In Love and Revolution: Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stephen Capus
Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Spring 2025
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Published 15th February 2025. Available for pre-order.
Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa, Ukraine, in 1889, as Anna Gorenko. She adopted her pen-name from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, and lived most of her life in that city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter-revolutionary activities.
Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia’s leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953—with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic War—she found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in the wake of the notorious Zhdanov speech, in which she was described as a ‘cross between a nun and a whore’. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted exclusion from publication as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem, her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges. Stephen Capus's formal translations offer a new way of approaching Akhmatova for Anglophone readers.
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