Deux ampoules sur cinq

Lydia Tchoukovskaïa, a writer and critic, has been familiar with the poems of Anna Akhmatova (the great Russian poet) since she was a child. She had run into her several times but never dared to say hello. On November 21, 1938, she visited her at home for the first time. Despite the danger involved, Lydia decided to keep a journal of their nearly daily conversations (The book covers the period from this first meeting to the day Anna Akhmatova’s death was announced on March 6, 1966.)
Anna is banned from publishing, her son is in the camps, Lydia’s husband has been arrested… but words, poetry, and humor sustain them in the face of history.

There is the communal apartment with its noises, the small room where Anna lives, the ashtray in which she burns her poems after Lydia has memorized them, Anna’s phone calls: “ Come on, right now is fine with me,” there’s also the line outside the Leningrad prison, Lydia walking toward Anna’s apartment while reciting her verses to herself, Lydia alone, her thoughts of exceptional subtlety, Pasternak’s funeral… and of course: “She,” Anna Akhmatova, a poet whose work would not be published for 25 years but whose verses everyone knew by heart.