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Anna Akhmatova
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Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), one of twentieth-century Russia’s greatest poets, was viewed as a dangerous element by post-Revolution authorities. One of the few unrepentant poets to survive the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Stalinist purges, she set for herself the artistic task of preserving the memory of pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage and of those who had been silenced. This book presents Nancy K. Anderson’s superb translations of three of Akhmatova’s most important poems: “Requiem,” a commemoration of the victims of Stalin’s Terror; “The Way of All the Earth,” a work to which the poet returned repeatedly over the last quarter-century of her life and which combines Old Russian motifs with the modernist search for a lost past; and “Poem Without a Hero,” widely admired as the poet’s magnum opus. —Yale University Press
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There are a number of editions of Akhmatova in English, but until this collection, published by the small Zephyr Press in Massachusetts, there has never been one either so directly accessible or so comprehensive. The result of an almost Sisyphean seven years of research and production, the book contains every known poem of Akhmatova, including those which have surfaced only during the last few years of glasnost. It includes as well a thorough introduction by the editor, Roberta Reeder, rare photographs, several memoirs of Akhmatova, extensive notes to the poems, and the Russian originals on the facing pages.
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Between the years 1910 and 1912 Akhmatova visited Paris, where she met the painter Amedeo Modigliani, and northern Italy. Modigliani drew sixteen portraits of Akhmatova, some of them nudes. One of the most famous is a portrait, in an Egyptian mode, which has been reproduced on several jackets of Akhmatova's books.
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By the time her second collection, the Rosary, appeared in 1914, there were thousands of women composing poems "in honour of Akhmatova." Her early poems usually picture a man and a woman involved in the most poignant, ambiguous moment of their relationship. Such pieces were much imitated and later parodied by Nabokov and others. Akhmatova was prompted to exclaim: "I taught our women how to speak, but don't know how to make them silent".
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Akhmatova, here in her fifties, had long possessed the capacity to express more than religious-erotic yearning. Nevertheless when, from the first arrest of her loved ones in 1935, she became an initiate into some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, her poetry soared into a category of its own.
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Akhmatova was left like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, who washes ashore carrying with her the last mementos of a sunken and irretrievable culture. Her gifts were such that, with these few fragments left to her, she was able to conjure both the glories and the tragedies of that culture so fully.
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Anna Akhmatova