Fiction and autobiography meet in literary St Petersburg.

  Elaine Feinstein’s favourite grandfather had a ginger beard and “blue eyes with deep laughter lines”. “His cardigan sagged at the back and he smelled of peppermint and snuff.” With his stories about “scholars and dreamers, and young men and women dancing together in the forest”, he acted as the young Elaine’s guide to a different world.

  This sense of the pleasure and promise of the outwardly mundane is central to The Russian Jerusalem, a novel interlaced with autobiography and poetry. Later in the book, Feinstein remembers being given some dried wood mushrooms by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “so strange in their beauty that I absolutely could not imagine putting them into soup as he suggested”. Honorifically preserved in a tin, the mushrooms eventually went bad, going straight into another existence without digestion.

  From the “wasteland of widowhood”, of which she wrote so movingly in Letters to the Dead, Feinstein here creates a tribute not just to famous poetic martyrs but to the stubborn survival of small things.

  Feinstein describes her fictional self living in St Petersburg in 2005. She is in the heart of Dostoevsky territory, a back courtyard near “Sadovaya Square”. Visiting Raskolnikov’s police station to report a theft, she finds the desk officer reluctant to record the details of the crime but determined to grant her entry to a city of ghosts.

  From a place where the pre-revolutionary Silver Age of poets, artists and musicians is remembered only by “a few singers/who have learned the sad language of goodbyes”, as an introductory poem has it, Feinstein plummets into the actual St Petersburg of 1913. Imploring the Russian writer with whom she is most often associated, Marina Tsvetaeva, to act as her guide, Feinstein proceeds to meet, face-to-face, the leading figures of “the Russian Jerusalem”.

  Finding herself now in the Soviet Union during the Great Terror, she encounters three Russian-Jewish writers of genius born in the 1890s: Osip Mandelstam, Isaak Babel and Boris Pasternak. The conceit may be based on Dante, but Feinstein is approaching the end of her life, not the middle. Tsvetaeva is no Virgil, and those entrapped in the Ninth Circle, unlike those of The Inferno, do not deserve their fate. It is not monsters and torments that are Feinstein’s subject but, once again, small glimpses of the dislocated everyday.

  The different layers of The Russian Jerusalem are held together not by linear sequence or logic, but by the sturdy personality of Feinstein herself. Russian in ancestry, Feinstein is English in her espousal of a luminous plainness of style. When Stalin hangs up on Pasternak, the telephone gives a “blank purr”; a young Russian male visitor “seemed to be strung too tight”. It is impossible to imagine any denizen of Russian Jerusalem, or Tsvetaeva, writing like this; a nearer Russian parallel, but even that some way off, is the work of Anna Akhmatova.

  The Russian Jerusalem is not perhaps the masterpiece it is claimed to be on the dustjacket. Postmortem encounters with Ilia Erenburg and Joseph Brodsky take us into less richly imagined districts of “the Russian Jerusalem”; the apotheosis of Brodsky seems particularly forced, given Feinstein’s sharp-eyed memory of an actual meeting later on.

  Yet this is a touching book, and one of stubborn integrity.