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Acknowledgments

The text I have primarily used has been the two-volume Akhmatova: Sochineniya (Inter-Language Literary Associates, second edition, 1967-68), edited by G. P. Struve and B. A. Fillipov. I am grateful also to Professor Struve for helpful advice in correspondence.

I wish to thank Jennifer Munro for her patient and expert help, over many months, with aspects of the Russian language that eluded me. Without her, my task would have been incomparably more difficult.

Amanda Haight’s biography of Akhmatova (Akhmatova, A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1976) has been invaluable in supplying background information and interpretative comment on the poetry. To her own translations, and to those of Richard McKane and Stanley Kunitz, I am indebted for the occasions when a phrase or a line, in one or other of them, has struck me as so ‘happy’ that it would have been foolish to try to find a better.

The Translator acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain.