Бег времени 1909-1965

The first edition, of which there were no large paper copies.
Publisher's grey cloth binding, lacking DJ with a drawing by Modigliani.
An exceptional autograph inscription signed in Russian and dated by Akhmatova on the half-title: “to David Carver, another reminder of the pines of Komarovo, Anna Akhmatova 23 February 1966”.
Single stain to upper cover, the spine slightly sunned, otherwise a very good copy.
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, known as Anna Akhmatova, was without doubt the greatest of the Russian female poets and occupies a place beside Pushkin in the Slavic pantheon, from whom she inherited her evocative force “across time, schools and literary styles”, as well as fame. She was very quickly called “the spirit of the silver age” in reference to the “spirit of the golden age,” or Pushkin.
Admired by the writer Boris Pasternak, loved by the poets Alexander Blok and Ossip Mandelstam, muse to the painters Amedeo Modigliani and Natan Altman, the “queen of the Neva” wrote only very little, mostly before 1922, after which she was barred from publishing for more than thirty years. Censured, persecuted, denigrated by the ruling Communists, Akhmatova was nonetheless profoundly loved and listened to by the Russian people, whose dark hours she shared and who knew her verses by heart. Despite the death of her husband, the imprisonment of her son and her own deportation, the “icon of Russian suffering” refused to save herself by exile.
“No, it is not under a foreign sky,
In the shelter of the foreign wings that I was
But in the heart of my people,
There, where for its sins, my people were.”
She overcame the ban on her writing by dictating her poems to her faithful friend, the poet Lydia Chukovskaya, in order, as her disciple Joseph Brodsky wrote at her death, to “endow a deaf-mute world with words”. It was only after the death of Stalin in 1953 that Akhmatova could, progressively, once more begin to publish in the Soviet Union some of her work, including this anthology, from which, however, Requiem, too strong, was cut. This proved a genuine, if belated national consecration for the poet and the last work she published before her death in 1966.
“The harsh era
Turned me like a river
To another bed. They changed my life.
It flows elsewhere now.
And I do not know my own banks.”
In the West, where Requiem had been published two years earlier in Berlin, Akhmatova was discovered partly thanks to the PEN Club. This international association of writers, founded in 1921 in order to “unite writers of all countries who believe in the values of peace, tolerance, and freedom, without which creation becomes impossible”, became one of the most important NGOs for the defense of the free movement of people and ideas. Confined to the West for a long time, PEN began to open towards the Soviet world from the 1950s onwards, especially under the influence of David Carver. In the middle of the cold war, the powerful Secretary of the PEN club had Arthur Miller elected President of the Club for his good relations with the Soviets and organized through COMES (The Communauté européenne des écrivains) of which he was an observer, the first meetings between Western and Soviet writers. Akhmatova was, thanks to this unprecedented rapprochement, the first Soviet writer to receive an international prize in 1964, given by COMES, after the Nobel Prize that Paternak had had to refuse in 1958.
In 1965, Carver invited Akhmatova to participate in a conference organized by PEN in Yugoslavia, but the poet, very weak by then, was unable to attend: “I would like to go,” she wrote to Chukovskaya, “ the topic interests me greatly, “literature and its readers”. The Europeans themselves say there is a crisis in literature in Europe: people like it less, people care less about it, etc. It's not like that here. I could have given them a speech based on letters from readers. Now, here, people love poetry like never before. Why do you think that is? I think it's because here, it takes the place of everything else. Religion, politics, conscience…Everything. Yes, yes, it takes the place of everything.”
Despite her fragile heart, which was soon overwhelmed by illness, she nonetheless undertook a second journey to Paris – more than fifty years after her stay with Modigliani. On her return, she once more underlined the special nature of the Russian soul: “The French,” she wrote, “were dumbfounded, that I got letters written [to me] by sailors and lumberjacks. There, no one reads poetry apart from a very narrow section of the intelligentsia and then, can you believe it, sailors and lumberjacks!”
The superb inscription from Akhmatova to Carver, ten days before her death, in this aptly named “flight of time” is testimony to the unique closeness between this visionary poet and the idealist Secretary of the PEN club. Though we are aware of the numerous trips that Carver undertook to the USSR in order to create a Russian PEN with the Union of Soviet Writers, we know nothing about his relationship in Russia with Akhmatova, the short-lived President of this state-run organization (from which she had nonetheless been violently expelled because of her writings). It would seem, however, that she had welcomed Carver at her last home in Komarovo. The muse of the Acmeists (a poetic movement that urged the “indivisible unity of the Earth and Man”), shared with this new friend the sharpness of her world view, so completely contained in the “reflections of a sky that's going out” on the walls of a Leningrad prison, or in this “memory of the pines at Komarovo”. It's in the little cemetery at the foot of these trees that the poet would be buried. Very rare, inscriptions by Akhmatova, especially to a Westerner, reflect the terrible trials of the Russian people, witnessed by the “sovereign words” of the poet.
Faithful to this heavy responsibility, this must be one of her final inscriptions, to a man who contributed to her international reputation, and to whom she gave this modest collection containing – almost – her entire oeuvre, and enriched with a souvenir of that imposing Russian forest laid out before the sea.
“Such is my life, such my biography. Who will then say no to their own life?”
(From the beginning of Requiem)