The Magazine

Russian Requiem

The tragic intersection of the lives of Soviet poets.

Oct 24, 2005, Vol. 11, No. 06 • By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ
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Moscow Memoirs

by Emma Gerstein

Overlook, 285 pp., $35

The Death of a Poet

The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva

by Irma Kudrova

Overlook, 232 pp., $29.95

TWO MAJOR, RECENT WORKS, done into English and issued by the same American publisher, deal with the lives of Russia's four greatest poets of the 20th century: Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak.

The fall of Soviet communism allowed the opening of minds as well as archives, and the publication of important memoirs of the general torment inflicted by that regime on Russian intellectual life, as well as the printing of significant records of specific secret police atrocities and other official documents. Both of these books examine the devastating consequences of unique events in Soviet history on the lives of the poets.

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