| Edition |
1st ed. |
| Description |
xv, 619 p., [32] p. of plates : ill. ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. [556]-602) and index. |
| Contents |
Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- Collected works of Anna Akhmatova: Wild child becomes a poet: 1889-1909 -- Petersburg, poetry, and the cabaret: 1910-1914 -- Twilight of imperial Russia: 1914-1917 -- Revolutionary years: 1917-1922 -- Great experiment: 1922-1930 -- Great terror: 1930-1939 -- War years: 1939-1945 -- Cold war begins:1946-1952 -- Thaw: 1953-1958 -- Pasternak: Nobel prize and death, 1958-1960 -- Gay little sinner repents: Poem without a hero -- Joseph Brodsky: Arrest and exile, 1963-1965 -- Last years: 1960s -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index. |
| Summary |
"Tall, slender, austere, with features that were described as haunting and hypnotic, Akhmatova possessed a quiet reserve, combined with an unusual intensity, that early on attracted fellow artists. As Picasso changed the face of art, Akhmatova would revolutionize the poetic vision of her contemporaries, for it was she who introduced the laconic style of twentieth-century poetry that seemed to blend in with the modernist forces of her age. One of those writers on whom she cast her spell was Nicholas Gumilyov, a swashbuckling Hemingway type, an eminent literary figure in his own right, who became her first husband. On their honeymoon, they went to Paris in 1910, where they met Modigliani, with whom Akhmatova later had an affair, succeeded by other extremely close relationships with the likes of the composer Arthur Lourie and Osip Mandelstam. Akhmatova and Gumilyov's relationship was clearly strained from the start, and the two, in a love-hate style, tortured each other until their divorce in 1918. Only after Gumilyov was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 did Akhmatova realize how much he had meant to her." "Friend and protector of writers like Pasternak and Mandelstam in the 1920s and 1950s, she was so lionized by her intellectual peers that even when the Bolsheviks turned on her poetry, the authorities feared to harm or kill her. When Mandelstam, for example, was arrested. Akhmatova was in his apartment, and she did everything she could to save him, before he later went mad and died under mysterious circumstances in 1958. Unlike Mandelstam, Pasternak chose to compromise, and wrote an ode to Lenin and translated other poems to Stalin, becoming for a while the government's literary "golden boy".". |
| Subject |
Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna, 1889-1966.
|
|
Poets, Russian -- 20th century -- Biography.
|
| ISBN |
0312112416 : $35.00 |
|
9780312112417 |
|
