This book outlines a fresh and coherent framework for the apprehension of Akhmatova's oeuvre in its totality, seeing her as a poet who moves beyond modernism in her later period. The appeal to postmodernism, which is in itself innovatory with regard to Akhmatova studies, also allows exploration of a second problematic issue: how to account for the shift in self-presentation in the later verse, and the different concept of poetic self which it advances. This new account of Akhmatova's path to maturity challenges the conventional view of the early Akhmatova as poet in the classical Russian tradition, and of the later Akhmatova as paradigmatically modernist.