SOURCE: "The Death of the Book à la russe: The Acmeists Under Stalin," in Slavic Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 125-35.

In the following essay, Cavanagh discusses how Akhmatova and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandel'shtam refused to be silenced by Stalinist oppression.

In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida apocalyptically proclaims what he calls "the death of the book," the death, that is, of the self-contained, organically unified, self-explanatory text. The postmodern age, he continues, has replaced the now defunct book with the notions of "writing" (écriture) and of a "text" that undermines or explodes any metaphorical bindings that might attempt to confine it within the safely "logocentric" limits of a single, self-sufficient volume. "The destruction of the book, as it is now underway in all domains" is a "necessary violence," Derrida claims; and the rhetorical violence with which he marks the unnatural death of the book finds its counterparts in the...