Anna Akhmatova was one of the most significant Soviet Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year.
Background
Anna Akhmatova was born at Bolshoy Fontan, a resort suburb of the Black Sea port of Odessa. She was born on June 23, 1889. Her father, Andrey Antonovich Gorenko, a Ukrainian naval engineer and descendant from a noble Ukrainian cossack family, and her mother, Inna Erazmovna Stogova, a descendant from the Russian nobility with close ties to Kiev. 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.
Education
Anna studied at the Mariinskaya High School, moving to Kiev (1906-1910) and finished her schooling there, after her parents separated in 1905. She went on to study law at Kiev University (now the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv), leaving a year later to study literature in Saint Petersburg.
Anna 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, Evgeny Baratynsky and the Symbolists; however, none of her juvenilia survives. 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.
Anna Akhmatova met a young poet, Nikolay Gumilev, on Christmas Eve 1903. Nikolay 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.
She married Gumilev in Kiev in April 1910; however, none of Akhmatova’s family attended the wedding. The couple honeymooned in Paris, and there she met and befriended the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.
Career
In late 1910, Anna Akhmatova came together with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky to form the Guild of Poets. 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 and by the end of that year he left on a six-month trip to Africa.
Anna Akhmatova later began an affair with the celebrated Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, whose wife, Nadezhda, declared later, in her autobiography that she came to forgive Akhmatova for it in time. Akhmatova's son, Lev, was born in 1912, and would become a renowned Neo-Eurasianist historian.
In 1912, the Guild of Poets published Akhmatova's book of verse Evening (Vecher) - the first of five in nine years. The small edition of 500 copies quickly sold out and she received around a dozen positive notices in the literary press. Anna Akhmatova exercised a strong selectivity for the pieces – including only 35 of the 200 poems she had written by the end of 1911. The book secured her reputation as a new and striking young writer.
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.
Anna 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, she wrote "Frightening times are approaching/ Soon fresh graves will cover the land"; on August 1, 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.
Anna 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, a volume which poet and critic Joseph Brodsky later described as writing of personal lyricism tinged with the "note of controlled terror".
In February 1917, the revolution started in Saint Petersburg (then named Petrograd); soldiers fired on marching protestors, and others mutinied. 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. She had the option to leave, and considered it for a time, but chose to stay and was proud of her decision to remain.
At the height of Akhmatova's fame, in 1918, Anna Akhmatova divorced her husband and that same year, though many of her friends considered it a mistake, Akhmatova married prominent Assyriologist and poet Vladimir Shilejko.
In 1921, Akhmatova's former husband Nikolay Gumilev was prosecuted for his alleged role in a monarchist anti-Bolshevik conspiracy and in August was shot along with 61 others. The executions had a powerful effect on the Russian intelligentsia, destroying the acmeist poetry group, and placing a stigma on Akhmatova and her son Lev (by Gumilev). 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 was roundly attacked by the state, by former supporters and friends, and seen to be an anachronism. During what she termed "The Vegetarian Years", Akhmatova's work was unofficially banned by a party resolution of 1925 and she found it hard to publish, though she didn't stop writing poetry. She made acclaimed translations of works by Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi and pursued academic work on Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. She worked as a critic and essayist, though many USSR and foreign critics and readers concluded she had died.
Anna Akhmatova had little food and almost no money; her son was denied access to study at academic institutions by dint of his parents' alleged anti-state activities. The impact of the nationwide repression and purges had a decimating effect on her St Petersburg circle of friends, artists and intellectuals. Her close friend and fellow poet Mandelstam was deported and then sentenced to a Gulag labour camp, where he would die. Anna Akhmatova narrowly escaped arrest, though her son Lev was imprisoned on numerous occasions by the Stalinist regime, accused of counter-revolutionary activity. She would often queue for hours to deliver him food packages and plead on his behalf.
Akhmatova wrote that by 1935 every time she went to see someone off at the train station as they went into exile, she'd find herself greeting friends at every step as so many of Saint Petersburg's intellectual and cultural figures would be leaving on the same train. In her poetry circles Mayakovsky and Esenin committed suicide and Marina Tsvetaeva would follow them in 1941, after returning from exile.
Anna Akhmatova was a common-law wife to Nikolai Punin, an art scholar and lifelong friend, whom she stayed with until 1935. He also was repeatedly taken into custody, dying in the Gulag in 1953. Her tragic cycle Requiem documents her personal experience of this time; as she writes, "one hundred million voices shout" through her "tortured mouth".
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".
During World War II, Anna Akhmatova witnessed the 900-day Siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). In 1940, she started her Poem without a Hero, finishing a first draft in Tashkent, but working on "The Poem" for twenty years and considering it to be the major work of her life. She was evacuated to Chistopol in spring of 1942 and then to greener, safer Tashkent in Uzbekistan, along with other artists, such as Shostakovich.
In 1946 the Central Committee of CPSU, 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 liberal, western, Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1945. 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. She spent much of the next years trying to ensure his release.
Akhmatova's stature among Soviet poets was slowly conceded by party officials, her name no longer cited in only scathing contexts and she was readmitted to the Union of Writers in 1951, being fully recognised again following Stalin's death in 1953. With the press still heavily controlled and censored under Nikita Khrushchev, a translation by Akhmatova was praised in a public review in 1955, and her own poems began to re-appear in 1956. That same year Lev was released from the camps, embittered, believing that his mother cared more about her poetry than for him and that she had not worked hard for his release. Akhmatova's status was confirmed by 1958, with the publication of Stikhotvoreniya (Poems) and then Stikhotvoreniya 1909-1960 (Poems: 1909-1960) in 1961. Beg vremeni (The flight of time), collected works 1909-1965, published 1965, was the most complete volume of her works in her lifetime, though the long damning poem Requiem, condemning the Stalinist purges, was conspicuously absent.
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.
Anna 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. She inspired and advised a large circle of key young Soviet writers. Her dacha in Komarovo was frequented by such poets as Yevgeny Rein and Joseph Brodsky, whom she mentored.
As one of the last remaining major poets of the Silver Age, Anna Akhmatova was acclaimed by the Soviet authorities as a fine and loyal representative of their country and permitted to travel. At the same time, by virtue of works such as Requiem, she was being hailed at home and abroad as an unofficial leader of the dissident movement, and reinforced this image herself. She was becoming a representative of both the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, more popular in the 1960s than she had ever been before the revolution, this reputation only continuing to grow after her death.
Anna Akhmatova died of heart failure on March 5, at the age of 76.
Views
Quotations:
"You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms..."
"If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up."
"Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree."
"My shadow serves as the friend I crave."
"You do not know just what you've been forgiven."
"It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace."