That was the time when only the dead could smile

I went to a Russian art exhibit today and got to see Nathan Altman's portrait of Anna Akhmatova, the poet (above).

Akhmatova wrote during the Stalin years, and her story is an amazing one. Here's an example of her work:

We thought we were beggars without property
until we began to lose one thing after another.
Then every day became a day of memory
and we began to compose new songs
about the wealth we once had
and God's generosity in the past.

I read a good biography of her a couple of years ago called Anna of all the Russias by Elaine Feinstein. Feinstein writes wonderfully of the life of artists under Stalin -- the constant threats of arrest, imprisonment and death -- so they memorized their poems and repeated them to each other to keep their work alive, as they couldn't risk writing anything down.

Of that period, Akhmatova wrote:

That was the time when only the dead could smile, happy to be at rest.