Russian literature. A short introduction

an open attack on Formalism, claiming that all her work was an attempt to represent the world and had nothing to do with ‘formal tasks’ in the abstract.

The ‘Big Four’ of Russian Poetry

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892– 1941) were four of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. All four suffered persecution under the Soviet regime. Mandel-stam died in a prison camp in 1938; Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed in 1921, and her son and third husband were imprisoned during the Great Purges, as were Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter; Pasternak was subjected to vilification after the publication of Dr Zhivago, and the award to him of the Nobel Prize. At the same time, because all four (unlike, say, Nabokov) died in Russia, they could be discussed in public and republished during the post-Stalin era. In Western writings about Russian literature, the four are often grouped together as though they were members of a kind of informal but exclusive circle, something along the lines of the Bloomsbury group. Yet no group photograph or portrait of the four exists (in fact, there was never an occasion when all were in the same place at once). And while Akhmatova and Mandel-stam were linked by lasting friendship, the same cannot be said about any of the others (Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam had a short-term affair, but lost contact after Tsvetaeva’s emigration; Tsvetaeva and Pasternak’s relationship was intense, but carried on by letter, and most of the emotion was on Tsvetaeva’s side; Akhmatova and Pasternak felt at most wary respect for one another; Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva’s relations were decidedly strained). On the other hand, there were several other figures