Moscow Memoirs

In the early 1960s Anna Akhmatova encouraged Emma Gerstein to record her own memories of the renowned Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. But Gerstein''s vivid and uncompromising account was not at all what she had expected. When first published in Moscow in 1998 Gerstein''s memoirs provoked responses from condemnation to rapturous praise amongst Russian readers. A shrewd observer, a close member of t...