“И всюду клевета…”: Ахматова, (по)читатели, ахматоведы

The plot of Anna Akhmatovaʼs poem ‘Slander’: people talking about the lyric subject of the poem cause its death and make the addressee (the “you” = the reader) feel guilty, effectively prohibits any unauthorized opinion about the poet. Akhmatova was unhappy with the deliberately objective approach to the study of her poetics by Viktor Zhirmunskii, Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Vinogradov (“slander”) and wanted to gain the status of “Akhmatova scholar number one” herself, whose verdicts were the only “true” ones and should be respected by readers and critics.