This book arose from several years of research on Akhmatova. Anna Akhmatova is one of the most acclaimed poets of the twentieth century. Her career falls into two distinct periods, an 'earlier' and a 'later', the dividing line being her period of relative silence between 1925 and 1940. As is often observed, her return to poetry brings with it a sudden and dramatic shift away from a relatively homogenous body of early lyric miniatures to a more diverse and complex style. One of the major unresolved problems in Akhmatova scholarship is that of how the poetics of the two phases are related....