Details
Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, 1889-1966)
Typescript signed ('A. Akhmatova') with autograph revisions of Poema Bez Geroia [Poem without a Hero] (here subtitled 'Triptch 1940-1955'), Moscow, 15 June 1955
In Russian. 46 pages, 209 x 140mm, numbered 1-44, 48, 49, autograph cancellations, emendations and additions in purple ink on 38 pages, a few other annotations in pencil and blue ink; stapled in a booklet, green paper covers, inscribed on verso of title to 'A.A.X.', Leningrad, 29 November 1955; with a photograph reproduction of a portrait drawing of Akhmatova, inscribed to the same on the verso, Leningrad, 1958; also a second photograph, and a related typescript. Provenance: Sotheby's, 15 May 1996, lot 152.

Corrected typescript of Akhmatova's magnum opus. Akhmatova's careful corrections to almost every page of the poem often attend to details of line-spacing, numbering of stanzas and other typographical matters, but also add or amend a number of words and phrases; more subsantial additions include four lines on p.24, a single line on p.27, 9 lines on p.33, one line on p.34, four lines on p.35, one line on p.36 and a concluding stanza of seven lines facing p.44.

Akhmatova worked on the autobiographical Poem without a Hero for more than twenty years, beginning in 1940 during the siege of Leningrad. Her longest and most structurally and thematically complex work, it evokes the ghosts of the pre-revolutionary period of her youth and literary debut. It was not formally published in Russia until after her death, but the present typescript is a significant witness to the circulation of the text even 7 years before its completion, and indicates the form it had reached at this date, before the completion of several sections of the final text (notably the 'Third and Last' section).
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Sophie MeadowsSenior Specialist
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