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Call it magnificence

Michael Hofmann: Antonio Muñoz Molina, 20 December 2018

Like a Fading Shadow 
by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by Camilo A. Ramirez.
Serpent’s Tail, 310 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 894 1
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... to loved ones’ is Benn’s description – not even the layman thinks that’s poetry. Poetry, Anna Akhmatova said, ‘is made from all sorts of rubbish’. ‘There is nothing that is not memorable,’ Muñoz Molina says, and then we get a half-page list of things that were found on Ray when he was finally picked up at Heathrow Airport on 8 June 1968 ...

The First Emperor

T.H. Barrett, 10 November 1988

Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times 
by Morris Rossabi.
California, 322 pp., £12.50, May 1988, 0 520 05913 1
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Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester John 
by L.N. Gumilev, translated by R.E.F. Smith.
Cambridge, 403 pp., £37.50, February 1988, 0 521 32214 6
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... It is this which allows Gumilev to sally forth, with courage and imagination worthy of the son of Anna Akhmatova, to conquer the vast empty terrain at the heart of our current historiography of the Medieval Mongols through a daring application of two main strategies: first, a close comparison of surviving clues as to Mongol activities at any point in ...

How was it for you?

David Blackbourn, 30 October 1997

Man Without a Face: The Memoirs of a Spymaster 
by Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy.
Cape, 367 pp., £17.99, June 1997, 0 224 04498 2
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The File: A Personal History 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
HarperCollins, 227 pp., £12.99, July 1997, 0 00 255823 8
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... Writers’ Union train, a journey during which Markus sometimes took the bread ration to an ailing Anna Akhmatova. Wolf was sent by the Party to the Comintern school to prepare for the liberation of Germany, then back to Moscow, where he worked for the German-language radio service and first met future GDR leaders like Walter Ulbricht. After 1945, a job ...
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia 
by Orlando Figes.
Allen Lane, 729 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 7139 9517 3
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... and Russian culture in exile. Members of the old intelligentsia who remained in the country – Anna Akhmatova, for example – suffered years of material hardship and cultural ostracism. They represented the Russia that the Bolsheviks wished to transform, spiritually as well as materially, with some of Peter’s zeal. ‘Trotsky waxed lyrical on the ...

Living on Apple Crumble

August Kleinzahler: James Schuyler, 17 November 2005

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-91 
edited by William Corbett.
Turtle Point, 470 pp., £13.99, May 2005, 1 885586 30 2
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... which they find unconvincing, while they are moved by Pasternak, particularly by his elegy for Anna Akhmatova, which Lowell translates: You ache for the calm reaches of Ladoga, then hurry off to the lake for a change of fatigue. You gain nothing, the shallows smell like closets full of last summer’s clothes. The dry wind dances like a dried-out ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... Strange Gods’.I’ve kept for last Isaiah Berlin’s most luminous moment: his encounter with Anna Akhmatova in St Petersburg, as it was called when Berlin first saw it and as it is again called today. When he made his visit in November 1945, as a First Secretary at the British Embassy, it was called Leningrad and had, under that name, resisted and ...

The Girl Who Waltzes

Laura Jacobs: George Balanchine, 9 October 2014

Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer 
by Elizabeth Kendall.
Oxford, 288 pp., £22.99, August 2013, 978 0 19 995934 1
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... girl, Tanaquil Le Clercq, who plunges her hands – her all – fatally into long black gloves (Anna Akhmatova: ‘In black memory you’ll find, fumbling,/A glove to the elbow that unlocks/A Petersburg night’). She is self-dramatising in 1960’s Liebeslieder Walzer (the Violette Verdy role) and dreaming her destiny in 1977’s Vienna Waltzes (the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... reading The Guest from the Future by György Dalos, an account of Isaiah Berlin’s visit to Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in November 1945 and its disastrous repercussions on Akhmatova’s career, or, at any rate, on her relations with the authorities. Neither the poet nor the philosopher comes out of it particularly ...

On not liking Tsvetaeva

Clarence Brown, 8 September 1994

Marina Tsvetaeva: Poetics of Appropriation 
by Michael Makin.
Oxford, 355 pp., £40, January 1994, 0 19 815164 0
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Tsvetaeva 
by Viktoria Schweitzer, translated by Robert Chandler, H.T. Willetts and Peter Norman.
Harvill, 400 pp., £20, December 1993, 0 00 272053 1
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... how Sophia Parnok, the lesbian with whom Tsvetaeva had a passionate brief fling, wrote. Not how Akhmatova wrote, not even in the ‘martial’ poems with which she sought to stiffen Soviet spines during Hitler’s invasion. Not how Karolina Pavlova, a contemporary of Pushkin’s and a forerunner treasured by Tsvetaeva, wrote. Those who write about Tsvetaeva ...
... in Britain, and susceptible to an overstatement the opposite of the reticence and irony of Akhmatova, for instance, whom he has translated memorably. When the poet’s subject is the survival of poetry he reflects obliquely a vanity of his own (one which may license the writing of poems about his penis). ‘The life of a great man is ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
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... understate central aspects of each: the simple chauvinism of War and Peace, the mysticism in Anna Karenina, the agrarian socialism of the Bell, the declared utilitarianism of On Liberty. The result is to make each sound somewhat closer to their commentator than it really is. His readings of Vico and Herder, the major subjects of his later work, show the ...

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