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(“Husband dead, son in gaol / Pray for me.”) In the last gasp of the Tsarist era
     she had known no persecution worse than routine incomprehension for her impressionistic poetry and condemnation by women for her effect on their men. The Russia of Lenin and Stalin made her
     first a tragic, then an heroic, figure. After 1922 she was condemned as abourgeois element and severely restricted in what she could publish. After World War II, in 1946,
     she was personally condemned by Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin’s plug-ugly in charge of culture. She was allowed to publish nothing new, and everything she had ever written in verse form was
     dismissed as “remote from socialist reconstruction.” Her prestige abroad helped to keep her alive at home, but also ensured that her life could never be comfortable: the security
     police were always on her case. In the 1950s she was rehabilitated to the extent that a censored edition of her collected poems was officially published. (“Requiem” was among the
     poems missing: Isaiah Berlin, who visited her in Moscow in 1946, was correct when he predicted that it would never be published in Russia as long as the Soviet Union lasted.) Unofficially,
     however, her work had always circulated, whether in samizdat or, in that peculiarly Russian tribute to greatness, from mouth to mouth, by memory. Akhmatova was the embodiment of the Russian
     liberal heritage that the authoritarians felt bound to go on threatening long after it had surrendered. As such, she was an inspiring symbol, but when a poet becomes better known than her
     poems it usually means that she is being sacrificed, for extraneous reasons, on the altar of her own glory. In Akhmatova’s case, the extraneous reasons were political. It should be a
     mark of reasonable politics that a woman like her is not called upon to be a heroine.

This lyrical wealth of Pushkin . . .
    —ANNA AKHMATOVA,
     “PUSHKIN’S ‘STONE GHOST’”
    S OME LANGUAGES ARE inherently more beautiful than others, and Russian is among the most beautiful of all. For anyone learning Russian, a phrase like “lyrical wealth” comes singing out of the page like a
    two-word aria from an opera by Moussorgsky. I noted it down as a soon as I saw it. In 1968 the West German publishing house that called itself Inter-Language Literary Associates produced a
    magnificenttwo-volume collection of Akhmatova’s works in verse and prose. I bought those books in London in 1978, when I was in my first stage of learning to read the
    language. I never got to the last stage, or anywhere near it: but I did reach the point where I could read an essay without too much help from the dictionary. (Memo to any student making a raid
    on the culture of another language: essays are always the easiest way in.) Reading Akhmatova’s essays, it was soon apparent that she would have been an excellent full-time critic of
    literature if she had been given permission. But of course she wasn’t, which brings us immediately to the point.
    If the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had never happened, the cafés of Petersburg and Moscow would
    probably have dominated this book. Petersburg, in particular, would have rivalled Vienna. (If the Nazis had never come to power, Vienna and Berlin would have continued to rival Paris, but
    that’s another matter, although one we are bound to get to soon enough.) The Russian cultural upsurge in the years before the Revolution was so powerful that after the Revolution it took a
    while to slow down. (In the emigration, it never slowed down, but it did thin out as time went on: whereas Diaghilev was a whole movement in the arts, Balanchine’s influence was confined to
    the ballet, and Nureyev and Baryshnikov, though they could create contexts, did so mainly for themselves—wonderful as they both were, they were just dancers.) Largely because the new regime
    took some time to purge itself of apparatchiks with a taste for the artistically vital, the Revolution, inheriting an