On Naked Soil – Imagining Anna Akhmatova

This three-character play looks at the poet Anna Akhmatova in two time frames and in the company of two other women: her contemporary Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, in the mid-1960’s and Lydia Chukovskaya, a young writer who kept a journal of her meetings with Akhmatova, in the late thirties. Through scenes among the three women, and using documentary film footage and video projections, as well as extensive use of the poetry itself, the play illuminates the life of a literary figure who was, for many, the conscience of her time.