Anna Akhmatova : Selected Poems - Hardcover

Anna Akhmatova; Richard McKane; Andrei Sinyavsky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0192112783 ISBN 13: 9780192112781

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1969

Synopsis

Anna Akhmatova is identified, along with Osip Mandelmstam, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva, as one of the four leading poets of twentieth-century Russian literature. Her poetry, classically rhymed and metered but also laconic and highly elliptical, is deeply engaged with predecessors such as Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Dostoevsky, Annensky, and above all Pushkin, and also with contemporaries Mandelstram, T.S. Eliot, and Gumilev, her husband, who was persecuted and finally executed by Stalin. The poems collected, including the masterworks 'Requiem' and 'Poem without a Hero', conjure intimations of the infinite and profound emotional depth through meditations on the perception of everyday objects and evocative settings, forming a powerful record of spiritual resilience. With introductory essays by Walter Arndt, acclaimed translator of Russian literature, and translations by Arndt, Robin Kemball, and Carl R. Proffer, this volume provides the most authoritative and readable versions of Akhmatova's poetry in English.

About this title

Review:

"A genius of Russian poetry" (Sunday Times)

"Once, when young, she had written the lines which lovers quoted to one another. Later she provided words which thousands of men and women repeated under their breath, as they suffered, feared and waited." (Observer)

"The greatest Russian poetess of the twentieth century" (Joseph Brodsky)

"Her fortitude and independence, the breadth of her compassion and the clarity of her realistic vision erased the line between herself and others; her intensely personal lyrics became the void of her nation's tragedy" (New York Times Book Review)

"The extraordinary misery of her life and the extraordinary merits of her poems make Anna Akhmatova one of the great literary figures of modern times" (Economist)

Book Description:

A new edition of the selected poems of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poet, published to celebrate her 120th anniversary.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1969
• ISBN 10: 0192112783
• ISBN 13: 9780192112781
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 112