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Anna Akhmatova: Stalinist Russia
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From her first readings at Mayakovsky’s Stray Dog cafe to the end of her life when Joseph Brodsky would later call her “the muse of keening,” Anna Akhmatova was in the center of history. She linked the pre-Revolutionary and post-Stalin eras of Russian history. Despite terrible persecution and censorship by the State, her poetry gave voice to the Russian people during times of great upheaval in Russian society. She did so with verse that is original and strikingly modern. Akhmatova outlived her persecutors, and her life has become a symbol of truth and integrity.
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Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko into an upper-class family in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1889. Although frequently confronted with official goverment opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and lauded by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her country during difficult political times. She died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of her life, in 1966.
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This superb introduction to the work of the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1886-1966) begins with an account of her life in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and Stalinist Russia, and focuses principally on her poetry. Incorporating all recent scholarship, the author traces the way in which Akhmatova's work reflects the tumultuous times in which she lived, and her emergence as the spokeswoman of her generation, to provide a long overdue account of her entire career.
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Anna Akhmatova died March 6, 1966. Her official state obituary praised her as a 'remarkable Soviet poet,' who nurtured Russian poetic style in service of her homeland, looking to Soviet society to build a new world.
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Anna Akhmatova's poetic diction and her predominantly psychological themes were drawn from the humanistic tradition of 19th-century Russian prose. Her poetry imitates the rhythm and structure of conversational speech. Her work, like that of Boris Pasternak, whom she admired, was a sincere response to the inhuman cruelties of the age.
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Russian poets, Anna Akhmatova became known as a leader of the acmeist movement, which called for clarity in writing. Her first publications in the 1910s were enormously successful, but her later work was banned by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for failing to further the Communist agenda.
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Stalinist Russia