Selected poems

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 Akhmatovas poetry in English.