Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) has long been seen as one of the greatest Russian poets of the last century. She came to fame with her first book of love poems, Evening (1912). Many of her concise, graceful lyrics attain the intensity of spells; they are also psychologically exact. Osip Mandelstam said that Akhmatova ‘brought into the Russian lyric all the huge complexity and psychological richness of the nineteenth-century Russian novel’. 

By the 1920s, however, Akhmatova was adopting – or being forced into – the role of witness to the horrors of the age. She herself was never arrested, but her first husband, the poet Nikolay Gumilyov – to whom she remained close even after their divorce – was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Her third husband, the art historian Nikolay Punin, died in the Gulag. The fate of her son Lev Gumilyov may have occasioned still deeper pain: he spent more than ten years in the Gulag and blamed his mother for not doing enough to help him.

There has been fierce controversy over the translation of works by Akhmatova and her contemporaries. Like most Russian poets before the 1990s, Akhmatova nearly always used metre and rhyme. Joseph Brodsky, among others, was appalled by the many free-verse translations of Akhmatova’s work, justifiably considering them flat and unmemorable. Such