Anna Akhmatova Quotes

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

Forgive me, that I manage badly,
Manage badly but live gloriously,
That I leave traces of myself in my songs,
That I appeared to you in waking dreams.

"You dreamt of me, I knew,
And hence I couldn't sleep.
The lantern flickered blue
And there my path ran steep.

[...]

"This is a lake," you thought.
"There is an island here..."
Just then, on the darkened road,
A little blue light appeared.

By wretched sunlight severed,
You stirred and moaned in pain,
And for the first time ever,
You called me by my name."

Creature of special tastes, you do not wait for gout and fame to elevate you to a luxurious jubilee chair, but bear your triumph over the flowering heather, over wildernesses. And you are guilty of nothing: neither of this, that, nor anything..

Let the gossip roll! What to me are Hamlet's garters, or the whirlwind of Salome's dance, or the tread of the Man in the Iron Mask? I am more iron than they.

Let love be the gravestone
Lying on my life.

For some the wind can fleshly blow, for some the sunlight fade at ease, but we, made partners in our dread, hear but the grating of the keys, and heavy-booted soldiers' tread. As if for early mass, we rose and each day walked the wilderness, trudging through silent street and square, to congregate, less live than dead.

They soar, they are somewhere mid-flight,
The words of love and liberation
And I'm succumbing to stage-fright,
My lips – ice cold in trepidation.
But soon, where birches, thin and humble,
Caress the windows with their leaves, -
The voice of the unseen will rumble
And roses will be tied in wreaths.

For seventeen months I have cried aloud calling you back to your lair. I hurled myself at the hangman's foot. You are my son, changed into nightmare. Confusion occupies the world, and I am powerless to tell somebody brute from something human, or on what day the word spells, "Kill!"

Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed, His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared. His mother stood apart. No other looked into her secret eyes. Nobody dared. — 1940-1943

And you, my friends who have been called away,
I have been spared to mourn for you and weep,
not as a frozen willow over your memory,
but to cry to the world the names of those who sleep.
What names are those!
I slam shut the calendar,
down on your knees, all!
Blood of my heart,
the people of Leningrad march out in even rows,
the living, the dead: fame can't tell them apart.

O let the organ, many-voiced, sing boldly, O let it roar like spring's first thunderstorm! My half-closed eyes over your young bride's shoulder Will meet your eyes just once and then no more.

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.

Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree.

If I can’t have love, if I can’t find peace, give me a bitter glory.