Have you noticed that most reviews of biographies read like book reports? The subject’s vital statistics are set out, and then – usually in less than a paragraph – the biographer is dispatched with adjectives such as “workmanlike,” “plodding,” “monumental,” “definitive,” and so on. The biographer, in other words, is an afterthought, and biography as a genre goes virtually unacknowledged. Even biographers reviewing other biographers subscribe to this lazy formula.

Indeed, biographers – even excellent ones like Elaine Feinstein – diminish the genre by acting as though their books require no prolegomenon. The Greeks, who invented the word, knew better. A biography ought always to include a beforehand, one that explains why, for example, another biography of Anna Akhmatova, one of great poets of the 20th century, is needed.

In “Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova” (Alfred A. Knopf, 332 pages, $27.50) Ms. Feinstein makes a few references to Amanda Haight’s “Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage” (1976), not only the first biography of Akhmatova in English but one that derived from Haight’s interviews with the poet. But how about Haight? Or the other Russian biographers of Akhmatova? They are acknowledged in Ms. Feinstein’s bibliography and notes, but what does Ms. Feinstein think of them and how does she situate her own work in their wake? Is she updating, correcting, shifting the emphasis to this or that in the poet’s life and work?

I applaud a biographer such as Peter Hart, who provides a short summing-up of the other Michael Collins biographers and then subtly builds on that precis in the course of his narrative. The abysmally low standards of biography reviews will never change unless more biographers begin to honor their own genre.

Ms. Feinstein’s strength is her precise prose and her immersion in her sources. She handles the reminiscences of the poet with great care, sorting out the motivations of those who commented on Akhmatova, including her son Lev, who had as fraught a relationship with his mother as Rebecca West had with her son Anthony. On balance, the biographer sides with her subject, while recognizing that, like many writers, Akhmatova could be self-absorbed and stinted her son, especially during his early years.

Here is an example of how Ms. Feinstein handles Akhmatova’s honeymoon journey to Paris with her first husband, the poet Nikolay Gumilyov:

[Sergey] Makovsky was traveling on the same train. He claims to have asked Akhmatova how she was “enjoying marital relations and were they giving her satisfaction?” She stalked out of the compartment without replying. Even if this tale is true – and Irina Odoevtseva, though a student of Gumilyov, was less close to him than she suggests in her memoirs – the interpretation of it is far from straightforward. Makovsky would like us to imagine that Akhmatova and Gumilyov were sexually incompatible but it seems likely Anna was simply offended at such an intimate inquiry.

It was a difficult marriage – as nearly all Akhmatova’s affairs with men turned out to be – and the biographer rightly insists on presenting a stereoscopic view of her subject.

Akhmatova’s life is a perfect enactment of Samuel Johnson’s adage: “The heroes of literary as well as civil history have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved; and volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely deaths.” Although a renowned and popular poet in pre-Soviet Russia, Akhmatova became first a nonpoet and then a nonperson – attacked initially by Leon Trotsky as a decadent dweller in the neuroses of private life, and then ostracized during Stalin’s Reign of Terror while suffering from tuberculosis and other ailments that made her impecunious life a daily tribulation.

Akhmatova deserves the title “Anna of All the Russias” because she never forsook her country, remaining during the terrible siege of Leningrad, never even considering a life of exile. She bent to Stalinist dictates only once, when she hoped a few poems in praise of Stalin would get her son released from prison. She waited in lines like everyone else for food and for news of her son. Although ordinary Russians recognized an aristocrat in her rather aloof, imposing figure, her life and her poetry put her at one with her nation.

A strong woman, Akhmatova nevertheless surrendered herself to several rather abusive affairs. If the men in her life sometimes demeaned her, she was not without resources, carrying on her own romances, and often regaining the loyalty and affection of the very men who had hurt her. She had extraordinary resilience and courage, which is also reflected in her work.

Ms. Feinstein lauds Akhmatova’s poetry of “classic restraint … literal, bare, bony, and precise.” The poet could also be prophetic, writing in 1933 on the eve of the Terror:

Wild honey smells like freedom,
And dust like a ray of sunshine,
A young girl’s mouth, like violets
While gold smells of nothing at all.
But we have learnt one fact forever:
Blood only smells like blood.

The biographer comments: “The last verse brings together Pontius Pilate’s attempt to cleanse his hands with Lady Macbeth trying in vain to wash her hands clean. The contemporary Soviet echoes are hard to overlook.” But then the biographer knows that Akhmatova translated “Macbeth” and knew her Shakespeare as well as her own pulses. The lines strike me as Akhmatova’s answer to enthusiasts of revolution, including some of her own poet-colleagues, who initially hailed the Bolsheviks, then retreated in horror, committing suicide, ending up in gulags, or, like her first husband, in mass executions.

Akhmatova never indulged in wishful thinking about revolution. She seemed born, in fact, without illusions. Although Ms Feinstein gives Akhmatova’s critics a fair hearing, the biographer never loses sight of her subject’s greatness. Akhmatova’s is surely the hardest kind of life – not only to endure but also to prevail over one’s own worst suspicions.

crollyson@nysun.com