ABSTRACT
She was the “bridge between Not and Was in a wail of torments and rapture.” This arresting line, written by the Russian poet Anatoly Naiman (b. 1936), evokes the legendary Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), one of the seminal poets of the twentieth century and the mentor, not only of Naiman, but also of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), Dmitry Bobyshev (b. 1936), and Evgeny Rein (b. 1935). Beginning in 1959, in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), these four aspiring poets—who were friends—sought out the ailing, impoverished, ever transient, and oft publicly denounced Akhmatova, the author of the poetic sequences Requiem, Poem without a Hero, and The Way of All the Earth. The young men recited their poems to her, helped her out in daily chores, and Naiman served as her secretary from 1962 to her death. Some of the one-to-one friendships in the foursome eventually soured; the reasons are suggested in Rein’s poem “In Pavlovsk Park.” Let’s avoid that topic. “Life is like a letter,” he rightly observes in “Signature for a Torn Portrait,” “with blotches on the page.”
