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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin
The Guest from the Future Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin Author:Gyorgy Dalos, Andrea Dunai The dramatic meeting between a great philosopher and a great poet-both a love story and a parable about politics, art, and freedom. In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, working in Russia for the British Foreign Office, met Anna Akhmatova almost by chance in what was then Leningrad. The brief time they spent together one long November evening was a transformi... more »ng experience for both, and has become a cardinal moment in modern literary history. For Akhmatova, Berlin was a "guest from the future," her ideal reader outside the nightmare of Soviet life and a link with a lost Russian world; he became a figure in her cryptic masterpiece "Poem Without a Hero." For Berlin, this "most memorable" meeting with the beautiful poet of genius was a spur to his ideas on liberty and on history. But there were tragic consequences: the Soviet authorities thought Berlin was a British spy, Akhmatova became a suspected enemy, and until her death in 1966 the KGB persecuted her and her family. Though Akhmatova was convinced that she and Berlin had inadvertently started the Cold War, she remembered him gratefully and he inspired some of her finest poems. Gyrgy Dalos-who interviewed Berlin and many others who knew Akhmatova well, and who examined hitherto-secret KGB and Politburo files-tells the inside story of how Stalin and other Soviet leaders dealt with Akhmatova. He ends with the touching story of her posthumous rehabilitation, when Russian astronomers discovered a new star and named it after her. 16 Black and White Photographs Chronologies/Notes/Bibliography/Index Gyrgy Dalos, born in Budapest in 1943, was banned in 1968 for "anti-state activities" when he joined Hungary's democratic opposition. A novelist and literary critic, he lives and works in Berlin, where he is director of the Institute for Hungarian Culture.« less