The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat; Poems of Memory

by Anna Akhmatova; Translated, with an introductory biography, critical essays, andcommentary, by Nancy K. Anderson

• ISBN13: 9780300103779
• ISBN10: 0300103778
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2004-10-11
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Anna Akhmatova (18891966), one of twentieth-century Russia's greatest poets, was viewed as a dangerous element by post-Revolution authorities. One of the few unrepentant poets to survive the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Stalinist purges, she set for herself the artistic task of preserving the memory of pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage and of those who had been silenced. This book presents Nancy K. Anderson's superb translations of three of Akhmatova's most important poems:Requiem,a commemoration of the victims of Stalin's Terror;The Way of All the Earth,a work to which the poet returned repeatedly over the last quarter-century of her life and which combines Old Russian motifs with the modernist search for a lost past; andPoem Without a Hero,widely admired as the poet's magnum opus. Each poem is accompanied by extensive commentary. The complex and allusivePoem Without a Heroisalso provided with an extensive critical commentary that draws on the poet's manuscripts and private notebooks. Anderson offers relevant facts about the poet's life and an overview of the political and cultural forces that shaped her work. The resulting volume enables English-language readers to gain a deeper level of understanding of Akhmatova's poems and how and why they were created.

Author Biography

Nancy K. Anderson is an independent scholar. She is a highly regarded translator of Russian poetry, including Yale University Press's translation of Alexander Pushkin's Little Tragedies, and has taught courses in Russian, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Biographical and historical background
Youth and early fame, 1889-1916	p. 3
Revolution and civil war, 1917-1922	p. 23
Outcast in the new order, 1922-1935	p. 44
Terror and the muse, 1936-1941	p. 68
War and late Stalinism, 1941-1953	p. 92
Late fame and final years, 1953-1966	p. 115
The poems
Requiem	p. 135
The way of all the earth	p. 145
Poem without a hero	p. 148
Critical essays
Bearing the burden of witness : requiem	p. 181
Forward into the past : the way of all the earth	p. 194
Rediscovering a lost generation : poem without a Hero	p. 203
Commentary
Commentary on Poem without a hero	p. 235
An early version of Poem without a hero (Tashkent 1942)	p. 267
Poem without a hero : excerpts from Akhmatova's notebooks	p. 280
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