The concept of the chronotope, introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, plays a crucial role in understanding the artistic organization of literary texts. This article examines the poetics of the chronotope in Anna Akhmatova’s Book of Poems, focusing on how time and space function as key elements in shaping lyrical meaning, emotional depth, and historical consciousness. Akhmatova’s poetry reflects an intense interaction between personal experience and collective memory, where spatial images such as the home, the city, and nature intersect with temporal categories including memory, waiting, loss, and historical trauma. Through close textual analysis, this study demonstrates that Akhmatova’s chronotope is characterized by compression of time, symbolic spaces, and a fusion of private and public history. The chronotope in her poetry becomes a means of expressing inner psychological states as well as broader cultural and historical realities. The article argues that Akhmatova’s unique poetic chronotope contributes significantly to the development of twentieth-century Russian lyric poetry.

chronotope, Akhmatova, time and space, lyric poetry, memory, poetics

Bakhtin, M. M. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981.

Akhmatova, A. Selected Poems. Moscow: Художественная литература, 1986.

Timenchik, R. Anna Akhmatova: The Poetics of Memory. St. Petersburg: Academic Press, 2005.

Zhirmunsky, V. Theory of Literature. Moscow: Nauka, 1977.

Pavlovsky, A. Anna Akhmatova’s Lyric World. Moscow: Sovetsky Pisatel, 1991.