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In the poetry of Anna Akhmatova the nineteenth-century myth of Petersburg, as the accursed, unreal city, is filtered through the vision of a poet born in Imperial Russia and destined to confront the terrors of Soviet rule. The city that emerges embodies loss and dislocation, continuity and miraculous survival. This "scholarly and imaginative study" (New York Review of Books) convincingly demonstrates that a good part of Akhmatovas verse could never have been written but for the Petersburg environment.
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Akhmatova's Petersburg Sharon Leiter "Erudite, perceptive, and very well written . . . offers a new and illuminating perspective on the development and leading themes of one of this century's major poets." Donald Fanger, Harvard Uiiiiigrsity
This book examines the poetry of Anna Akhmatova in light of its evolving vision of PetersburgLeningrad. Of those transitional writers who came of age in imperial Petersburg and survived into the Leningrad era, Akhmatova was most consistently preoccupied with the Petersburg tradition and the pos sibilities for its survival in the Soviet world. The half-century of her poetic landscape is dominated by the out line of her city, constant in its manv incarnations. Inheriting the darkhued, "unreal" city of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Blok, Akhmatova was to adapt and trans form the Petersburg myth through her unique vision: as a woman and as a refugee from the nineteenth to what she was to call "not the calen dar, but the True Twentieth Century." Sharon Leiter's Akhmatova's Petersburg is the first study to sys tematically view the evolution of Akhmatova's Petersburg poetrv. Pro ceeding chronologicallv from the (coutiiiued on back flap)
Akhmatova's Petersburg
Akhmatova in Tsarskoe Selo, ca. 1916
Akhmatovas Petersburg Sharon Leiter
University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia 1983
For my parents, Selma and Al Sherman, with love and gratitude
Credits Cover and photo on p. 83 are from Leningrad: History, Art, and Architecture by Nigel Gosling. Copyright © 1963 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Photos by Colin Jones. Used with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., acting as agent for Crowell Collier Publishers Ltd., formerly part of Cassell Ltd. Studio Vista Ltd. The following photos of Akhmatova on pp. ii, 12, and 144 are from Anna Akhmatova, stikhi, perepiska, vospominanija, ikonografia, compiled by Carl Proffer (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1977), and are used with permission. The translation of Poem Without a Hero by Carl Proffer with Assya Humesky from Anna Akhmatova (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1977) is used with permission. Other illustrative material from Russian publications. This work was published with the support of the Haney Foundation. Copyright © 1983 by the University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Leiter, Sharon. Akhmatova's Petersburg. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna, 1889-1966—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Leningrad (R.S.F.S.R.) in literature. I. Title. II. Title: Petersburg. PG3476.A324Z74 1983 891.71'42 82-40491 isbn 0-8122-7864-x
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction
1
I The Early Petersburg Love Poems
II The Historical City in Transition III The Terror and the War
IV The Postwar City
n 51
83
113
V Poem Without a Hero
143
The Second Petersburg: Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
203
Index of Names and Subjects Index of Poems by Akhmatova
208
213
191
Photographs Cover: The Neva in Winter Frontispiece: Akhmatova in Tsarskoe Selo, ca. 1916 Akhmatova, 1924. (Photograph by