Anna Akhmatova Research Articles

Ahmatova'nın Şiirlerinde II. Dünya Savaşı

The Second World War is one of the most important events in the history of the Soviet Union. As a result it became a basic theme in Russian literature and in almost every part of Russian culture. The famoiis poet Anna Akhmatova also described these bloody times and the life of the people of her country during these years. It is possible to separate her war poetry into three parts: Leningrad in war, the Tashkent years and coming home. The most important characteristics of her war poetry are courage,with which she tried to inspire Russian troops and the public, and fear for the next generations. Courage and fear make an interesting and a contrasting pair. On the other hand, the Tashkent poems in which Akhmatova describes roses, tulips, nightingales, poplars and the 'diffrent positions of stars' and moon in the sky, make an exotic and coloiirful picture of the east. The poetry, which she wrote when she came to Leningrad, is full of enthusaism for the victory and of sadness for the millions of losses. In her words meeting is worse than parting.

Anna Akhmatova's Search for Political Light

(2001). Anna Akhmatova's Search for Political Light. Peace Review: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 181-186.

The Diaries of Nikolai Punin, 1904-1953 by Sidney s> Monas Jennifer Greene Krupala , Nikolai Punin (review)

326 SEER, 79, 2, 2001 Monas, Sidney and Krupala,Jennifer Greene (eds). 7The DiariesofNikolai Punin, I904-I953. TranslatedbyJennifer Greene Krupala.Universityof Texas Press, Austin, TX, I999. xliv + 26I pp. Photographs. Glossary. Index. $29.95. SINCE the collapse of the Soviet Union the privatediaryhas proven to be one of the most eloquent and occasionally disconcerting testaments to the real force of terror and repression. Since I99I we have seen the publication of diariesby Mikhail Prishvin, Ol'ga Berggol'ts,FedorAbramov, David Samoilov , and the literary critics Igor' Dedkov and Vladimir Lakshin, among others, all of which have cast a distinctly personal eye over momentous historical events. Not only do we get a clear picture of how these events affectedindividuals,but the diary as a specificallyRussian literarygenre has come into itsown. Nikolai Punin (I888- I953) was one of the best-known art criticsin Soviet Russia, and was particularlyinvolved with the Constructivistand Futurist movements. He is perhaps better known, however, for his long and often tempestuous relationship with Anna Akhmatova (between 1922 and 1936). These diaries,collected and translatedfromarchivesboth in the Universityof Texas at Austin and the Punin family archive in St. Petersburg,cover almost half a century, beginning when Nikolai Punin was still an adolescent and ending in 1946. Punin'slast yearswere spent in the Abez prison camp in the Komi peninsula (he was arrestedin 1949), and are covered here by various documentarymaterials,includingPunin'scorrespondencewith MarfaGolubeva , his thirdwife. What is remarkableabout these diariesis the sheerbreadthof emotion and subjectmatter. Punin conveys brilliantlythe atmosphereof Petrogradduring FebruaryI91 7, the anxietiesand the fearsof ordinarypeople as criticalevents are taking place in the streets outside. The diary form here expresses the feelingsand thoughtsof the moment, an immediate responseto events such as Kornilov'sattemptedputsch in August 19I7: 'Getting readyfor bed, I loaded my revolver [. . .] I await what might happen in the streets in the morning, anxiouslylisteningto even the slightestrumble is it a cannonade?The wind howls;today there is a terriblewest wind. How many days, hourswill I live?' (p. 52). There are many vivid passages, none more so than his description of the Leningrad flood in September I924. Punin's prose brilliantlyand unforgettablyrecreatesthe terrorfacing the people of Leningradwhen war breaksout in 1941, the fear and day-to-day uncertainty as bombs fall and food runs scarce.Buttherearemany otherpages of a distinctlyprivatenature,including letters between Punin and Akhmatova. Punin's love for his 'olenik'is unbounded, and the modern readercannot help but be touched by the depth of his feelingsover the decades (even aftertheirrelationshipended). There are also many pages devoted to Punin's reflectionson God, art and science, and the roll-call of famous names that drop in and out of the text is highly impressive. This book will thus help (re)establishNikolai Punin as a majorfigurein Russian art and culturein the twentieth century.We get a full picture of an eager, inquisitivemind, and of a man very often at the mercy of REVIEWS 327 his own emotions. The edition also contains excellent introductoryessaysby Sidney Monas on Punin and Futurism,and by Jennifer Greene Krupala on the relationship between Punin and Akhmatova. The final few pages of the text, containing letters and transcriptsrelating to Punin's arrest, trial and death in the Gulag offer a bitter, somewhat ironic conclusion to the story of one talented and eruditeman'slife in a brutaltotalitarianstate. Unrizversi{y ofBath DAVID GILLESPIE Pasternak,BorisL.; Pasternak,Leonid, and Pasternak,E. B. Pis'makroditeliam i sestram. Stanford Slavic Studies I8 and I9. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, I998, 2 vols. 328 and 334 pp. Photographs. Notes. Indexes. $70ooo. ONE of the paradoxicaltwistsin the heritageof Russianpoetry in Soviet times is that a privateletter was more a public document than a poem: likely, even certain to be intercepted, it would be subject to a critical reading far more gravidwith consequences for the authorthan any of his poems. This, and the inefficiency of the Soviet postal system, national and international, partly explains why the epistolarywork of Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak is far less interestingin itselfand farless revealingas an adjunctto the poetry than, say, the letters of Pushkin, Tiutchev or Blok. Soviet constraintsmade poets better and more prolific translatorsbut turned their letters either to overblowneuphuismsor shrunkencrypticwarnings. In the case of Pasternak,the...

Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts

Introduction: boundaries of the spectacular Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell Part I. The Arts Reflected in Literature: 1. Defining the face: observations on Dostoevskii's creative processes Konstantin Barsht 2. Painting and autobiography: Anna Prismatova's Pesok and Anna Akhmatova's Epicheskie motivy 3. Picture windows: the art of Andrei Siniavskii Jane Grayson 4. Mikhail Zoshchenko's shadow operas Alexander Zholkovsky Part II. Adaptations, Collaborations, Disputes and Rapprochements: Russian Literature, Visual Arts, and Performance: 5. 'Theatricality' as a concept in the Russian modernist movement 6. Design on drama: Chekhov and Simov Cynthia Marsh Khlebnikov eye Robin Milner-Gulland 8. Cinematic literature and literary cinema: Olesha, Room and the search for a new art form Milena Michalski 9. Meaningful voids: facelessness in Platov and Malevich Andrew Wachtel 10. Painted mirrors: landscape and self-representation in women's verbal and visual art Pamela Chester Bibliography.

Anna Ahmatova ve Requiem

Requiem, which was written by famous Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova between 1935-1940, is a giant monument ofthirties in Russia. in this poem Akhmatova describes Stalin's great terror on the intelligentsia and their intense suffering. Reauiem was kept in memories of ten persons, who were trusted by Akhmatova, from 1935 untill 1963. This is one of the most important characteristics of the poem. The poem was published first in Munich in 1963. Russian readers got acquainted with Requiem in their own language in 1987, after twenty years following Akhmatova's death.

Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy by David Rigsbee (review)

154 SEER, 79, I, 2001 tradition and innovation in Russian literature and evaluates the novel's prescriptionfor social ills frorm both aesthetic and ethical angles (as indicated in the title). Henrietta Mondry's essay, 'The Russian LiteraryPress, 1993-98: Critics Reach Reconciliation With their Audience', is an exploration of some of the most significantissuesaddressedin contemporaryRussianjournals, including ideologies of patriotismand nationalismand anti-Semitism;and the trendsin their reception. Mondry's decision to investigate the contemporary literary press is perhaps ironic, given that the readership of thesejournals has now dropped to an unprecedented low. She notes that 'market forces' have in effect'dismantledthe concept of the literarycanon' and alsotracksthewaning of ideological battlesin criticalfora(p. 123). Individually, the essays are interesting, but together they fail to form a cohesive whole. The introductionservesas a lukewarmeffortto bind together the four pieces of work contained in the volume, but no synergetic effect is achieved. In Swift's essay, he notes that P'etsukh'believes that the Russian reader will sample, out of curiosity, the new offerings in pornography, adventure tales and mysteriesbut will ultimatelyfind them unsatisfyingand return to literature of substance the classics and contemporary Russian literature'(p. 65). Indeed, this unifyingtheme appearsto surfacein severalof the pieces contained in this volume, identifyingan anxiety of sortsabout the future of 'serious' Russian literature given the proliferation of mass culture combined with changing tastes. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ELIZABETHSKOMP tniversityCollege London Rigsbee, David. Styles of Ruin. joseph Brodskyand the Postmodernist Elegy. Contributions to the Study of World Literature,93. Greenwood Press, Westport,CT, i999. xx + I7I pp. Index. ?43.95. IN this reworked I996 University of Virginia doctoral dissertation, David Rigsbee, Professor of English at Mount Olive College in North Carolina, searchesforcommon threadsamong the elegiesJoseph Brodskiiwrote in both the USSR and the West. In so doing, he argues that the elegy 'standsas the most sadlyfittingtwentieth-centurygenre' thanksto the abilityof a poet such as Brodskiito 'shiftto the cosmologicalequivalentof language' (p. I50). Rigsbee pays particularattention to four pre-emigrationtexts: 'The Great Elegy forJohn Donne', 'Verseson the Death of T. S. Eliot', 'Almostan Elegy' and 'The Burialof Bobo' (pp. I9-62,passim). He does so despite the existence of authoritative commentaries by David Bethea, Mikhail Kreps, David NMacFadyen, Valentina Polukhinaand others and despite his own contention that the poet's elegiac dimension 'had seemed to arrivetoutcourt with the fact of his exile to the Westin 1972' (P. 4). These poems are all of a piece, being for the most part heavily stressed iambic pentameters (and little differentin George Kline's translations),while thelaterelegies arestylisticallyand formallydistinct.Nouns fallatthe rhyming position in the Russian originals of these poems in overwhelming numbers REVIEWS 155 and occur relentlesslyline by line in the poem to Donne (i963). Moreover, that text and the one to Eliot (i 965) both deal lesswith wintrydeath than with the revival that naturallyfollows hibernation. The latter looks ahead to new life from its very firstlines: 'On umer v ianvare, v nachale goda . .. Neuspevala pokazat'prirodaEmu svoikhkrasotkordebalet. . .' The Anglo-Saxon view of winter, less benign than that of many Russian authors, for example, Pushkin and Bunin, leads Rigsbee to derive unwarranted interpretations from the Kline translations.Thus, in anotherline fromthat elegy, puddleshave turned to ice, a reversible process ('Na perekrestkakhzamerzali luzhi ...'). Kline here has the poetic 'stiffened',which Rigsbee perversely connects with the English colloquialism for a corpse (p. 43). These poets obviously suffered physical demise but they survive through their texts and through their successors' glorification. The same holds true for Brodskii's poem on the centenary of Anna Akhmatova, which, curiously, goes unmentioned in this book. In briefer discussions Rigsbee considers various emigre poems, many of whose Englishtranslationsinvolvedcollaboration andeven modificationon the part of the poet himself. Unfortunately, Rigsbee allows himself to be distractedby blemishes in translationand lines that simply do not carrytheir music over into English (for example, p. 92), to say nothing of his failure to alert the reader to quotations from Mandel'shtam, Brodskii'solder Russian poet-in-exile. The key poems here are '1972', 'On the Death of Zhukov', the much-discussed 'Butterfly', 'Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots', 'Lullaby of Cape Cod', 'To a Friend: In Memoriam', 'The Thames at Chelsea', 'December in Florence' and 'York:In...

Memuary , and: Vospominaniia (review)

Reviewed by: Memuary, and: Vospominaniia Galina S. Rylkova Emma Gershtein, Memuary. St. Petersburg: INAPRESS, 1998. 588 pp. ISBN 5-87135-060-7. Nadezhda Mandel′shtam, Vospominaniia. Moscow: Soglasie, 1999. xx + 576 pp. ISBN 5-86884-066-6. The new edition of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's Vospominaniia hardly needs introduction. For many years after Osip Mandel'shtam's death in 1938, Nadezhda (1899–1980) was the sole custodian and interpreter of her husband's poetic legacy and of his life in general. As Nikolai Panchenko notes in his foreword, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam "was equal to Osip Mandel'shtam in her heroic stature. Had it been otherwise, we would have had no great poet, nor [would we have a record] of the devastating experience of culture surviving in the twentieth century, nor would we have a brilliant and absolutely unique interpretation of our saddening recent history" (v). Written in the early 1960s, Vospominaniia covers the period from 1934 to 1938; it tells about Osip Mandel'shtam's first and final arrests and the intervening period which the couple largely spent in exile (first Cherdyn' and later Voronezh). In 1937 and early 1938 the Mandel'shtams tried to insert themselves back into the Soviet literary establishment – a virtually impossible task, since they were banned from living in a number of large cities, including Moscow. The book finishes with Nadezhda in despair and groping for a sudden death, for she senses that her future will be nothing but slow degradation. However, Nadezhda was blessed by remarkable longevity and saw her chronicles published and ideas disseminated (even if mainly by samizdat and tamizdat). The 1998 publication of the memoirs under review here is the first volume of what is expected to become a three-volume edition of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's collected works, which has been launched by the publishing house Soglasie to commemorate her centennial. Panchenko in his foreword also praises the famous memoirist for presenting an objective account of her time that taught many people to see the truth; he scorns her wicked contemporaries like Emma Grigor'evna Gershtein (b. 1903) for writing "anti-memoirs" [antivospominaniia] about the same period (iii). This negative contrast is only to be expected, for Gershtein's highly subversive approach to writing memoirs enlists numerous enemies as well as supporters. This did not stop her, however, from receiving two prestigious literary awards in 1998: her Memuary was awarded both the little Russian Booker and the Anti-Booker [End Page 224] Prizes. This is quite remarkable, given that the latter was instituted by Nezavisimaia gazeta three years ago in opposition to the Russian Booker Foundation. Memuary features Gershtein's recollections of Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Lev Gumilev, Nikolai Khardzhiev, Boris Eikhenbaum and Aleksandr Os'merkin – to name but a few of her illustrious friends – and of less "extraordinary" people, such as those she met while working in Moscow's Literaturnyi muzei in the 1930s. A large portion of her book is devoted to her ill-fated affair with Lev Gumilev that spanned almost two decades. Gershtein spares us neither titillation nor embarrassing detail, such as extramarital affairs or hints as to sexual preferences. She is after Truth with a capital letter, and in writing her memoirs ransacked many closets. In the new political, social and cultural climate of the late 1990s, Gershtein's objective was to straighten out earlier renditions of events and fill in gaps left by her predecessors. Indeed, the main "target text" of Gershtein's Memuary is Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's Vospominaniia and its authoritarian style of remembering. Not surprisingly, Memuary has provoked heated discussion among Russian intellectuals about whether a memoirist is entitled to wash the dirty linen of his or her contemporaries in public. Reading Gershtein's Memuary side by side with Mandel'shtam's Vospominaniia raises questions about the distinction between "private" and "public." It also brings out concerns about the proprietorship of memory about objects, events and people, and the status of memoirs vis-à-vis historical accounts. Gershtein met the Mandel'shtams in October 1928. Their friendship blossomed when the homeless Mandel'shtams stayed for a month at Gershtein's house in the same year. Their bond became even more personal after...

The Diaries of Nikolay Punin, 1904-1953

Nikolay Punin was the most articulate Russian/ Soviet critic of the 1920's. He strongly advocated Constructivism, and proclaimed a movelment to bring art into the centre of popular life. In the US, he perhaps best remembered for his love affair wth one of the great poets of the 20th century. This volume presents an English translation of 10 diary notebooks that Punin wrote between 1915 and 1936, as well as selections from his earlier and later diaries and some 30 notes and letters relating to his affair with Anna Akhmatova. These materials seek to offer a glimpse into the life of art and artists in Russia. They are also present vivid scenes from the 1905 Revolution, World War I, the 1917 Revolutions, World War II and Stalinist oppression through the reflections of a talented man who unlike many of his generation, lived to tell the tale.

Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Romola Nijinsky andthe Literary Legacies of their Love

Is black an appropriate colour for literary widows? Some literary biographers have tended to think so, those who have maligned or satirized women like Florence Hardy and Sonya Tolstoy, making them look ridiculous for their willingness to attached, Nora Barnacle-like, to underside of an author's career; and then, when that career is over, to submit herself to theunrewarded task of preserving that career in public imagination.' However, there are also literary widows who have been painted in much brighter hues. In case of Soviet Russia in particular, where people could, as Nadezhda noted, be killed for poetry-a sign of unparalleled respect because they are still capable of living by (23),2 inclination, as Beth Holmgren and Sarah Pratt have argued, was for women to function, and revered, as guardians of domestic and literary spheres, as in Stalinist house.3 This article will focus on two such angels who came to cultural prominence as their husbands' biographers. Writing on opposite sides of former Iron Curtain, they both present similar interpretive challenge. Not merely a widow to culture,' Nadezhda has been hailed as the most heroic literary widow in modern history5 for saving her husband's poetry from almost certain destruction by acting as living library through dark years of Stalinism and then writing it out when it was possible, if safe, to do so. efforts, literary and otherwise, of Hungarian-born Romola Nijinsky to engage in sorry fate of her schizophrenic husband, Vaslav, meteoric star of Ballets Russes in first decades of this century, may have been comparably heroic, but in international belle-monde of ballet, they have been decidedly less well-received. In comparing both means by which these two women wrote their husbands and themselves into cultural history and way these efforts have subsequently been received, this article will explore primarily cultural and philosophical dimensions of these autobiographical writings. With appearance of her memoirs in 1970s, Nadezhda established herself as force to reckoned with in discussions of Stalinist period in Russian history and of Russian poetry, and in questions of horrors of twentieth century life, especially as they have affected lives of women. Her sharp wit and acidic, irreverent style initially raised ire of many in Soviet literary establishment used to hagiographic biographical approach. Unseemly comments in especially second volume of her memoirs about such Russian literary icons as her close friend, regal and respected Anna Akhmatova, created furor; anti-memoirs, such as those of Lidiia Chukovskaia and Emma Gerstein, were published in an unsuccessful attempt to throw her unconscionably brash assertions into disrepute. However, with time and glasnost rancor subsided. Not only have her memoirs received praise for what they convey about her husband,b and plight of women in Stalinist Russia, only has romance of their relationship become part of literary legends Nadezhda has also received attention and praise as writer in her own right.9 In increasing number of works and collections devoted to Russian women writers, and to Russian autobiographical writing, it is rare for her memoirs to go without mention. I Beth Holmgren, who has written, to my knowledge, only book-length study of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam,11 alludes in her article The Creation of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam to fact that Nadezhda in these memoirs is construct, literary creation. However, instead of focusing on dynamics of literary creation which motor Nadezhda's project, she analyses memoirs for important patterns and strategies that recur in development of other Russian women writers in order not to fall into old (and still effective) traps set to contain and dismiss women's writing. …

Adding to the "Guest" List: Hugo's Hernani and Pushkin's Don Juan

Leporello: Milady, this is the list of the beauties that my master has loved: it's a list that I have made; look at it, read it with me. In Italy, six hundred and forty; in Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; but in Spain there are already a thousand and three.(Madamina, il catalogo e questo delle belle die amb ilpadron mio: un catalogo egli e che hofatt'io; osservate, leggete con me. In Italia seicentoquaranta, in Almagna duecentotrentuna, cento inFrancia, in Turchia novantuna, ma in Ispagna son gid mille e trLorenzo da Ponte, Il dissoluto punito ossia UDon Giovanni: Dramma giocoso in due atti, 1.5

Translating Vietnamese Poetry

Translating Vietnamese Poetry John Balaban (bio) Tony Barnstone’s phrase “the poem behind the poem” offers a useful way of looking at translation. In the translation of a poem—as opposed, say, to a technical document—we are always looking for more than mere denotative equivalencies. We want to feel how the poem felt in its original. We want to inhabit the condition of its first reader or listener. Traveling in English, we seek to cross cultural borders and encounter the poem on native ground. To do this, we must hear “the poem behind the poem.” What lies behind, or even prior, to the poem depends on several things at once. First is the poem’s historical tradition, including that tradition’s habits of prosody, its abiding themes, its range of language, and its notion of what a poem is (and is not). Second, to hear “the poem behind the poem,” we must consider the poet’s unique operations within his or her poetic tradition. We must be able to feel the dialectical commerce, as it were, between the poem and the tradition it plays against. And finally, for the above to be working in a translation—for our incognito travel to take place—the translator must possess true talent in English poetry so that all prosodic possibilities seem alive and attendant. As Stanley Kunitz writes in the introduction to his and Max Hayward’s beautiful translations of Anna Akhmatova: The poet as translator lives with a paradox. His work must not read like a translation; conversely, it is not an exercise of the free imagination. One voice enjoins him: “Respect the text!” The other simultaneously pleads with him: “Make it new!” He resembles the citizen in Kafka’s aphorism who is fettered to two chains, one attached to earth, the other to heaven. If he heads for earth, his heavenly chain throttles him; if he heads for heaven, his earthly chain pulls him back. And yet, as Kafka says, “all the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in the original fettering.” The discovery of “the poem behind the poem” for a translator of Vietnamese is a long prospect. The literary poetry of Viêt Nam began in the first century c.e. with poetry written in Chinese. From the tenth century and into the early twentieth, Vietnamese poets wrote in nôm, a calligraphic script devised by the literati for Vietnamese phonetics. This nôm literary tradition, with its characteristic forms, subjects, and allusions, was heavily influenced by the poetry of China (particularly the T’ang)—even more than the literary models of classical Greece and Rome influenced English poetry. These literary poetries are only part of the Vietnamese landscape. Alongside and beneath the nôm and Chinese poetries, an even older poetry [End Page 76] known as ca dao runs like a vast river or aquifer. This oral poetry, still sung in the countryside, originated perhaps thousands of years ago in the prayers and songs of the Mon-Khmer wet-rice cultures to which the Vietnamese are tied. The word-stock of ca dao is native, bearing few loan words from Chinese. It is a lyric poetry—not narrative—and its power lies in its allusive imagery and brief music. Its references are to nature, not to books; to delta fish and fowl, to creatures of the field and forest, to wind and moon, to village life. It belongs to the farmers of Viêt Nam, which is to say that it belongs to most Vietnamese because eighty percent live, as ever, in the countryside. This repository of images, melodic patterns, aspirations, and beliefs is the cultural center of all Vietnamese poetry. Even literary poets—whether they are working in lü-shih regulated verse (thoduòng luât in Vietnamese), modern free verse, or the metrics of the oral tradition, like the great classical poet Nguyên Du—seem always to be working in some relation to ca dao. Ca dao is the fixed foot of the literary culture’s compass. Representing a folk culture resistant throughout the millennia to Chinese acculturation, it is an...

Confronting the Image: Works of Art in some Poems by Anna Akhmatova

Confronting the Image: Works of Art in some Poems by Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry

Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry

Библеизмы в русской поэтической речи

Efim Etkind, Biblical terms in the Russian poetic language. Church Slavic vocabulary significantly enriches the Russian language. It has remained in the language thanks to the Bible that passed it on to secular literature which evolved into belles- lettres in the mid-eighteenth century. French underwent an ever-increasing purification process that culminated in Racine's two-thousand-word-rich poetry. Racine's biblical tragedies, Esther and Athalie, differ only very slightly in style from other tragedies. For the German language, biblical locutions were lost in Luther's 1521 and M. Mendelssohn's 1779 translations which took away the sacred aura of the Scriptures. Russian poetry, on the other hand, kept a significant amount of Church Slavic turns of phrase. Lomonosov, Derzhavin, and Pushkin used them in their own ways. During the Soviet era, poets found other ways of expressing solemnity. For example, Zabolotskii borrowed from the scientific language of mathematics, natural science, and philosophy. Anna Akhmatova's poetry is very individualized. Throughout her work, biblical terms no longer serve the purpose of ornamentation, but reflect the essence of man's inner world.

Anna Akhmatova: her poetry

This superb introduction to the work of the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1886-1966) begins with an account of her life in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and Stalinist Russia, and focuses principally on her poetry. Incorporating all recent scholarship, the author traces the way in which Akhmatova's work reflects the tumultuous times in which she lived, and her emergence as the spokeswoman of her generation, to provide a long overdue account of her entire career.

Joseph Brodsky in Memoriam: The Russian Perspective

members of the poetic establishment in Russia react to the news of his death? And what did they consider his legacy to Russia's already rich and long-standing poetic tradition-a tradition that includes among its ranks such exalted giants as Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in the nineteenth century, and Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak in the twentieth century? Brodsky had not set foot on Russian soil since his exile in 1972, and the ban on his poetry was only lifted in 1987, under the more permissive and open climate accompanying the early years of perestroika and glasnost. Significantly, though, the Russian poetic community mourned his death too; in fact, after meeting with several members of Russia's poetic elite last May and June, it became all too obvious to me that many are still in mourning. Almost without exception, Brodsky's contemporaries remembered their former countryman as a friend; as an enormously gifted and original poet who has left his authorial stamp on the course and future development of Russian poetry; and, finally, as a nonconformist of legendary status in the scheme of Russian history and culture.

A Concordance to the Poetry of Anna Akhmatova

A Concordance to the Poetry of Anna Akhmatova

Wild Nights and White Nights: Dickinson's Vision of the Poet in Anna Akhmatova

Wild Nights and White Nights:Dickinson's Vision of the Poet in Anna Akhmatova Joanna Yin (bio) While Emily Dickinson's poems were available to few people in the United States during her lifetime, the poems of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) were well-known in her country during most of her life, despite frequent attempts by the Communist regime to suppress publication. Akhmatova was born three years after Dickinson's death in Odessa, Russia and soon moved with her family to St. Petersburg, city of the White Nights, where it never gets completely dark around the summer solstice. Although Akhmatova did not know English and there is no evidence that she read Dickinson's poems in translation, these great poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had similar ideas about where their poetry came from and where it should be directed. While both women saw the power to write poems as a divine gift, both used as the matter of their poems the familiar objects and experiences of life. They saw the process of creating poems as active, intense and totally consuming. Juxtaposing three poems by each poet will indicate similar visions of the poet as an inspiring and invigorating voice in her community. In P454, Dickinson makes it clear that God has given her the ability to create poems, yet it is a skill that she must continually practice and perfect: It was given to me by the Gods—When I was a little Girl—They give us Presents most—you know—When we are new—and small.I kept it in my Hand—I never put it down—I did not dare to eat—or sleep—For fear it would be gone— [End Page 53] I heard such words as "Rich"—When hurrying to school—From lips at Corners of the Streets—And wrestled with a smile.Rich! 'Twas Myself—was rich—To take the name of Gold—And Gold to own—in solid Bars—The difference—made me bold— This poem is written from the perspective of a grown woman who can play with the sounds of key words from her life: Gods, Girl, Gold, bold. She kept the gift in her "Hand," as a poet would a pen and paper; such treatment gives a physicality to this unnamed gift. She always carries this mysterious ability, for which she chooses to deny herself the physical activities of eating and sleeping. She discerns that the gift makes her, not what she owns, rich—the "difference" between inner and material wealth. The subtle metaphor of alchemy, in the gold at the end of the poem, emphasizes this difference. The speaker takes the name, or the metaphor, of Gold, not the gold itself. In this way she chooses the transformative power of poetry, which can create "Gold." The near rhymes of Girl / small, down / gone, school / smile give way to the final rhyme of Gold / bold. This riddle poem describes the speaker's calling as a poet. Further, it describes the careful, intense and anxious nurture of this gift. This is the last poem in fascicle 21, which contains poems that deal in different ways with transformation. Akhmatova also sees the ability to create poems as a gift from God and in "The Freshness of Words" (84) urges other poets to remember their obligations to their readers: For us to lose the freshness of words and simplicity of feeling,isn't it the same for a painter to lose—sight,or an actor—voice and movement,Or a beautiful woman—beauty? But don't try to save for yourselfthis gift sent by heaven to you:It is our fate—and we know this ourselves—to squander it, not hoard it. Walk along and heal the blind,in order to know in the heavy hour of doubt,the gloating mockery of disciplesand the indifference of the crowd In an illusion to Christ, the speaker states that the poet should not amass wealth but transform blind people into sighted people, who subsequently either ignoreor scorn the healing poet. As in Dickinson's poem, the poet [End Page 54] creates and bestows worth, which she highlights with dramatic...

The Poetry and Autobiography of theBâbur-nâma

Literary biography is a difficult art to practice when the subject is a premodern Muslim poet. Even in the work of such explicitly autobiographical western writers as the twentieth-century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova the relationship between art and life can be tantalizingly ambiguous. In the case of most well-known classical Muslim poets, though, the connection between life and literature is usually indeterminable. To personalize the lyrics of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz is as problematic as trying to glean autobiographical details from Shakespeare's sonnets. The reasons are essentially the same. Little is known of these poets' lives, and their poems exemplify lyric and panegyric genres that were not intended to be autobiographical or idiosyncratic. Neither Hafiz nor Shakespeare were Romantics, and they did not write introspective or self-revealing poems.

Tangled loyalties: the life and times of Ilya Ehrenburg

Journalist, novelist, poet --Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) was one of the most important Russian cultural figures of the 20th century. A political exile from Czarist Russia, he spent years in Paris as a bohemian poet and later became Izvestia correspondent in Western Europe. He was one of the few distinguished Soviet writers to survive Stalin. Ehrenburg's 1954 novel, Thaw lent its name to the critical period following Stalin's death. His memoirs People, Years, Life outraged the Kremlin in the '60s for describing a conspiracy of silence that had prevailed under the dictator. In this groundbreaking biography, Joshua Rubenstein tells the story of one of Russia's most controversial and enigmatic figures. Ehrenburg was a young Bolshevik who turned anti-Communist, then two decades later became a spokesman for Stalin. He was an assimilated Jew who fought anti-Semitism, and a Russian patriot who was both mistrusted by orthodox Communists and denounced by Hitler as his main enemy. As a Jew, he was said to have betrayed his people; as a writer, his talent; as a man, his conscience. Yet Ehrenburg retained a measure of personal integrity. He helped other writers, including Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak. He battled censorship and championed European art in Moscow. His circle of friends included Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Babel, and Andre Malraux. In vivid detail, Tangled Loyalties draws extensively on new material from Russian archives, from Ehrenburg's private correspondence, and from interviews with scores of family members and friends. The book uncovers the man behind the controversies, whose personal life was asunconventional as the career he fashioned.