[In the following review, Lamonte discusses the ghosts that haunt the pages of Akhmatova's My Half Century.]

In his preface to My Half Century, a splendid selection of the translated prose writings of Anna Akhmatova, Ronald Meyer, the editor of the volume, explains that the author never conceived of composing a chronicle of her life and times. Although, as Meyer points out, it is futile to imagine what the completed work might have been, a model could perhaps be sought in Pasternak and Mandelstam's "autobiographical fragments," as Safe Conduct and The Noise of Time were defined by their creators. In fact, this form of autobiography is characteristic of the postmodern esthetic, and even of "high modernism." For example, all of Ionesco's published diaries assume this loose, highly suggestive structure (Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre, Fragments of a Journal, Present Past Past Present, Un homme en question, Antidotes, La quête intermittente). We no longer look for linearity in these accounts, but rather for revealing, allusive, if not elusive traces.

Since Akhmatova did not prepare a final version for publication, Meyer provides his own concise, helpful biographical sketch, in which he includes her in "the magnificent quartet of Russian poets" who were destroyed by the brutally repressive Soviet regime. Osip Mandelstam died on the way to a labor camp, Tsvetaeva hanged herself, and Pasternak was hounded into an early grave after the publication in Italy of Doctor Zhivago (1957) and his subsequent selection as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1958). As to Akhmatova, she was silenced by the August 1946 condemnation of the Central Committee (rescinded only in 1988). This list of victims is also the honor roll of the greatest and purest poetic voices of post-czarist Russia.

My Half Century begins with "Pages from a Diary." Born in Odessa in June 1889, the velichavaia (stately, regal) poet glories in the fact that her birth came in "the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, and the Eiffel Tower." There is humor in this rapprochement between a modern monument, a literary masterpiece, and the greatest clown of our age. This, however, is followed by a reminder that, through her mother, she is a descendant of Genghis Khan. She grew up in Tsarskoe Selo, the czar's summer residence outside St. Petersburg, renamed Pushkin in 1937 in honor of its most illustrious resident. As Meyer declares, "the place held a special importance in her psychological geography." In her own journal the poet evokes the house they occupied, near the station, and which had been in the past a wayside inn. As a child, Akhmatova perused the dwelling's various aspects as she peeled off, layer by layer, the wallpaper in her yellow room until she reached "an unusually bright red." The room becomes a kind of palimpsest. Tsarskoe and nearby Pavlovsk were haunted by history and literature. The poet mentions "the specter of Nastasya Filippovna," the magnificent femme fatale of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. Looking at the photo in the book, one is struck by the resemblance between these women; Akhmatova could easily have acted the part of Nastasya Filippovna in one of the dramatizations of the novel.

Many ghosts haunt these pages: Nikolai Gumilev (1886–1921), Akhmatova's first husband, whom she met while he was still a student at the Tsarskoe Selo lycée; the symbolist poet Alexander Blok, whose portrait she sketches here; Amadeo Modigliani, who made sixteen drawings of her in Paris for her room in Tsarskoe (they vanished during the first years of the revolution); Osip Mandelstam, who described her in a poem as "a black angel"; Innokenty Annensky, considered by Akhmatova as the master of Gumilev, Mayakovsky, and Pasternak; Marina Tsvetaeva, who took her life in 1941. Akhmatova ponders: "It is frightening to think how Marina would have described these meetings … if she had remained alive and I had died on August 31, 1941." When she wrote these lines in 1959, Akhmatova must have felt that she had become the ghost of herself.

The ultimate ghost and teacher is Pushkin, the emblematic poet with whom Akhmatova identifies. She emulated his subtextual way of denouncing the autocratic czars. As Meyer states: "Writing in the 1930s, one of the bleakest decades in Russian history, Akhmatova is the first to identify the source of Pushkin's tale ['The Golden Cockerel'] as Washington Irving 'The Legend of the Arabian Astrologer.' Akhmatova, however, proceeds to interpret Pushkin's use of Irving's tale as a device for political satire, marshaling formidable evidence to prove that the fairy-tale Tsar is based on Nicholas I." She identifies with her predecessor when she speaks of the neglect and disdain he had to suffer. Still, she says, his haughty, stupid contemporaries are now forgotten, recorded by history only as people who somehow came into Pushkin's presence, however marginally. He stands at the center of his century. "People say: the Pushkin era, Pushkin's Petersburg…. In the palace halls where they danced and gossiped about the poet, his portraits now hang and his books are on view, while their pale shadows have been banished from there forever."

The essays, vignettes, and letters gathered in My Half Century reveal that Akhmatova grew increasingly fascinated with the genre of the memoir. She developed on her own a Proustian attitude toward memory, believing, as he did, that "the human memory works like a projector, illuminating individual moments, while leaving the rest in impenetrable darkness." This is not so different from Proust's privileging of involuntary memory over voluntary remembrance. Some small detail will suddenly recall the whole, re-creating a moment in the past or the essence of a human being. Also like Proust, she realized that the state of childhood is infinitely rich. As an adult one must therefore peel off the layers, just as Akhmatova peeled the wallpaper of her room in Tsarskoe Selo. One must concentrate on recalling a scent, a color, a sensation, a note of music. It is then that something begins to sing inside of one: a poem, a prose sketch, even an intellectual discovery.

From her work on Pushkin we realize that Akhmatova could have been an extraordinary scholar, but fortunately she was not only that. She was a passionate person, and so all she did was infused with feeling. She was luminous because, in her, intelligence went with kindness and kindness with intelligence. Without the combination of the two, each part is unusable. Akhmatova made herself wholly usable, even when a stupid, cruel regime tried to toss her onto the gar-bage heap. Like Pushkin's contemporaries, the tyrants will be remembered because they lived in the Akhmatova era.