Poems

The first of Akhmatova's works to be published after the death of Stalin, confirming the great writer's partial rehabilitation after a period of being considered more or less an enemy of the state. Akhmatova and Stolyarova's friendship had begun in 1957, not long after Stolyarova began working for Ilya Ehrenburg. She met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1962 and became his chief conduit for smuggling microfilms of his work to the West during the period leading up to the writer's 1974 expulsion from the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn devoted a chapter to Stolyarova in his supplementary memoir Invisible Allies, beginning with the remarkable life of her mother, who was sentenced to a life of hard labor for her part in the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Stolypin but organized a prison break and fled abroad, where she married Natalya's father and had three daughters before dying of the Spanish flu.

Natalya was raised in Paris but decided to join her father in Russia as a young adult. It was a dangerous move. Natalya Stolyarova's parents had been revolutionaries but not Bolsheviks, which put the family in poor standing with the new regime. Father and daughter were arrested separately within two years of Stolyarova's 1935 return; he was executed and she spent eight years in a Siberian labor camp. Years later, when fellow Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked her for help sending copies of his work to the West, "she agreed without a moment's hesitation, stipulating only that no one else should know about it."

The KGB had its eye on Stolyarova for decades, even sending agents to her funeral in 1984, but never quite managed to catch her. In a 1977 letter written during a stay in Paris, she explained her decision to return once again to Russia despite the atmosphere of fear and oppression: "Yes, I prefer living there, listening to the steps on the subway at night, frantically stripping the apartment of anything subversive because someone kept ringing my doorbell the night before...I prefer a life spent constantly outwitting the "all-seeing eye" (and ear) and drawing as best I can on the literature in which our land is so rich (and which floats out to me here in Europe with such insultingly effortless ease), a life spent satisfying as best I can my inexhaustible craving to hear the word of truth.