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Anna Akhmatova: Poets
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The young Anna (nee Gorenko) was a privileged tomboy, who grew into a free-spirited schoolgirl (losing her virginity at 16), and then an even more free-spirited woman. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolay Gumilyov, keeping her pen name of Anna Akhmatova. The marriage wasn't a happy one, and both soon started affairs on the side. Even on her honeymoon in Paris, the young bride met a then unknown painter named Modigliani, with whom she would walk in the Luxembourg gardens, for whom she would buy roses, for whom she would pose in the nude.
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Anderson, meanwhile, cuts straight to the chase: "She was not born Anna Akhmatova. She came into the world on June 11, 1889, as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, the daughter of a naval officer." When Anna was 17, it came to her father's attention that she had the unladylike ambition of becoming a poet. He warned her not to bring shame to his name; she replied that she didn't need his name, "and promptly disowned the entire masculine side of her lineage by choosing as her literary name the maiden name of her maternal grandmother".
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At the age of 21 Akhmatova became a member of the Acmeist group of poets, whose leader, the poet and literature critic Nikolai Gumilyov she married in April 1910, in a church near Kiev. Nikolai was ... friend of Annensky, and from Tsarskoe Selo. Nikolai, three years her senior, had fallen in love with Akhmatova when she was just fourteen. Akhmatova become "Gumi-lvitsa" (Gumi-lioness) and her husband was "Gumi-lev" (Gumi-lion).
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Akhmatova went on to experience the siege of Leningrad, a period of post-war poetic stagnation and at last the international recognition she deserved. The two biographers differ somewhat over the extent of her readership. Anderson quotes Akhmatova speaking of 95,000 copies of her books being printed from 1940 to 1961, whereas Feinstein claims that a 1960 edition of the poems had a print run of 1,700,000. Whatever the exact numbers, she could legitimately, if arrogantly, describe herself as the voice of the wounded nation.
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Akhmatova dedicated the poem to the women she met during the 17 months of her son's imprisonment in Leningrad's Kresty Prison, when she waited with hundreds of others outside the walls for some word of those on the inside. "And like a useless appendage, Leningrad/swung from its prisons," Akhmatova wrote. The terrible emotions of those months, in which the women moved through cycles of terror, hope, and despair only to land finally in some nether world of numb endurance, are sketched out in the preface, as she describes how one day someone in line identified her as a poet:
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[C]ollection Evening appears under the pseudonym Anna Akhmatova, a name she takes from her Tatar grandmother. This collection highlighted the intimate, colloquial, romantic voice that would characterize much of her early poetry. Her only son Lev Gumilev is born.
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