Word: akhmatova
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West...
Silenced Women, a tribute to Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) at Sanders Theatre last Wednesday, treated the work of these two great Russian poets with complexity and power. Acclaimed English and Russian actresses Claire Bloom and Alla Demidova and soprano Anna Steiger all gave decidedly different interpretations of the poems, and for once, the contrast between East and West was constructive and original, highlighting the differences in dramatic interpretation between the two culture rather than forcing them to conform to one another...
...evening was divided into two acts, the first featuring works by Tsvetaeva and the second featuring works by Akhmatova. The otherwise random selections of the poems related to periods in the poet's lives, rather than to periods in their literary development. Before each reading, Bloom would provide some historical context, explaining connections between events in the poet's lives and the poems. This information gave a certain degree of coherence to the evening. More importantly, it added a personal dimension to the words of the poets, tying the emotions evoked to the physical reality behind them. The specific events...
...dressed entirely in black without a hint of bright color to lighten up their outfits, and the historical descriptions made real the tragedy behind the poets' lives. Tsvetaeva's daughter and husband were both arrested by the Soviet authorities in the late 1930s, and in 1941 she hanged herself. Akhmatova's son was arrested three separate times; her husband was shot by the Bolsheviks; and her lover Nikolai Punin died in a labor camp...
Most Leningraders volunteered not for love of Stalin. It was their city they were defending -- the cultural center of traditional Russia, home of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Anna Akhmatova. The ordeal, however, required more than pride, certainly more than courage. The supply of food was erratic, and plummeted during the darkest moments of the war. On Dec. 23, 1941, for example, the whole city had just two days' supply of flour. At one point, rations were 1,087 calories for workers who had to man the city's strategic munitions plants, 581 calories for office workers, 684 calories for children...