Anna of All the Russias by Elaine Feinstein

Author:Elaine Feinstein [Feinstein, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307424822
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Like the sound of quiet waters

While the black whisper of ill-luck

Is warm in my ear, murmuring,

As if it were the night’s business,

“You wanted comfort, did you?

Do you know where it is—your comfort?”25

If there is a suggestion in these last lines that her only comfort would be found in death, Akhmatova nevertheless sturdily rejected suicide and continued to do so when she experienced even greater disasters. She went away more often to Moscow, however, where she usually stayed with the Ardovs.

Punin was far from free of her. On 30 July 1936 he wrote in his diary, “An. has won this fifteen-year war,”26 and was deeply upset by Akhmatova’s poem, “A Last Toast,” which acknowledges the waste-land of their relationship:

I drink to my ruined house

My life of viciousness

The loneliness we shared.

Just so, I drink to you—

To the lie of treacherous lips,

To the deathly cold of your eyes,

To this cruel rough world,

Where God does not save anyone.27

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