Evening

I Akhmatova was born in 1899, well-educated, of a noble, land-owning family. Evening was published in 1912, when she was twenty-three. It inaugurated a new epoch in Russian poetry. Each poem condenses into a few lucid stanzas the emotional depth one might expect in a psychological novel. Nothing like it had ever been seen, in Russia or elsewhere. It sold out edition after edition, and became the Bible of Russian lovers. The book found many imitators among literary ladies. Told, "You have given Russian womankind a voice!" Akhmtova replied, "Yes, but now how do I get them to shut up?" Akhmatova had a gift for depicting physical things in a way that carried psychological meaning. But she was not simply manufacturing metaphors. Her images have a photographic precision that makes them too concrete to be simply symbols. And they are not photographs, because they capture not a moment, but a narrative. They have a momentum . Akhmatova's imagery is cinematic .

I Akhmatova was born in 1899, well-educated, of a noble, land-owning family. Evening was published in 1912, when she was twenty-three. It inaugurated a new epoch in Russian poetry. Each poem condenses into a few lucid stanzas the emotional depth one might expect in a psychological novel. Nothing like it had ever been seen, in Russia or elsewhere. It sold out edition after edition, and became the Bible of Russian lovers. The book found many imitators among literary ladies. Told, "You have given Russian womankind a voice!" Akhmtova replied, "Yes, but now how do I get them to shut up?" Akhmatova had a gift for depicting physical things in a way that carried psychological meaning. But she was not simply manufacturing metaphors. Her images have a photographic precision that makes them too concrete to be simply symbols. And they are not photographs, because they capture not a moment, but a narrative. They have a momentum . Akhmatova's imagery is cinematic .

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A rich testament to the depths of passion and grief, this "exquisite [and] beautifully realized work" ( The Boston Globe ) explores time, memory, and love's transcendence. "In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain."-- The New York Times Book Review (Best Books of the Year) July 1954. Ann Grant--a twenty-five-year-old New York career girl--is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding on an island off the coast of Maine. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . . After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies dying in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes up to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend forty years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A rich testament to the depths of passion and grief, this "exquisite [and] beautifully realized work" ( The Boston Globe ) explores time, memory, and love's transcendence. "In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain."-- The New York Times Book Review (Best Books of the Year) July 1954. Ann Grant--a twenty-five-year-old New York career girl--is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding on an island off the coast of Maine. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . . After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies dying in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes up to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend forty years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life.