Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
It Happened One Night
By John Bayley
The Guest from the Future:Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin
by György Dalos, Translated from the German by Antony Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 250 pp., $25.00
The Diaries of Nikolay Punin
edited by Sidney Monas, and Jennifer Greene Krupala, Translated from the Russian by Jennifer Greene Krupala
University of Texas Press, 261 pp., $29.95
'This book is the story of a single night, the night of Isaiah Berlin's visit to Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in November 1945,' György Dalos writes. 'It is a love story, the story of a love that became a focal point in the life of the poet, giving meaning to events that preceded and followed it.' A Hungarian writer who became fascinated by Berlin and Akhmatova, he is quite right. He is telling a love story, but a love story of a very peculiar kind, one that could only have taken place between two persons from wholly different backgrounds and cultures, and in a country whose authorities and ideology were doing their best to ensure that those two cultures never encountered, still less fraternized with, each other. It was like the parting in the Bible between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; but it also has tragic overtones that made it as fateful as Juliet's first glimpse of Romeo in Shakespeare's play.
Review, 2777 words
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