Nightingale Fever

In this book, Hingley, widely published critic and translator in the field of Russian literature, takes as his subject ''nightingale fever'' -- the poet's inability to stop singing regardless of consequences -- showing how this ''disease'' afflicted four of this century's greatest Russian poets: Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak. Linked by their closeness in age, their similar cultural, educational, and social backgrounds, and their hostility toward a social system of which all became victims, the four poets, their lives, and their creative outputs are examined here against a backdrop of revolutionary and social upheaval during the years immediately preceding World War I to those just after the outbreak of World War II.