Ahead of Victory Day, we would like to share with you a poem which was a source of inspiration and consolation for many during World War II.

Jonathan Bex, actor and director of the Moscow English Theatre, presents Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Courage”.

Anna Akhmatova spent the first few months of World War II in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) . As the German blockade tightened around the city, Akhmatova— as well as many other poets, writers, musicians, and intellectuals—addressed their fellow residents in a series of special radio transmissions. During those early months of the war, she wrote one of her best-known wartime poems, “Courage”, which became a symbol of her suffering city.

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