Volume 52, Number 17 · November 3, 2005
A Great Russian Prophet
By Aileen Kelly
The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory
by Anna Akhmatova,translated from the Russian, with an introductory biography, critical essays, and commentary, by Nancy K. Anderson
Yale University Press, 326 pp., $30.00
No poet has been more photographed or painted than Anna Akhmatova: the unique profile with its imperious nose is instantly recognizable. Since her debut as a poet in the 1910s her contemporaries were fascinated with her image: tall, slender, very pale with deep-set eyes and a melancholy, pensive expression; she was often likened to a nun. All who met her were struck by her regal bearing, the more impressive in her later years in its contrast with the shabbiness of her clothes and the poverty of her surroundings as a pariah under Stalin's regime. Of all the great Russian poets whom he persecuted, she, more than Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, or Marina Tsvetaeva, is renowned as a resister and martyr.
Review, 5458 words
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