'The Twenty-first. Night. Monday...' is the first book in a five-part series titled 'The Real Akhmatova.' The book includes poems from 1909 to 1922 by Anna Akhmatova, who was then just beginning her ascent to the Russian poetic Olympus. '...A new poet is coming to us, young, but possessing all the makings of a true poet,' is how M. Kuzmin responded to Akhmatova's first collection, 'Evening.' He is echoed by Z. Gippius: “Akhmatova is a genuine lyricist... immediately stood out... both by the nobility of her entire poetic appearance, and especially by the sincere mood of her voice, and by the bold techniques of her poetic mastery...” Later, O. Mandelstam would say: “Akhmatova brought to Russian poetry all the enormous complexity and psychological richness of the 19th-century Russian novel.”
The “Real Akhmatova” series differs from all previous editions of A. Akhmatova’s poems and verses, first of all, in the quality of its textual preparation: all the texts in this series have been verified against autographs stored in state archives and private collections, as well as against the first publications in periodicals. In the books of this series, the features of the author's writing have been preserved as far as possible, the author's punctuation of the originals has been preserved, the type of writing of the texts of the works has been observed: the arrangement of lines, indents, 'ladder', italics, uppercase and lowercase letters, etc.
All books in the series are provided with introductory articles and notes.