My Half Century: Selected Prose

by Anna Akhmatova

all the major prose works

Genres: Russia, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature, Memoir, Essays, Russian Literature

439 pages, Hardcover

First published December 24, 2012

About the author

also known as: Анна Ахматова and Anna Ajmátova

Personal themes characterize lyrical beauty of noted work of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, pseudonym of Anna Andreevna Gorenko; the Soviet government banned her books between 1946 and 1958.

People credit this modernist of the most acclaimed writers in the canon.

Her writing ranges from short lyrics to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her work addresses a variety of themes including time and memory, the fate of creative women, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism. She has been widely translated into many languages, and is one of the best-known Russian poets of 20th century.

In 1910, she married the poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, who very soon left her for lion hunting in Africa, the battlefields of World War I, and the society of Parisian grisettes. Her husband did not take her poems seriously, and was shocked when Alexander Blok declared to him that he preferred her poems to his. Their son, Lev, born in 1912, was to become a famous Neo-Eurasianist historian.

Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for activities considered anti-Soviet; Akhmatova then married a prominent Assyriologist Vladimir Shilejko, and then an art scholar, Nikolay Punin, who died in the Stalinist Gulag camps. After that, she spurned several proposals from the married poet, Boris Pasternak.

After 1922, Akhmatova was condemned as a bourgeois element, and from 1925 to 1940, her poetry was banned from publication. She earned her living by translating Leopardi and publishing essays, including some brilliant essays on Pushkin, in scholarly periodicals. All of her friends either emigrated or were repressed.

Her son spent his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she even resorted to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release. Their relations remained strained, however. Akhmatova died at the age of 76 in St. Peterburg. She was interred at Komarovo Cemetery.

There is a museum devoted to Akhmatova at the apartment where she lived with Nikolai Punin at the garden wing of the Fountain House (more properly known as the Sheremetev Palace) on the Fontanka Embankment, where Akhmatova lived from the mid 1920s until 1952.

Reviews

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text
A Biographical Sketch, by Ronald Meyer

Pages from a Diary

--Pages from a Diary
--Briefly about Myself
--Reviewing the Past
--On the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Literary Career
--Random Notes
--On the History of Acmeism
--Nikolai Gumilyov and Acmeism
--1910
--Clearing Up a Misunderstanding
--'Rosary'
--'White Flock'
--'Anno Domini'
--On 'Petersburg Winters'
--Pseudo-Memoirs
--Excerpts from the Last Diary Entries

My Half Century

--Reminiscences of Alexander Blok
--Mikhail Lozinsky
--Amedeo Modigliani
--Osip Mandelstam
--Innokenty Annensky
--Nikolai Gumilyov
--Boris Pasternak
--Marina Tsvetaeva
--Titsian Tabidze and Paolo Yashvili

Prose about the Poem

--Prose About the Poem
--The Ballet Libretto

About Pushkin

--A Word about Pushkin
--Pushkin's Last Tale
--'The Tale of the Golden Cockerel': Commentary
--Benjamin Constant's 'Adolphe' in Pushkin's Work
--Pushkin's 'Stone Guest'
--Pushkin's Death
--Alexandrina
--Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva

Reviews and Public Addresses

--On Nadezhda Lvova's Poetry
--Work in Progress
--An Address Broadcast on the Program "This Is Radio Leningrad"
--A Radio Broadcast on the Anniversary of Pushkin's Birth
--Notes in the Margin
--Pushkin and Children
--A Word about Dante

Letters

--To Sergei von Shtein
--To Valery Bryusov
--To Alexander Blok
--To Pavel Shchegolyov
--To Nikolai Gumilyov
--To Georgy Chulkov
--To Anastasia Chebotaryevskaya
--To Fyodor Sologub
--To Anna Gumilyova
--To Vladimir Shileiko
--To Ioanna Bryusova
--To Nikolai Khardzhiev
--To Osip Mandelstam
--To Emma Gershtein
--To Nadezhda Mandelstam
--To Vladimir Garshin
--To Irina Tomashevskaya
--To Boris Pasternak
--To Vera Sutugina
--To Lev Gumilyov
--To Aleksis Rannit
--To Kornei Chukovsky
--To Semyon Weinberg
--To Georges Nivat
--To Viktor Gorenko
--To Fyodor Malov
--To Joseph Brodsky

Afterword: Akhmatova's Prose, by Emma Gershtein

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

[Garnette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing selected prose of the Russian poet who refused to escape communism, choosing to stay in Russia, was declared a non-person-sent to Tashkent, lived by her wits, almost starved and yet wrote incredible poetry. Baby-sat as not 'allowed' to work, she held the baby on her breast and wrote.

[Gemma Fasheun · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing piece.