All of Akhmatova's poems are available in one exhaustively researched volume, The Collected Poems of Anna Akhmatova. The expanded edition, published by Zephyr Press in 1998, was translated by Judith Hemschemeyer and includes notes by Roberta Reeder and a memoir by Akhmatova's friend Isaiah Berlin.

One of the most comprehensive biographies of Akhmatova is Roberta Reeder's Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, published in 1994 by St. Martin's Press.

The poetry of Akhmatova's mentor and first husband, Nicholas Gumilyov, is available for the first time in decades in the collection The Pillar of Fire: Selected Poems (1999), translated by Richard McKane and published by Anvil Press.

The epigraph from "Elegy Before the Coming of Spring" comes from French poet Gérard de Nerval's poem "El Desdichado." A selection of the stories, essays, and poetry of Nerval, who has been compared to the novelist...