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Anna Akhmatova
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Anna Akhmatova is one of the most important poetic voices of the twentieth century, a legend in the Soviet Union. PERSONAL FILE vividly portrays the life and struggles of this celebrated poet, who was persecuted by the Soviet state throughout her literary career. Born in 1889, Akhmatova refused to leave the Soviet Union even during the bleakest times, becoming a forceful voice against repression. Based on excerpts from her biography and the memoirs of the writer Lidiya Chukovskaya, PERSONAL FILE is itself a haunting, visual poem and a photographic catalog of her times. The filmmakers' footage of Akhmatova's funeral, locked away for 20 years, is seen for the first time. Other archival footage features candid glimpses of Soviet leaders, and Akhmatova's important Russian literary counterparts, including Blok, Gumilev, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn.
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Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko in Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, as the daughter of a naval engineer. She began writing poetry at the age of 11, and adopted a pseudonym to allay her father's fears that as a"decadent poetress" she would dishonour the family. The pseudonym was the Tatar name of Akhmatova's great-grandmother. When she was sixteen, her father abandoned his family. Akhmatova attended a girls' gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo and the famous Smolnyi Institute in St. Petersburg. She continued her studies in Kiev in Fundukleevskaia gymnasium (1906) and in a law school (1907) before moving to St. Petersburg to study literature.
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Anna Akhmatova had a lifelong connection with the town of Tsarskoe Selo outside St. Petersburg. Tsarskoe Selo came to play an important role in Akhmatova’s works, as it had for other Russian writers before her.
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Anna Akhmatova lived mainly in St. Petersburg and at her nearby country home, Komarovo, but traveled abroad several times: in 1910-1911 to Paris; in 1912 to northern Italy; and in 1965 to Oxford, England, where she was awarded an honorary degree. Throughout her life St. Petersburg played an important thematic role in her poetry. It was the city of such great writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Aleksandr Pushkin, and it represented Anna Akhmatova's affinity to the 19th-century Russian prose tradition.
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Through much of the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova's poetry has given voice to the deepest yearnings and struggles of the Russian people. Born in 1889, she survived these upheavals, refusing to abandon either Russia or her craft despite vicious attacks on her name and censorship of her work. When committing poems to paper threatened to cause her arrest, a few close friends faithfully memorised her lines. By the time she died in 1966, Anna Akhmatova was recognized as one of the world's great poets.
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Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreyevna Gorenko) was born on June 23, 1889, near Odessa, and grew up in Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence, where Pushkin had attended the Lyceum. She studied law in Kiev, then literature in St. Petersburg. She married poet Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev in 1910, and the couple visited western Europe on their honeymoon. She made a return visit to Paris in 1911, and Amedeo Modigliani, still an unknown artist at the time, painted sixteen portraits of her.
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Anna Akhmatova