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1SG Steven Imerman
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Great! She was best friends with Osip Mandelstam, the premier Russian poet of that era and co-founder of the Acmeist movement. I recently read the book by Mandelstam's widow in which Akhmatova figured prominently. (I got the idea for reading that book from a SGT (Join to see) post a couple months ago. Again, thanks.)
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SGT English/Language Arts Teacher
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I've read both of her books, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Akhmatova was friends with Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and later in life, Joseph Brodsky among others.
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1SG Steven Imerman
1SG Steven Imerman
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SGT (Join to see) - I got Hope Against Hope from Amazon as none of the libraries near here have it. That was a horrible time and place to be alive.
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SGT English/Language Arts Teacher
SGT (Join to see)
4 y
1SG Steven Imerman - I have been rereading the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. The first part of book 1 relates the kinds of ways one was mentally and physically tortured. I don't know how they survived that and exile to Siberia.
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1SG Steven Imerman
1SG Steven Imerman
4 y
SGT (Join to see) - I was very impressed (or traumatized, or whatever) by Nadezhda Mandelstam's description of the wild eyed, clearly desperate Chinese man she caught a glimpse of in the Lubyanka Prison. You know he was thinking, "50 feet away people are walking on sidewalks and having normal life, while I am trapped in an endless nightmare of sleep deprivation, beatings, and malnutrition, with the only prospects being dying during an over enthusiastic beating or else being shot in the head when they are tired of playing with me."

I hope to God I am never in the hands of Leftists.
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PVT Mark Zehner
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Talented woman!
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CW3 Kevin Storm
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Thanks for the very informative post. I am not normally a person who is interested in poetry, but her story is moving!
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