Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was one of the greatest Russian poets of this century. But during her life she was subjected to scathing critical attacks, denounced as "half-nun, half-whore," and then expelled from the Writers' Union. She also endured severe personal losses. Akhmatova's friend Lydia Chukovskaya (1907–96) kept intimate diaries of her conversations with the great poet. First published in the U.S.S.R. in 1987, The Akhmatova Journals offers a rare look into the day-to-day life of Akhmatova.

"I was overwhelmed by Lydia Chukovskaya's sustained conversation with her friend. . . . The unforgettable is on every page." —Bruce Chatwin, London Observer

"[T]he journals record . . . an intellectual friendship between two women whose knowledge of Russian and world literature was breathtakingly large. . . . At times, the Akhmatova-Chukovskaya conversations are like fragments from a Dostoyevsky novel." —Wall Street Journal

"A deeply moving book. . . . Apart from what it tells us about a great poet, it is a detailed and vivid description of the intellectually and imaginatively rich lives of a heroic handful of human beings." —Isaiah Berlin, Times Literary Supplement

"Equal certainly to Eckermann's table talk with Goethe and Boswell's journals about Dr. Johnson, Chukovskaya's indispensable log of her friendship with the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova—and act of literary and personal fidelity accomplished under the most insanely difficult circumstances—is finally available here in translation, and few books are quite as illuminating both of horror and genius." —Kirkus Reviews

"This English edition will confirm Chukovskaya's place among that select band of women memoirists who did so much to preserve for posterity many priceless texts of twentieth-century Russian literature, which might well have perished without their courage and their prodigious feats of memory." —London Review Books