... alwaysbeing told exactly what's true and what's false, what's real andwhat's illusion. Perhaps my taste in reading had something to do with the limitations I was ... Osip, and his friend and fellow poet, Anna Akhmatovaparticipated in a sort of otherworldly communion with theirpredecessors:Both M. and Akhmatova had the astonishing ability ofsomehow ... violence, and I was hav-ing trouble getting it to sound natural and inevitable rather thanforced and melodramatic. Fortunately, I was teaching the storiesof Isaac Babel, whose work so often...