Beginning of Essay
The Time is Night is a short novel by Liudmila Petrushevskaya. It is one of the few stories that I enjoy reading over and over again. The reason is that each time I re-read it, I perceive it in a slightly different way. The complicity of characters and the styl ....

Middle of Essay
.... is Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, one of the most symbolic poets of the silver century of the Russian poetry. Anna carries this cross through her entire life. There are only two roles she has: a poet and a woman defending a child from misery and starvation. I assume she is not a really good poet, she never gets published and gets very little money but that is not the point. She says that she writes for herself, if she stops, she will die. This is very true. The two main themes of the novel seem to be loneliness and misery. Several times in the diary Anna says that she writes it for her daughter, the one who later sent the notes to Petrushevskaya. ....