Product Description

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) is among the most moving and revered voices in Russian literature. A poet of passion and conscience, she was persecuted after the Revolution and under Stalin, but chose to remain in Russia and bear witness. Her works capture a rich emotional world - poems such as ‘A Ride’ and ‘By the Seashore’ reflect a complex attitude to love or explore the duality of her own nature, while others, such as ‘Courage’ and ‘In 1940’, evoke the horrors of war. And in her two great poem cycles, Requiem and Poem without a Hero, she creates a heart-rending depiction of a mother waiting outside a prison for news of her son and a magical layering of the old, joyous St Petersburg upon a tormented Leningrad.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46039 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-25
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Anna Akhmatova is the literary pseudonym of Anna Andreevna Gorenko. Her first husband was Gumilev, and she too became one of the leading Acmeist poets. Her second book of poems, Beads (1914), brought her fame. Her earlier manner, intimate and colloquial, gradually gave way to a more classical severity, apparent in her volumes The Whte Flock (1917) and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1922).

Customer Reviews

an excellent introduction to a major Russian poet
This is a selection of Anna Achmatova's poetry spanning her whole writing career and starting in 1912. Although Russian history looms large in the background of these poems - many of those close to Akhmatova became victims of Stalinist terror - the atmosphere is not exclusively bleak in this collection. It also reveals her development as a poet and the diverse range of subjects she wrote about, from real-life events like the London Blitz in 'To The Londoners' written in 1940, to biblical figures and love poems. Dominating everything are the references to St Petersburg, the city she lived in for most of her life, and which forms the backdrop to what is probably the stand-out poem in this book, 'Poem Without A Hero'. Defining what it's 'about' is not easy - people and events in the city and in Russia over several decades, taking in references to censorship, political persecution and the Russian people, all skillfully woven together, is an approximate definition. How true it is to the original is impossible to say without a knowledge of Russian, but the translation certainly reads well, leaving you in no doubt that Akhmatova really was a great poet. The translator's notes at the back are also informative. This is a comprehensive and likable introduction to someone considered a major twentieth-century poet.

correction
As the translator of the poems in this book, I cannot comment on the quality of translation, but Akhmatova is indeed a great poet. I do wish to correct the 'author's note'. I'm not Dylan Thomas! I'm the author of 'The White Hotel' and many other novels and collections of poetry.
By the way, my Akhmatova translations are now also available in the Everyman Pocket Poets series, with about twenty new translations.
D.M.Thomas

"O My Son, My Terror!"
Akhmatova was one of Russia's leading and most celebrated poets. Personally I gelled best with the poems written during Stalin's excesses and the second world war. "I'm not one of those who left their country for wolves to tear it limb from limb" she wrote. She stayed after the revolution and went through the privations and terror like everyone else. Later she lamented that "the souls of those I love are on high stars".

"Requiem" written largely for her son who was imprisoned by Stalin is heartbreaking. "They took you away at daybreak. Half waking as though at a wake, I followed." Later on she cries "O my son, my terror!". She spent 17 months waiting for him outside prison gates. And that's where standing in queues alongside others that she "learned how faces fall apart, How fear looks out from under the eyelids, How deep are the hieroglyphics cut by suffering on people's cheeks".