Anna Akhmatova: Likeness

Anna Akhmatova was Russian modernist poet. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Anna Akhmatova: 198   quotes 10   likes

“I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium
Or a reflection in someone else's mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.
Already I knew the list of crimes
That I was destined to commit.”

Anna Akhmatova
Dreams

“O let the organ, many-voiced, sing boldly,
O let it roar like spring's first thunderstorm!”

Anna Akhmatova

Translated by Irina Zheleznova
Context: O let the organ, many-voiced, sing boldly,
O let it roar like spring's first thunderstorm!
My half-closed eyes over your young bride's shoulder
Will meet your eyes just once and then no more.

Spring , Singing

“This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from this course.”

Anna Akhmatova

"This Cruel Age has deflected me..." (1944)
Context: This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from this course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.

Age

“Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.”

Anna Akhmatova
Girl , Freedom

“Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible and nocturnal…”

Anna Akhmatova

Source: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“You will come in any case — so why not now?
How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall.
I have put out the light and opened the door
for you, because you are simple and magical.
Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,
take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot,
or strangle me like an efficient mugger,
or else infect me — typhus be my lot”

Anna Akhmatova

Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), To Death

Light , Time , Waiting

“I hear always the sad voices
of summer
passing like red winged birds
over the high grass”

Anna Akhmatova

Red Winged Birds (1917)

Sadness , Bird , Grass , Summer

“In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the supor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.”

Anna Akhmatova

Leningrad, 1 April 1957
Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Instead of a Preface

Smile