SOURCE: A review of My Half Century: Selected Prose, in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 3, Summer, 1993, pp. 628-29.

In the following review, Lamonte discusses the ghosts that haunt the pages of Akhmatova's My Half Century.

In his preface to My Half Century, a splendid selection of the translated prose writings of Anna Akhmatova, Ronald Meyer, the editor of the volume, explains that the author never conceived of composing a chronicle of her life and times. Although, as Meyer points out, it is futile to imagine what the completed work might have been, a model could perhaps be sought in Pasternak and Mandelstam's "autobiographical fragments," as Safe Conduct and The Noise of Time were defined by their creators. In fact, this form of autobiography is characteristic of the postmodern esthetic, and even of "high modernism." For example, all of Ionesco's published diaries assume this loose, highly suggestive structure (Notes...