Word: akhmatova
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...length. Few would question the selection of a figure like Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first accredited woman doctor in the U.S. But the writers' list includes quite unimportant figures like Vita Sackville-West and Agnes Smedley, while ignoring real heroines of literature like the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. What has caused the real flap, however, is Chicago's relentless concentration on the pudenda...
...become a mockery of its original promise, the Revolution is unlikely ever again to be as frightful as it was under Stalin, if only because the Russian people are so much better informed now and probably would not stand for such mass terror. Then, the poet Anna Akhmatova wrote: "The stars of death stood over us./ And Russia, guiltless, be loved, writhed/ under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." Life under Lenin's current successor has relaxed, grown somewhat less bleak, but there still seems no prospect that the mythology will be fulfilled: that...
...irony of World War II was that it brought many Russians a small degree of freedom. Stalin entreated his "brothers and sisters" to unite in defending the motherland. Pravda even printed one of Akhmatova's heroic war poems. Her dormant fame was reawakened. In 1944 she received a standing ovation after reading her poetry from a Moscow stage. But two years later, with the war won, Stalin was asking. "Who organized this standing ovation?" Akhmatova was proscribed again and her son was rearrested...
Like so many Russian artists, Akhmatova learned to discern fate in the changing cold war weather. The Khrushchev thaw brought renewed official acceptance. Much of her work was republished in Russia. At 75, she traveled to Oxford for an honorary degree, to Italy for a prize and to Paris. where 53 years before Modigliani had sketched her portrait. But fame, as Akhmatova once wrote, "is a trap wherein there is neither happiness nor light." Two years later, when she was buried with full Orthodox rites, her graveside was crowded with the Soviet literary establishment...
...Akhmatova's life seems to have been dedicated by history to a task more important than making fine poems. She had a mission, as her friend Nadezhda Mandelstam said, to survive and testify about a cruel age. She embraced the role. In a brief recollection, she tells about the hundreds of hours spent waiting outside Leningrad's prison for word about...