Martin Puchner'sreview of THE WRITTEN WORLD How literature shaped history

Writing wrongs

DAISY DUNN

Martin Puchner'sreview of

THE WRITTEN WORLD

How literature shaped history 432pp. Granta. £14.99.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/writing-wrongs-written-world/?CMP=Sprkr-_-Editorial-_-TimesLiterarySupplement

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Modigliani and Anna Akhmatova

這幅畫，最早讀自：
熊宗慧 《俄羅斯私風景：走過生活，讀過文學 時代的不安與女人的心事－－阿赫瑪托娃的情詩》2013，pp.244-54，
我去Thames and Hudson的World of Art叢書確認。
現在，英國的報紙www.telegraph.co.uk也寫他倆的故事了。

Modigliani and the Russian beauty: the affair that changed him ...

今天讀倫敦書評，前2段：

Modigliani would be out drinking in Paris when a sudden desire came over him to remove his clothes, flex his naked body, and give a performance of Dante’s Divine Comedy. If it wasn’t Dante then it was something else – he could recite dozens of poems from memory, even while drunk, a skill that served him particularly well when he met the young Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in 1910 and determined to win her heart. She was on her honeymoon at the time but Modigliani was undeterred. They soon began an affair, absconding to the Jardin du Luxembourg to sit in the rain and intone the poetry of Verlaine. “We rejoiced that we both remembered the same work of his”, Akhmatova recalled later.

Modigliani captured her on paper, nude and perpendicular and as long in body and round in stomach as a butternut squash. And he drew her clothed and sphinx-like on a chaise longue. He is said to have sketched her sixteen times in all. Their relationship did not last, but Akhmatova took the drawings back to Russia and hung one on her wall. When we meet her in Martin Puchner’s vivid new history of writing, she is twice divorced but still reciting poetry, this time her own and to friends in Leningrad in the 1930s. Modigliani’s is one of the rare sheets of paper left in her home. She has burned the drafts of her latest poems after committing them to memory and is anxiously entrusting them to a group of women to remember until the Great Purge is over, and it is safe enough to write them down. Her devastating Requiem was finally published in Germany in 1963 and in Russia in 1989.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/writing-wrongs-written-world/?CMP=Sprkr-_-Editorial-_-TimesLiterarySupplement-_-

Anna Akhmatova, 1911 - Amedeo Modigliani

Anna Akhmatova, 1911 by Amedeo Modigliani. Expressionism. nude painting (nu)

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