"Although officially stifled, Akhmatova’s work continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work..."

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Although officially stifled, Akhmatova’s work continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden, passed and read in the gulags.

Akhmatova’s close friend and chronicler Lydia Chukovskaya described how writers working to keep poetic messages alive used various strategies. A small trusted circle would, for example, memorize each others’ works and circulate them only by oral means. She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove. The poems were carefully disseminated in this way, however it is likely that many complied in this manner were lost. “It was like a ritual,” Chukovskaya wrote. “Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.”

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Anna Akhmatova (via mollycrabapple)

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