In Remembering Anna Akhmatova Anatoly Nayman makes strong claims for Akhmatova’s position in World Literature, with particular attention to Poem Without a Hero.  Isaiah Berlin reports of his conversations with her that she showed keen interest in Eliot, Kafka and Hemingway.  In his later years, Mandelstam defined Acmeism—the poetry movement of the 1910s that he and Akhmatova helped found—as allegiance to world culture.   In a culture of Soviet socialist realist dogma and conformity, allegiance to world culture and world literature had strong oppositional political overtones.  Akhmatova worked on Poem Without a Hero for over 20 years and the recent Russian 7 volume variorum prints 4 distinct versions of the poem.  Later versions “write out” some of the evidence of an attention to being a voice in world literature and thus challenge, to some degree, Nayman’s case.  This paper explores Akhmatova’s changing position in the discourse of world literature as she displays different strategies for achieving a voice in Poem Without a Hero, within the monologic Socialist literary ideologies of her time, straddling, as she does, allegiances to world culture and to the Russian national tradition in both its 19th century “golden age” and its modernist manifestations.