Our Notes & References

Unusually large-format edition of Akhmatova’s poetry, hardly encountered in commerce and containing a selection of her poems reproduced mimeographically.

According to the diary of Georgii Glekin, a close friend of the poet in her final years, Akhmatova herself learned about the book’s appearance in May 1963, from Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovskii. Lidia Chukovskaia notes that this news came as a shock to Akhmatova, who was equally disturbed at not knowing which poems had been selected and at the fact that they had been published using a typewriter. But what worried her most was the suspicion that the book was her ‘Requiem’, a cycle of verse about her son’s imprisonment, which she feared would be used against her in renewed attacks by the Party. Incidentally, ‘Requiem’ was published that same year, but in Munich, rather than Paris.

This edition actually shows a good cross-sample of Akhmatova’s poetry, with excerpts from her early collections, and a few later poems; it includes celebrated poems such as ‘Vecherom’, ‘Ia prishla k poetu v gosti’ and ‘I upalo kamennoe slovo’. Each poem is followed by its date: most from the 1910s and some from the 1930s up to 1945.

Provenance

Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, Cambridge, MA (Amercian bookdealer’s ticket to first page of t.o.c.).