Without a doubt, Moscow Memoirs is an extraordinary book, one of those literary memoirs that comes along once a decade. Emma Gerstein, in her nineties when she published it, has shed completely new light on some of the most important poets and writers of the 20th century, providing previously unknown biographical details, some of which will lead to new interpretations of their work. The book has been beautifully translated, introduced and annotated by John Crowfoot, one of the great translators of Russian to English.
Having said that, I would caution readers: the poets and writers in question were Russians living in Stalin’s Soviet Union, a civilisation as remote from ours as the moon. To find this book completely gripping, as I did, you have to care quite a lot about the main cast of characters, mainly the poet Osip Mandelstam, his wife and biographer Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet Anna Akhmatova and Akhmatova’s son, the historian Lev Gumilyov.
You also have to be aware of the obsessive reverence which is normally bestowed upon these four figures in Russia. For Moscow Memoirs is not at all reverent — and therein lies its charm. Gerstein was a contemporary of her protagonists, and intimately involved with all of them. She was a close friend of the Mandelstams, so close that they once attempted to involve her in a ménage à trois. She was also Lev Gumilyov’s lover. After he was sent to Stalin’s concentration camps, she became close to his famous mother, and even attempted to patch up her relationship with Gumilyov when it became shaky in later life. She had many opportunities to view these four cultural icons up close, and she doesn’t mind disturbing the golden haze that normally encases them all.
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