Profile of Anna Akhmatova on Famous Like Me

Anna Akhmatova (Russian: А́нна Ахма́това, real name А́нна Андре́евна Горе́нко) (June 23, 1889 (June 11, Old Style and also St. John's Eve) - March 5, 1966) was the pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko, head and soul of St Petersburg tradition of Russian poetry in the course of half a century.

Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece on the Stalinist terror. Her work addresses a variety of themes including time and memory, the fate of creative women, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism.

Early life

Akhmatova was born in Bolshoy Fontan near Odessa. Her childhood does not appear to have been happy; her parents separated in 1905. She was educated in Kiev, Tsarskoe Selo, and the Smolny Institute of St Petersburg. Anna started writing poetry at the age of 11, inspired by her favourite poets - Racine, Pushkin, and Baratynsky. As her father didn't want to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name, she had to adopt the surname of one of her Tatar ancestors as a pseudonym.

In 1910, she married the boyish poet Nikolay Gumilyov, who very soon left her for hunting lions in Africa, battlefields of the WWI and the society of Parisian grisettes. Her husband didn't take her poems seriously and was shocked when Alexander Blok declared to him that he preferred her poems to his. Their son, born in 1912, was named Lyov to rhyme with the surname Gumilyov; he was to become a famed historian of steppe peoples.

Silver Age

In 1912, she published her first collection, entitled Evening. It contained brief, psychologically taut pieces which English readers may find distantly reminiscent of Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy. They were acclaimed for their classical diction, telling details, and the skilful use of colour.

By the time her second collection, the Rosary, appeared in 1914, there were thousands of women composing their poems "after Akhmatova". Her early poems usually picture a man and a woman involved in the most poignant, ambigious moment of their relationship. Such pieces were so much imitated and later parodied by Nabokov and others, that it prompted Akhmatova to exclaim: "I taught our women how to speak but don't know how to make them silent".

Together with her husband, Akhmatova enjoyed a high reputation in the circle of Acmeist poets. Her aristocratic manners and artistic integrity won her the titles of the "Queen of the Neva" and the "soul of the Silver Age", as the period came to be known in the history of Russian poetry. Many decades later, she would recall this blessed time of her life in the longest of her works, the "Poem Without Hero" (1940-65), inspired by Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

The accursed years

Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for activities considered anti-Soviet; Akhmatova presently remarried a prominent Assyriologist and then another scholar, who died in the Stalinist camps. After that, she spurned several proposals from the married poet Boris Pasternak.

During the whole period from 1925 and 1952, Akhmatova was effectively silenced, unable to publish poetry. She earned her living by translating Leopardi and publishing some brilliant essays on Pushkin in scholarly periodicals. All of her friends either emigrated of were repressed.

Only a few people in the West suspected of her still being alive, when she was allowed to publish a collection of new poems in 1940. During the Great Patriotic War, when she witnessed the nightmare of the 900-Day Siege, her patriotic poems found their way to the front pages of the Pravda. After Akhmatova returned to Leningrad after the Central Asian evacuation in 1944, she was disconcerted with "a terrible ghost that pretended to be my city".

Upon learning about Isaiah Berlin's visit to Akhmatova in 1946, Stalin's associate Andrei Zhdanov publicly labelled her "half harlot, half nun", and had her poems banned from publication. Her son spent his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she even resorted to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release. Their relations remained strained, however.

The Thaw

After Stalin's death, Akhmatova's preeminence among Russian poets was grudginly conceded even by party officials. Her later pieces, composed in Neoclassical rhyming and mood, seem to be the voice of many she has outlived. Her dacha in Komarovo was frequented by Joseph Brodsky and other young poets, who continued Akhmatova's traditions of St Petersburg poetry well into the 21th century.

Akhmatova got a chance to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel with Lidya Chukovskaya to Sicily and England, in order to receive the Taormina prize and the honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University. In 1962, her dacha was visited by Robert Frost.

Akhmatova's reputation continued to grow after her death, and it was in the year of her centenary that one of the greatest poetic monuments of the 20th century, Akhmatova's Requiem, was finally published in her homeland.

There is a museum devoted to Akhmatova at the Fountain House (more properly known as the Sheremetev Palace) on the Fontanka Embankment, where Akhmatova lived from the mid 1920s until 1952.

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