cover image The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin

The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin

Gyorgy Dalos. Farrar Straus Giroux, $25 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-374-16727-1

In the annals of 20th-century literature, few encounters between great writers were at once so ephemeral and so fraught with meaning as the evening in 1945 that Isaiah Berlin spent in the Leningrad home of Anna Akhmatova. The celebrated Russian poet saw Berlin, a Russian-born Oxford professor of political theory, then first secretary for the British Embassy in Moscow, as a visionary from the democratic world that she'd never experienced. According to Dalos, Akhmatova became romantically obsessed with Berlin and placed him as the central figure in a famously cryptic masterpiece, ""Poem Without a Hero."" The encounter also left Akhmatova under the surveillance of the KGB, who denounced Berlin as a British spy. Dalos, a Russian novelist and literary critic who now lives in Berlin, was captivated by the story at a 1993 meeting of the Heinrich B ll Foundation in Moscow, at which a former KGB official delivered a paper on Akhmatova and her secret government file. Quoting at length from Akhmatova's friends and supporters, and from extensive interviews with Berlin, who died in 1997, Dalos makes considerable headway in recasting Akhmatova's lifework. Dalos is least convincing when using complex passages from her writing to support his theories about her relationship with Berlin. When weaving together details from Russian history and the notes and letters of Berlin and Akhmatova, his writing is more graceful, lending support to the growing reputation of a poet who only late in life earned global publication and an honorary doctorate from Oxford, and for whom a star was named in 1988, 22 years after her death. (Nov.)