Every Slightest Pebble

Clarence Brown

• The Akhmatova Journals, Vol. I, 1938-1941 by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova
  Harvill, 310 pp, £20.00, June 1994, ISBN 0 00 216391 8
• Remembering Anna Akhmatova by Anatoly Nayman, translated by Wendy Rosslyn
  Halban, 240 pp, £18.00, June 1991, ISBN 1 870015 41 X
• Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle edited by Konstantin Polivanov, translated by Patricia Beriozkina
  Arkansas, 281 pp, $32.00, January 1994, ISBN 1 55728 308 7
• Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet by Roberta Reeder
  Allison and Busby, 592 pp, £25.00, February 1995, ISBN 0 85031 998 6
• Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam by Beth Holmgren
  Indiana, 225 pp, £25.00, September 1993, ISBN 0 253 33860 3

In the late Fifties, in the dusty warren of a Manhattan apartment, the composer Artur Sergeevich Lourié answered my questions about his friend Osip Mandelstam, whom he plausibly deemed to have been by that time irretrievably forgotten. I had turned up at his door out of the blue, led there by an article he had published in an émigré journal. He could not decide which was the more astonishing: intricate questions about a vanished poet, or the questioner himself, a young American speaking army-taught Russian: ‘Someone,’ he said, seeing me off, ‘should write about you.’