Article

Name: “I’m Bored and Getting Wet in the Booth”: Letter from Anna Akhmatova to Nika Glen

Authors: Olga E. Rubinchik

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

In the section Plots and Destinies

Abstract:

The article discusses an unknown letter from Anna Akhmatova to Nika Glen, written on July 10, 1963, which shows both the everyday and literary side of her life.

Glen is a translator of Bulgarian prose and an editor. From 1956 to 1983, she worked in the Slavic editorial office of the “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” publishing house (Goslitizdat). In 1956 she met Akhmatova and offered her a job of translating the poems of Bulgarian poet Elisaveta Bagryana. From 1958 to early 1963, Glen was Akhmatova’s unofficial literary secretary. And subsequently she enjoyed Akhmatova’s absolute trust and remained one of her main assistants. From 1988, Glen served for several years as the secretary of the Commission on her literary heritage. She contributed to the return of Akhmatova’s works to the reader in full, and to the preservation of her memory. Glen donated her Akhmatova archive (more than 500 storage units) to the Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House. The archive includes the Akhmatova epistolary addressed to Nika Nikolaevna, which includes this letter. The publication of the letter is accompanied by a detailed commentary, revealing the circumstances in which it was written, and also telling about the people mentioned in it and the nature of their communication with Akhmatova. These are the poetess and translator Maria Petrovykh; Tatyana Ivanova, translator from Romanian and English, and editor; Vyacheslav Ivanov, linguist, literary scholar, and anthropologist; Borislav Georgiev, Bulgarian classical philologist, translator from ancient Greek, and poet, who compiled the first Bulgarian bibliography of Akhmatova; Boris Vakhtin, writer and sinologist; Julia Zhivova, editor and translator of Polish prose; Olga Kutasova, translator of works by Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian writers. The commentary includes a number of previously unpublished documents, in particular, Zhivova’s oral recollections of about herself and her acquaintance with Akhmatova, recorded on tape by the author of the article.

Keywords: Anna Akhmatova, letter, translations, Komarovo, Nika Glen, Tudor Arghezi, Tatyana Ivanova (Shpolskaya), Borislav Georgiev, Julia Zhivova, Olga Kutasova

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