Moscow memoirs

"Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova stood at the pinnacle of twentieth-century Russian literature, and their works continue to stand as monuments of literary achievement, yet they also suffered brutally under Stalin's regime, martyrs to its paranoia and its suppression of free thought." "In the early 1960s Akhmatova encouraged Emma Gerstein, a close member of the Mandelstam and Akhmatova family circles, to record her memories of Mandelstam." "Part biography, part autobiography, this book radically alters our view of Russia's two greatest twentieth-century poets and provides memorable vignettes of numerous other figures, Boris Pasternak among them."--BOOK JACKET.