1914 / St. Petersburg

Nothing to Refuse

Tags:: 1910s,; Anna Akhmatova,; poetry,; Russia,; St. Petersburg

Nothing is changed: against the dining room windows
hard grains of whirling snow still beat.
I am what I was,
but a man came to me.

“What do you want?” I asked.
“To be with you in hell,” he said.
I laughed, “It’s plain you mean
to have us both destroyed.”

He lifted his thin hand
and lightly stroked the flowers:
“Tell me how men kiss you,
tell me how you kiss.”

His torpid eyes were fixed
unblinking on my ring.
Not a single muscle stirred
in his clear, sardonic face.

Oh, I see: his game is that he knows
intimately, ardently,
there’s nothing from me he wants,
I have nothing to refuse.

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Published In

Eros

About the Text

Anna Akhmatova, "The Guest." Akhmatova began writing poetry at the age of eleven and at twenty-one fell in with the Acmeists, a group of St. Petersburg poets, one of whose members, Nikolay Cumilyov, she married in 1910. In 1946, a prominent member of Joseph Stalin's Politburo denounced her as "a mixture of nun and harlot," and she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.