Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984
Poems with a Heroine
By John Bayley
Poems
by Anna Akhmatova, selected and translated by Lyn Coffin, introduction by Joseph Brodsky
Norton, 100 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Akhmatova's Petersburg
by Sharon Leiter
University of Pennsylvania Press, 215 pp., $20.00
Anna Akhmatova had been in her youth one of the 'Acmeist' poets, along with her husband Gumilev and Mandelstam. Acmeism was essentially a reaction against the symbolist movement in Russian poetry, a movement that tended, as such things do in Russia, to extremes, in this case extremes of uplift, mysticism, apocalypse. Acmeism by contrast was concerned with poetry as architecture, and poems as objects of weight and mass-produced as if in a workshop (the poets' guild or workshop was one of the group's other names for itself). The most important early influence on Akhmatova was her discovery of the poems of Innokenti Annensky, an expert translator and scholar of ancient Greek, who had written—they were published posthumously—a volume of verses called The Cypress Box. Her early poems are precise evocations of places, moments, loves, deceptive intensities of being, carved out with reticence and a kind of inner dignity.
Review, 3769 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |