In Akhmatova's poems we are faced with three images of the poet: the one arising out of the facts of her biography; the one created by Russo-Soviet criticism of the poems; and the one she created of herself in her work. The third image emerges initially from many different versions of 'I'. Slowly, during the course of her life, the word and the person giving the word utterance ceased any longer to be divided, so that the voice of the person Akhmatova can be heard speaking to us directly through her poetry, without intermediary and with the awesome authority of complete integrity. But in the poems of her youth we find the poet searching for heroines who can reflect a part of her own personality and set it in a larger context, freeing her experience from the purely private.

The figure of the village woman, with her structured...