Elaine Feinstein is a well regarded translator of Russian poetry, notably Marina Tsvetaeva, and also biographer of Pushkin and Ted Hughes. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova is so well told it moves like a good novel. Akhmatova was a poet and, in a sense, celebrity of mythic proportions. Myths, gossip, and innuendo surrounded her life and everyone had, and still has, an opinion about her. Joseph Brodsky, who was part of the last circle of her life, considered her, along with Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam, to be among the three greatest poets of Russia's twentieth century. In a 2005 review of Feinstein's biography in the British newspaper The Observer, Neal Ascherson wrote:
To me as a non-Russian, her contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva seems as a writer to be richer and more astonishing. I know Russians who now dismiss Akhamatova as 'a minor poet'. But how do you separate the passionate response to her verse, a response which has itself become part of Russian history, from the quality of that poetry?I cannot imagine any intelligent, discerning Russian making such a statement about Akhmatova. She really cannot be separated from Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. Each wrote poems about, for and to each other. Each suffered the tragedy that was Russia under Stalin. And each are different in their sensibility and tone in such a way as to give voice to the variety of experience in that era. I remember during a New Year's Eve party in Moscow in 1993, discussing with my Russian friends what I, as someone who had only been able to read these writers only in translation or in very poorly understood Russian (with much help from friends and dictionaries), saw as each writer's distinct quality. My friends had asked me how I could really get a sense of these writers in translation and I said that from Akhmatova I got the sense of great events both personally and nationally tragic retold as if from the cooler perspective that distance and reflection can give to events; from Tsvetaeva I had the sense of passion spilling onto the page like small flames, barely able to be sustained by the paper itself; from Mandelstam I felt the overflowing heart of humanity in all its pungent, earthy aroma and all its compassionate and fragile warmth. I said that I cannot think of Russian poetry or 20th century Russian history without thinking of all three. They are a holy trinity. Anyone who would think Akhmatova minor reminds me of the kind of foolishness I would hear when I lived in New York, where some would-be-arbitor of literary taste would declare that really James Joyce was overrated as a writer and that Gaston Leroux was truly the more revolutionary writer (you go figure). Also there is this: if response to her verse was so passionate how does that invalidate the quality? Why would you separate it? Russian's know their poetry and can argue for their poetry better than I have ever witnessed with any other group of people. They have placed the three mentioned above in the top tier of their country's poetry regardless of whether it was Brodsky writing or Yevgeny Yevtushenko (two as at odds with each other as it is possible to be).
Feinstein demonstrates why Akhmatova is major throughout this magnificent biography. She links Akhmatova's life to the life of her country to the distillation of both into her words. Words that every Russian, at one time, could recite extemporaneously. Or, to put the poet's own words to it:
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):from Requiem
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.
Listen to how easily she sums up the years of terror. Look at how she conveys the fear and anxiety and anguish they were all suffering under. "Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face." A minor poet indeed!
John Richardson has been writing about Pablo Picasso for most of his life. He began his biography in the 1980s and published the first volume, A Life of Picasso, Volume 1: 1881-1906 in 1991. Random House was his publisher and the book was simply gorgeous. Large in size, between a normal sized biography and a coffee table book, generous in pictures and on paper of art-book quality, Richardson's narrative matched the quality of the pages. He mapped out not just a life of Picasso but a history of the age, giving excellent detail to Picasso's life by truly filling in the lives of the artists and people who surrounded him. The second volume, A Life of Picasso: 1907-1917, The Painter of Modern Life, was published in 1996 and was equal to the first in quality of product and in the writing. Both volumes had a distinct quality that made them memorable for me, that is that on every page of each book were countless pictures on the page or in the margins that made it so easy to follow what Richardson was writing. If he was comparing a painting to the subject of the painting we got the painting as well as a picture or pictures of the subject. If he were comparing paintings we got both on the same page in order to see for ourselves. If there was an important person in his life, Fernande Olivier for instance, we got plenty of pictures of her to compare to the many ways she was represented in Picasso's paintings. For whatever reason, though one would guess money, Random House dropped Richardson and any future volumes. It looked bleak for those of us waiting Richardson to continue his chronicle and then Knopf stepped in and announced publication of the third volume.
Well, here it is, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf, 2007). Richardson's excellence in writing is equal to the previous two volumes. He gives us another history of an era as seen through the life of Pablo Picasso. It is filled with the same attention to detail as the first two. In all three you get mini-lessons in the lives of the other artists who influenced, competed with and loved and fought with Picasso. Richardson is generous in his research and what he brings to his subject. He is also uncompromising in his opinion, not allowing his own friendship with the subject to interfere with his view of the man as both an artist and a human being. The written word of this biography is worth the price of this book alone.
The actual product of the book is another matter. Knopf should be commended for taking this on and roundly chastised for short-changing both Richardson and the public that has been buying and reading these biographies. The quality of the third volume is reprehensible. Reduced in size (although fatter in width) and miserly in pictures and on much cheeper paper, it's as if Knopf agreed to do this not to continue the excellence set in the previous books but as a sop to the writer and a boost to their own ego. But why go so cheap? If you look at the examples above, in the previous volumes you have can find anywhere from two pictures (the least) to seven (the most) on every page! The current volume has 48 pages in the center of color reproductions of the paintings discussed, placed in chronological order comapared to no color photos in the the other two volumes; but you have to constantly turn to the center of the book to follow what Richardson says about the paintings, interrupting your reading and flow of the material. As for photos of the actual people who were part of his life and paintings, there are paltry few. Marie Therese Walter, who from 1927 to 1936 was Picasso's greatest love and figured in most of his paintings and sculptures from that time, has one, pathetic photo from which to judge all the work against. Contrast that to the number of photos of Picasso's wife Olga in the book and it almost makes you wonder if her ghost had a hand in selecting the pictures for this volume. To my mind the first two volumes are more imaginative in design and the third is pedestrian - a standard, run-of-the-mill production for writing that is far from run-of-the-mill.
Still, if you have the opportunity to read this work you should- and now that Knopf has the rights and has produced the other two in paperback you get the chance to read all three at once instead of at 7 year intervals - you will find yourself hooked and transported to another world, exciting in possibilities, people and history. Whether you appreciate Picasso's art or not you will get such a sense of the time he lived, of the twentieth century, than you could from any ten histories of the same age.
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