Domna Anisimovna Anisimova was born on January 18, 1815 in the village of Degtyanom in the Spassky District of Ryazan Oblast, Russian Federation. She was the daughter of a sexton in the local village Orthodox church. According to one source she was born in 1808, according to another source in 1812.
From an early age Domna Anisimovna loved to be read to, but at first had no cause to hear works except church books, sermons, ancient stories, and fairy tales. But when a new young priest, Sergei Ivanov, was assigned to her village, he became friendly with Domna Anisimovna and began to read some later works, especially the work of contemporary poets. She was read "Twelve Sleeping Virgins" by Vasily Zhukovsky. This ballad made such an impression on her that she was deprived of sleep and was inspired with a great desire to compose poetry, which she soon began to do, dictating poems to her brother.
Her first experiments were "Lullaby" and "Sound of the Night Wind". Domna Anisimovna tried to hide her creations, but they came to the attention of the county police chief, who asked Domna Anisimovna to expound on the village harvests. One night she composed a rather long poem, "Depiction of the Harvest".
Rumors about Anisimova's work spread throughout the Spassky district and came to the attention of the provincial governor, who informed Dmitry Bludov, the Minister of Internal Affairs and later president of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, who was a man with a considerable interest in and knowledge of literature. Bludov sent some of Anisimova's work to Admiral Alexander Shishkov, the president of the Russian Academy and a philologist and literary critic. The Academy decided to encourage Domna Anisimovna and sent her one hundred rubles and some books, published an edition of her poems, and arranged for her to be given disability subsidy of 40 rubles a month for her blindness, which she was to receive for the rest of her life.
The collection of poems published by the Academy under the title Poems by Miss Onisimova, the Blind Daughter of a Village Sexton (St. Petersburg, 1838) included "Sound of the Night Wind", "On the Death of a Friend", "Lullaby", "On the Birth of a Child", "To a Faded Flower", "Greeting", and "Depiction of the Harvest", and prefaces by Bludov and Shishkov.
About fifteen of her poems were published in the Ryazan Diocesan Gazette, and some of her poems were published in the literary newspaper Northern Bee.
Little information on the last years of her life has survived.
Domna Anisimovna loved solitude and old stories about the past, as well as being read books, and worship.
Physical Characteristics: At the age of five Domna Anisimovna was stricken with smallpox, which left her nearly blind; she could only distinguish day from night and dark colors from bright. Her blindness alienated her from normal society.
