Book description
Beginning in present-day St Petersburg, The Russian Jerusalem
explores the landscape of twentieth century Russian literature. In
this evocative autobiographical novel, distinguished poet, translator,
novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein moves among the dead poets of
Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva as her Virgil, mingling
with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak,
Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. These imaginary encounters are
interspersed with new poems by Feinstein. The author, herself of
Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often
Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing
them at the heart of the European tradition.
'In this fascinating, lyrical meditation on literature, politics,
suffering and friendship, Elaine Feinstein - a biographer of poets and a
poet of the first rank herself - takes us on a richly imagined journey
through a lost literary archipelago, and reconstructs the lives and
fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet
terror. Combining family history, travels through modern Russia and very
personal encounters with famous ghosts, Feinstein evokes, throughpoetry
and prose, both the inferno of cruelty and persecutions, and a golden
Jerusalem of creativity, talent and intense literary bonds. This is a
moving, original work, for which Feinstein has created a selection of
poems worthy of the predecessors she admires.' - Eva Hoffman. 'All poets
are Jews, said Marina Tsvetaeva. Elaine Feinstein, Britain's most
distinguished Jewish poet, was her first translator into English and has
a wonderful wiry lyricism of her own, influenced both by Russian poetry
and by Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets. She has written here
a unique blend of poetry, history and personal memoir, a descent into
the heartbreaking and ground breaking vistas of Russian Jewry, and
Russian literary figures of the twentieth century. The poets of genius
whom she did not know alive, she knows equally intimately in the best
way in which one poet knows another - by learning, reading, studying,
translating. The book opens with her memories of renting a flat in a
rundown quarter of St Petersberg in 2005, and also with Marina Tsetaeva
accepting, as Virgil accepted for Dante, the role of guide to the
underworld of colourful and talented figures Feinstein has known in her
rich literary life, both in Russia, London and Cambridge.' - Ruth Padel
Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has
worked as a university lecturer, a subeditor, and a freelance
journalist. Since 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature, she has lived as a full-time writer. In 1990, she
received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.
Litt from the University of Leicester. Her versions of the poems of
Marina Tsvetaeva - for which she received three translation awards from
the Arts Council - were first published in 1971. She has written
fourteen novels, many radio plays, television dramas, and five
biographies, including the critically acclaimed A Captive Lion: the Life
of Marina Tsvetaeva (1987) and Pushkin (1998). Ted Hughes: The Life of a
Poet (2001), was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. Her
biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias was published in
2005. Elaine Feinstein has travelled extensively, not only to read her
work at festivals across the world, but to be Writer in Residence for
the British Council, first in Singapore, and then in Tromso, Norway. She
was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her poems have
been widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002)
was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has served as a
judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the
Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature translated from
Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the judges for the T. S. Eliot
Prize. In 2010 her debut novel The Circle was longlisted for The Lost
Man Booker Prize, a one-off award honouring books published in 1970 that
were not eligible for consideration for the Booker Prize.
