In the following essay, Reeder analyzes Akhmatova's poetry from the years of Stalinist oppression.

In the following essay, Simon analyzes what Lydia Chukovskaya's The Akhmatova Journals reveal about Anna Akhmatova, and he also points out what the book is lacking, including better footnotes and better translations of the poet's work.

In the following essay, Brody discusses the poems in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, and Akhmatova's place in Russian literature.

In the following essay, Cavanagh discusses how Akhmatova and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandel'shtam refused to be silenced by Stalinist oppression.

In the following essay, Ketchian traces many of the devices and allusions in Akhmatova's poem "Stansy" to Pushkin.

In the following review, Bayley presents an overview of Akhmatova's life and career in his discussion of three works concerning the poet: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer: Remembering Anna Akhmatova, by Anatoly Nayman; and In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova, by Susan Amert.

In [Akhmatova's] four collections after Rosary, the love theme remains dominant despite the cataclysm of war and revolution, and the total destruction of the world that [she] had known. If the tone of these volumes reflects the turmoil of the times and becomes less capricious and more austere, the focus remains inward, on a woman's ill-starred love. (p. 55) It is interesting to note that even in Akhmatova's very earliest work (two poems from the first copy book), desertion and abandonme...

In Akhmatova's poems we are faced with three images of the poet: the one arising out of the facts of her biography; the one created by Russo-Soviet criticism of the poems; and the one she created of herself in her work. The third image emerges initially from many different versions of 'I'. Slowly, during the course of her life, the word and the person giving the word utterance ceased any longer to be divided, so that the voice of the person Akhmatova can be heard speaking to us directly...

In the following essay, Kunitz discusses the difficulty in translating Akhmatova's poetry from its original Russian.

Russell is an author and writes for art and culture for the New York Times. In the following essay, he describes the museum in St. Petersburg dedicated to Akhmatova.

In the following review, Franklin judges the quality of the discussion and presentation of Akhmatova's work in In a Shattered Mirror, by Susan Amert; My Half Century, edited by Ronald Meyer; and The Complete Poems, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer.

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

[In Vecher, Akhmatova's first book of poems, she] speaks about simple earthly happiness and about simple intimate and personal sorrow. Love, love's parting, unrequited love, love's betrayal, clear and serene confidence in the lover, feelings of grief, of loneliness, of despair—all the things that everyone Anna Akhmatova 1888–1966 Gabriel D. Hackett, NYmight feel and understand, though perhaps less deeply an...

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

For many years Anna Akhmatova's poetry appeared to her contemporaries as if it had frozen within the restricted limits laid down by her first books: Evening, Rosary, White Flock…. It seemed that the poetess, submerged in the past, in the world of intimate reminiscences and in her own tradition of versification, would never tear herself away from the captivity of her beloved themes, familiar images, and established intonations. Even in the twenties critics had written that Anna Akhmatova was do...

Anna Akhmatova's personality was phenomenal. It was not given to any woman in Russian poetry before her to express herself with such convincing, lyrical power, to speak out so independently that her voice added once and for all a special—Akhmatovan—note to the art of the Russian poetic word. Akhmatova triumphed in competition with many poets of the early twentieth century who were then regarded as leading figures in poetry and who occupied the center of the stage. Akhmatova's wor...

In the following essay, Specter discusses the museum dedicated to Akhmatova.

In the following review, Ketchian praises that The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova is an important resource for lovers of Russian poetry, but complains that further editions need better editing to correct mistakes in translation.

In the following essay, Byelyakova provides an overview of Akhmatova's career.

Akhmatova is a traditional poet, in the highest sense of the word…. Traditional verse more vividly than free verse emphasizes the banal, or the basic, in what is said. The contrast of traditional form to so-called contemporary content gives the work greater scale and tension. The principle is extremely simple: here is a normal person, with arms and legs, properly dressed, a tie and stickpin, but just look at the way he talks! Remember how the author of The Waste Land dressed, or imagine an automobile...

Akhmatova was a very unselfconscious poet in many ways; she had qualities of elemental force, utterance haunted and Delphic; yet these went together with elegance and sophistication, even a certain kind of mirror-gazing and a cunning which is chétif, or, as the Russians say zloi. She is not in the least like Blake or Eliot, and yet those are the English poets—different as they are—who offer some sort of parallel with her finest work. The incongruity in coupling such names shows how exce...

[The] young Akhmatova shuns the obscurity so characteristic of avant-garde verse. When she published her first poems, Russian readers had long been accustomed to expect new poetry not to yield its secrets as easily as hers does. True, her lyrics normally convey no more than an elusive and vague impression of emotions that are themselves elusive and vague. But they are otherwise largely free from obscurity, their originality being that of startling simplicity. The language is straightforward, conversational&...

[Akhmatova's] incorruptibility as a person is closely linked to her most fundamental characteristic as a poet: fidelity to things as they are, to 'the clear, familiar, material world'. It was Mandelstam who pointed out that the roots of her poetry are in Russian prose fiction. It is a surprising truth, in view of the supreme musical quality of her verse; but she has the novelist's concern for tangible realities, events in place and time…. In all her life's work, her...

[Anna Akhmatova's Selected Poems] ranges from whispers to anguished screams, from personal happiness to the most acute personal distress. It is lyrical, modest, feminine, narrow in tone and form. The sensibility of many passages is admirable, and has encouraged scores of young "unofficial" poets in Russia, brought up to despise sensibility, nevertheless to give expression to their own. In her youth Akhmatova was capable of turning out sentimental trash such as "The Grey-Eyed King...

The 'I' of [Akhmatova's] poems is without egotism, though autobiography is her natural medium. How can we fail to be moved by the story of the victimisation, silence and persistence of a poet who loved her country but not the revolution? Her work survives on memory ('Flaubert, insomnia, the smell of lilacs') as Eliot's does, and it is a poetry of that social class. Indeed, Acmeism has clear affinities with Imagism. But unlike H. D., Akhmatova's perspective is...