Tag Archives: Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova in the Modernist Moment

Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 1914. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Anna Akhmatova Foundation] Anna Akhmatova had become a cultural icon by the time Nathan Altman painted her in 1914. Her bangs and shawl, her regal bearing … Continue reading






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Listening to the Voice of Anna Akhmatova

What I found, remarkably, were recordings of Anna Akhmatova reading poems late in her life in the 1960s. This may be as close as we can come to hearing Mandelstam’s voice. Indeed, Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam preserved his verse in their voices and memories for three decades, resurrecting it furtively from inner speech, reciting it aloud to one another in the privacy of their rooms, then preserving it again in memory. Only after a political “thaw” came after Stalin’s death could Mandelstam’s poetry begin to be spoken publically and printed in books.






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A Word is the Search for It, part 5: The Renewal of Motive

Early in my study of Lev Vygotsky’s work I asked an experimental psychologist, an eminent authority on the evolution of the mammalian brain, what he knew about Vygotsky. He was working on sabbatical in London at the time, so our … Continue reading






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A Word is the Search for It, part 3: Subtext and Secret Writing

As Vygotsky probed deeper into the inner processes of thought and language, he reached motive. “Thought is not begotten by thought,” he wrote. “It is engendered by motivation, … by our desires and needs, our interests and emotions. Behind every … Continue reading






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