Word: akhmatova
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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...
...decide on the artistic worth of one group over another? Is the Glee Club more deserving than a reading of Anna Akhmatova's poetry? Will the Undergraduate Council's next comedian be censored by a prudish colloquy of students and administrators? Calling for a distribution of space on the basis of artistic merit, a proposal only Senator Helms could love, has no place in a liberal university...
...colonnaded auditorium of the House of Physicians, other Muscovites listen transfixed to a recording of poet Anna Akhmatova reading her long- banned poem Requiem in a deep, rasping voice. When the melancholy cadences end, literary historian Lydia Chukovskaya, 82, recounts how she memorized the verse from scraps of paper that Akhmatova had handed her before the poet burned them in an ashtray...
...Akhmatova, whose former husband was executed by the Bolsheviks, was denounced by Soviet authorities and only received some recognition in the years before her death in 1966. So there was a touch of poetic justice last week when Pravda announced that an asteroid discovered by Soviet astronomers will be named Akhmatova in honor of the centennial of her birth next year...
...wasn't exactly what Akhmatova had in mind. In the Epilogue to Requiem, she wrote: "And if my country ever should assent/ to casting in my name a monument,/ I should be proud to have my memory graced,/ but only if the monument be placed/ . . . here, where I endured three hundred hours/ in line before the implacable iron bars...