In the poetry of Anna Akhmatova the nineteenth-century myth of Petersburg, as the accursed, unreal city, is filtered through the vision of a poet born in Imperial Russia and destined to confront the terrors of Soviet rule. The city that emerges embodies loss and dislocation, continuity and miraculous survival. This scholarly and imaginative study (New York Review of Books) convincingly demonstrates that a good part of Akhmatovas verse could never have been written but for the Petersburg environment.
About the Author
Sharon Leiter earned her Ph.D. degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and has taught Russian literature at the University of Virginia. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Lady and the Bailiff of Time, and a winner of a Virginia Prize for Fiction. Her poems and stories have appeared in major literary quarterlies.
