds and flowers on the walls\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Seem to be longing for the clouds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a world of every kind of experiment, especially sexual. Love   between women or between men and ménages à trois were easily accepted   among the intelligentsia. Anna Akhmatova, too, was part of this   sexually promiscuous society, though she had married Nikolay Gumilyov   on 25 April 1910. In old age, she spoke of their life together as “a   marriage of strangers,” while Gumilyov described his own unhappiness at   being married to “a witch, not a wife.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Musicians like Artur Lurye, then thought of as a rising young composer,   played the piano and Ilya Sats, who was famous for his plays at the   Stanislavsky Arts Theatre in Moscow, sometimes experimented with a   “prepared” piano in the manner of the much later American composer John   Cage. Sats had thick black hair and a walrus moustache and wrote his   most important work—The Goat-Legged Nymph—while sitting in the Stray   Dog. Symbolists, Futurists, Acmeists, for all the differences that   separated their aesthetic theories, were crammed together there at   crowded little tables. Above all there were the poets. Vladimir   Mayakovsky in his yellow tunic, Mikhail Kuzmin and Osip Mandelstam—a   thin boy with long, dark eyelashes, sometimes remembered with a lily of   the valley in his buttonhole. Akhmatova often sat smoking a cigarette   at a side table, dressed in a tight skirt, with a scarf round her   shoulders and a\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    necklace of black agate. She was always surrounded by a group of   admirers. Alexander Blok, the great poet of the preceding generation,   found Akhmatova’s beauty strangely terrifying. Mandelstam described her   as “a black angel” with the mark of God upon her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Akhmatova’s whole bearing changed when she stood to read her poems. She   became pale and intense, almost as if hypnotising her listeners. One   reason for her charm lay in her voice. The artist Yury Annenkov wrote:   “I do not recall anyone else among the other poets who could read their   poems so musically.” Georgy Adamovich remembers: “When people recall   her today, they sometimes say she was beautiful. She was not, but she   was more than beautiful, she was better than beautiful. I have never   seen a woman . . . whose expressiveness, genuine unworldliness and   inexplicable sudden appeal set her apart anywhere and among beautiful   women everywhere.” Many artists tried to catch her poise in their   portraits, notably Natan Altman. Akhmatova was always ambivalent about   his celebrated portrait, which shows her in a silken blue dress, its   folds almost Cubist in their emphasis, and a bright yellow shawl.   Instead, she preferred a portrait by Alexander Tyshler.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The central figure of the cabaret at the Stray Dog was the actress Olga   Glebova-Sudeikina. Olga had danced in the Maly Theatre and played   Columbine in Meyerhold’s Columbine’s Scarf. Her performance in Sats’   The Goat-Legged Nymph was highly erotic. She also played the role of   the Virgin in The Flight of the Virgin and Child to Egypt, with a   script by Mikhail Kuzmin and music by Sats.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Olga’s apparition hovers over Akhmatova in Poem Without a Hero, a   fluttering black and white fan in her hand, whispering of springtime,   and evoking a dream of their lost youth together. Akhmatova called Olga   her “double” but the two women did not much resemble each other   physically. Olga had long golden braids, “like Melisande,” as Artur   Lurye put it. Whatever Olga’s charms, Akhmatova’s beauty was of another   kind. She was elegantly slender to the point of angularity, with a   straight back and haughty bearing. Her face had high cheekbones, huge   grey eyes and a soft mouth. Her black hair was caught back severely at   her neck and cut into a fringe over her forehead. Her features had a   classical perfection, though seen from the side her aquiline nose would   not be admired today. “Her face and her entire physical appearance was   striking. When she stood on the stage, with her shawl falling off her   shoulders, she had a strange poised nobility which blended harmoniously   with her image.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Even her jewellery took on an iconic quality. Akhmatova’s grandmother   had bequeathed her a black ring, a band of even width covered with gold   enamel. In the centre was a small diamond. Anna was superstitious about   its powers to protect the wearer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In Akhmatova’s “A Petersburg Tale,” the figure of “Confusion Psyche”   lives in an apartment furnished in the style of Olga’s home:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Your house was flashier than a circus wagon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Dilapidated Cupids stood on guard\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e        There at the side of Venus’ altar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Your song birds were uncaged,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Your bedroom decorated like an arbour.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Olga was passionately interested in Italian commedia dell’arte, masks   and puppets. Rather surprisingly, she came from the province of Pskov   where her great-grandfather had been a serf, while her father was one   of the poor functionaries described by Dostoevsky. Not everyone found   her interesting. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip’s wife, wrote of her with   some unkindness as one of the “dolls” of St. Petersburg, and comments   on her faded, tired look, even while admitting she was a “nice,   light-headed, flighty creature.” Vera de Bosset—in later life the   wife of Igor Stravinsky—married Sudeikin after taking him away from   Olga; she claimed “basically she was a rather empty-headed little thing   whose only interest was suitors.” Artur Lurye, however, who lived   with her for a time, observed that she was exceptionally musical and   had an enchanting laugh and a playful manner. She enjoyed making dolls,   and kept her treasures—Don Juan, the Queen of the Night and   Desdemona—in special boxes, only taking them out when guests came to   visit her. She liked to walk to the Alexandrovsky market, where she   bought old china and knick-knacks such as snuff boxes and miniatures.   She loved to entertain in the famous Ozarovsky “theatre house.” This   exquisite little house contained Elizabethan furniture made of Kerelian   birch, harpsichords, Venetian mirrors, Russian glass . . . She had a   wonderful ear, and an extraordinary memory for music. She could sing   anything at a moment’s notice.”","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303869599973,"sku":"NP9781400033782","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400033782.jpg?v=1767721619","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/anna-of-all-the-russias-isbn-9781400033782","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}