Bella Akhmadulina Critical Essay | Critical Review by John Bayley

Critical Review by John Bayley

SOURCE: Bayley, John. Review of The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose, by Bella Akhmadulina. London Review of Books 13, no. 2 (January 1991): 12.

In the following review, Bayley briefly discusses Akhmadulina’s poems from The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose and comments on the Russian poets who influenced her.

Bella Akhmadulina, a still comparatively young Soviet poet, identifies strongly with Akhmatova's outlook and personality [in The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose]. ‘The Photograph’ and ‘Anna Akhmatova’ celebrate this slightly ambiguous hero-worship. ‘Anna Akhmatova’ is in six-line stanzas carefully rhymed. Notwithstanding this sort of continuity, there seems an essential lack of strong involuntary character in this poetry, as in that of Evtushenko, to whom Akhmadulina was once married. She has remarked that she could hardly remember their marriage, a failure of memory which would not have commended itself to Akhmatova, for whom the poet was...
(read more)