Description
"In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, working in Russia for the British Foreign Office, met Anna Akhmatova almost by chance in what was then Leningrad. The brief time they spent together one November evening was a transforming experience for both, and has become a cardinal moment in modern literary history."--BOOK JACKET. "For Akhmatova, Berlin was a "guest from the future, " her ideal reader outside the nightmare of her own time and country. Also, since he had known St. Petersburg as a child before the Revolution, he was a link with a lost Russian world; he became a figure in her cryptic masterpiece "Poem Without a Hero, " on which she was already at work. For Berlin, this "most memorable" meeting with the beautiful poet of genius was a return to his homeland and a spur to his ideas on liberty and on history."--BOOK JACKET. "There were tragic consequences, however. The Soviet authorities thought Berlin was a British spy, and Akhmatova, who was never a dissident, became an ideological enemy. Until her death in 1966 the KGB persecuted her and her family. Akhmatova was convinced that her meeting with Berlin had inadvertently started the Cold War, yet she remembered it gratefully and it inspired some of her finest love poems."--BOOK JACKET. "Gyorgy Dalos - who interviewed Berlin and many others who knew Akhmatova well, and who examined hitherto-secret KGB and Politburo files - tells the inside story of how Stalin and other Soviet leaders dealt with Akhmatova. He ends with the touching story of her posthumous rehabilitation, when Russian astronomers discovered a new star and named it after her."--BOOK JACKET.
