Anna Akhmatova was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year. Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem, her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterized by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry.

The Everyman Library presents about two hundred and fifty pages of poems by each poet or on each theme in the collection. The Akhmatova collection gives an introduction to one of Russia’s great modern poets. Her writing stretches from the Czarist period through the revolution and Stalin’s reign of terror. Her last works were published under Khrushchev.

There is a noticeable change from her earlier writing and that from the Stalin Era:

Empty white Christmastide.
Snow, snowstorm, snow
Let the roads be an ice-rink
I’ve nowhere to go!
(1914)

Black and enduring separation
I share equally with you
Why weep? Give me your hand,
Promise me you will come again.
You and I are like high
Mountains and we cannot move closer
Just send me word
At midnight sometime through the stars.
~In Dream (1946)

The joy and a subtle religious tone found in early poems are replaced with caution and separation. Later poems were written in secrecy as surveillance by the Cheka and executions of intellectuals were commonplace. Andrei Zhdanov publicly labeled her "half harlot, half nun", her work "the poetry of an overwrought, upper-class lady", her work the product of "eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference". He banned her poems from publication in the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, accusing her of poisoning the minds of Soviet youth. Her surveillance was increased and she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.

The rhyme scheme that exists in the original Russian is lost in translation. Russian poetry uses feminine rhymes and in English, there are far fewer feminine rhymes. The well-collected selection of poetry covering the change in a nation and in a poet’s life.
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I first became aware of poet Anna Akhmatova from portraits of her in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, one painted by Nathan Altman in 1914, the other by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin in 1922. At once fashionable and striking, the first captures her at 25 in her ascent, having travelled to Paris a few years earlier, famously meeting Modigliani and forming quite a relationship with him, and having already published two volume of poetry (‘Evening’ and ‘Rosary’). The second, three volumes of poetry and eight years later, was made a year after her first husband Nikolay Gumilev had been rounded up with 61 others and shot. It reflects the grim sobriety of an intellectual whose world is about to crumble, but even it doesn’t anticipate just how difficult it will be over the coming decades – her poetry banned by Stalin, watching friends sent off to the gulags and being executed, and standing outside a prison for hundreds of hours, pleading on her son’s behalf after he too was jailed. ‘Requiem’, a longer poem from 1957 about that experience, is a tour-de-force, reflecting a mother’s grief, an intellectual’s anger, and beautiful poetic moments:

“Gently flows the gentle Don,
Yellow moonlight leaps the sill,

Leaps the sill and stops aston-
ished as it sees the shade

Of a woman lying ill,
Of a woman stretched alone.

Son in irons and husband clay.
Pray. Pray.”

…and my understanding those last two lines are nearly impossible to translate from the original. Akhmatova would also live through the siege of Leningrad in WWII and great poverty. Her poetry being memorized in bits and pieces by close friends because she wasn’t allowed to write it is a real-life Fahrenheit 451, and her story of perseverance and strength through this oppression is truly inspiring.

This collection includes poems spanning her entire life, and while there are certainly common themes, her range is broad – from her direct, approachable style (most of which I quote below, out of practicality), to her elegies and avant-garde symbolic works (e.g. ‘Poem Without a Hero’). Through it all, while clearly haunted, she endures.

A few samples…

Untitled (1910)
I share my room with
A slow black snake;
It’s like me, just as lazy,
Just as cold.

In the evening I make up
Marvellous stories, on the rug
By the fire’s glow. Its emerald
Eyes gaze at me indifferently.

At night the dead, mute icons hear
Moans of resistance … It’s true
I’d take my desires elsewhere
Were it not for the serpent eyes.

In the morning I’m compliant again,
I melt like a slender candle;
Then from my bare shoulder
A black strap slides.

Untitled (1915)
There is a frontier-line in human closeness
That love and passion cannot violate –
Though in silence mouth to mouth be soldered
And passionate devotion cleave the heart.

Here friendship, too, is powerless, and years
Of that sublime and fiery happiness
When the free soul has broken clear
From the slow languor of voluptuousness.

Those striving towards it are demented, and
If the line seem close enough to broach –
Stricken with sadness … Now you understand
Why my heart does not beat beneath your touch.

Untitled (1940)
Some walk in a straight line,
Others in circles,
Waiting to return home, hoping
Their sweethearts have waited.
But I walk neither straight ahead
Nor aslant,
But to nowhere and never,
Like a derailed train.

In Dream (1946)
Black and enduring separation
I share equally with you.
Why weep? Give me your hand,
Promise me you will come again.
You and I are like high
Mountains and we can’t move closer.
Just send me word
At midnight sometime through the stars. ( )

D.M. Thomas's translations are surprisingly lyrical. There is the sense, so deftly is the prosody handled, that some of these were written in English. One is filled with awe at times. How can these poems be so mesmerizingly lyrical? It's the earlier poems I prefer to the later serious ones, which tend to be be a slog. I think this volume, which contains the stirring "Requiem," is an excellent place for those curious about Akhmatova's poetry to start. Highly recommended. ( )

This collection follows Akhmatova's career from her idealist youth through her grief for the disappearance and murder of her son and literary friends. It's remarkable to watch her voice change as she lives with a repression no writer would choose. A truly moving collection. ( )