51�Թ�

Why, the chorus asks, quoting Anna Akhmatova, is this age worse than others?

Odesa’s past is intertwined with some of Russia’s most revered figures, including Catherine the Great, author Leo Tolstoy and poet Anna Akhmatova.

In four months he completed “The Flute-Player,” a political and sexual fantasy about a group of writers in an unnamed totalitarian state, loosely based on the lives of Ms. Akhmatova, the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak and the poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam.

“Lifeline,” from 2004, was a collection of old Pentecostal hymns, and for “The Trackless Woods,” from 2015, she set to music poems by the writer Anna Akhmatova — a project inspired by her Russian-born adopted daughter.

“The effect of reading this collection reminded me of only a few other modern poets: Robert Frost, in his virtuosity and beauty, and the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, in her passion and straightforward honesty.”