Anna Alexandrovna Barkova, July 16, 1901 – April 29, 1976, was a Soviet poet, journalist, playwright, essayist, memoirist, and writer of fiction.
Background
Anna was born into the family of a private school janitor in the textile town of Ivanovo in 1901. She was allowed to attend the school because of her father"s position, a rare opportunity for a young working class girl in pre-revolutionary Russia.
Career
She was imprisoned for more than 20 years in the Gulag. Soon after joining she began to write short pieces for the group"s paper The Land of the Workers. She also published poetry in the paper under the pseudonym Kalika perekhozhaia ("the wandering cripple"), a name given to blind or maimed singers who went from village to village singing devotional ballads to obtain alms.
She became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet life in the late 1920s.
Her poems of the early 1930s were highly critical of Soviet life and institutions. She wrote in 1925: In 1934 Anna was denounced and arrested, and some of her poetry was used against her as evidence.
She was sentenced to five years imprisonment. She endured repeat arrests in 1947 and 1956, and served 9 years in the Gulag for each arrest.
She also suffered 2 long periods of exile from 1939 to 1947 and from 1965 to 1967.
In 1967 she was allowed to return to Moscow after the intervention of a group of writers led by Alexander Tvardovsky and Konstantin Fedin.
Membership
In 1918 she enrolled as a member of the Circle of Genuine Proletarian Poets, a writers group based in Ivanovo.