BOOKS
507
Of the Siberian land.
Filled with the literary echoes of both Russian and European culture,
as befits a Petersburg tale, worked and re-worked, there is nevertheless
something unfinished about this last great poem, something that links the
cultivated, frivolous world of elite St. Petersburg, sunk in narcissism but
dimly aware that its time is coming to an end, with the desolate
Leningrad of 1942. Akhmatova kept working on it, and it is to the
credit of the editors that they have included the large number of frag–
ments that the poet added to or subtracted from this extraordinary work
from 1940 almost to the time of her death. The demarcated text is the
one she confirmed during her visit to Oxford in 1965. Yet it is good to
have nearby in one volume the fragments that surround it, for I think
there is no last word, and the poem stands open - like the imaged rela–
tionship of the Petersburg of 1913, the ruined Leningrad of 1942, and the
"museum-city" of 1965 and today. St. Petersburg, quintessentially self–
conscious, Dostoevsky's "most intentional city in the world," which
continually ponders its past, is a city whose end has by no means arrived.
SIDNEY MONAS
Eyeless
in Gaza
GAZA. A
YEAR IN THE INTIFADA: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT
FROM
AN OCCUPIED LAND.
By
Gloria Emerson.
Atlantic Monthly
Press. $19.95.
The Gaza Strip is a sad and grim place. Almost 650,000 Palestinians, the
majority refugees, live packed together on a thin slice of shoreline,
twenty-eight miles long and five miles wide, sandwiched between Israel
and Egypt. Although a number of prominent Palestinian leaders hail from
the Strip, including Yasser Arafat of Fatah and his political rival Sheikh
Ahmad Yasin of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Gaza's fa–
vorite son is, undoubtedly, the Intifada.! On December 9, 1987, four
1Arafat's birthplace, like so much pertaining to him, has been mystified. At various times,
it has been cited as Gaza, Jerusalem, and Cairo.
