Bearing Witness

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She…

Today’s One-Liner (#221)

This is the Akhmatova who, in a friend’s words, could not bear to see another person’s suffering, though she bore her own without complaint. –D. M. Thomas, Introduction to his translation of Anna Akhmatova, Selected…