Requiem.
Munich: Tovarishchestvo Zarubezhnykh Pisatelei, 1963. First edition of Akhmatova’s masterpiece, first published in this form in the West, without the poet’s knowledge, fourteen years prior to its publication in the Soviet Union in the journal Novyi mir in April 1987. “From 1925 until 1940, there was an unofficial ban on the publication of Akhmatova’s poetry. Akhmatova concentrated on scholarship, immersing herself in her critical studies of Pushkin. But in 1935, following the arrest of Nikolay Punin, the man she was living with, and Lev Gumilyov, her son, she began to compose the 15-part poetry and prose cycle Requiem. Not daring to write it down, she recited various parts to friends, including Lidiya Chukovskaya (Korney Chukovsky’s daughter), who memorized and reassembled them. Requiem, a tribute to the ordeal of the victims of the Terror, and the women who waited in the prison lines hoping to get word of them, is based on her own experience in Leningrad, where Lev was imprisoned for 17 months. In this great cycle, the “you” becomes all Russians imprisoned and tortured by their own government. Requiem was finally published in the Soviet Union in April 1987, in the journal Novy mir, was included in a book of her poems, Anna Akhmatova, Ya – golos vash. (Anna Akhmatova, I – am your voice. Moscow 1989) and in subsequent editions of her work.” – Judith Hemschemeyer, from her preface to The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (Boston and Edinburgh, 1992). Assessing Akhmatova’s unique place in Russian poetry, and the profound identification of the Russian people with her, and she with them, during the Stalinist period, Joseph Brodsky wrote: “At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise couldn’t be retained by the mind. In that sense, the whole nation took up the pen name of Akhmatova.” – Joseph Brodsky, The New York Public Library’s Books of the Century, (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 174. A fine copy, preserved in a folding cloth box. 8vo, frontispiece portrait, original printed white wrappers.
Price: $3,500.00