The Akhmatova Journals

Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), described by Chukovskaya as ``famous and neglected, strong and helpless . . . a statue of grief, loneliness, pride, courage,'' springs vividly to life in this fragmentary diary. Chukovskaya, a fellow Russian writer who revered and befriended Akhmatova, recorded from memory their almost daily conversations in Leningrad. Along with animated discussions of Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Aleksandr Blok, Freud, Joyce and many contemporaneous Russian writers, their talks contain veiled intimations of Akhmatova's fear and loathing of Stalin's terrorist police state. This installment of the diary concludes with the two friends evacuating besieged, war-torn Leningrad by train to Tashkent. Norman's stunning translations of 54 of Akhmatova's poems, while faithful to their traditional diction, simultaneously convey their emotional fireworks and modernist sensibility. (Mar.)