Customer Reviews (1)

Fascinating
I found out about Akhmatova when I read Jane Kenyon's translations (One Hundred White Daffodils). This audio cassette is one of the best productions I've heard. The voices (Christopher Reeves is of coursewonderful) are authentic and it is like seeing a play on stage. Her storyis fascinating and for all her suffering, she continues to stay loyal toher love of her country and to love. Her poetry is so beautiful. You'lllove this cassette & Anna. ... Read more

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Surveys the poets whose work comprise the core curriculum of high school and undergraduate poetry studies. Poetic works are discussed in the context of a poet's life, times and body of work. Key works are examined in each author's canon along with techniques and themes of interest to the poet. ... Read more

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In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, working in Russia for the British Foreign Office, met Anna Akhmatova almost by chance in what was then Leningrad. The brief time they spent together one long November evening was a transformng experience for both, and has become a cardinal moment in modern literary history.

For Akhmatova, Berlin was a "guest from the future," her ideal reader outside the nightmare of Soviet life and a link with a lost Russian world; he became a figure in her cryptic masterpiece "Poem without a Hero." For Berlin, this "most memorable" meeting with the beautiful poet of genius was a spur to his ideas on liberty and on history. But there were tragic consequences: the Soviet authorities thought Berlin was a British spy, Akhmatova became a suspected enemy, and until her death in 1966 the KGB persecuted her family. Though Akhmatova was convinced that she and Berlin had inadvertently started the Cold War, she remembered him gratefully and he inspired some of her finest poems.

György Dalos--who inteviewed Berlin and many others who knew Akhmatova well, and who examined hitherto-secret KGB and Poliburo files--tells the inside story of how Stalin and other Soviet leaders dealt with Akhmatova. He ends with the touching story of her posthumous rehabilitation, when Russians astronomers discovered a new star and name it after her.
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Customer Reviews (1)

Fear and the Muse
In 1946 the Russian born British philosoper Isaiah Berlin, then a diplomatat the British Embassy in Moscow, learned that Anna Akhmatova, one of thegreat poets of the 20th century, was still alive and living in Leningrad. He went to see her, spending a night talking about art, poetry, philosophy,and history.The night ended when the newspaper correspondent (andWinston's son) Randolph Churchill came to Akhmatova's house and, notknowing where to find Berlin, began bellowing Berlin's name at the top ofhis lungs in the building's courtyard.This may not seem like aterribly important incident; in the course of a normal life such days areusually forgotten within a few weeks of their happening...but in Stalin'sSoviet Union there were no normal lives. The consequences of that night arethe subject of this book, a harsh unblinking look into the workings of aparanoid society and one artist's reaction to it. For Akhmatova that nightwas one of the greatest of her life; unlike many other pre-Revolutionwriters and artists she refused to leave Russia. For her contact withsomeone from outside the four prison walls of Soviet society was likeoxygen to someone suffocating; Berlin became "the guest from thefuture," the unnamed character in her great work 'Poem without ahero,' the reader she would have had if she lived in a normal society. Butshe did not. Dalos shows how all the forces of Stalinist repression swunginto action against her; how she was publicly humiliated by the CentralCommittee, how her son was arrested and sent to the gulag, how MikhailZoshchenko, the satirist and popular writer who was condemned with her, wasslowly driven mad by the government's denunciation of him and his work. Ifanyone is interested on the effect of totalitarianism on the lives ofpeople this is the book to read. A great tribute to a great poet. ... Read more

Product Description
Sensitive new translations of Akhmatova’s great long poems that document both intense personal suffering and cataclysmic national tragedy.

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.

Each poem is accompanied by extensive commentary. The complex and allusive Poem Without a Hero is also provided with an extensive critical commentary that draws on the poet’s manuscripts and private notebooks. Anderson offers relevant facts about the poet’s life and an overview of the political and cultural forces that shaped her work. The resulting volume enables English-language readers to gain a deeper level of understanding of Akhmatova’s poems and how and why they were created.



Nancy K. Anderson is an independent scholar. She is a highly regarded translator of Russian poetry, including Yale University Press’s translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies, and has taught courses in Russian, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky at Yale University.

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