Мимоходом (In Passing)

"¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿" ("In Passing") is Irina Roskina's account of a life lived at the edges of Soviet literary Moscow - not a conventional memoir, but a deliberately unsystematic gathering of what she happens to remember. Roskina, a longtime simultaneous interpreter for foreign films and one of the last living witnesses to the literary circles around Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Alexander Galich, moves quickly and often ironically through portraits of family, friends, and chance acquaintances rather than lingering over any one story. A second section turns to the material texture of Soviet daily life - food shortages, communal apartments, samizdat, salaries, and the work of translation itself. The book closes with two longer essays: one on the return of Gulag prisoners after Stalin's death, the other a close reading of Pasternak's poem "¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿" in relation to Doctor Zhivago and Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero. Framed by prefaces from editor Lena Berson and scholar Gasan Guseinov, the book is both testimony and literary essay - modest in tone, precise in observation.