On the Banks of the Neva

"I don’t write about myself and for myself, but about those whom I was given to know… I write about them and for them. About myself, I try to speak as little as possible…"—this is what Irina Odoevtseva wrote in the foreword to her memoirs. A Russian poetess, the favorite student of Nikolai Gumilyov, she left Russia in 1922. She lived a long life and returned to her homeland in 1987—the last representative of the distant Silver Age. Her memoirs, “On the Banks of the Neva,” were published in Russia in the late 1980s in a staggering run of 150,000 copies, and were received as a revelation. Even now, this book is a monument to an era—its living testimony—and it is read with great interest. On its pages appear Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Georgy Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky… Odoevtseva’s phenomenal memory allowed her, even after many decades, to reproduce the conversations, discussions, and disputes of that time.

… (bibliographic lines)