Anna Akhmatova

The first of Russian poet Akhmatova's works to be published after the death of Stalin.

• Anna Akhmatova (Russian).
• Stikhotvoreniia [Poems].
• Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1958.
• Octavo.
• 132 pages.
• Text in Russian.
• Bound in the original maroon cloth, gilt lettering to upper cover.

Akhmatova (1889–1966) was one of the legendary figures of modern Russian poetry. Her life was one of great achievement and great loss. Her first husband, Nikolay Gumilev, was executed, her second husband, Nikolay Punin, died in the Gulag and her son Lev was also sent to the labor camps.

Being one of her country's great lyric poets, she wrote first hand and movingly about Stalin's terror. While fellow poets and artists adored her, she was spied on by the state and finally expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. She survived to become one of the century's most eloquent witnesses to the Soviet nightmare and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965.