ANNA AKHMATOVA, COMPLETE POEMS by JUDITH HEMSCHEMEYER/RUSSIA/2 BOOKS/1990 $150

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THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNA AKHMATOVA . TRANSLATED BY JUDITH HEMSCHEMEYER . EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERTA REEDER. Massachusetts : Zephyr Press, 1990. Second Printing. Scarce.A set of two solid and attractive scarce books. Published 25 years ago, this edition is now long out of print and hard to find.From the dust jacket: "In 1966, just after Anna Akhmatova died, poets gathered at the Union of Soviet Writers for a memorial service. One writer said, "there has departed form us a poet of unheard of power, bringing fame to Russia verse far beyond the limits not only of our native city but of our entire land." For Akhmatova , that fame had a double edge. Although her poems were memorized by millions of Russians and later read elsewhere as well, her work was banned for years, her work was banned for years, and she herself vilified and maligned by the authorities. Terror infiltrated her life as she watched friends and loved ones imprisoned and killed at the hands of the State. Her son was arrested three times, the last imprisonment stretching for seven years and ending only after Stalin died. "Into what dirt they've trampled me!" she said toward the end of her life. "I've had everything -- poverty, prison lines, fear, poems remembered only by heart, and burnt poems. And humiliation and grief." Nevertheless, her experiences did not cow her. She recognized at an early age that she was marked for both great fame and suffering. Akhmatova wrote her first poems as teenager, and published her first book in 1912, at the age of 23. By the time she died, she had left the world well over 700 lyrics. This collected brings them all together for the first time, including poems that were only partially published due to censorship, and several that surfaced recently in the Soviet Union."From the Translator's Preface: "Anna Akmatova (born Andreevna Gorenko ) was one of the four major lyric poets of Twentieth-century Russia. The other three, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva , all died before her; Tsvetaeva was a suicide and Mandelstam was hunted down and hounded to death by Stalin. Pasternak died in 1960 and Akhmatova , who died in 1966, had a career that spanned more than 60 years. Enormously resilient, intensely obstinate, she refused to emigrate, though she had many opportunities to do so. To her, being a Russian meant living in Russia no matter what its government did to her and her loved ones, and being a lyric poet meant writing the truth.Obviously, these two principles were destined to collide and they did, tragically, but ti was Akhmatova's strength to be able to suffer tragedy, survive and, somehow, write about it, over and over again. By the time she was eleven years old, Anna Gorenko knew she would be a poet, even though the only poetry book in the house was a large volume of Nekrasov . By the age of 13, she was reading the poems of Verlaine, Baudelaire and other French poets. When she started writing poetry, in her teens, her father told her he did not want his name associated with that trade, so she obliged by changing her surnamed to Akhmatova , the Tatar name of a maternal ancestor..."According to Wikipedia: "Anna Andreyevna Gorenko [Notes 1] (23 June [O.S. 11 June] 1889 - 5 March 1966), better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova (/?? k'me ?t?v?/;[1] Russian: ???? ????????, IPA: [? x'mat ?v?]), was a Russian modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.[2] Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry.[2] Her writing can be said to fall into two periods - the early work (1912-25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output.[2] Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist auth... read more

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