The Guest from the Future is a difficult book to classify. It comprises a goodly amount of literary criticism, and the bulk of the work focuses on the life of Anna Akhmatova, yet the author informs us in the preface that "[t]his book is not a biography of Anna Akhmatova, nor is it a work of literary criticism." The more general rubric of "history" might be applied, but the work is structured unlike most books of history, repeatedly expanding and narrowing its scope from the personal to the global, and referring to scraps of poetry as if they were historical documents. In the process, however, and amid multiple frustrations, a fascinating tale unfolds.

The pivot of the book is a twelve-hour meeting that took place in November, 1945, between the British scholar and diplomat Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, at her home in Leningrad. Relatively little is known about the meeting itself, but its impact on Akhmatova's poetry was most significant — Dalos posits that Berlin was, among other things, the unnamed "guest from the future" who appears in Akhmatova's opus "Poem Without a Hero" — and its impact on her life may have been cataclysmic. (There's no getting around the uncertainty of the "may have been" — it is known that Akhmatova was under KGB surveillance, and that Berlin was suspected of being a spy, and the Soviet regime did effectively excommunicate Akhmatova in 1946, but a direct link between meeting and excommunication is unprovable.) In any event, Akhmatova herself believed that her meeting with Berlin was what started her troubles, and out of deference to his subject, Dalos seems inclined to agree with her.

What followed for Akhmatova were twenty years of subtle persecution (the Soviets having recognized that to blatantly persecute a world-famous writer would be a public relations disaster). She was publicly defamed; her son and ex-husband were sent to the gulag; her works were banned; her pension and rations were suspended and reinstated; her poetry was accepted for publication only to be held up for years by government censors. In our culture, the state is so distanced from the literary/artistic world that unless you adorn a Virgin Mary with elephant dung, the government is unlikely to notice you, much less react to you. And so a situation like Akhmatova's — in which one's artistic life is entirely subject to the caprices of an all-powerful state; in which one cannot write what one wants, cannot publish what one writes, and cannot even speak to a friend without worrying that a quick conversation will get your son arrested, your husband killed, and the Cold War escalated — seems foreign to the point of being incomprehensible. But Dalos renders it deliberately and skillfully, allowing the full gravity of the situation to become clear without straying too far into melodrama.