Selected Poems

Anna Akhmatova is identified, along with Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva, as one of the four leading poets of Twentieth-Century Russian literature. Her poetry, classically rhymed and metered but also laconic and highly elliptical, is deeply engaged with predecessors such as Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Dostoevsky, Annensky and above all Pushkin, and also with contemporaries such as Mandelstam, T.S. Eliot, and Gumilev, her husband, who was persecuted and finally executed by Stalin. The poems collected, including the masterworks "Requiem" and "Poem without a Hero," conjure intimations of the infinite and profound emotional depth through meditations on the perception of everyday objects and evocative settings, forming a powerful record of spiritual resilience. With an introductory essay by Walter Arndt, acclaimed translator of Russian literature, and translations by Arndt, Robin Kemball, and Carl R. Proffer, this volume provides the most authoritative and readable versions of Akhmatova’s poetry in English.