Akhmatova, Anna.

the typescript undercopy with manuscript additions to the text, on behalf of the author, mainly part titles, mottos and quotations in Latin script from Mozart's Don Giovanni, Byron ("...In my hot youth when George the third was king. Byron"), and Hemingway (not in the final version), and also Akhmatova's notes at the end of the poem; the corrected typescript containing many significant divergences from the final published version, including a different Foreword, fewer dedications and shorter, apparently earlier, versions of Part One (chapters 1, 2, 3 & 4), Part Two (16 stanzas, including one apparently unpublished) and a substantially different "Epilog" in Part Three, 10 pages, folio (353 x 213mm.), typescript undercopies, no place or date (probably Tashkent and elsewhere, c. 1944)

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This is an early version of Akhmatova's great poem, containing shorter and fewer sections (excluding some yet to be composed), with different mottos heading the sections entered in manuscript and including some material not in the published poem. It is closest to Akhmatova's third version of 1944, according to N.I. Kraineva's edition Anna Akhmatova, Poema bez geroya (St Petersburg, 2009), which compares nine versions written between 1942 and 1963.

Poem without a Hero is the great work of Akhmatova's maturity--"It was for Akhmatova what Onegin was for Pushkin: a compendium of all the themes, plots, and principles of her poetry". She began writing her three-part work in Leningrad in 1940 and continued working on it until the 1960s. This typescript contains variants of the text not recorded in the published versions (see The complete poems of Anna Akhmatova, edited by R. Reeder, Somerville MA, 1990). The typescript contains a foreword ("Vmesto predisloviya", a different version from that published), first dedication ("Posvyashcheniye", the second and third dedication apparently still unwritten), Introduction ("Vstupleniye"); and the following early, generally shorter, versions of Part One, Chapter One : "1 Ya zazhgla zavyetnye svechi" (113 lines, headed by the above quotation from Byron, and ending "Ya k smyertu gotov"), Chapter 2: "Raspakhnulas' atlasnaya shubka" (headed with a quotation from Baratinsky); Chapter 3: "Byli svyatki kostrami sogrety" (headed with a quotation from Khlebnikov); Chapter 4 (unnumbered): a very different version ending with the newly-typed 5-line ending "Eto ya tvoya staraya sovyest...", and Epilogue "Vsye v poryadke"; followed by Part Two: "Moy redaktor byl nedovolyen" (lacking stanzas 4, 9-14, 18-20, 22-23 of the final version, but containing one apparently unpublished), and Part Three: "Epilog", "Tak pod krovlei Fontannogo Doma", ending "Predo mnoyu shla na vostok".