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Anna Akhmatova: Poems
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Anna Akhmatova was a poet who always wrote about love. When she was young in Russia, and her life was simple, her poems, called brilliant and original, were still simple and lyrical. As circumstances made her life difficult, then painful, she still wrote about love, but as a memory. It never abandoned her. When finally life improved, the mature Akhmatova found herself the voice of the Russian people coming to terms with the difficult times they had lived through. After age 65 she wrote some of her best work, bringing love and despair together, making her what Nation critic Alexander Werth called the "tragic queen" of Russian poetry.
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The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was 28 at the time of the Russian Revolution and already famous as a poet in the St Petersburg that disappeared in its wake. Like Pushkin, whose reputation she was eventually to share, she grew up in Tsarskoye Selo, the summer home of the Imperial family. Her early poems were as if Pushkin's Tatiana, rejected by Onegin, has been given a chance to write obsessively of every nuance of the affair, even if the intimate details were as much elaborated and invented as coolly recalled. Like the greatest confessional poets, of which she might be seen as the first, as Joseph Brodsky suggested, her work remained always "half self-portrait, half-mask".
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In a tribute to Anna Akhmatova last March at Harvard, the Russian actress Alla Demidova gave a recitation from memory of Requiem, Akhmatova's long poem for the victims of Stalin's purges. With periodic snatches of Mozart's Requiem played in the background, you could hear how Akhmatova's lines followed the same pulsing rhythms, the same sad, swooping cadences as the music. It was a stupefying performance—less a recitation than an incantation or a summoning of ghosts.
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Books: The conscience of a nation turned to stone; Anna Akhmatova's secret poems helped keep Russia's literary flame alive during the terrifying Stalin years. As a brilliant new biography is published, Olivia Cole surveys the tragic, triumphant life of a heroic survivor.(Features)
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Anna Akhmatova is known as one of twentieth-century Russia's greatest poets, a member of the quartet that included Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva. Famous at an early age for her love poems and beauty, Akhmatova later became a voice of her country's misery as she chronicled the harsh realities of the revolutionary generation.
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Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko into an upper-class family in Odessa, the Ukraine, in 1889. Her interest in poetry began in her youth, but when her father found out about her aspirations, he told her not to shame the family name by becoming a "decadent poetess". He forced her to take a pen name, and she chose the last name of her maternal great-grandmother. She attended law school in Kiev and married Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and critic, in 1910. Shortly after the marriage, he travelled to Abyssinia, leaving her behind. While Gumilev was away, Akhmatova wrote many of the poems that would be published in her popular first book, Evening. Her son Lev was ... born in 1912.
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