From the Index to Akhmatova’s “Notebooksˮ: A. Efros

An essay from the author's cycle “From the Index to Akhmatova's ʽNotebooks’ ˮ, opening the fifth dozen in a series of similar ones, demonstrates an attempt of extensive commentary on Akhmatova's working notes, organized around the names of characters present on the pages of her notebooks, a kind of free Akhmatova encyclopedia, where different times of her long life are combined in an onomasticon. A commentary of this kind snatches out representative fragments of Akhmatova's epoch, but the degree of presence or absence of different persons in the index do not always reflect their weight in Akhmatova's biography. This essay is dedicated to the art critic, poet, Pushkinist Abram Efros.