[In the following review, Franklin judges the quality of the discussion and presentation of Akhmatova's work in In a Shattered Mirror, by Susan Amert; My Half Century, edited by Ronald Meyer; and The Complete Poems, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer.]

Anna Akhmatova, empress of poets, died in 1966. She had grown up in Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar's Village outside St Petersburg, where Pushkin had been to school. In 1911 in Paris, Modigliani drew her "in the attire of Egyptian queens". With Osip Mandelstam and her husband Nikolai Gumilev she was at the centre of the Guild of Poets professing the creed of Acmeism. Between 1912 and 1922 she published five books of poetry, "lyrical diaries" of precisely evoked fragments of experience, sharp memories of love and guilt and pain. More artists painted her and sculpted her, admirers flocked.

From 1925 she disappeared from public view. Nobody would print her. What good were her private insights and precious diction when there was Socialism to be built? During the war she was useful, but in 1946, Andrei Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, denounced Akhmatova as "one of the standard-bearers of an empty, aristocratic, drawing-room poetry, which is totally alien to Soviet Literature". Zhdanov's last phrase was, of course, correct.

Her son was arrested, Gumilev had been executed, Mandelstam died in the camps. Akhmatova lived on the margins, migrating from friend's flat to friend's flat, carrying with her the one inviolable possession, her language, into which all was absorbed. She said of her poetry from the late 1930s: "my handwriting had changed and my voice sounded differently".

Akhmatova's "changed handwriting" has attracted many graphologists. In his memoir of his meetings with Akhmatova, Isaiah Berlin expressed concern that some of her later work may be smothered under the "tumulus of learned commentary inexorably rising over it". Susan Amert's admirable study, In a Shattered Mirror, shows that erudition can illuminate as well as suffocate.

The early Akhmatova communed with the Muse who "dictated Inferno to Dante". Mandelstam once called Acmeism "nostalgia for world culture", and Akhmatova's poems were allusive even when ostensibly direct. They were transparent at a distance but obscure in close-up; openly autobiographical, but notoriously hard to pin to any single event. In much of Akhmatova's later poetry, the inner complexity was brought to the surface. Short poems were combined into cycles, literary echoes merged with pointedly enigmatic semi-references. Here is an adventure-playground for sleuths and intertextualists, but for Akhmatova the multiple resonances were not a game but a mission. A capacious language could overcome time, which blotted out so much of the past and present. When she wrote, she and a very few trusted friends would silently commit the poem to memory and then destroy the writing. Poetry was the concentrated remembrance of words: her own words, words of past poets, words of the women at the prison gates (in Requiem: "I have woven a wide mantle / From their meagre, overheard words").

Akhmatova encouraged speculation, but discouraged conclusions. Of her most mysterious cycle, Poem Without a Hero, she wrote: "unexpected galleries open up, leading nowhere…. The shades pretend to be those who have cast them…. Everything doubles and trebles…. It is impossible to discern which is the voice and which the echo, which is the shadow of the other".

Sensibly, therefore, Amert does not try to be comprehensive, or to find any single key. Instead she offers selected close readings. She does have a central and plausible thesis—that Akhmatova increasingly meditated on the theme of the Poet rather than recording moments of the Poet's experience—but she does not force her material, and she makes generous use of the observations of other commentators. Indeed, her larger belief is in the "fundamental open-endedness and infinite allusiveness of the later poetry". Her role, then, which she plays with delicacy, is to enrich the experience of reading.

The poems in the late cycle, Sweetbriar in Blossom (1946–62), for example, frame both a love-story and a series of reproachful evocations on the theme of forgetfulness, the lover's forgetfulness of the poet. The lyrical persona slips in and out of overt and concealed associations with Dido and Aeneas, Keats's Isabella and Lorenzo, Pushkin's Lensky and Olga from Eugene Onegin, and of course, Beatrice and Dante, as well as several meetings and partings in Akhmatova's life. The aim is neither to produce a set of erudite footnotes nor to play theoretical games with intertextuality. Amert listens carefully, pursues the echoes to their sources, and arrives at a persuasive interpretation of these enigmatically interlinked fragments, in which "the imagery of death is in every instance counterbalanced by images of transcendence … of the poet's triumph over death, oblivion and betrayal through memory and poetry".

These are old-fashioned readings. Amert dismisses "modern-day sophists", and is happy to accept that there is nothing retrogressive in poetic retrospection, in "nostalgia for world culture". She lets Akhmatova set the agenda and the terms.

I suspect that Akhmatova would be rather less pleased at the way she is reflected in Ronald Meyer's volume of her [My Half Century:] Selected Prose. From a variety of mostly posthumous publications Meyer and a team of translators have put together what they reasonably claim to be "the most complete collection of Akhmatova's prose in any language": autobiographical fragments, memoirs of writers and artists, a set of articles on Pushkin, and about a hundred letters spanning the period from her schooldays in Kiev in 1906 right through to 1965.

In the preface to an edition of her poems, published in the year before she died. Akhmatova stated, with only the faintest motion of tongue towards cheek: "from the very beginning I knew everything about poetry—I never knew anything about prose". Curiously, her list of "three leviathans of the twentieth century" contains only prose-writers: Proust, Joyce and Kafka. But she herself never felt entirely comfortable in prose. She tried a few bits of short fiction, but destroyed them. In her later years she made quite copious autobiographical notes, but with the exception of one brief summary they remained as drafts. Meyer hints that the reason was censorship, but in most cases I doubt it. Akhmatova was well able to finish poems with no immediate prospect of publication. Her narrative cycles of poetry consisted of separate small jewels which reflected one another through their adjacent settings. In prose, the polish was more nervously applied. She lacked the magisterial assurance in her control of the rhythms, in the presence of the Muse at her shoulder.

By far the most resonant of the autobiographical pieces is, not surprisingly, the one which Akhmatova herself passed as finished: "Briefly about Myself", a series of lapidary factual statements in chronological sequence from 1889 to 1965, as taut as a poem. Elsewhere there is a fair amount of parochial polemic, as Akhmatova responded to what she felt were inaccurate accounts of the origins of Acmeism, or of the early influences on her poetry, or of the extent of her early popularity. There are glimpses of gold (the smell of damp leather in the Petersburg cabs; reciting Verlaine with Modigliani under a Parisian drizzle in 1911), but overall these drafts cannot compare with the best Russian memoirs of the period.

Akhmatova's articles on Pushkin, however, have a special status. All Russians suck in Pushkin with their mothers' milk; Russian writers seem to feel it their occasional duty to meditate publicly on Pushkin's genius (the most famous and fatuous specimen being Dostoevsky's speech at the Pushkin monument in 1880). When she chose, Akhmatova was as capable as any of treating Pushkin as a symbol (of the poet who in time defeated the anti-poets who in his time had destroyed him). But besides communing with Pushkin, Akhmatova also studied him, identified sources, puzzled over documents. She produced a detailed interpretation of the intrigues which led to Pushkin's fatal death in a duel. And her articles on Pushkin's debt to Benjamin Constant, and on his transformation of the Don Juan theme in The Stone Guest, have become classics in their field.

For reading Akhmatova's poetry, the non-Russianist now has an "expanded edition" of Judith Hemschemeyer's much-praised labour of massive devotion, The Complete Poems. The new edition is a single-volume paperback instead of a two-volume hardback. The parallel Russian texts have been omitted, as has Roberta Reeder's introductory biography of Akhmatova. Hemschemeyer has added translations of some seventy items which first appeared in Russian in 1990, and one spuriously attributed poem has been removed. Seventy pages are allocated to a "Photo Biography", the new paginations throughout will be bibliographically confusing.

The first edition of Hemschemeyer's translations was widely reviewed. Without wishing to dampen her well-earned applause, I hope that her achievement does not discourage others from producing new versions. Hemschemeyer comes close to emulating Akhmatova's precise and restrained diction, but—as she frankly admits in her preface—at the expense of musicality and resonance. Attempts to replicate Akhmatova in rhyme and metre have mostly resulted in wordy doggerel, but translators have to be optimists even if they cannot be perfectionists.

One editorial quibble. Akhmatova was a perfectionist. Much of the new material in Hemschemeyer's volume consists of draft fragments. Akhmatova is misrepresented if her deliberately finished poems are merged with her provisionally jotted verses, just as in Meyer's volume drafts mingle with complete pieces under the single label of "prose". Wherever possible, the distinctions should be more clearly signalled.