Anna Akhmatova – författare

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CAROL ANN DUFFYAnna Akhmatova is one of the most accomplished and well loved poets Russia has ever produced. Her moving and passionate writing has won her an ardent readership all over the world. This selection, beautifully translated by poet and novelist D.M. Thomas, illustrates her broad scope and brilliant imaginative gifts. It covers both her earlier work and the poems she produced during her persecution by the Russian authorities.

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.

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) had a life that spanned prerevolution Russia, Bolshevism, and Stalinism. Throughout it all, she maintained a restrained, graceful, yet muscular style that could grab a reader by the throat, or the heart, at a moment's notice. Her themes include romantic yearning and frustration, the pull of the sensory, the emotional power of the mundane, and her belief that a Russian poet could only produce poetry in Russia. By reputation, both Akhmatova's poems and the poet herself are defined by tragedy and beauty in equal measure, and she is for many the quintessential twentieth-century Russian poet. You Will Hear Thunder spans Akhmatova's very early career into the early 1960s. These poems were written through her bohemian prerevolution days, her many marriages, the terror and privation of life under Stalin, and her later years, during which she saw her work once again recognized by the Soviet state. Intricately observed and unwavering in their emotional immediacy, these strikingly modern poems represent one of the twentieth century's most powerful voices.

From the artistic passion of the St Petersburg poets and bohemians, to the collective suffering of a nation, Anna Akhmatova spoke to, and for, the soul of her people. This magnificent edition includes: more than 800 poems, half of them available in no other translated edition: translator's preface: biographical introduction by Roberta Reeder: more than 125 photographs, including a 65 page photo biography, and 'The Artist's Muse' images of Akhmatova in art: memoir by Isaiah Berlin: comprehensive notes to the poems: index of first lines: bibliography.

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa in 1889. Christened as Anna Gorenko, she adopted her pen-name from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo and lived most of her life in Saint Petersburg, the city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. Together they became associated with the literary movement know as Acmeism. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter revolutionary activities. Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia's leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953-with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic War-she found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union in the wake of the notorious speech by the Communist Party cultural boss Andrey Zhdanov, in which he described her as a 'cross between a nun and a whore'. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted exclusion from publication as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem, her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges. After Stalin's death in 1953 the restrictions on Akhmatova's work were gradually relaxed and a selection of her poems, entitled The Course of Time, was published in 1958. She died in Moscow in 1966.