A magnificent story. A magnificent text. — Challenges

Geneviève Brisac, as if draping Akhmatova’s shoulders in a shawl of words, elegantly weaves her prose into the verse of the woman poet. — Nouvel Obs

Geneviève Brisac (…) delivers a vibrant tribute in this powerful portrait of a strong woman. — Télé 7jours

A ride as attentive as it is empathetic into the life and work of Anna Akhmatova (…)—  La Croix

Anna Akhmatova is the great Russian poetess of the 20th century and one of the most important poets of our time. Born in 1889, she became a celebrity with the publication of her first collection, Evening, in 1912, where she expressed the ambiguities of romantic relationships between men and women without hesitation. With her friend Ossip Mandelstam, she invented Acmeism, a Verlainian literary movement, and continued her work, surrounded by the greatest artists of her century, from Modigliani to Pasternak.

However, in 1922, the Communist regime silenced her. For eroticism, mysticism, political indifference… Only the death of Stalin in 1953 lifted the publication ban, but Akhmatova remained subject to censorship until she died in 1966. Her work coincided with a century of iron and a life marked by the deaths of two murdered husbands, the 18-year deportation of her son, and the violent deaths of almost all her friends, from Blok to Mayakovsky.

Anna Akhmatova, who always refused to leave her country, sang of mass crimes and mass suffering from her hometown of Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, in splendid texts such as Requiem and Poem Without a Hero, which her close ones had to memorize to ensure their survival, thereby allowing the triumph of language over barbarism, of poetry over death. From this poet, who is also a heroine, Geneviève Brisac paints a magnificent portrait—a portrait in the pictorial sense of the word, where one can feel both the soul of the model and the touch of the painter.

• Anna Akhmatova holds an increasingly important place in the pantheon of contemporary poets; over time, her poetry, imbued with irony and restraint, whether speaking of love or resistance, affirms its modernity.
• The persistence of violence in the former Soviet empire lends a new relevance to Akhmatova’s life and work.
  Anna Akhmatova is also a poetess of camaraderie among women, their strength, and their solidarity in the most terrible trials (e.g. her friendships with Nadezhda Mandelstam or Lydia Chukovskaya).
• The sensitive, free, committed, and passionate writing of Geneviève Brisac fully expresses itself in this powerful, lively, and beautiful act of admiration.