During Osip Mandelstam’s internal exile in the Soviet city Voronezh, Anna Akhmatova visited her Acmeist colleague, whose 1934 arrest she had witnessed, and wrote this poem in March 1936. The poem first appeared in the journal Leningrad, with the last… Read More ›
Scholars consider this complex autobiographical triptych an exceptional achievement. In it, Anna Akhmatova revisits pre–World War I St. Petersburg with the hindsight of several decades and from the perspective of Tashkent and Moscow. The cycle, “the work that would crown… Read More ›
This 1940 cycle of five poems is included in Poems and Long Poems (Stikhotvoreniya i poemy), published in 1979. The poem’s first appearance in the journal Leningrad (1946) was suppressed swiftly, and the publication led to the poem’s condemnation when… Read More ›