SOURCE: "Shards of Russian History," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 21, 1993, pp. 3, 9.

In the following review, Reynolds discusses the world evoked by the essays in Akhmatova's My Half Century.

On the morning of May 13, 1934, Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam began to clean up the scattered books and papers left by the agents who had arrested Nadezhda's husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, the night before. While some papers, including the incriminating poem about Stalin ("And every killing is a treat / for the broad-chested Ossete") had already been smuggled out by friends and visitors, one pile still lay by the door. "Don't touch it," said Akhmatova. Nadezhda, trusting the instincts of her friend, left the papers on the floor. "Ah," said the senior police agent, back for a surprise visit, "you still haven't tidied up."

This instinct for survival, what Nadezhda Mandelstam later called her "Russian powers of endurance...