SOURCE: Ketchian, Sonia. Introduction to The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina, pp. 1-7. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Ketchian presents an overview of Akhmadulina’s background and of the influences on her poetry.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never. 

—John Keats

Ot strannоj liriкi, gdi кazdyj sag—siкrit. 

—Anna Akhmatova

Bella Akhmadulina is Russia's premier contemporary woman poet. In her poetry the Russian language attains a sophisticated symbiosis of meaning, dazzling imagery, rhythm, and sound in articulation that conveys to advantage the artist's unique evolution and service to Russian letters.¹ This new peak for the Russian poetic language, reached in her collection The Secret (Taina, 1983)² and continued in the collection The Garden (Sad, 1987),³ firmly places her in the great pantheon of classic Russian poets.

Izabella Akhatovna Akhmadulina was born on 10 April 1937, in Moscow to a Tartar father and a...