ABSTRACT
The attitude of Anna Akhmatova toward what appears to be in Poèma bez geroia a reported evaluation of her epoch by some contemporaries as the “silver age,” I serebrianyi mesiats iarko/ Nad serebrianym vekom styl-“And the silver moon was brightly / Freezing over the silver age,” is tensely ambivalent, in her typical proud and, at the same time, self-effacing manner, not so much because the age has been somehow overpraised, but because it may have been underestimated. The age had been reviled quite sufficiently by the socially minded critics before and after the revolution as the age of decadence. However, whether good or evil, beautiful or ugly, life-giving or deadly, it was not second-rate, weak, imitative, or pale. Hence Akhmatova’s precise pinpointing of the poles of that era:
There is no evidence that Akhmatova ever shared the condescending skepticism of Georgii Adamovich (1967:87), who wrote, blending a reference to Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age” and the expression applied to the Latin of the Middle Ages, latinitas argentata (rather than argentea): “[…]our Silver Age, which ought to be called actually a
silver-plated age” (kotoromu vprochem luchshe bylo by nazyvat’sia vekom poserebrennym).
