Article

Name: A Siberian Pupil of “Anna Akhmatova’s Readers School”

Authors: Roman D. Timenchik

The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

In the section On the Occasion of the Centenary of Yury Chumakov

Abstract:

A totally forgotten feuilleton placed in Tomsk newspaper in 1916 is reproduced with a historical commentary. It belonged to a pen of art expert Tatiana Sapozhnikova-Chernavina (1887– 1971) and was never mentioned in any of numerous bibliographic lists on Anna Akhmatova’s creative works. She is known as brave fugitive female for her heroic escapade from USSR in 1932 together with her husband, a prominent fishery biologist, and little son.

Her early works as a literary observer are worth to be included in contemporary circularization (e.g. an essay on Ilya Ehrenburg’s poetry et al.). The article “Modern Poetesses: Anna Akmatova” was an attempt to reconstruct the net of motifs spanning the poems of the book “Rosary” (1914). The foreword to the annotated republication points some relevant patterns of the literary attitude of Sapozhnikova-Chernavina as well as lists some of the main milestones of her biography including the episodes when she is represented as an eyewitness of swift-passing but meaningful tragic moments in the history of Russian poetry under Soviets. A question is raised about picking up her scattered literary heritage.

Keywords: Anna Akhmatova, Tatiana Sapozhnikova-Chernavina, schools of poet’s readers

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