SENTIMENTUL TIMPULUI SAU ESENŢA MODERNITĂŢII
THE FEELING OF TIME OR THE ESSENCE OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: “Poem Without a Hero”, written in 1942 and continuosly revised till 1962, was considered, by Akhmatova herself, to be the "summit of my creative path". The difficulty of this narrative is that Poem Without a Hero never quite probes the relationship of Petersburg's past to its present or future. If Silver Age Petersburg was too self-absorbed, frivolous, and materialistic, its antithesis—the gloomy, hellish Leningrad of World War II—was, after all, ten times worse. “Poem Without a Hero” is a poem without a meaningful moral compass, the complexities promised in the brilliant first part never resolved or even addressed. It is as if Akhmatova's terrible experiences from the early ’20s to the present had made it impossible for her to conjure up anything more than brilliant fragments.

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