Article

Name: “...Passed Me the Highest Orders...”: Akhmatova’s Note with Instructions to Nika Glen

Authors: Olga E. Rubinchik

Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskij Dom) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article introduces Anna Akhmatova’s note with instructions to her literary secretary Nika Glen. At first glance, this is a completely “blind” list, which can neither be dated nor deciphered. However, the information accumulated by contemporary Akhmatology about Akhmatova’s creative biography in the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s makes it possible to place the note in the context of the events. The work conducts and substantiates the dating of the text, reveals the content of the items on the list of assignments, including the illegal transfer abroad of “Poem without a Hero” for its publication in the American anthology “Aerial Ways”. The note partly shows the circle of Akhmatova’s Moscow friends in the early 1960s and allows us to understand the scope of her concerns, problems, and interests at this time.

Keywords: Anna Akhmatova, Nika Glen, еpistolary, errand lists, the publishing house “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” (Goslit), Soviet censorship, “Poem without a Hero”, the poem “To the Poem itself”, anthology “Aerial Ways”

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