Far from Russia

The daughter of a Parisian migr poet and the granddaughter of Russian socialist, writer and painter Leonid Andreyev, Carlisle (Voices in the Snow) offers an engaging, albeit unevenly written, chronicle of a postwar Euro-American intellectual milieu. At the age of ""five or six,"" Carlisle, who grew up in Paris in the 1930s, already had literary pretensions: ""I too considered myself a Pushkinite, although it was Pasternak, yet another poet, who was in fact my favorite."" These pretensions and enthusiasms endure throughout the memoir, making for a fun and opinionated assessment of trends and fashions in the Western worlds of art and literature. As a young reporter, Carlisle is given a chance assignment to travel to Russia during the Khrushchev era, thus setting in motion a thriving writing career. Sparing no false modesty, Carlisle writes, ""I like to think that over the years my extremely circumspect reporting about Russian affairs might have contributed in some infinitesimal degree to the emergence of glasnost."" She has a keen sense of her intellectual heritage, though occasionally the fluidity of her narrative suffers; at times passages read like an annotated list of deeds, achievements and important friends. Additionally, a section elaborating on a professional tiff with Nobel Prize-winning author Solzhenitsyn seems out of place, more intemperate than informative. In the end though, Carlisle, who has crossed paths with Motherwell, Rothko, De Kooning and Pollock, offers a sharp, measured view into the Western art world. (Mar.)