Volume 37, Number 2 · February 15, 1990
High Spirits
By John Russell
To the Memory of Childhood
by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Eliza Kellogg Klose
Northwestern University Press, 168 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Entretiens avec Anna Akhmatova
by Lydia Tchoukovskaïa
Albin Michel, 556 pp., 155FF
On any list of inhospitable shores, a place should be reserved for the Soviet side of the Gulf of Finland in late October. Spruce and fir look their worst. Dunes are both slimy and precipitous. On the strand, huge misshapen stones, greasy and granitic, sweat the day away. Tumbledown dachas have a look of sodden cardboard. Except when the late autumn storms come rampaging in from the Baltic, the sea mumbles to itself. Stale and exhausted, it can barely make it to the beach.
Review, 5663 words
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