Tamara Katayeva has written a 600-page assault on the literary legacy Anna Akhmatova, but Victor Sonkin, who sees it as little more of a critique of the much-beloved Russian poet 's characater, says "so what?"
Some critics have already expressed their outrage at Katayeva's book, and not one failed to mention that it is derivative and verbose. But certain other reviewers welcomed the book as a sign that Russian poetry of the 20th century, instead of turning into classical marble, is alive and still provokes outbursts of emotion.
Certainly, there are several hundred lines of Akhmatova's poetry that make the question of whether she was a model human being utterly irrelevant.
This reminds me of Emma Gerstein's Moscow Memoirs, which was supposed to have debunked Nadehzda and Osip Mandelshtam's literary legacy, and really just portrayed them as particularly difficult people going through particularly hard times.
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