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| | The passionate voices of Russian poet-martyrs |
 | | Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, two of the leading figures in the history of 20th century Russian literature, continue to be revered as poets, confirming the verdict of their contemporaries. |
 | | Russian poets, after all, are supposed to be outrageous, promiscuous, melodramatic, quarrelsome and contradictory, and the fact that not even Stalinist persecution could dampen the challenge they posed to bourgeois morals will surely make them seem, to many readers, only the more admirable. |
 | | For all the uniformity that Russian communism sought to enforce, and for all its power to stifle dissent, what survives of Stalin's rule, when censorship ceases, is a heritage obstinately diverse and utterly Russian: passionate, untamed by convention and, in its search for truth, impossible to silence for long. |
| www.sfgate.com /cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2004/09/12/RVGKK8IJ9F1.DTL (904 words) |
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