Friends and Shadows

The book is written as a novella-memoir and is of value and interest to anyone who is following Russian history, literature, poetry and the development of intellectual challenge to the Soviet regime.

Between the mid-50ies and early 60ies intellectuals, poets and writers of Leningrad were the vanguard of the Soviet intelligentsia. David Shrayer was a part of this inner circle and hence is able to ledger its participants – portraits of the future prominent people as movie director Ilya Averbach, poets Evgenny Reyn, Dmitriy Bobyshev, Anatoly Nayman, Aleksander Kushnir, Viktor Sosnora and the young Vassily Aksyonov. Later on another young and promising poet joined this group, whose achievements paled those of his cohorts. It was no other than Joseph Brodsky, the future Nobel Prize laureate.

In the nucleus of this group were the poetess Anna Akhmatova and the literary critic of French literature, Yefim Etkind.

283 pages