Sharon Leiter

"Erudite, perceptive, and very well-written…offers a new and illuminating perspective on the development and leading themes of one of this century's major poets."
"Sensitive…well-planned and elegantly written."

This book examines the poetry of Anna Akhmatova in light of its evolving vision of Petersburg-Leningrad. Of those transitional writers who came of age in imperial Petersburg and survived into the Leningrad era, Akhmatova was most consistently preoccupied with the Petersburg tradition and the possibilities for its survival in the Soviet world. The half-century of her poetic landscape is dominated by the outline of her city, constant in its many incarnations. Inheriting the dark-hued, "unreal" city of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Blok, Akhmatova was to adapt and transform the Petersburg myth through her own vision: as a woman and as a refugee from the nineteenth to what she was to call "not the calendar, but the True Twentieth Century."

Sharon Leiter's Akhmatova's Petersburg is the first study to systematically view the evolution of Akhmatova's Petersburg poetry. Proceeding chronologically from the teens to the 1960s, the author examines the successive stages in Akhmatova's merging of her poetic biography with the history of the city she called her "blessed cradle," marriage bed, and place of her posthumous monument. Beginning with the early love poetry, the study traces the emergence of Akhmatova's historical vision of the city, as imperial Petersburg became war-torn, revolutionary Petrograd, a city "turned into the opposite of itself," and, later, Soviet Leningrad: the prison city of the 1930s (Requiem), the great martyr of the Leningrad blockade, and the spectral postwar city, people by the ghosts of its own past. A final chapter interprets Poem Without a Hero, the oblique masterpiece of Akhmatova's later years, as the culmination and reconciliation of her Petersburg themes. Each chapter centers around close readings of key poems and traces the movement of city imagery from poem to poem. Excerpts from verse and criticism are given both in the original Russian and in English translation.

Dr. Leiter identifies Akhmatova as the last great poet of the Petersburg tradition, who continued to claim for it, until her death in 1966, a central symbolic role in Russian destiny. Her study establishes the centrality of Petersburg to Akhmatova's poetic world and demonstrates the impact of radical change upon a literary tradition.

"An extremely productive new approach…jargon-free, highly recommended for specialists and informed readers.",