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“... without which ‘the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.’ Akhmatova would have dryly agreed with all that. Like her fellow Acmeists, Gumilev and Mandelstam, she took a down-to-earth view of the process, although none of them would have gone along with the English Movement’s stylised derision of high culture and classy ...”

“... woodcuts are by Goncharova. And look: Blok. Bely. Gumilev.’ ‘The Acmeist who married Akhmatova?’ (I was such a show-off.) ‘Yes,’ they confirmed. ‘And this is the book with the cycle of poems dedicated to her by Marina Tsvetaeva’     – who titled them The Muse, and later said:     ‘I read as if ...”

“... of a fullness and intimacy that my few recollections can hardly rival. But such was the stature of Akhmatova that every slightest pebble lending strength to the aggregate of her posthumous monument must seem valuable. Whoever sets out to write about her soon wishes that the English lexicon were richer in synonyms for ‘regal’. After ‘queenly’ and ...”

“... maybe miserable; Daphne Spencer, giving nothing away in the portrait by her uncle Stanley (1951); Anna Akhmatova in 1922, rather dryly painted, tentatively drawn and stiffly posed in a portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin which is also entirely convincing as a human record – a great portrait need not be a great painting. But mostly the paint beats the ...”

“... The Acmeist poet Zenkevich declared in 1911 that when he first met Anna Akhmatova he was struck by her saying that poetry was ‘something organic’, and that she was amused at the idea of the poet Valery Bryusov schooling himself to write a certain number of lines each day. ‘Organic’ is a word now considerably overworked, but the little anecdote does suggest aspects of an elemental distinction ...”

“... Well into the 20th century, however, Natalya has been the object of considerable contempt: Anna Akhmatova, for example, often became vituperative about her. Comparatively little has been said about either Pushkin or his wife in this country, but in a recent broadcast Gwyn Williams described Natalya as a ‘good-natured bimbo’, not a very fierce ...”

“... it is almost impossible now to separate him from his own legend. What Derzhavin was to Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova was to Brodsky: the mentor who anointed him as the next great Russian poet. When Brodsky died, the journal Zvezda printed Akhmatova’s quatrain ‘I don’t weep for myself now’, with a new dedication to ...”

“... is seen here, was one of Repin’s pupils at the Academy. Her decoratively symbolist portrait of Anna Akhmatova draws attention also to a period of prolific cultural activity in which innovative female practitioners would at last be noticed. For the most part, however, the zenith of Russian portraiture at the NPG is, through its focus on the architects ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by the bellowing of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard outside, hotly pursued by the Russian Secret Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest ...”

“... did dragon dances to drown them out). I’d imagined that meeting dissidents would be like meeting Anna Akhmatova. But Qi was tired and cold and I couldn’t think of a question that didn’t seem childish. So I didn’t ask her ...”

“... one gets it in the balls, that one in the forehead,         him right between the eyes. Anna Akhmatova, who was present, told Mandelstam that she thought it ‘a monumental, rough-hewed, broad-sheet character of a piece’ – in other words, a crude political lampoon. The discriminating literary critics from the NKVD who ransacked ...”

“... gave the manuscript to BerlinWilliam Hayter, the British Ambassador in MoscowIsaiah Berlin in 1985.Anna AkhmatovaPasternak’s dacha in PeredelkinoPreviousNextHow Pasternak survived the necropolitics of the Stalin era was a mystery. ‘It is surprising that I remained whole during the Purges,’ he wrote in 1954. ‘You cannot imagine the liberties I allowed ...”

“... particularly striking. Bronstein’s widow, Lydia Chukovskaya, no less courageous than her friend Anna Akhmatova, in the long run faced down Stalinism, and tells her husband’s fate in her story ‘Sofia Petrovna’. The manuscript, hidden for years by a series of friends, was published only in 1988: passages from it would merit inclusion in ...”

“... as Stuart Hampshire finds its genius in the love relation between Lara and Zhivago, while the poet Anna Akhmatova, although she admired Pasternak as a poet, could not take him seriously as a deep sage and public figure, or even as a lover, and professed maliciously to suppose that the Lara episodes had been written by Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s ...”

“... freedom’, a verse from Rudyard Kipling’s The Fairies’ Siege and a passage from Anna Akhmatova, which Suu Kyi says gave her the strength to endure house arrest in solidarity with other political prisoners: ‘No, this is not me. This is somebody else that suffers. I could never face that and all that happened.’ Her essays and speeches ...”