A small Moscow publishing house has released "Anti-Akhmatova," authored by a relative unknown, Tamara Katayeva. The title nicely sums up the contents of the book: It is a huge, 600-page-long assault on the famous poet Anna Akhmatova.

It is hard to say whether the object of Katayeva's wrath is Akhmatova herself or the iconic status she gained among friends and awestruck readers. At any rate it is an easy task to find material for an anti-Akhmatova book: Her life was documented much better than the lives of other 20th-century poets of comparable stature, and not always by devoted admirers.

Katayeva's main sources are a mammoth three-volume memoir by Lidiya Chukovskaya, who was for decades a Boswell to Akhmatova's Dr. Johnson, and a book by Anatoly Naiman, who served as Akhmatova's literary secretary toward the end of her life. Chukovskaya was famous for her acerbic wit and clarity of vision, and wrote a fiercely anti-Stalin novella in the 1930s. As for Naiman, a man whose talent was no match for his ambition, he had his own reasons to be bitter, overshadowed by Akhmatova and his friend Joseph Brodsky, the future Nobel laureate.

It is obvious that many of the accusations one could make when waging a war against Akhmatova are well-founded. Akhmatova was the type of woman who was always busy building her own fan base. She preferred relying on the kindness and financial support of her friends to doing menial work unworthy of her poetic greatness. And though she did all she could to help her son Lev Gumilyov, who spent many years in Stalin's camps, she distanced herself from him and basically severed all intimate ties, for which he never forgave her. Katayeva also claims that a 1946 decree castigating two journals for publishing her and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko was less threatening than it sounded. Shortly after, Akhmatova was in vogue again, and she even traveled to receive several prestigious foreign awards later in her life – an honor few Soviet authors could openly accept.

So what? Some critics have already expressed their outrage at Katayeva's book, and not one failed to mention that it is derivative and verbose. But certain other reviewers welcomed the book as a sign that Russian poetry of the 20th century, instead of turning into classical marble, is alive and still provokes outbursts of emotion.

Certainly, there are several hundred lines of Akhmatova's poetry that make the question of whether she was a model human being utterly irrelevant.