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Anna Akhmatova: Stalinist Russia
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ANNA AKHMATOVA Portrait by Nathan Altman of Anna Akhmatova, 1914 below The poet Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko in Odessa, in the Ukraine, in 1889; she later changed her name to Akhmtova. In 1910 she married the important Russian poet and theorist Nikolai Gumilyov.
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Anna Akhmatova is a pseudonym of ANNA ANDREYEVNA GORENKO (b. June 11 [June 23, New Style], 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire--d. March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow), Russian poet recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature.
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Born into the minor aristocracy in 1889, Anna Andreyevna Gorenko took the pseudonym Akhmatova from her Tartar ancestor, Khan Akhmat, after her father warned her not to publish and disgrace the family name. A more significant relative, perhaps, was Anna Bunina, whom Elaine Feinstein describes as "the first Russian woman poet". Bunina's fierce independence echoes strangely in the life of her great-great niece.
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Akhmatova, Anna, pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (1888-1966) born near Odesa, Ukraine. Russian lyric poet, considered one of the greatest poets in the history of Russian literature. With Osip Mandelstam she was a leader of the early 20th-century Acmeist movement, which called for use of poetic language that would convey exact meanings with simplicity and clarity. Akhmatova's principal motif is love, mainly frustrated and tragic love, expressed with an intensely feminine accent and inflection entirely her own.
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Akhmatova ... translated the works of Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets, and she wrote memoirs of Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok, the artist Amedeo Modigliani, and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandelstam. In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honors were her first travels outside Russia since 1912. Two years before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was chosen president of the Writers' Union. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966.
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Though willing to acknowledge her capriciousness and egoism, and the infuriating aspects of her character, Feinstein takes as a given Akhmatova's stature as an artist and the terrible sentence that this ban entailed. During these years it was estimated that in any gathering of 10 people, one would be a spy. Her poetry was shared with seven trusted friends who would learn her poems by heart. The manuscripts were burned. In this precarious, painstaking way she wrote her extraordinary public sequences, Requiem, about a mother's desperate search for news of her imprisoned son, and Poem Without a Hero. Russians' terrible experiences in these years meant that Akhmatova's own griefs were as easily recognised experiences as those ordinary feelings she had caught in her love lyrics.
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Stalinist Russia