Before emigrating to the United States, Sophia Bogatyreva was a prominent literary editor and a part of Moscow and Leningrad literary circles that included Joseph Brodsky, Konstantin Bogatyrev, Korney Chukovsky, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Lilya Brik and many other celebrities. Her memoirs, written in a brilliantly lucid and humorous style, represent several generations of Soviet literary intelligentsia. Her focus is on those segments of Soviet intelligentsia that preserved their living connections with traditions of modernism and avant-garde despite ideological control and political repressions, while at the same not retreating into the “underground” but rather being well-published and well-read. Bogatyreva’s memoirs convey the complex and multi-layered atmosphere uniting those writers who had to discover ingenious and frequently brilliant ways to use their remarkable talents in the narrow space of the permissible. Angela Brintlinger and Catherine O’Neil’s translation excellently conveys the original style, lucidity and humor of Bogatyreva’s book.

These memoirs read as a significant contribution to scholarship, full of important facts and characterizations. At the same time, they become an original intellectual novel with real-life protagonists seen from the point of view of a child, teenager and young woman. The position of the narrator creates a “defamiliarizing” effect similar to the one about which the Formalists and first and foremost Viktor Shklovsky wrote. However, this powerful effect is “hidden in plain view” – the style of Bogatyreva’s memoirs is strikingly transparent and non-pretentious, which makes her book available even for an unprepared reader.

Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University