First printing. Pages lightly toned, minor general wear. 1969 Mass Market Paperback. 111 pp. Translated with an introduction by Richard McKane, and an essay by Andrei Sinyavsky. Anna Akhmatova is identified, along with Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva, as one of the four leading poets of Twentieth-Century Russian literature. Her poetry, classically rhymed and metered but also laconic and highly elliptical, is deeply engaged with predecessors such as Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Dostoevsky, Annensky and above all Pushkin, and also with contemporaries such as Mandelstam, T.S. Eliot, and Gumilev, her husband, who was persecuted and finally executed by Stalin.