In the late 1950s, Anna Akhmatova encouraged the literary historian Emma Gerstein to record her memories of the renowned Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. But Gerstein"s vivid and uncompromising account was not at all what Akhmatova expected. When Gerstein"s memoirs of both poets were finally published in Moscow in 1998, they provoked everything from condemnation to rapturous praise among Russian readers. A shrewd observer, an intimate member of the Mandelstam and Akhmatova family circles, and a serious scholar in her own right, Gerstein was uniquely qualified to remove both poets from their pedestals without diminishing them, or their work, and to bring the extraordinary atmosphere of the Soviet 1930s back to life. Part biography, part autobiography, this book radically alters our view of two great twentieth-century poets, Mandelstam and Akhmatova. It also offers several unforgettable vignettes of Boris Pasternak. By challenging and correcting Nadezhda Mandelstam"s classic...