Travels of Cosmo the third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, through England during the reign of King Charles the second (1669). Tr. from the Italian manuscript ... To which is prefixed, a memoir of his life

Born in 1889 and brought up in Tsarskoye Selo, a palace town just south of Petersburg, she had won fame before the Revolution as a writer of lyrical, bittersweet love lyrics, travelled round Europe and been sketched БЂ” tall, lean and eagle-nosed БЂ” by Modigliani. The shadows began to lengthen in the late 1920s, when her ex-husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was arrested and executed, one of the first prominent artists to fall victim to the Bolsheviks. Through the thirties, as all around friends disappeared into the camps, she turned to lecturing and translation, while continuing secretly to compose her own increasingly profound and wrenching poetry; each new work was committed to memory, then the manuscript burned. In 1938 her twenty-six-year-old son was arrested for the third time in five years and sent to the Gulag, where he remained at the outbreak of war. Despite all this, Akhmatova eagerly took up an invitation to make a patriotic broadcast to the БЂwomen of LeningradБЂ™, and took her turn standing guard duty outside the Sheremetyev Palace on the Fontanka river, where she lived in a cramped and chaotic mц©nage ц  trois with her second ex-husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin, and his new wife and daughter ...»