Description

Lydia Tchoukovskaya, a writer and critic, has known the poems of Anna Akhmatova (the great Russian poet) since she was little...<div> She had crossed paths with her several times without ever daring to greet her. She visited her at her home for the first time on November 21, 1938. Despite the danger involved, Lydia decided to keep a diary of their almost daily conversations. (The book covers the period from this first meeting to the day of Anna Akhmatova's death on March 6, 1966.)</div><div> Anna is banned from publishing, her son is in the camps, Lydia's husband has been arrested... but words, poetry, humor sustain them in the face of History.</div><div><br></div><div> There is the communal apartment with its noises, the small room where Anna lives, the ashtray in which she burns her poems after Lydia has learned them by heart, Anna's phone calls: "Come, what suits me is right away", there is also the queue outside the Leningrad prison, Lydia walking towards Anna's apartment reciting her verses to herself, Lydia alone, her thoughts of exceptional finesse, Pasternak's funeral... and of course: "She", Anna Akhmatova, a poet who would not be published for 25 years but whose verses everyone knew by heart.</div>