POEMS OF AKHMATOVA
Selected and translated by STANLEY KUNITZ with MAX HAYWARD
173 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.
In the first volume of her magnificent memoir, Hope Against Hope (TIME, Jan. 18, 1971), Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of Poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled her husband's grim joke on the subject of Russian culture in the 1930s. "Poetry is respected only in this country," he said. "There's no place where more people are killed for it."
Mandelstam was to die in one of Stalin's Siberian prison camps at the beginning of World War II. He was one of Russia's finest...
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