Elaine Feinstein: The Russian Jerusalem

Carcanet, May 2008, £9.95

What remains?

Elaine Feinstein’s The Russian Jerusalem calls itself ‘a novel’, and so it is. It’s a time-travelling, magical-realist compendium of a fiction, in which the protagonist — a British Jewish poet, somewhat resembling the author herself — is transported into the lives of the Russian poets of the Silver Age. That it tells the life, and often tragic death, stories of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Ehrenburg and Babel means that a swathe of history from the dark days of the twentieth century is covered by its less than a hundred and fifty pages. However, Feinstein writes with a passionate celerity which makes The Russian Jerusalem the very opposite of trite costume drama or literary-biographical summary.
It is in particular a book about poetry, and the costs poetry exacts from those who believe in and write it. Arguably, this is what deepens its concerns and, indeed, informs its high style. Fourteen of Feinstein’s own poems stud the text. These are themselves inlaid with quotations from the author’s beloved Russians, as is the surrounding prose narrative, which serve as both summary and breathing space. The effect of these palimpsests is of a conversation between poets; one which the author, with her specialist’s knowledge and wearing her poetic identity-like colours, enters as an equal protagonist. Read more