Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), one of twentieth-century Russia’s greatest poets, was viewed as a dangerous element by post-Revolution authorities. One of the few unrepentant poets to survive the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Stalinist purges, she set for herself the artistic task of preserving the memory of pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage and of those who had been silenced. This book presents Nancy K. Anderson’s superb translations of three of Akhmatova’s most important poems: Requiem, a commemoration of the victims of Stalin’s Terror; The Way of All the Earth, a work to which the poet returned repeatedly over the last quarter-century of her life and which combines Old Russian motifs with the modernist search for a lost past; and Poem Without a Hero, widely admired as the poet’s magnum opus. Each poem is accompanied by extensive commentary. The complex and allusive Poem Without a Hero is also provided with an extensive critical commentary that draws on the poet’s manuscripts and private notebooks. Anderson offers relevant facts about the poet’s life and an overview of the political and cultural forces that shaped her work. The resulting volume enables English-language readers to gain a deeper level of understanding of Akhmatova’s poems and how and why they were created.

Definitive translations of Akhmatova back in bilingual format.

Waiting for the Muse: Poems of Anna Akhmatova presents new translations of the work of this great Russian poet, set in the context of her life. Akhmatova saw the source of her creativity as the appearance to her of the Muse, the embodiment of poetic inspiration. In the poems written over her lifetime, from the early love lyrics to poems of resistance during the Stalinist Terror to poems of remembrance as her life neared its end, her conception of the Muse changed with the circumstances of her life. The Muse first appeared as an unpredictable young woman, then the classical figure of Erato, then a woman who stood beside her in the prison lines, then a cruel taskmaster. Akhmatova herself became the Muse for other Russian poets. Ultimately, Akhmatova concluded that the Muse may have been the torment she had been forced to suffer.

Akhmatova was recognised as one of the world's great poets after her death in 1966. Refusing to leave Russia when her work was censored and her name attacked she spoke to and for the soul of her people. There are 800 poems and essays in this edition some of which have not been published in English before.

A portrait of the Russian poet offers insight into her life, works, associates, and twentieth-century Russia