Anna Andreyevna Gorenko ( – 5 March 1966), known by her pen name Anna Akhmatova, was a Russian and Soviet poet. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966.

Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935–40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work (1912–25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Akhmatova's first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was executed by the Cheka, and her son Lev Gumilev and her common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, where Punin died.

Early life and family

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko was born on at Bolshoy Fontan, a resort suburb of the Black Sea port of Odessa, then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. Her father, , was a descendant of a Ukrainian Cossack noble family, a naval engineer, later a civil servant in the rank of collegiate assessor, and her mother, Inna Erazmovna Stogova, was from a Russian pomeshchik (landowner) family with close ties to Kiev. She wrote:

<blockquote>No one in my large family wrote poetry. But the first Russian woman poet, Anna Bunina, was the aunt of my grandfather Erasm Ivanovich Stogov. The Stogovs were modest landowners in the Mozhaisk region of the Moscow Province. They were moved here after the insurrection during the time of Posadnitsa Marfa. In Novgorod they had been a wealthier and more distinguished family. Khan Akhmat, my ancestor, was killed one night in his tent by a Russian killer-for-hire. Karamzin tells us that this marked the end of the Mongol yoke on Russia. [...] It was well known that this Akhmat was a descendant of Genghiz Khan. In the eighteenth century, one of the Akhmatov Princesses – Praskovia Yegorovna – married the rich and famous Simbirsk landowner Motovilov. Yegor Motovilov was my great-grandfather; his daughter, Anna Yegorovna, was my grandmother. She died when my mother was nine years old, and I was named in her honour. Several diamond rings and one emerald were made from her brooch. Though my fingers are thin, still her thimble didn't fit me.</blockquote>

Her family moved north to Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, when she was eleven months old. The family lived in a house on the corner of Shirokaya Street and Bezymyanny Lane (the building is no longer there today), spending summers from age 7 to 13 in a dacha near Sevastopol. She studied at the Mariinskaya High School, moving to Kiev (1906–10) and finished her schooling there, after her parents separated in 1905. She went on to study law at Kiev University, leaving a year later to study literature in Saint Petersburg.

Akhmatova started writing poetry at the age of 11, and was published in her late teens, inspired by the poets Nikolay Nekrasov, Jean Racine, Alexander Pushkin, Yevgeny Baratynsky and the Symbolists; however, none of her juvenilia survive. Her sister Inna also wrote poetry though she did not pursue the practice and married shortly after high school. Akhmatova's father did not want to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name, so she chose to adopt her grandmother's distinctly Tatar surname 'Akhmatova' as a pen name.

thumb|Anna Akhmatova with her husband [[Nikolai Gumilev and their son, Lev, 1915]]

thumb|[[Amedeo Modigliani's sketch of Anna Akhmatova (1911)]]

She met a young poet, Nikolai Gumilev, on Christmas Eve 1903. Gumilev encouraged her to write and pursued her intensely, making numerous marriage proposals starting in 1905. At 17 years old, in his journal Sirius, she published her first poem which could be translated as "On his hand you may see many glittering rings" (1907), signing it "Anna G." She soon became known in Saint Petersburg's artistic circles, regularly giving public readings. That year, she wrote unenthusiastically to a friend, "He has loved me for three years now, and I believe that it is my fate to be his wife. Whether or not I love him, I do not know, but it seems to me that I do."

In late 1910, she came together with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky to form the Guild of Poets. It promoted the idea of craft as the key to poetry rather than inspiration or mystery, taking themes of the concrete rather than the more ephemeral world of the Symbolists. Over time, they developed the influential Acmeist anti-symbolist school, concurrent with the growth of Imagism in Europe and America. From the first year of their marriage, Gumilev began to chafe against its constraints. She wrote that he had "lost his passion" for her, and by the end of that year he left on a six-month trip to Africa. Akhmatova's son, Lev, was born in 1912, and would become a renowned Neo-Eurasianist historian.

Silver Age

thumb|Anna Akhmatova in 1914, by

In 1912, the Guild of Poets published Akhmatova's book of verse Evening (Vecher) – the first of five in nine years. (She noted that Song of the Last Meeting, dated 29 September 1911, was her 200th poem.) The book secured her reputation as a new and striking young writer, the poems "Grey-eyed king", "In the Forest", "Over the Water", and "I don't need my legs anymore" making her famous. She later wrote, "These naïve poems by a frivolous girl for some reason were reprinted thirteen times [...] And they came out in several translations. The girl herself (as far as I recall) did not foresee such a fate for them and used to hide the issues of the journals in which they were first published under the sofa cushions".

Akhmatova's second collection, The Rosary (or Beads – Chetki) appeared in March 1914 and firmly established her as one of the most popular and sought after poets of the day.

Akhmatova became close friends with Boris Pasternak (who, though married, proposed to her many times) and rumours began to circulate that she was having an affair with influential lyrical poet Alexander Blok. In July 1914, Akhmatova wrote "Frightening times are approaching / Soon fresh graves will cover the land"; on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia, marking the start of "the dark storm" of world war, civil war, revolution and totalitarian repression for Russia. The Silver Age came to a close.

thumb|Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by [[Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaya, 1914]]

Akhmatova had a relationship with the mosaic artist and poet Boris Anrep; many of her poems in the period are about him, and he in turn created mosaics in which she is featured. She selected poems for her third collection, Belaya Staya (White Flock), in 1917,

In February 1917, the revolution started in Saint Petersburg (then named Petrograd); soldiers fired on marching protestors, and others mutinied. They looked to a past in which the future was "rotting". In a city without electricity or sewage service, with little water or food, they faced starvation and sickness. Akhmatova's friends died around her and others left in droves for safer havens in Europe and America, including Anrep, who escaped to England.

Akhmatova wrote of her own temptation to leave:

At the height of Akhmatova's fame, in 1918, she divorced her husband and that same year, though many of her friends considered it a mistake, Akhmatova married prominent Assyriologist and poet Vladimir Shilejko. She later said, "I felt so filthy. I thought it would be like a cleansing, like going to a convent, knowing you are going to lose your freedom." She began affairs with theatre director Mikhail Zimmerman and composer Arthur Lourié, who set many of her poems to music.

1920s and 1930s

In 1921, Akhmatova's former husband Nikolay Gumilev was prosecuted for his alleged role in a monarchist anti-Bolshevik conspiracy and in August was executed via shooting by the Cheka along with 61 others. According to the historian Donald Rayfield, the murder of Gumilev was part of the state response to the Kronstadt rebellion. The Cheka blamed the rebellion on Petrograd's intellectuals, prompting the senior Cheka officer Yakov Agranov to forcibly extract the names of 'conspirators' from an imprisoned professor, guaranteeing them amnesty from execution. Agranov's guarantee proved to be meaningless. He sentenced dozens of the named persons to death, including Gumilev. Maxim Gorky and others appealed for leniency, but by the time Lenin agreed to several pardons, the condemned had been shot. Within a few days of his death, Akhmatova wrote:

The executions had a powerful effect on the Russian intelligentsia, destroying the Acmeist poetry group, and placing a stigma on Akhmatova and her son by Gumilev, Lev. Lev's later arrest during the purges and terrors of the 1930s was based on being his father's son. From a new Marxist perspective, Akhmatova's poetry was deemed to represent an introspective "bourgeois aesthetic", reflecting only trivial "female" preoccupations, not in keeping with these new revolutionary politics of the time. She would often queue for hours to deliver him food packages and plead on his behalf. She describes standing outside a stone prison:

<blockquote>One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): 'Can you describe this?'<br />And I said: 'I can.'<br />Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face. Of the members of her poetry circles, Mayakovsky and Yesenin committed suicide, and Marina Tsvetaeva would follow them in 1941 after returning from exile. Her tragic cycle Requiem documents her personal experience of this time; as she writes, "one hundred million voices shout" through her "tortured mouth".

1939–1960

In 1939, Stalin approved the publication of one volume of poetry, From Six Books; however, the collection was withdrawn and pulped after only a few months. In 1993, it was revealed that the authorities had bugged her flat and kept her under constant surveillance, keeping detailed files on her from this time, accruing some 900 pages of "denunciations, reports of phone taps, quotations from writings, confessions of those close to her". Although officially stifled, Akhmatova's work continued to circulate in secret. Akhmatova's close friend, chronicler Lydia Chukovskaya described how writers working to keep poetic messages alive used various strategies. A small, trusted circle would, for example, memorise each other's works and circulate them only by oral means. She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove. The poems were carefully disseminated in this way, but it is likely that many compiled in this manner were lost. "It was like a ritual," Chukovskaya wrote, "Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter."

During World War II, Akhmatova witnessed the 900-day siege of Leningrad, now known by Saint Petersburg. In 1940, Akhmatova started her Poem without a Hero. She finished a first draft in Tashkent, but she worked on the poem for twenty years and considered it to be the major work of her life, dedicating it to "the memory of its first audience – my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad during the siege". She was evacuated to Chistopol in spring of 1942 and then to greener, safer Tashkent in Uzbekistan, along with other artists, such as Shostakovich.

She regularly read to soldiers in the military hospitals and on the front line; her later pieces seem to be the voice of those who had struggled and the many she had outlived. She moved away from romantic themes towards a more diverse, complex and philosophical body of work and some of her more patriotic poems found their way to the front pages of Pravda.

In 1946 the Central Committee of the Communist Party, acting on the orders from Stalin, started an official campaign against the "bourgeois", individualistic works by Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. She was condemned for a visit by the Russian-born British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1945, and Andrei Zhdanov publicly labelled her "half harlot, half nun", her work "the poetry of an overwrought, upper-class lady", her work the product of "eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference". He banned her poems from publication in the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, accusing her of poisoning the minds of Soviet youth. Her surveillance was increased, and she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.

Akhmatova's son Lev was arrested again at the end of 1949 and sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian prison camp. Lev remained in the camps until 1956, well after Stalin's death, his final release potentially aided by his mother's concerted efforts.

During the last years of Akhmatova's life, she continued to live with the Punin family in Leningrad, still translating, researching Pushkin, and writing her own poetry. Though still censored, she was concerned to re-construct work that had been destroyed or suppressed during the purges or which had posed a threat to the life of her son in the camps, such as the lost, semi-autobiographical play Enûma Elish. She worked on her official memoirs, planned novels, and worked on her epic Poem without a Hero, 20 years in the writing.

Akhmatova was widely honoured in the USSR and the West. In 1962, she was visited by Robert Frost; Isaiah Berlin tried to visit her again, but she refused him, worried that her son might be re-arrested due to family association with the ideologically suspect western philosopher.

thumb|Anna Akhmatova's grave, [[Komarovo, Saint Petersburg]]

Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel to Sicily and England, in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University, accompanied by her lifelong friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya. Akhmatova's Requiem in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963, the whole work not published within USSR until 1987. Her long poem The Way of All the Earth or Woman of Kitezh (Kitezhanka) was published in complete form in 1965.

In November 1965, soon after her Oxford visit, Akhmatova suffered a heart attack and was hospitalised. She was moved to a sanatorium in Moscow in the spring of 1966 and died of heart failure on 5 March, at the age of 76. Thousands attended the two memorial ceremonies, held in Moscow and in Leningrad. After being displayed in an open coffin, she was interred at Komarovo Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.

Isaiah Berlin described the impact of her life, as he saw it:

<blockquote>

The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure [...] not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in [the twentieth] century.

</blockquote>

In 1988, to celebrate what would have been Akhmatova's 100th birthday, Harvard University held an international conference on her life and work. Today her work may be explored at the Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Work and themes

thumb|Poem by Akhmatova on a [[Wall poems in Leiden|wall in Leiden]]

Akhmatova joined the Acmeist group of poets in 1910 with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky, working in response to the Symbolist school, concurrent with the growth of Imagism in Europe and America. It promoted the use of craft and rigorous poetic form over mysticism or spiritual in-roads to composition, favouring the concrete over the ephemeral. Her first collections Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914) received wide critical acclaim and made her famous from the start of her career. They contained brief, psychologically taut pieces, acclaimed for their classical diction, telling details, and the skilful use of colour.

Akhmatova often complained that the critics "walled her in" to their perception of her work in the early years of romantic passion, despite major changes of theme in the later years of the Terror. This was mainly due to the secret nature of her work after the public and critical effusion over her first volumes. The risks during the purges were very great. Many of her close friends and family were exiled, imprisoned or shot; her son was under constant threat of arrest, and she was often under close surveillance.

Her essays on Pushkin and Poem Without a Hero, her longest work, were only published after her death. This long poem, composed between 1940 and 1965, is often critically regarded as her best work and also one of the finest poems of the twentieth century. Her talent in composition and translation is evidenced in her fine translations of the works of poets writing in French, English, Italian, Armenian, and Korean.

  • Translations of some of her poems by Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin are set to music on the 2015 album The Trackless Woods by Iris DeMent.
  • Anna Akhmatova is the main character of the Australian play The Woman in the Window by Alma De Groen, premiered at Fairfax Studio, Melbourne, in 1998; Sydney: Currency Press, .
  • Dutch composer Marjo Tal set Akhmatova's poetry to music.
  • Ukrainian composers Inna Abramovna Zhvanetskaia and Yudif Grigorevna Rozhavskaya set several of Akhmatova's poems to music.
  • Porcelain figurine: When Anna Akhmatova was at the peak of her popularity, to commemorate her 35th birthday (1924), a porcelain figurine resembling her in a grey dress with flower pattern covered in a red shawl was mass-produced. Throughout the following years, the figurine was reproduced multiple times on different occasions: once in 1954, on her 65th birthday, as she was fully recognised and praised again following Stalin's death, and again in 1965 as both a tribute to her being short-listed for the Nobel Prize in 1965
  • 1965 – honorary doctorate from Oxford University
  • 1914 – Chetki / Чётки (Rosary or literally Beads)
  • 1917 – Belaya Staya / Белая Стая (White Flock)
  • 1921 – Podorozhnik / Подорожник (Wayside Grass/Plantain). 60 pages, 1000 copies published.
  • 1921 – Anno Domini MCMXXI
  • Reed – two-volume collection of selected poems (1924–1926); compiled but never published.
  • Uneven – compiled but never published.
  • 1940 – From Six Books (publication suspended shortly after release, copies pulped and banned).
  • 1943 – Izbrannoe Stikhi / Избранные Стишки (Selections of Poetry). Tashkent, government-edited.
  • Iva / Ива – not separately published

Later editions

  • 1967 – Poems of Akhmatova. Ed. and trans. Stanley Kunitz, Boston
  • 1976 – Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems (trans. D. M. Thomas); Penguin Books
  • 1985 – Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (trans. Jane Kenyon); Eighties Press and Ally Press;
  • 1988 – Selected Poems (trans. Richard McKane); Bloodaxe Books Ltd;
  • 2000 – The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (trans. Judith Hemschemeyer; ed. Roberta Reeder); Zephyr Press;
  • 2004 – The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory (Annals of Communism) (trans. Nancy Anderson). Yale University Press.
  • 2006 – Selected Poems (trans. D. M. Thomas); Penguin Classics;
  • 2009 – Selected Poems (trans. Walter Arndt); Overlook TP;

See also

  • Akhmatova's Orphans
  • Lidiia Alekseeva, relative and fellow poet

Notes

References

Sources

  • Akhmatova, Anna, Trans. Kunitz, Staney and Hayward, Max (1973) Poems of Akhmatova. Houghton Mifflin;
  • Akhmatova, Anna, Trans. Kunitz, Staney and Hayward, Max (1998) Poems of Akhmatova. Houghton Mifflin;
  • Akhmatova, Anna (1989) Trans. Mayhew and Mcnaughton. Poem Without a Hero & Selected Poems. Oberlin College Press;
  • Akhmatova, Anna (1992) Trans. Judith Hemschemeyer The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Ed. R. Reeder, Boston: Zephyr Press; (2000);
  • Feinstein, Elaine. (2005) Anna of all the Russias: A life of Anna Akhmatova. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; ; Alfred A. Knopf, (2006)
  • Harrington, Alexandra (2006) The poetry of Anna Akhmatova: living in different mirrors. Anthem Press;
  • Martin, Eden (2007) Collecting Anna Akhmatova, The Caxtonian, Vol. 4 April 2007 Journal of the Caxton Club; accessed 31 May 2010
  • Monas, Sidney; Krupala, Jennifer Greene; Punin, Nikolaĭ Nikolaevich (1999), The Diaries of Nikolay Punin: 1904–1953, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series, University of Texas Press;
  • Polivanov, Konstantin (1994) Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, University of Arkansas Press;
  • Reeder, Roberta. (1994) Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet. New York: Picador;
  • Reeder, Roberta. (1997) Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years Journal article by Roberta Reeder; New England Review, Vol. 18, 1997
  • Wells, David (1996) Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry Berg Publishers;
  • Profile and poems at Academy of American Poets
  • Anna Akhmatova poetry at Stihipoeta (rus)
  • Profile and poems at Poetry Foundation
  • Poetic translations