My Half-Century: Selected Prose FROM THE PUBLISHER
Anna Akhmatova is known as one of twentieth-century Russia's greatest poets, a member of the quartet that included Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva. This is the first paperback collection of her prose available in English. The subjects of her memoirs are extraordinary: she describes Modigliani as she knew him in Paris, Blok near the end of his days, and Mandelstam as a close friend. The autobiographical prose section reveals the elusive poet's personality more clearly than any biography could, including her thoughts about how difficult it was to be a poet at a time when women writers were rarely taken seriously.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Voice of her generation and prophet of Russia's misery, poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was touched by personal tragedies. Her first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed on the false charge of treason in 1921; their son Lev spent years in prison and exile. Herself vilified in the press, censored, isolated, plagued by tuberculosis, Akhmatova eked out a living as a translator until her belated recognition came in the 1960s. This kaleidoscopic selection of her prose includes autobiographical fragments, letters, essays on Pushkin, a rousing 1941 wartime broadcast to the women of Leningrad, diatribes against the Stalinist cultural establishment and encounters with Modigliani, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Blok. Akhmatova's quicksilver prose registers a resilient personality. Meyer, a Columbia University scholar, provides a useful biographical sketch and notes. Photos. (Jan.)
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