Under a New Sky CL

Carlisle's palpable mystic love for Russia, no doubt inherited from her illustrious forebears and reinforced during her lengthy visits there, informs this ravishing re-creation of her five stays during the 1960s--which she also wrote about in Voices in the Snow and Poets on Street Corners --and her two recent return trips there. Having been denied a visa during the intervening decades, the Paris-born San Franciscan, granddaughter of Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, daughter of an emigre poet father, niece of a ``rediscovered'' Moscow poet (her father's twin, Daniel), experienced a homecoming in the truest sense. The occasion for her 1989 visit was the celebration of the centenary of Anna Akhmatova's birth; Carlisle recalls Akhmatova lovingly here, as she does other authors who had befriended her, such as Boris Pasternak and Kornel Chukovsky. Carlisle, who was on close terms with the dissident writers of the Soviet era, explains why she became their ``literary intermediary,'' and one realizes that she was trusted because, as Nadezhda Mandelstam observed, she is ``an old Russian intellectual.'' Her portrayals of that persecuted generation make vividly clear why those writers were dangerous to the regime. But toward one of them she is acrimonious: Solzhenitsyn, who named her trustee for Western publication of The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago , then denounced her. That tale is more fully told in Carlisle's Solzhenitsyn and the Secret Circle . During her Moscow visit in 1990, to teach a course in emigre literature and to attend a Jewish film festival, Carlisle was the houseguest of her uncle Daniel's widow, Alla. Her aunt proved to be a Slavophile and a budding anti-Semite, however, and these movements, now resurgent in Russia as Carlisle bears witness, sober her exhilarating memoir. Witness, for example, her concluding sentences, in which she quotes the unidentified N: ``The Soviet Union will never be a democracy. Don't you understand? We have not yet even begun to pay for Russia's imperial past.'' (Mar.)