caxtonianJOURNAL OF THE CAXTON CLUB VOLUME XV, NO. 4 APRIL 2007

Collecting Anna AkhmatovaR. Eden Martin

Russia is, above all, a country of lit-erature, particularly poetry. (Devo-tees of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Bul-gakov or Solzhenitzin or evenRachmaninoff or Mussorgsky mightargue the point.) Cab drivers in Peters-burg and Moscow readily quotePushkin; and the characters and linesof his Evgeny Onegin are embedded inthe Russian national consciousness.Petersburg alone has at least a dozenliterary museums dedicated to preserv-ing the memory of the writers wholived there.

Anna Akhmatova (accent on secondsyllablema) was one of the greatestof these Russian poets. She lived fromthe late years of the 19th Century untilher death in 1966. The early years ofthe 20th Century are sometimes calledthe Silver Age of Russian poetry. Cen-tered in the two great cultural centersof Moscow and Petersburg, manydozens of writers filled the pages of lit-erary journals and turned out volumesof verse. Their names are mostly unfa-miliar to Western audiences becausefew Westerners read Russian, andpoetry in translation loses most of itsmusicthe rhythms, rhymes, allitera-tions, and nuances. These Silver Agepoets were greatly talented and enormouslycreative. Today, experts generally regardfour or five of these at the top level:Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak,and Tsvetaeva.

These Russian poets organized them-selves into groups or schools: the Symbol-ists, Acmeists, Futurists (with their manypermutations), Imagists, and many others.They published thousands of volumes ofpoemsthick books and thin, expensive

and cheap, cloth bound and with paperwrappers, and with and without illustra-tions.

When War and the Revolution came,many of these poets died or were killed.Some left the country; a few stayed andfaced poverty, persecution, censorship, andoften much worse. Mandelstam wasarrested, interrogated, convicted because ofa poem he wrote about Stalin, and died on

the way to a work camp inSiberia in 1938. Tsvetaevahanged herself in 1941.Pasternak was subjectedto intense criticism afterthe publication in theWest of Doctor Zhivago,but at least managed todie at home, in 1960.

Anna Gorenko wasborn June 23, 1889,in a town near Odessa onthe Black Sea Coast.1

Joseph Brodsky, theAmerican Poet Laureateand winner of the NobelPrize in Literature, knewher well. He writes thatwhen Annas fatherlearned that she was aboutto publish a selection ofher poems in a Petersburgjournal,he called her inand told her that althoughhe had nothing against herwriting poetry, hed urgeher not to befoul a goodrespected name and to usea pseudonym. She chose aname that could be tracedback to a maternal ances-tor, Achmat Khan, a

descendant of Genghis Khan. Brodskynoted that it was her first successful lineAnna Akhmatovafive open as,memo-rable in its acoustic inevitability.2

Annas father, Andrey Gorenko, was anaval engineer. The Gorenko family hadattained nobility status a generation earlieras a reward to Annas grandfather for hisnaval service, but the family was notwealthy. Annas mother, Inna, was from aSee AKHMATOVA, page 2

Nathan Altman, Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1914. TheRussian Museum, Petersburg, Russia

The Caxton Club 60 W Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610 3305 ph 312 255 3710 caxtonclub@newberry.org www.caxtonclub.org

oC A X T O N I A N

The Caxton Club, Founded 1895Junie L. Sinson, PresidentAdele Hast, Vice-PresidentSusan Hanes, SecretaryJohn C. Roberts, TreasurerMichael Thompson, Past PresidentCouncil

Class of 2007Bruce H. BoyerWilliam D. MullikenWilliam DrendelCaryl SeidenbergC. Steven Tomashefsky

Class of 2008Anthony MourekCarolyn QuattrocchiJohn BlewBarbara Denemark LongEdward C. Bronson

Class of 2009Rob CarlsonKim CoventryEd HirschlandWendy HusserDavid Mann

Appointed OfcersPaul T. Ruxin, ProgramsPaul F. Gehl, ArchivistHayward R. Blake, FABSRepresentativeFrank J. Piehl, HistorianCommitteesRobert Cotner, DevelopmentWilliam Drendel, ExhibitionsAdele Hast, FinanceEd Quattrocchi (Honorary Chair), J. William Locke, Dorothy Sinson(Co-Chairs), Friday LuncheonsDan Skip Landt, MembershipJunie L. Sinson, Nobel StudyDonald Chatham, PublicationsMartha Chiplis, PublicityWendy Husser, Web SiteCaxton Club StaffDan Crawford, General ManagerCaxtonianRobert McCamant, EditorWendy Husser, Copy EditorCarolyn Quattrocchi, Copy EditorRobert Cotner, FounderKathryn DeGraff, MatthewJ.Doherty, Wendy Husser, PaulRuxin, Florence Shay, ContributingEditors2007, The Caxton Club. The Caxtonian ispublished monthly by The Caxton Club,whose ofce is in the Newberry Library.Printing: River Street Press, Aurora, IL

family of landowners, but their means were alsomodest. After Anna was born, her father took acivil service position in Petersburg. From the ageof 2 to 16, she and her family lived in TsarskoyeSelo (the Tsars village), a small market townlocated a few miles south of Petersburgwherethe Tsar had a great summer palace and manyaristocratic families had summer homes.

Life in the Gorenko household had its stresses.Annas younger brother later described theirfather as a great chaser after good-looking ladiesand an even greater squanderer of money.3 Annasmother, Inna, was a beautiful and kind womanabout whom Anna would later write and speakwith affection. Inna was also impractical and dis-organized in domestic matters, a characteristicwhich carried over to her oldest daughter.

Somehow, despite the absence of literary influ-ences in the home, Anna was inclined towardpoetry at an early age. When she was a child shefound a pin in the form of a lyre in a park, and hergoverness told her this signified that she wouldbecome a poet. Her father called her a decadentpoetess even before she wrote her first poem.

Anna learned to read at the age of seven, andwas sent to a school in Tsarskoye Selo at the ageof 10. When she was 11 years old, she was gravelyill; it was during this period of illness that shewrote her first poem. She always linked begin-ning to write poetry with that illness.4

Another influence was the memory of Pushkin,who had attended the Lyceum School on thepalace grounds of Tsarskoe Selo almost a centuryearlier. Today, one can visit the classrooms wherehe studied and one of the rooms where he lived.

Although the Gorenko family was far from lit-erary, they possessed a book of Nekrasovs poetry,and Anna knew many of his poems by heart.Anna later remembered that it was the only bookof poetry in the house.5 In 1900, age 11, Annabegan attending the Maryinsky Gymnasium inPetersburg; by age 13 she was reading Verlaineand Baudelaire.

Anna was an unusual childmore serious thanother children, more stoic, perhaps to the point ofmelancholy. She spent her summers from age 7 to13 in a dacha near Sevastopol, where the neigh-bors regarded her as wildsomething of atomboy. She swam and climbed, and cared littlefor the corsets and starched petticoats of well-brought-up young women.

Her biographer writes that by the age of 14,

Anna had become a beauty, with chiseled fea-tures, huge grey eyes and long, black straight hair.She had a dancers body. As an adolescent she wasfive foot eleven inches tall, and so lithe and supplethat she could easily touch the nape of her neckwith her heels when she lay prone. 6

The year 1905 was a turbulent one for Rus-sians generally, and for the Gorenko family in par-ticular. It was the year of the destruction of theRussian fleet by the Japanese, and of the firstRussian Revolution, which led to profoundchanges within the government. It was also theyear in which Annas parents finally separated.Her father moved in with his lover, the widow ofa rear-admiral, and her mother took the childrento the Crimea.

In spring 1905, about the time of her 16thbirthday, Anna fell in love with a student namedKutuzov, who was 10 years older than she.Kutuzov was the first in a long series of lovers.One reads Annas biography with amazement atthe number of serious love affairs she reportedlyhadbefore, during, and after her marriages.Explanations are impossible and judging point-less. Perhaps it was part of the culture of theRussian aristocracy, accentuated by the upheavalsof the times in which she lived.

During this stormy and stressful year, Annabecame a target of the affections of a schoolmatewho would later become her first husbandthepoet, Nikolay Gumilyov. Nikolayor Kolyawas far from handsome, and was personallyawkward with people. But he was on his way tobecoming a fine poet. Kolya was 19 in the springof 1905 when he first declared his love to Annaabout the same time Anna was having her affairwith the student Kutuzov. For whatever reason,she rejected Kolyas advances, leaving him sodepressed that he threatened to kill himselfwhich further upset and irritated young Anna.

Given the chaotic nature of their relationship, itwas a surprise when Anna announced in February1907 that she was going to marry Gumilyov. Shewrote unenthusiastically to a friend,He has lovedme for three years now, and I believe that it is myfate to be his wife. Whether or not I love him, Ido not know, but it seems to me that I do.7

During 1906 and 1907 Anna attended schoolin Kiev, living with an aunt and preparing forexaminations. In early 1907, while she was stillonly 17 years old, she published her first poem:On his hand are many shiny rings. Gumilyov

AKHMATOVA, from page 1

included it in the second issue of a literarymagazine he had started, called Sirius. Itappeared under her newly-adopted literarynameAkhmatova. The sadness of someof the lines is striking:

On his hand are many shiny rings from tender hearted and submissive girls.The diamond triumphs, and the opalDreams, the ruby glows like a miracle.On his fingers there is no ring of mine.Nor will I ever give my ring to anyone.

Not exactly an up-beat attitude towardher upcoming marriage. And, in fact, inApril 1907 she called it off. Kolya did nottake the news well and spent much of thesummer trying to persuade her to changeher mind. When he was unsuccessful, hetried to kill himselffirst in August, andagain in December.

Meanwhile, Anna had graduated in May1907, a month shy of her 18th birthday;and in the fall she began studying law atKiev University. The world of literature isricher for the fact that legal studies did notagree with her.

In late 1909, Anna gave up. Gumilyovhad written to her: I realized that only onething in the world is interesting to me. Andthat is everything that concerns you. Sheneeded to be important to someone whowanted her. A law career in Kiev was not anattractive prospect; and continuing to live inKiev with her aunt and an abusive unclewas unsupportable. She had no money andno way to make a living. Gumilyov offeredthe chance to live in Petersburg and be partof its literary culture.

So they were married in Kiev in April1910. None of Annas family attended thewedding. The young couple went off toParis for their honeymoon; and it was therethat Anna made the acquaintance of ayoung Italian artist named Modigliani, whowrote many letters to her after she returnedto Russia.

In 1909 Gumilyov, the poet VyacheslavIvanov and several colleagues in Peters-burg founded a literary and arts magazineentitled Apollon. A beautiful publication, itcontained literary works as well as essays ofcriticism, pictures of architecture and art,and reports on exhibitions and indeed theentire cultural life of Petersburg andRussia. As I page through Apollon, I am

struck by the richness and beauty of theculture of pre-War Petersburgwhichunderscores the enormity of the devasta-tion that was about to be inflicted on theRussian people by the evil twins War andRevolution. Four of Annas poems werepublished in the fourth number of Apollonin 1911. It was her first major exposure tothe Russian literary community.

Gumilyov and Anna had not beenmarried long before, as Annas biographerdelicately puts it, Kolya began to chafe atthe constraints of matrimony. Anna latertold a friend that they had been engagedtoo long, and that by 1910 her newhusband had already lost his passion forher.8 The suspicions and tensions engen-dered by his behavior worked their wayinto several of Annas early poems. Forexample:

He loved three things in this world:White peacocks, evensongAnd faded maps of America.He hated it when children cried.He hated tea with raspberry jam, andAny female hysteria in his life.Now imagine it: I was his wife.

Kolya also loved to travel, and by the fallof 1910 he was off on a trip to Africa. Hewas gone six months. In 1910 one of hispoems contained these lines: From theSerpents lair / from the city of Kiev / Itook not a wife, but a sorceress . . . . Duringhis absence, Anna worked on several poemsof her own that would later appear in herfirst volume. Several of these were intimateand intense, but whether about Kolya orsomeone else, it is impossible to be sure.

Anna later told a friend that while Kolyawas in Africa,I wrote a lot and had myfirst taste of fame: all around . . .he cameback. I didnt tell him anything. Then heasked: Have you written any poetry?Ihave. And I read it to him. . .he gasped.From that time onwards, he always lovedmy poetry very much.9

Perhaps the most important figure inRussian poetry at the time was VyacheslavIvanov, whose sixth-floor apartment inPetersburgknown as the Towerwaswhere the major poets and others gatheredin the evening to socialize, drink, and hearpoetry readings and lectures about poetry.It is there in the spring of 1911 that Annafirst met one of the future giants of Russian

poetryOsip Mandelstam.In March 1911, the month Gumilyov

returned from Africa, Anna was invited byIvanov to read her poems to those gatheredin the Tower. One of the poems she read,The Grey-Eyed King, was written threemonths earlier and would become one ofher best known. It appeared in the pages ofApollon in 1911 (No. 4).

The other place where artists and poetscongregated was the basement caf knownas the Stray Dog, which became a focalpoint for the artistic and literary communi-ties of Petersburg. Akhmatova, Gumilyov,and their fellow writers spent manyevenings theredrinking, smoking,arguing, reading their poems, andappar-entlytaking their colleagues sexual tem-peratures.

By this time, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, andMandelstam had identified themselves as agroup of poets with common views abouthow to create great poems. They calledthemselves Acmeists, and wrote aboutconcrete objects in the world of reality. Intheir view, clarity and details, rather thangauzy or ambiguous symbols, representedthe way to achieve beauty through words.The Guild of Poets, formed by Gumilyovin November 1911, became their organiza-tional vehicle; and their artistic credo wouldlater appear in a manifesto written byGumilyov, appearing in the January 1913issue of Apollon.

In May 1911 Anna returned to Paris fora brief visit without Kolya. If he couldtravel on his own, so could she. In Paris sheagain met Modigliani, with whom sheformed a close friendship. How closecannot be known for sure. But it is knownthat he made several drawings of herincluding one of her lying on a bed, andmore than one of her nude. She later wrote:

I didnt pose for his drawings of me; hedid them at home and gave them to melater. There were sixteen in all, and heasked me to mount and hang them inmy room in Tsarskoe Selo. They van-ished in that house during the first yearsof the Revolution. The one that survivedbears the least resemblance to his futurenudes . . . . 10

She later told a young friend that therehad been twenty, and that they had disap-peared. A few of these have resurfaced in

CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007 3See AKHMATOVA, page 4

recent years.11 One of the drawings thatsurvived would later appear on the cover ofone of her collections of poetry.

After her return to Petersburg, Annadecided that she had enough poems (thosewritten during the winter of 1910-1912) tocomprise a volume. It was published byGumilyovs Poets Workship in 1912 in anedition of 300 copies. Entitled Vecher orEveningthe slender gray volume con-tained 46 poems assembled in 92 pages. Onthe cover appears a lyrethe symbol of theAcmeists. Inside is a drawing of a womanattired in robes and looking downwardwith a melancholic expression at flowingwaters.

One modern critic finds three principalstylistic elements in these early poems: (1)the decorative stylization which may becalled more specifically the manner ofRussian Art Nouveau, (2) the use ofcommon, spoken language, including collo-quialisms, and (3) the clean, classicalelement that was associated with Acmeism.The poems in Vecher make use of lan-guishing adjectives and lethargic images.12

The critics received it favorably.13 Gumi-lyov wrote one of these reviews:[W]omenin love, cunning and rapturous, at last speakin their own genuine and at the same timeartistically convincing language.14 The col-lapse of their marriage did not sour Kolyasgenuine admiration for her craftsmanship.

Anna herself was more critical. She laterwrote in her draft memoirs:

These nave poems by a frivolous girl forsome reason were reprinted thirteentimes. . . . And they came out in severaltranslations. The girl herself (as far as Irecall) did not foresee such a fate forthem and used to hide the issues of thejournals in which they were first pub-lished under the sofa cushions so thatshe wouldnt get upset. She even went toItaly (1912), because she was distressedthat Evening had been published. Sittingin the streetcar and looking at her fellowpassengers, she thought to herself:What lucky peoplethey dont havebooks coming out.15

Elsewhere, she wrote that she liked onlytwo of the lines in Vecher.16

When Anna and Kolya left for Italy inearly April 1912 seeking artisticinspiration, she was three months pregnant.In Italy, Kolya explored Rome while Annaremained in Florence. They also stayedtogether in Venice for about ten days. ByOctober 1, 1912the day their son Levwas bornshe was back in Tsarskoe Selo.

Two of Annas friends from the StrayDog basement cabaret were soon involvedin a tragic episode that would later featureprominently in one of Annas greatestworks. The two friends were a dancer, OlgaSudeikina, and one of her lovers, a mannamed Knyazev. Olga was at that timemarried to an artist, appropriately namedSudeikin. Apparently because of Olgasaggressively non-monogamous behavior,

Knyazev shot himself in late March 1913.The whole affair seems now to have been

characteristic of the dissolute condition ofthe Russian intelligentsia just before thegreat catastrophes that were to wipe manyof its members from the face of the earth.Gumilyov was a part of this culture. Beforehe headed off to Africa on another creativeboondoggle in October 1913, Anna discov-ered letters to him from one of hisinamoratae. About the same time, an illegit-imate son of Gumilyovs was born to anactress in Petersburg.

During the fall of 1913 and winter of1914, through her emotional travails, Annacontinued to write. Some of her poemswere about her relationships with menperhaps loversother than Gumilyov. Onewas the art historian Nikolay Punin;another was Nikolay Nedobrovo, a poetand critic. By March 1914 there wereenough poems to fill 120 pages of a newcollection, which she entitled ChetkiorRosary (or, more literally,Beads).Perhaps each bead was a different poemor a different man. The book is on my lapas I write this. Its verses are about sin andsadness, parting and heavy hearts, shame,long days of sadness, long walks beforenightfall, sleeplessness . . . . Anna later wrotethat this book had sensational press butwas allotted a life of approximately sixweeks.17

The great poet Blok, a few months later,4 CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007

AKHMATOVA, from page 3 Vecher (Evening), 1912One of Modiglianis 1911 drawings

remarked about Annas poems that,Shewrites verse as if she is standing in front ofa man and one should write as if one standsbefore God.18

Events would soon force a broadening ofher perspective. As the summer of 1914moved toward August, intelligent peopleeverywhere must have had at least a faintidea of what was about to happen. Annawrote in July:

Into my yard came a strangerWith only one leg, and he said to me:Frightening times are approaching. SoonFresh graves will cover the land:Therell be earthquakes, plague and

famine;Eclipses and signs in the heavens.And yet our enemies will notRip up our lands at their pleasure,For the mother of God herself will

spreadA white cloth over our sorrows.

Germany declared war on Russia onAugust 1, 1914. Gumilyov immedi-ately joined the Russian cavalry, seeking achance to show his bravery; he was at thefront within a few weeks. As with theEnglish war poets, it took some time forthe initial rush of euphoria and patriotismto wear thin.

In September 1914 Anna wrote herpoem,Consolation. She was now begin-ning to write as if she were standing beforeGod:

You will have no more news of him,Nor hear about him again.And you will not find his graveIn the fires of wretched Poland.Your soul must be quiet and tranquil.He is no more a lost soul,But a new soldier in Gods army.So do not mourn any longer.Your grief and tears are a sin.Dont weep when you are home.Think, rather that now you can prayTo an intercessor of your own.19

Despite the stresses of the early Waryears 1914-15, Anna continued to write.She also gave readings at the Stray Dogcaf, as did the othersMayakovsky,Kuzmin, Mandelstam, and even Gumilyov,back from the front lines. When the StrayDog was closed because of suspected sub-versive activity, the poetry readings shiftedto other venues.

In January 1915, Anna read At the Edge

of the Sea to a group of friends. One of herlonger works, it would soon appear in thepages of Apollon and in 1921 was published

as a separate book. As the War progressedand privations mounted, and as Anna suf-fered from attacks of tuberculosis, the rangeof her themes continued to broaden. Herfocus was much less on herself and herromantic attachments, and much moreabout the shared conditions of life. One ofthese is typical:

We thought we were beggars withoutproperty

Until we began to lose one thing afteranother.

Then every day became a day of memoryAnd we began to compose new songsAbout the wealth we once hadAnd Gods generosity in the past.

Anna spent much of 1915 at the Gumi-lyov country family house in Slepnyovo,caring for her son Lev and writing. News ofthe War and the bitter conditions ofRussian life by now had dissipated anyremaining enthusiasm for patriotic struggle.In May 1915, Anna wrote Prayer:

Give me bitter years of illnessA fight for breath in sleepless feverTake my child and take my loverAnd my mysterious gift of song Thus I shall pray at your liturgyAfter so many pain-filled days:Let the dark storm over RussiaBecome a cloud of glorious rays.

It was also in the spring of 1915 thatAnna met Boris Anrep, with whom shesoon fell in love; he had spent years inEngland, and would later return there. Shewrote a passionate poem dedicated to himthat spring:You have come many years toolate / but still I am glad you are here.Several of her lyrical poems during the1915-1916 period were about Anrep. Theyparted when he returned to England inFebruary 1916.20

In January 1917, Anna selected thepoems that would make up her third collec-tion. Entitled Belaya Staya (White Flock),and containing 142 pages, the small volumeappeared in September 1917, in an editionof 2000 copies. Brodsky says that with thisbook, Akhmatovas personal lyricismbecame tinged with the note of controlledterrora note which he says would laterbecome increasingly intertwined with hermore romantic lyrics: With this collection,Russian poetry hit the real, non-calendar

CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007 5

Chetki (Rosary),1914

U Samovo Morya (At the Edge of theSea), 1921

Belaya Staya (White Flock), 1917

See AKHMATOVA, page 6

twentieth century but didnt disintegrate onimpact.21 Anna received enough from thisbook to buy herself a dress and to sendmoney to her mother and her son Lev.22

But by this time, there were more urgentconsiderations than the amounts of royal-ties to be earned from books of poetry.

In February 1917 the revolution startedin Petersburg, then called Petrograd. Sol-diers fired on marching protestors, and sol-diers mutinied. Nicholas II abdicated inMarch. In June Gorky wrote to his wifethat Petersburg had become a cesspit. Noone works, the streets are filthy, there arepiles of stinking rubbish in the court-yards . . . . There was a moment of hopewhen Russia was governed by the Con-stituent Assembly, headed by Kerensky, butthe hope did not last long. Kerenskys gov-ernment failed to work out a peace settle-ment; and, by October (November, accord-ing to the Gregorian calendar) Lenin andthe Bolsheviks were in the drivers seat.They brought the war with Germany to anend in December 1917, and Kerensky spenthis latter years teaching at Stanford.

As civilization unraveled in Russia, manypeople with money or education or senseescaped, in droves. Anna Akhmatova choseto stay, and it was a choice. She had thoughtabout it. But Russia was home. In thesummer of 1917 she had written, withAnrep (who had escaped to England) inmind:

You are a traitor, and for a green island,Have betrayed, yes, betrayed your native

land,Abandoned all our songs and sacred

icons,And the pine tree over a quiet lake.

She saw Anrep in January 1918 duringhis brief return, but their affair, if not herregret, was over. Anrep knew that Englandwould be a more welcoming home for himin the future than a Lenin-led workers par-adise.23

In the meantime, Anna had developed anintimate friendship with Vladimir Shileiko,an amateur poet and noted expert onAssyria. When Gumilyov returned toPetersburg in April 1918, Anna asked himfor a divorce and explained that sheintended to marry Shileiko. Gumilyov was

shocked, as were many of her other friends,but made no effort to prevent the divorce,which was granted in August 1918. Annamarried Shileiko in December. She laterexplained,I felt so filthy, I thought itwould be like a cleansing, like going to aconvent, knowing you are going to lose yourfreedom.24 The European War had endedthe month before.

The year 1918 brought other majorchanges. Although the War was over,life in Petersburg remained a battle zone forsurvival. Lenin moved the capital toMoscow in early 1918, leaving Petersburgto decay. There was no electricity, no sewageservice, no water, and little food. (Today,tap water still cannot be drunk in Peters-burg without boiling it first; and that takescare of the bacteria only, not the chemicals.)There were times during the coming yearswhen Anna was near starvation. Many ofher friends were dead, others had left.

Annas new husband Shileiko was egotis-tical, demanding, jealous, and harsh. Annatook his dictation and fixed his tea. She hadlittle or no time for poetry during 1919 and1920. Shileiko wanted her attention; he didnot want her distracted by writing. Thusshe wrote little during the years of theirmarriage. One of her few poems says it all:

Ice floats by in chunks;The skies are hopelessly pale.Why are you punishing me?I dont know what Ive done wrong.If you need tothen kill meBut dont be so harsh and stern.You dont want children from meAnd you dont like my poetry.Let everything be as you wish.I have been faithful to my promise.I gave my whole life to you My sadness Ill take to the grave.There was probably justification for

Shileikos jealousy, though whether the jeal-ousy or the justification came first isunclear and irrelevant. Akhmatovas biogra-pher reports that she apparently had twointimate relationships with other men whilemarried to Shileiko. One of these menArtur Luryewas a musician who shared aflat with the actress, Olga Sudeikina,Annas friend from the Stray Dog days.25

Sometime in mid-1921 Anna moved outof Shileikos rooms and moved in withLurye and Sudeikina. She later referred to

Lurye as one of her husbands, though theywere never formally married. Perhaps notcoincidentally, she resumed writing poemsin 1921. One of theseMCMXXIsays much about conditions of life in Russiaand also Annas mood:

Everything has been plundered, betrayedor sold;

The black wings of death flicker over us.The pain of starvation gobbles

everything,So why is it now so bright?By day the scents of cherry blossomsReach us from the woods nearbyAnd at night there are new constellationsIn the translucent depths of the sky.By 1921 there were enough poems to

make a small volume entitledPodorozhnikPlaintain. About half thepoems in it were to or about Shileiko. Itwas a tiny book in paper wrappers withonly 60 pages, and was published in anedition of 1000 copies. Of these, 100 werenumbered and not sold; mine is numbered

6 CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007

Podorozhnik (Plaintain.), 1921

Anno Domini MCMXXI, 1921

AKHMATOVA, from page 5

56 and is gracefully initialed, perhaps byAkhmatova.

By the end of the year there were morepoems; a new volume was produced, AnnoDomini MCMXXI (with 1921 Petropolison the title page but 1922 printed inwords on the cover). It was a bit larger102 pages, and there were 2000 copies. Itincluded the poems from the earliervolume, Podorozhnik. Anno DominiMCMXXI, as Brodsky points out,was herlast collection: in the forty-four years thatfollowed she had no book of her own.26

The Bolsheviks did not wait long tocrack down on intellectualsparticu-larly writers. In early August 1921 Gumi-lyov was arrested along with a number ofhis acquaintances. He had apparently saidsomething critical of the Lenin governmenta year earlier. Imprisoned, he was brutallyinterrogated by the Cheka, after which hewas declared to be an enemy of the peopleand sentenced to execution by shootingalong with 61 others. His executionoccurred on August 25, 1921. At hismemorial service, Anna was treated as hiswidow, even though his second wifeattended as well.27

A couple of days after Kolyas execution,Anna wrote in one of her poems:

Terror fingers all things in the darkLeads moonlight to the axe.Theres an ominous knock behind the

wall:A ghost, a thief or a rat . . . .

Not surprisingly, the executions encour-aged others to leave Russia. (Or perhaps itwas the continuing general poverty, hungerand wretchedness of living conditions.)One of these was Artur Lurye, Annas thirdhusband. But Anna remained. In 1922she wrote:

My cheeks are sunken, and my lipswithout blood.

He wont recognize my face;I am no longer beautiful, nor am IThe one whose songs once troubled you.

She could foresee what was coming, andfaced it:

I am not among those who left the landTo be torn open by our enemies.And crude flattery does not influence me,I will not give them my songs.Still I feel some pity for an exileLike somebody sick, or a prisoner.

A refugee has to walk a dark road,And foreign bread has a bitter flavour.

Here in the smoke of blinding firesWhats left of our youth will be destroyedAnd we wont be able to ward offA single blow from ourselves.Yet in the final totting upandWe know each hour will be countedThere is no people on earth more

tearless,More simple and more proud.

Even though her personal life waschaotic, Annas poetry now moved furtheraway from the self-focused themes of lovesexperienced and lost, and in the direction ofthe larger themes of life shared in commonwith the Russian people during the years ofhardship.

Meanwhile, some things did not change.As her friend Lurye was making his deci-sion to leave Russia, Anna became enam-ored of Nikolay Punin, a handsome art his-torian, with whom she would have a longerrelationship than any of her other hus-bands. The only problem was that Punin atthat time was married to Anna Ahrens, adoctor. He never divorced Ahrens, so heand Anna never marriedthough shereferred to him more than once as herhusband. It appears that the pre-Warmarital practices of the Russian intelli-gentsia were not altered much by the Waror by Revolution. By the end of 1925, Annahad formally been divorced from Shileiko,and had moved into Punins apartment,sharing it with Punin, his wife and daugh-ter.28 The flat was in the former Shereme-tevo palace known as the FontankatheFountain House, on the Fontanka canal;the apartment now houses the AkhmatovaMuseum.

One thing that did change, however, wasthe governments tolerance for literaturethat did not contribute to or celebrateMarxist themes. The personal concernsthat constituted the subject matter of somuch of Annas earlier verse were simplyirrelevant to the construction of the peoplesstate. And irrelevant meant useless, whichmeant unacceptable. Irrelevant writerswould find it difficult to be published. Ifthey persisted in being irrelevant, theymight find it difficult to workor to getfoodor to find a place to live.

Anna felt the force of repression. She had

hoped to publish a two-volume collectionof her poems in 1926, and proofs of thepages were prepared. But the governmentcensors decided to limit the number ofcopies, and to insist on removal of 18poems from the first volume; later she wasasked to remove another 40 from thesecond volume. Matters drifted, but it soonbecame clear that the new collection wouldnot be published at all. Stalin himself mayhave made the decision.29

For the next 14 years, Akhmatova hadno new publications. (Akhmatova calledthese the vegetarian years; the later andharsher period is often called the GreatTerror.)

The Struve edition of Akhmatovas writ-ings lists no poems published in journalsbetween 1924 and 1940.30 Anna was ableto do scholarly work on Pushkin; butthough she eventually wrote essays onaspects of Pushkins work, these were neverpublished as a book. Her health was gener-ally poor; she had little food and almost nomoney. In 1928 her son Lev came to livewith her and the Punins in Petersburg. Butbecause of Levs parentage, he was deniedadmission to academic programs.

The great peasant poet Esenin killedhimself in 1925. Mayakovsky shot himselfin 1930. Three years later, Stalins wifekilled herself. In 1933 Annas son Lev wasarrested briefly, and it would not be the lasttime. In May 1934 Anna was visiting theMandelstams when her good friend Osipwas arrested.31 After several weeks, Osipwas exiledeventually to a place calledVoronezh.

The killings and torture became moresystematic after the assassination of Kirov, apopular party leader, in late November1934. Both Annas son Lev and husbandPunin were arrested in the fall of 1935. Itwas enough that they were part of the intel-ligentsia. Anna wrote a personal letter toStalin giving her personal assurance thatneither of them was a spy or counter-revo-lutionary:32

I have been living in the USSR since thebeginning of the Revolution. I neverwanted to leave a country to which I amconnected by heart and mind, despitethe fact that my poems are not beingpublished any more, and critics reviews

CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007 7See AKHMATOVA, page 8

give me many bitter moments . . . . InLeningrad I live in solitude, and I amoften ill for long periods of time. Thearrest of the only two people who areclose to me gives the kind of blow fromwhich I shall not be able to recover. I askyou, Iosif Visarionovich, to return myhusband and my son to me. I am sureyou would never be sorry after doing so.[Note her use of the word husband inreferring to Punin.]

Miraculously, her letter worked. Weknow now from the opening of the govern-ment archives that Stalin personally wroteacross her letter: To Comrade Yagoda. Tofree from detention both Punin and Gumi-lyov [Lev] and reply that this action hasbeen carried out. Stalin. Punin was able togo back to work, but Lev was not permittedto go back to the University, and lived onthe edge of starvation.33 Gratitude was notone of Punins strong suits. By 1936 he hadtaken a new lover, though he remainedmarried to Ahrens.

By the fall of 1937, during or followingher break-up with Punin, Anna developedan intimate relationship with a marrieddoctor and university professor, VladimirGarshin. She did not finally separate fromPunin until the fall of 1938.34

In 1938 Lev was arrested again, and washarshly treated during interrogation.Eventually he was sentenced to 10 years ina prison camp. In 1939 his case wasreviewed to determine whether he shouldbe executed. In the meantime, he was heldin Kresty prison in Leningrad. During themonths of his incarceration, Anna, likeother women hoping for news of their rela-tives or for an opportunity to pass foodparcels to them, waited in long lines outsidethe prison. It was often very hot, and Annawas ill much of the time. Her feet and legssometimes hurt so much she could notstand.

One day as she was waiting in the queue,she was recognized. She told the story inthe words she wrote in the place of apreface to her great poem,Requiem:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terrorI spent seventeen months in the prisonlines of Leningrad. One day somebodyin the crowd recognized me. Then awoman with bluish lips standing behind

me, who of course had never heard mecalled by name before, awoke from thestupor to which all had succumbed, andwhispered in my ear (everyone spoke inwhispers there):Can you describe this?And I answered,I can. Then some-thing that looked like a smile passedover what had once been her face.

It is worth the trouble to learn Russianjust to be able to read this poem. Her biog-rapher calls it one of the greatest lyricalsequences in the Russian language.35 Thepoets personal experience becomesenlarged and magnified, and in a sensebecomes an artistic expression of the condi-tion of the entire Russian people, orperhaps of any people stressed to the break-ing point.

Akhmatova often wrote dates after par-ticular poems or sections of poems, indicat-ing when they had been written. Some ofthe lines of Requiem are dated 1935 butmost appear to have been written in 1939or 1940. A few were added much laterinthe late 1950s or even 1961. The translatedlines of the Dedication will provide only adim idea of the power and beauty ofAkhmatovas lines:

In the presence of this grief, mountainsbow down,

The great river ceases to flow,But the prison gates are closed,Behind them are the prisoners holesAnd mortal anguish.For someone, fresh breezes blow,Some are able to enjoy the sunset But we wouldnt know, we who

everywhere,Hear only the scrape of the shameful keyAnd the heavy footsteps of the soldiers.We arose as if for an early church service,Walked through the ravaged capital,And there came together, more lifeless

than dead,The sun is lower, and the Neva cloudy,But hope sings from a distance.And then the sentence. . . And

immediately the tears pour forth,Already she is separated from the others,As if life was painfully ripped from her

heart,As if they brutally knocked her down,But she goes on. . . staggers . . . aloneWhere now are the involuntary friendsOf my two Hellish years?What do they think goes on in the

Siberian storm,

What appears to them dimly in the circleof the moon?

I send them my parting greetings.

The poem is extraordinary. At one pointshe writes:

If you could have been shown, youmocker,

And favorite of all your friends,Gay little sinner of Tsarskoye Selo,What would happen in your life . . . .

Life and the horrors of the Communistregime had put in perspective the frivolityof her earlier years. Anna was now writingas if she were standing before God.

In the epilogue, she writes that if thepeople ever erect a monument to her, theyshould put it in the prison yard, where shewaited so many hours. And she concludes:

And may, from unmoving and bronzedeyes,

The melting snow stream like tears,And may a prison dove coo in the

distance,While ships quietly sail the Neva.

During the 1940s and early 1950s, Annarelied on her memory and that of a fewfriends for the preservation of this greatwork. Brodsky points out that the precau-tion was not excessive because peoplewould disappear forever for smaller thingsthan a piece of paper with a few lines on it.Mandelstams fate was vivid proof. Also,Anna had her son to think about as well asherself. Both their days would have beennumbered had the authorities found herRequiem.36 But there came a time after thedeath of Stalin when, as common withmany works of literature by controversialRussian authors,samizdat (self-published)

8 CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007

The authors 9-page samizdat copy ofRequiem, 1962

AKHMATOVA, from page 7

versions began to be circulated surrepti-tiously before the first book publication in1963. I have one of thesea 9-page typedversion of Requiem that Anna gave to oneof her friends in 1962. It is not signed, butdoes have a few corrections she made byhand.

Requiem did not appear in book formuntil it was published in Russian in Munichin 1963, in tan paper wrappers. The fulltext was not published in Russia until itappeared in a literary journal in 1987.

The War unexpectedly brought newopportunities for Annas poems to bepublished. Stalin and his thuggish govern-ment must have concluded that Russia hadless to fear and more to gain from inspiringliterature. In early 1940 Anna was invitedto publish a selection of her poems. Whenthe publisher insisted on removal of two ofthe poems, Anna acquiesced; she had nochoice, and it must have seemed a smallprice to pay in the circumstances. Then, inAugust, publication was delayed again,either by a paper shortage or bureaucraticuncertainties. A month or so later, the diffi-culty was resolved and the collection waspublished. From Six Books, published inLeningrad, consisted of 327 pages. Therewere to be 10,000 copies, according toStruve. But shortly after the book was pub-lished,on 29 October it was banned and allcopies taken from the shops.37 Of thecopies which survived, most were surelydestroyed during the War and its after-math, so copies in fine or near fine condi-tion are now scarce. Interestingly, the titlerefers to six previous collections eventhough the sixth had not previously been

published in book form.One of the Annas great longer poems

that was not included in the new collectionwas The Way of All the Earth, sometimesknown as Kitezhanka, the woman ofKitezh. Annas notes say that she hadbegun this work in March 1940 while shewas still in Leningrad. Kitezh was a mythi-cal Russian city, an island city, which, afterhaving been defended against the Tatars,was believed to have sunk into a lake. Thecity was said to reappear on special occa-sions. Annas poem describes a trip by thewoman of Kitezh, the writer, back to thefabled city. The lines of the poem suggestthat Anna has been summoned home,through bullets, past sentries, acrosstrenches, through burning towns,by wayof the crucified capital. Anna laterdescribed the process of composition as if

the poem had written itself . . .discon-nected lines began to appear to me out ofnowhere. . . The meaning of these linesseemed very dark to me at that time and, ifyou wish, even strange. For a rather longtime they did not promise to turn into any-thing whole and seemed to be ordinarymeandering lines until they beat their waythrough and reached that refinery fromwhere they came out as you see themnow.38

The Way of All the Earth was not pub-lished in complete form until 1965, 25years later, although separate parts didappear before that in Russian literary maga-zines. In the meantime, Anna prepared afew samizdat versions to give to her friends.One of the very early samizdat versions ofThe Way of All the Earth is in handwrit-ing, with colorfully-decorated pages. Thecolored drawings seem to depict scenes innaturea pool of water, water plants,perhaps a spider web, an insect, and brightflowers. Some but not all of the handwrit-ing appears to be Annas. The poem isbound in gray-blue wrappers, and bears thename Anna Akhmatova on the cover,along with the place and yearTashkent1944. The title page shows the title asKitezhanka, with The Way of All theEarth shown in brackets as a subtitle. The

title page also shows a dedication to V. G.Garshin, Annas doctor friend inLeningrad.

The inside of the rear wrapper of thishand-written version of Kitezhanka con-tains Annas personally-inscribed presenta-tion to Dear Golina LonginovnaKoslovskyin memory of our Tashkentwith love, Anna Akhmatova. 4 February1944. Golina Kozlovskaya was the wife of

CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007 9

The Munich edition of Requiem, 1963

An early samizdat copy of Kitezhanka (The Way of All the Earth), 1944

See AKHMATOVA, page 10

Alexei Kozlovsky, a Tashkent composer.Anna was a friend of both the Kozlovskys,and Alexei may have been in love with her.But more of that later.

The German-Soviet non-aggressionpact freed Hitler to attack Polandwithout fear of having to fight a double-front war, with Russia on the East and theFrench and English on the West. Similarly,Hitlers early success against the French inMay and June 1940 freed him to attackRussia.

In June 1941 the German air force beganstriking Russian cities. One of the firsttargets of the German army was Leningrad.When the long siege of Leningrad began inSeptember 1941, Akhmatova was there.She continued to see her friends, includingDr. Garshin, who had become more than afriend. But late in September she was evac-uated, along with many other artists andliterary figures. She flew to Moscow, andthen traveled by train to Kazan and then toTashkent, where she arrived in earlyNovember; she would remain in Tashkentuntil May 1944. At first she lived in a dor-mitory for writers. Nadezhda Mandelstam,Osips widow, was given a room in the samebuilding. Later, Anna shared a place withthe widow of Mikhail Bulgakov. There werefresh fruits and flowers in the Tashkentmarket place, but Anna and her friends hadlittle money.

In Tashkent Anna continued to write, toread her poems at meetings, and to visitwith other exiled writers. She also madenew friends, two of whom were theKozlovskys, Alexei, the composer, and hiswife, Golina.

The loosened constraints that had per-mitted publication of her collection, FromSix Books, in Leningrad in 1940 continuedto be sufficiently relaxed to allow anothergroup of selections to be published. Enti-tled Izbrannoe Stikhi or selections ofpoetry, the little paper-backed volumeappeared in Tashkent in 1943. Governmenteditors did the selecting, not Anna. Shereferred to it as small, incomplete andstrangely put together. The little book con-sisted of 114 pages of poems all of whichhad appeared in earlier volumes, and sold

for only 3 rubles, 50 kopeks.Reportedly, 10,000 copies were issued,

so the book should be very far from rare.But copies are rarely seen; probably most ofthe copies were destroyed during the war.My copy of this new little collection is oneAnna presented with an inscription:Tomy dear Kozlovsky friends, and dated June20, 1943.

Anna was now thinking more aboutDoctor Garshin than Punin, referring toGarshin as my husband, though they wereof course not formally married.39 It will alsobe recalled that she had dedicated hermajor poem Kitezhanka to Garshin.When the siege of Leningrad was lifted inJanuary 1944, Anna sought permission toreturn, expecting to be with Garshin. Sheand Garshin exchanged letters, and in oneof these, Garshin asked her to marry him.Anna agreed, and told friends in Tashkentof her plans to marry him on her return.

In mid-May 1944, she was permitted togo home. Friends remember that thoughshe had gained weight, she seemed youngand happy. After a stop-over in Moscow,Anna arrived at the Petersburg train stationin mid-June 1944. Garshin was waiting forher at the station. He had promised to finda new apartment for them both. But it soonbecame evident that things had changed.Annas biographer reports that the priva-tions of Leningrad under siege had beenterribly hard on Garshin. His wife had diedduring the first winter of the siege. As adoctor, he had witnessed starvation andworse. Anna later told a friend that Garshinwas mentally ill. He apparently told herthat he had had visions of his dead wife,and that she had forbidden him to marryAkhmatova.40

But simple explanations are preferred toweird as well as complex ones. Akhmatovasbiographer also reports that by June 1944,Garshin may have been in the midst of alove affair with a woman doctor. AlthoughAnna would have had ample ground tochange her mind about the proposed mar-riage, it was Garshin who called it off. Aftera 10-minute conversation on the trainstation platform, they parted.

Anna was now in war-ravaged Leningradwith no place to live and little or no money.How she would survive was not clear. But acouple of things are clear. One is that she

destroyed all of her correspondence withGarshin. The second is that she removedthe dedication to Garshin from The Wayof All the Earth.

In Leningrad, the one constant, amidrubble, sickness, hunger, and poverty, waspoetry. Anna had begun her greatest longpoem,Poem Without a Hero, in Decem-ber 1940, and she continued to refine it inTashkent and Leningrad after her return.She worked on the poem until 1963. Annalabeled the poem a Triptych1940-1962-Leningrad-Tashkent-Moscow, and dedi-cated it to the memory of its first audi-encemy friends and fellow citizens whoperished in Leningrad during the siege.Her biographer says,It is one of her fewlong poems: complex, many-layered andallusive; not a series of linked lyrics likeRequiem, but imagined and invented as awhole.41

The events fleetingly depicted in the firstpart of the poem occurred in 1913 beforethe collapse of the Russian way of life.Anna dedicated it to the young man whosedisappointed love for her friend OlgaSudeikina led him to kill himself. In theintroduction, Anna writes that she surveysher life from 1940 as if from a tower,as ifbidding farewell again to what I partedfrom long ago. . . . Ghosts from the year1913 appear, and she is back in the hall ofmirrors of the Sheremetev Palace. One ofthe apparitions from her past is that ofSudeikina, whose promiscuous self-cen-teredness (the goat-legged nymph) becameboth a symbol of pre-War Russian life ingeneral and a reproach to Anna for her ownconduct. Anna labeled her one of mydoubles. Sudeikina had left Russia, lived inParis, and died there in January 1945. Annawrites,How did it come to pass / That Ialone of all of them am still alive. And,Ido not want to meet again / The woman Iwas then. . .

Annas friend Gershtein wrote in herMemoirs42 that after Anna returned toLeningrad, she made many copies ofPoem Without a Hero, and gave them tofriends. On July 15, 1946, she sent one ofthese copies to her friend Alexei Kozlovskyin Tashkent. This copy, in brown paperwrappers, contains on the page after thetitle page, the typed inscription toand

10 CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007

AKHMATOVA, from page 9

the handwritten letters Al. F. K. with thedate 15 May. It is initialed simply A. Thetext is typed, but contains several notationsor changes in Annas handwriting. At theend, she signed at the bottom her full name.Interestingly, several quotations in Latin,Italian, and English are printed, apparentlyby Anna herself. Presumably this is becausethe Russian typewriter did not have theforeign-language characters, so she left thespaces blank to permit the foreign words tobe inserted by hand.

My friend Professor Dmitry Bobyshev ofthe University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (a distinguished Russian poet whoknew Akhmatova well) told me about Dr.Natalia Kraineva, a scholar at the RussianNational Library in Petersburg, who hasspent more than 10 years researchingPoem Without a Hero and through themiracle of the internet, he introduced me toher. Professor Kraineva, who works at theNational Library in Petersburg, identifiesnine versions of the draft. When it is pub-lished, her scholarly work will supersedethe recapitulations now found inKovalenko, Petersburg Dreams (2004), andan Appendix to Haight, Akhmatova, APoetic Pilgrimage, New York, (1976).

My copy (given to Kozlovsky) was one ofthe early Tashkent versions. How manycopies of this or other samizdat versionsexist? Professor Kraineva, wrote me thatshe had found more than 100 copies insamizdat, and that my version was from thethird draft, which was composed in 1944. It

is the third carbon copy of the typewritingset. She found two other copies of thisversion.

In addition to the early samizdat ver-sions, fragments of the poem appeared inliterary journals in the 1940s and 1950s. In1960 an incomplete version of Part Iappeared in a New York journalVoz-duishnye Puti43 . Then what Haight callsprobably the first completed version of thepoem can be found in Eng-Liedmeier andK. Verheul, ed., Tale Without a Hero andTwenty-Two Poems by Anna Akhmatova(1973).

Russias war with Germany ended May8, 1945. Leningrad had been almostdestroyed by the siege. After living for atime with friends, Anna moved back intothe flat in the house on the FontankaPunins flat. Punins former wife was dead,but he had a new wife, as well as his daugh-ter by his deceased wife. Given the historyof their relationship, it is unsettling torealize that Anna had no choice but toreturn to Punins flat; but the apartmentproblem, where to live, was a gnawingreality for virtually all Russians during theentire Communist period. During the siege,Akhmatovas personal library had beenburned by the person who lodged in herrooms in an effort to keep warm.44

To make matters worse, Anna was nowunder continuing police surveillance. Theperiod of government relaxation seems tohave ended with the end of the Germanthreat. One of the police reports on herstated:

Akhmatova has many acquaintances.She has no close friends. She is good-natured and does not hesitate to spendher money when she has it. But at heartshe is cold and arrogant with a childishegoism. She is helpless when it comes tothe practical tasks of everyday life.Mending a stocking poses an insolubleproblem for her. Boiling potatoes is anachievement. Despite her great fame,she is very shy. . . . 45

In 1945 Isaiah Berlin, later the renownedOxford scholar of politics and history, wasappointed to the staff of the Britishembassy in Moscow. He was born in Russiaand spoke the language fluently. WhenIsaiah visited Leningrad, he made a point of

visiting the bookshops. In one of these, heasked about the fate of some of Leningradsauthors; he was told that Akhmatova wasstill alive and that a meeting could bearranged. That afternoon, he showed up inher apartment. The story is told in Berlinsbook Personal Impressions (1981), andreprinted as a preface to Vol. II of Akhma-tovas Complete Poems.46

Berlin told how he climbed the staircaseat the Fontanka and was admitted toAkhmatovas room:

It was very barely furnishedvirtuallyeverything in it had, I gathered, beentaken awaylooted or soldduringthe siege. . . . A stately, grey-haired lady,a white shawl draped about her shoul-ders, slowly rose to greet us.Anna Akhmatova was immensely digni-fied, with unhurried gestures, a noblehead, beautiful, somewhat severe fea-tures, and an expression of immensesadness.

Berlin had given little or no thought tothe possibility that Akhmatova was beingwatched, or that contact with an Englishdiplomat could easily be misconstrued byparanoid Soviet leaders as espionage. Tomake matters infinitely worse, Berlin was atthat moment tracked down by an oldfriend:

Suddenly I heard what sounded like myfirst name being shouted somewhereoutside. I ignored this for a whileitwas plainly an illusionbut the shout-ing became louder. . . I went to thewindow and looked out, and saw a manwhom I recognized as RandolphChurchill. He was standing in themiddle of the great court, looking like atipsy under-graduate, and screaming myname.

Berlin had not seen Randolph Churchillfor years, and did not know that he hadcome to Leningrad as a journalist. Berlinnoted in his memoir that Randolph wascertainly being followed by Russian police.And by this careless act, Churchill causedrumors to circulate to the effect that theEnglish diplomats, including the son of theEnglish Prime Minister, were trying to per-suade Akhmatova to leave Russia.47

Later that same day, Berlin returned toresume his conversation with Akhmatova.They talked about Gumilyov and Mandel-stam. Berlin reports that Akhmatova told

CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007 11See AKHMATOVA, page 12

Samizdat copy of Poema Bez Geroya(Poem Without a Hero), 1946

him that Mandelstam had been in love withher. They talked about Modigliani, andBerlin remembered later that one ofModiglianis drawings of Anna hung overthe fireplace. Anna recited for him long pas-sages from her poems. She said:Poemslike these, but far better than mine, werethe cause of the death of the best poet ofour time, whom I loved and who lovedme. . . Berlin didnt know whether Annareferred to Gumilyov, her first husband, orMandelstam; but I think it must have beenMandelstam. Berlin said he asked her aboutMandelstam:she was silent, her eyes filledwith tears, and begged me not to speak ofhim. . . . It took some time for her to collectherself.48 They talked about Tsvetaeva: Marina is a better poet than I am, she saidto me.

She read for Berlin the unfinished PoemWithout A Hero. Berlin said he realizedthat he was listening to a work of genius.He described it as a many faceted and mostmagical poemwhich was intended as akind of final memorial to her life as a poet,to the past of the citySt. Petersburgwhich was part of her being . . . . It was amysterious and deeply evocative work. Heasked her to let him write down the lines,but she declined. And she did not offer himone of the samizdat copies, if any stillremained.

Later, when Akhmatova was refiningPoem Without a Hero, she added linesand a third dedication to the Guest fromthe Future, having in mind Berlin. Someyears later, when the poem was published infinal form within the Soviet Union, thededication was removed for politicalreasons.49

Berlin was the first person from theoutside world who spoke her language andcould bring her news of a world from whichshe had been isolated for many years.Berlin came to believe that she saw him asa fateful, perhaps doom-laden messengerof the end of the worlda tragic intima-tion of the future which made a profoundimpact upon her. . . . Anna believed thatStalin personally learned of the visit andwas enraged by the fact that she had com-mitted the sin of seeing a foreigner withoutformal authorization. . . . So our nun now

receives visits from foreign spies,(so it isalleged), and followed this with obsceni-ties . . . . Twenty years later, when Annavisited London on the occasion of beingawarded an honorary degree, she toldBerlin she heard about Stalins outburstfrom someone who was present at thetime.50

Whether her story about Stalin is accu-rate or not, within a few days of hermeeting with Berlin, the secret policeinstalled a microphone in the ceiling of herroom. Also, in August 1946, Akhmatovawas denounced by Andrey Zhdanov, one ofthe party bosses. He said she was one ofthe standard bearers of a hollow, empty,aristocratic salon poetry which is absolutelyforeign to Soviet Literature. He also calledher half nun, half whore. This denuncia-tion meant the end of any possibility thather poetry could be published, as well asexpulsion from the Writers Union and lossof her monthly stipend and her rationcard.51

A collection of her poetry planned forpublication in 1946 was printed but nevermade it into the bookstores, and most ofthe volumes were destroyed. Also, her sonLev was refused readmission to the Univer-sity, and in 1949 was rearrested and sen-tenced to 10 years in a Siberian prisoncamp. In 1950 Anna, like Mandelstambefore her, wrote several poems praisingStalin in the hopes that they might save herlife or her sons. These poems,In Praise ofPeace, appeared in 1950 in a Soviet literarymagazine.52

With Stalins death in March 1953, thesharp edge of totalitarianismbecame somewhat dulled. Akhmatovabegan to be given translation work, forwhich she was paid. A volume of Chinesepoetry entitled Tsui Yuan translated byAnna appeared in 1954. Two years later,her translation of Korean Classical Poetrywas published in Moscow. She did notselect the poems, and did not knowChinese or Korean. One of her friends whoknew the languages gave her the meaning ofthe poems in Russian, and she created theverse to translate the poems. She pre-sented her co-translator, AlexanderKholodovich with copies of both thesevolumes, and a second edition of the

Korean volume. In the latter she wrote:ToAlexander Alekseevich Kholodovich, inmemory of the time when we worked onthis book, with friendship of Akhmatova.

In 1956 Khrushchev spoke to the Twen-tieth Party Congress about Stalins crimes,and changes in the political climate acceler-ated. Not long after, in May 1956 Annasson Lev was permitted to return homefrom the prison camp where he had beenheld. Lev was embittered about his experi-ences in the camps. He blamed Anna forthe fact that he had been imprisoned, andbelieved that she had not done all she couldto help him. He also thought her intensefocus on poetry had been more importantto her than his welfare. When Anna was illin the hospital, he did not visit her.

In 1958 a thin collection of Akhmatovaspoems was published in an edition of25,000 copies. Brodsky described it as con-sisting of reprinted early lyrics plus gen-uinely patriotic war poems and doggerelbits extolling the arrival of peace. Thepoems were selected by government editorswhose aim was to convince the public thatAkhmatova was still alive, well and loyal.53

Titled simply Stikhotvoreniya, or Poetry,this collection is, of course, not a rare book.Though it contained nothing new, as herbiographer put it,the movement inAkhmatovas life from disgrace to recogni-tion and acclaim had begun.54

In 1961 Khrushchev denounced Stalin atthe 22nd Congress of the CommunistParty accompanied by disclosures far moredetailed and critical than his speech fiveyears earlier. The dam was starting to crackopen. In 1960-61, parts of Poem Withouta Hero were published in Russian in NewYork in the literary magazine, VozdushnyePuti; and in 1963 a small section of thepoem was published in Russia in a literaryjournal called Day of Poetry. The appear-ance of this piece inside Russia would havebeen impossible before the party congressof 1961. About the same time, copies ofRequiem began to be circulated.

In 1965 a collection of Annas poemsfrom 1909-1965 was published, entitledBeg Vremenithe flight of time. It is anattractive book; and the front paperwrapper is graced with one of Modiglianasmore modest drawings of Anna. The col-lection includes poems drawn from seven of

12 CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007

AKHMATOVA, from page 11

her booksincluding the sixth (not sepa-rately published) book Iva, and also aseventh (not previously published) book,Sedmaya KnigaSeventh Book. Therewere 50,000 copies of the 471-page collec-tion, so it is not rare.

In June 1965 (the month Anna became76) she went to Oxford, where she receivedan honorary degree, arranged by her friendIsaiah Berlin. She also visited Shakespeareshome in Stratford.

Back in Russia, in November 1965 shesuffered a heart attack and was hospital-ized. In the spring of 1966 she was movedto a sanatorium, where she was able toreceive visitors. She died March 5, 1966,and was buried in Komarova, nearLeningrad.

Today, one may visit the Akhmatovamuseum in Petersburg, located in theapartment palace on the Fontanka whereAnna lived many years. The rooms containfurnishings from the 1930s and 1940s, andthe exhibition cases contain copies of herbooks and reproductions of pictures ofAnna and her family and friends. But thereis nothing in the apartment that is origi-nalnothing dating back to the yearswhen she lived there.

I visited the National Library in Peters-burg in June 2006 where I met Dr.Kraineva, the editor of the most recent andcomprehensive edition of Akhmatovaswritings. She showed me Akhmatovas

papers, including the spiral notebook inwhich Akhmatova wrote the original draftof Poem Without a Hero andKitezhanka, and many of the typed ver-sions that circulated in Russia before publi-cation. She also showed me Annas scrap-book of fading black and whitephotographs containing pictures of her as achild with her family, as a young woman inpre-War Petersburg, and in her middle-age.

Isaiah Berlin, with his breadth of visionand his command of Russian and other lan-guages, was perhaps in the best position toevaluate Akhmatovas work and life:

Akhmatova lived in terrible times,during which. . . she behaved withheroism. . . . She did not in public, norindeed to me in private, utter a singleword against the Soviet regime: but herentire life was . . .one uninterruptedindictment of Russian reality. The wide-spread worship of her memory in[Russia] today, both as an artist and asan unsurrendering human being, has, sofar as I know, no parallel. The legend ofher life and unyielding passive resistanceto what she regarded as unworthy of hercountry and herself, transformed herinto a figure. . .not merely in Russian lit-erature, but in Russian history in [theTwentieth] century.55

All photographs from items in the authorscollection, most photographed by RobertMcCamant.

NOTES

1 The basic facts of Akhmatovas life are set forth ina recent biography by Elaine Feinstein, Anna OfAll The Russias, (London 2005), and alsoAmanda Haights earlier book, Anna Akhma-tova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, (New York 1976). Wealso have Akhmatovas own autobiographicalnotes, published in My Half Century, edited byRonald Meyer (Ann Arbor 1992), as well as therecently-published diaries of one of her hus-bands, The Diaries of Nikolay Punin, 1904-1953, ed. Monas/Krupala (Austin 1999). I havealso made use of Nadezhda Mandelstams greatmemoir of her husband and their friends, HopeAgainst Hope (London 1975), and Hope Aban-doned, (London 1989). Isaiah Berlins memoir ofAkhmatova is a wonderful piece; it can be foundas a preface to the second volume of The Com-plete Poems; see below.

Many of the bibliographic details withrespect to her books are set out in the notes tothe great three-volume collection of her works,Sochineniya, edited by G.P. Struve and B.A. Fil-ippov (Inter-Language Literary Associates,1967), which is now itself a collectors item.

An excellent collection of Akhmatovaspoetry in both Russian and English translationis the two-volume Complete Poems of AnnaAkhmatova, edited by Judith Hemschemeyer(Somerville 1990). Shorter collections inpaperback are edited by Stanley Kunitz, Poemsof Akhmatova (Boston 1967), and D.M.Thomas, Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems,Penguin Books, 1976. The translations in thepresent paper may be found in the Feinsteinbiography.

2 Brodsky, Less Than One (New York, 1986) p. 34-35.

3 Feinstein, p. 12.4 Feinstein, p. 11.5 Feinstein, p. 13.6 Feinstein, p. 16.7 Feinstein, p. 23.8 Feinstein, p. 28.9 Feinstein, p. 33.10 My Half Century, p. 80.11 Feinstein, p. 253.12 Rannit, Preface to Sochinenie Vol. II, ed. Struve

et al, p. 7-12, 1968.13 Akhmatova, My Half-Century, p. 26.14 quoted in Feinstein, p. 37.15 My Half Century, p. 8.16 Id., p. 18.17 My Half-Century, p. 26-27.18 Feinstein, p. 52.19 Feinstein, p. 52.20 Feinstein, p. 62-63.21 Brodsky, p. 41.22 Feinstein, p. 93, 109.23 Feinstein, p. 72-73.24 Feinstein, p. 77.25 Feinstein, p. 83, 90.26 Brodsky, p. 48.27 Feinstein, p. 94.28 Feinstein, p. 114-123.29 Feinstein, p. 126, 134.30 Complete Poems, Vol. II, 462-469.31 See Collecting Mandelstam, Caxtonian,

November 2006, Vol XIV, No. 13.32 Feinstein, p. 15033 Feinstein, p. 151-52.34 Feinstein, p. 162.35 Feinstein, 171.36 Brodsky, p. 51.37 Feinstein, p. 178-181.38 Complete Poems, Vol II, p. 766.39 Feinstein, p. 205.40 Feinstein, p. 206-208.41 Feinstein, p. 237. See also a recent Russian study,

Kovalenko, S.A., Petersburg Dreams of AnnaAkhmatova, Petersburg, 2004.

42 St. Petersburg, 199843 New York, 196044 Feinstein, p. 211.45 Quoted by Feinstein, p. 213.46 Somerville, 1990,Memoir, at 28-4547 Berlin, p. 26-27.48 Berlin, p. 30-31.49 Berlin, p. 35.50 Berlin, p. 38.51 Feinstein, p. 222.52 Feinstein, p. 228.53 Brodsky, p. 48.54 Feinstein, p. 247.55 Berlin, p. 43.

CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007 13

Anna, from her last collection, BegVremini, 1965

14 CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007

that you would give to someone as a smallkindness, to thank them for something. Sooften in the volumes that I have, there willbe an inscription on the fly-leaf: to Helmutand Gabi with thanks for Sunday after-noon. They really became a part of theculture of the educated and middle class.

While he certainly does spend timeleafing through and admiring them, inanswer to the question, does he actuallyread them:No. I like collecting thembecause theyre cheap, and I like collectingthem because the possibilities are infinite.There are so many variations: the same titlewill go through many editions, with differ-ent cover designs, different typography.

I carry something with me, where Irecord what Ive got. Helmut Musiol did a

catalog,4 a sale catalog, of variants of Insel-Bcher. I started using this. I sat down withmy collection at the time, and recordedeverything that I had. Immediatelydespitethe fact that hes got about thirty-eighthundred entries hereprobably half thethings that were in my collection or that Iadded later, he didnt have in thecatalogthough he made no claim ofexhaustiveness. I started interpolatingthings between his numbers. This is myconvenient record of what Ive got. I carrythis with me as Im looking at a shelf, so Ican look and see if Ive got something ornot, or if the spines missing on the one thatIve got, so I can get one in better condition.At last count, I had 864.

He displays them, spines-out, on a coupleof hallway bookshelves,in number order,

then chronologically. This isnt the best wayto display them. I really need to devise away so some of them you can look at headon.

Photograph by John Dunlevy.

NOTES1 It was Paul Ruxins interview of Gwin Kolb that

inaugurated Caxtonians Collect as a series ofinterviews with members in the Caxtonian 12,no. 12 (December 2004): 5.

2 Remembered in the Caxtonian 14, no. 6 ( June2006): 5.

3 Why 1900? Rosenthal explained his reasoningin an informal manifesto. It was as good a dateas any other, he wrote, but was especially attrac-tive because of the two zeros. 1900: For col-lecting books, it was a very good year, Universityof Chicago Chronicle, March 14, 1996.

4 Helmut K. Musiol: Variationen der Insel-Bcherei, self-published, Murnau 1989.

Book and manuscript-relatedexhibitions: a selective listCompiled by John Blew

(Note: on occasion an exhibit may be delayed or extended; it is alwayswise to call in advance of a visit.)

The Meaning of Dictionaries (featuring historical dictionariesfrom the Research Centers holdings, as well as archival materi-als from the University of Chicago Press, this exhibit exploresthe ways English language dictionaries have defined meaningfrom the Enlightenment to the digital age, and what dictionar-ies mean within their cultural contexts) at theSpecial Collections Research Center, Univer-sity of Chicago Library, 1100 E. 57th Street,Chicago 773-702-8705 (closes 6 July 2007)

Black Jewel of the Midwest: Celebrating 75 yearsof the George Cleveland Hall Branch Libraryand the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection,spotlighting their roles in the cultural flower-ing of the Chicago Renaissance and the BlackArts Movement (includes books, manuscripts,photographs and ephemera, many of whichhave never before been exhibited, from theHarsh Collection, one of the finest institu-tional collections anywhere of African-Ameri-can history and literature) at the WoodsonRegional Library of the Chicago PublicLibrary, 9525 South Halsted Street, Chicago312-747-6900 (closes 31 December 2007)

Science and Faith Between Observance and Censorship: TheIndex of Forbidden Books (presents copies from four librariesof the Regione Compania in Italy of more than 150 rare scien-tific and religious books published between 1563 and 1765,banned by the Roman Catholic Church) at the Loyola Univer-

sity Museum of Art, 820 North Michigan Avenue (at thecorner of Pearson Street), Chicago 312-915-7600 (closes 29April 2007)

Type for the Tower of Babel (an exhibit of books, documents andother materials from the Librarys collections that relate totranslations in connection with the Caxton Club and NewberryLibrary 2007 Symposium of the Book) at the NewberryLibrary, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago 312-255-3700 (closes28 April 2007)

Building the Future City: Past Visions (a small exhibit featuringmaps, plans, manuscript materials, publications, and photo-graphs from the collections of UIC Special Collections and theUIC Archives Department that document past visions of

improvements and grand plans for Chicago)at the Richard J. Daley Library (first floorlobby), University of Illinois at Chicago, 801South Morgan, Chicago 312-996-2742(from 19 April to 17 August 2007)

Imposters (an exhibition of materials from theAdlers collections determined to be forger-ies) at the Adler Planetarium & AstronomyMuseum, 1300 South Lake Shore Drive (theMuseum Campus), Chicago 312-322-0300(closes 3 June 2007)

Czanne to Picasso, Ambrose Vollard, Patronof the Avant Garde (in addition to tradi-tional works of art, this exhibition contains anumber of livres d artistes created by theartists featured in the show, includingBonnard, Degas, Denis, Dufy, Picasso, andRouault) at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111

South Michigan Avenue, Chicago 312-443-3600 (closes 12May 2007)

Members who have information about current or forthcoming exhibi-tions that might be of interest to Caxtonians, please call or e-mailJohn Blew (312-807-4317, e-mail: jblew@bellboyd.com).

Science and Faith, Loyola MuseumSCALA, 1559, COURTESY FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

SUTTER, from page 15

CAXTONIAN, APRIL 2007 15

Interviewed by John Dunlevy

Caxtonian Sem Sutter (88) came tobook collecting and to the Caxton Club viathe route that also brought him to hiscurrent position as Assistant Director forHumanities and Social Sciences in the Uni-versity of Chicago Library. He came to theU of C as a grad student in history in 1972,specializing in early modern Germanhistory. By the timehe was writing hisdissertation, he haddoubts aboutwhether he would behappy in a teachingcareer. He knew hewanted to be an aca-demic,so an obviousalternative was beingan academic librar-ian. While writinghis dissertation, hegot a job in thelibrary, working inSpecial Collections,in 1980. He finishedthe dissertation in1982, and by thattime I was convincedthat I did want to bea librarian.

His boss and mentor was Robert Rosen-thal, who was Curator of Special Collec-tions and was a very active Caxtonian.Rosenthal advised Sutter that he should goto library school.At that point, we still hada Library School here, so I went to libraryschool while continuing to work full-time.It was during that period when I workingin special collections and also was in libraryschool that I became aware of the CaxtonClub. I started coming to meetings some-time in the first half of the eighties whenRosenthal would sometimes invite mewhen the topic was something that hethought would interest me.

Sutter earned his MLS in 1985.Thenext year, the Western European literaturebibliographer position became availableacase of the dream job opening up at just theright time for me. He joined the CaxtonClub three years later. A particularly mem-

orable meeting was when Eudora Weltycame andinstead of giving a talkreadher story Why I Live at the P.O. She was avery good friend of Gwin Kolb,1 who was aCaxtonian and a faculty member here. Hedied last year.2 It was through him that theywere able to ask her to come.

As far as collecting goes (one of his anti-quarian-dealer friends in Germany calls itan affliction), he accumulates all sorts of

books, but theres really only one thing thatI collect purposefully, and thats books inthe Insel-Bcherei series. It was not some-thing that I originally set out to collect. Isuppose most people who collect dont sud-denly decide one day, Im going to collectxand then start buying it. You find your-self attracted to it, you find youve gotten acertain number of them, you becomeintrigued and buy more. One early factor inmy deciding to collect them was somethingthat Bob Rosenthal told me. He said thathe thought every librarian ideally had to bea collector in his or her own rightbutthat you needed to be very careful aboutwhat you collect so that its not somethingthat could ever pose a conflict of interest; Inever want to be in a position where Im ina bookstore, and I pull a book off the shelf,and I have to think: Is this for me or is itfor the library? His solution was to collectarbitrary categoriesthings like books

published in 1900,3 books that had thename of one of the members of his familyin the title, and books with double enten-dres in the title. For me, collecting the Insel-Bcherei seemed to fit those criteria.

The books are octavo format, thin, typi-cally 80-100 pages, not particularly sturdy,and normally the texts have been publishedover and over in many forms, so an Insel-Bcherei edition would almost never be the

ideal thing for you to buy forthe library. The booksusually are very inexpensive.Besides being interesting asphysical objects, the slice ofGerman culture they repre-sent matches my intellectualinterests. The first ones thatI would have seen werewhen I was in Germany formy junior year of college atthe University of Marburg.The first ones I bought werein my grad student yearshere, running into them inbookstores in Hyde Park,and book sales at the librarybefore I became anemployee.

I find them attractive,and Im intrigued by the

history of the series, although Ive nevertaken the time to learn as much about thehistory of the series as a collector reallyshould. The series started in 1912. InselVerlag had been doing a fair amount of fineprintingthings like limited editions oftranslations of Oscar Wilde, Hugo vonHofmannsthal. One of the partners in thefirm had the idea that besides fine editionsfor people with means they should doattractive, mass-produced editions of classicworks that are so inexpensive theyre acces-sible to anyone. They were an instantpopular success, and theyve been going eversince.

One of the things that is interesting tome is how much a part of German culturetheyve become. Not just German culture inthe sense of intellectual culture, but a socialculture. Very early on it became somethingthat you would bring as a gift to your host,

Caxtonians Collect: Sem SutterTwenty-ninth in a series of interviews with members

See SUTTER, page 14

Luncheon ProgramApril 13, 2007Peter ThomasTreasures of Intricate Craftsmanship:The Amazing World of Artists Books

Since 1976 Peter and Donna Thomas from Santa Cruz havebeen individually and collaboratively creating artists books(including the paper, illustrations, printing and the bindings).Their books can be found in collections world-wide, including theNewberry, Huntington, Harvard, Princeton and Yale Libraries.One of Donnas books was recently on display at the Grolier aspart of the Neal Albert Collection. Peters lecture will include:exactly what are artists books, as compared to fine press booksand book-inspired art; what must viewers know before they canproperly enjoy and evaluate artists books; how necessary is text;which of the 5 senses is uniquely important when experiencingthis art form; what are the special challenges that artists bookexhibitions make upon viewers and especially upon curators?Peter and Donna will be sending ahead to the Caxton Club acomprehensive sampling of their work (including an airplane-shaped book!). Please go to www2.cruzio.com/~peteranddonna/to view their impressive repertoire.

An afternoon of enlightenment.

Bookmarks...Dinner ProgramApril 18, 2007Stuart ShermanDavid Garrick and Death

We have had many great scholars and great speakers over theyears at Caxton, but as powerhouse combination, we havenever had the equal of Stuart Sherman. The holder of a Ph.D.from Columbia, three Masters degrees and a B.A. from Oberlin, heis chairman of the English Department at Fordham University.Caxtons program chairman has heard him speak, and assures usthat Prof. Sherman is truly an electrifying speaker. He will tell usabout David Garrick, the most famous actor ever on the Englishstage.Is it possible, a besotted fan once asked,that he can besubject to Pain, Disease,& Death, like Other Men? In one way, ofcourse, the answer must be yes. Garrick could die, and dieaffectingly, on every night he performed in tragedy. But Garrickalso knew how to work the prospect of his own death for effectsother than pathos: for laughs in his comedies, and for an abidinghold over his audience. He was the first celebrity to harp skillfullyon the matter of his own mortality, playing up the inevitability ofhis own evenescence against the accumulating evidence of his ownstaying power. Prof. Shermans talk will explore the ways in whichGarrick both won his bet and lost it, by complex means whichhelped shape our ideas of celebrity death and deathlessness eversince.

All luncheon and dinner meetings, unless otherwise noted, are held inthe Mid-Day Club, 56th floor of Chase Tower, Madison and Clark,Chicago. Luncheon: buffet opens at 11:30; program 12:30-1:30.Dinner meetings: spirits at 5 pm, dinner at 6 pm, lecture at 7:30 pm.For reservations call 312-255-3710 or email

caxtonclub@newberry.org. Members and guests: Lunch $25, Dinner$45. Discount parking available for evening meetings, with a stampedticket, at Standard Self-Park, 172 W. Madison. Call Steve Masello at847-905-2247 if you need a ride or can offer one.

Beyond April...MAY LUNCHEONOn May 11 Lesa Dowd, of theChicago Public Library, willdeliver a behind-the-scenes lookat a current juried artists booksexhibition which she curated.One Book, Many Interpretationscelebrates the 5th anniversary ofMayor Daleys One Book, OneChicago program.

MAY DINNERRobert H. Jackson is a notedbibliophile and a founder ofFABS. He is also an author andthe editor of the recentlypublished Book Talk. On May16 he will talk about his interestin illustrator Rockwell Kent,whom he has pursued even toGreenland.

JUNE LUNCHEONOn June 8th the FridayLuncheon welcomes KayMichael Kramer, proprietor of aprivate press (the Printery),editor of the FABS newsletterand a member of the Caxtonand Bixby Clubs. His anecdotalpower-point presentation willcelebrate Benjamin Franklin, asauthor, publisher and printer.

JUNE DINNEROn June 20, Gary Johnson,President of the ChicagoHistory Museum, has beenrescheduled to talk about theMuseums 22 million objectsand the window they provide onChicago history. He will alsotouch on his efforts to open awindow to the on-going work ofauthors.

16 CAXTONIAN, APRIL 20007