Oral Akhmatova of the 1920s-1960s: Poetics and Contexts

"Oral Akhmatova" is a corpus of Anna Akhmatova's statements that we have collected from memoirs, diaries, and letters (as well as the sole tape recording of her conversation). These statements possess a unique poetics, in some ways similar to, and in other ways diverging from, the artistic principles of her written texts (both poems and memoir prose). Akhmatova's words acquire special significance within the context of the era's circumstances, during which she was not only unable to publish her texts but often hesitated to even write them down. Akhmatova's statements contribute almost equally to her mythologized personal and literary biography as her poems do, and they reconstruct her own portrayal of the epoch to no lesser extent. By examining individual phrases or groups of statements and noting their connections to the poet's written texts and the circumstances of the era, we identify not only the main directions within the corpus of "Oral Akhmatova," but also the key elements of the poetics of this corpus.