Anna Akhmatova in the Last Years of Her Life

I have known her name and lines from her poems for as long as I remember myself. In the early 1920s writers would gather in my parents' house and read their own and others' poems; my sister and I would doze off to the sound of voices declaiming on the other side of the door.… Later, among my mother's books I discovered two thin little white books, The Rosary Chetki] and Anno Domini. In The Rosary there was the portrait by Al'tman: broken lines throughout. In Anno Domini there was Annenkov's: the swanlike neck, the comb, the bangs.