Short-listing doomed intellectuals

So powerful was the image of Russia created by the extraordinary group of writers, artists and philosophers who dominated their country’s intellectual life at the beginning of the 20th century that it persists even today. Much of our admiration for Russian ballet, art and literature dates from that era, when the achievements of Russia’s creative class first became widely known abroad. Tragically, that image, and the accompanying admiration, are long out of date. Not only did the Bolsheviks comprehensively destroy Russia’s creative class, for 75 subsequent years they did their best to prevent its re-emergence.

Lesley Chamberlain’s latest book on Russia relates one of the lesser-known chapters of that story. The deaths, by starvation or execution, of Russian poets and thinkers like Osip Mandelstam and Nikolai Gumilyov, as well as the persecution of others, among them Anna Akhmatova, are now well documented. But others were not murdered. Instead, they were sent into exile abroad.