Anna Akhmatova | Russian Poet & Symbolist (2024)

Anna Akhmatova (born June 11 [June 23, New Style], 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) was a Russian poet recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature.

Akhmatova began writing verse at age 11 and at 21 joined a group of St. Petersburg poets, the Acmeists, whose leader, Nikolay Gumilyov, she married in 1910. They soon traveled to Paris, immersing themselves for months in its cultural life. Their son, Lev, was born in 1912, but their marriage did not last (they divorced in 1918). The Acmeists, who included notably Osip Mandelshtam, were associated with the new St. Petersburg journal Apollon (1909–17; “Apollo”) and such poets of the older generation as Innokenty Annensky and Mikhail Kuzmin, who stood apart from the dominant Symbolist poets of the day. Partly in response to the manifestos of the Russian Futurists (1912–13), the young poets founded Acmeism, a school that affirmed “beautiful clarity” (Kuzmin’s term) in place of the vagueness and abstractness of Russian Symbolism. Codifying their own poetic practice, Acmeists demanded concrete representation and precise form and meaning—combined with a broad-ranging erudition (Classical antiquity, European history and culture, including art and religion). To these Akhmatova added her own stamp of elegant colloquialism and the psychological sophistication of a young cosmopolitan woman, fully in control of the subtle verbal and gestural vocabulary of modern intimacies and romance. A small detail could evoke a whole gamut of emotions (“You are drawing on my soul like a drink through a straw”). Her first collections, Vecher (1912; “Evening”) and Chyotki (1914; “Rosary”), especially the latter, brought her fame and made her poetic voice emblematic of the experience of her generation. Her appeal stemmed from the artistic and emotional integrity of her poetic voice as well as from her poetic persona, further amplified by her own striking appearance. Akhmatova’s principal motif is frustrated and tragic love expressed with an intensely feminine accent and inflection entirely her own.

During World War I and following the Revolution of 1917, she added to her main theme some civic, patriotic, and religious motifs but did not sacrifice her personal intensity or artistic conscience. Her artistry and increasing control of her medium were particularly prominent in her next collections: Belaya staya (1917; “The White Flock”), Podorozhnik (1921; “Plantain”), and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1921). The broadening of her thematic range, however, did not prevent the communist cultural watchdogs from proclaiming her “bourgeois and aristocratic” and condemning her poetry for its narrow preoccupation with love and God, even as her standing as a premier poetic voice of the generation was being affirmed by major critical authorities of the 1920s (e.g., Korney Chukovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum, who in 1922 coined the definition of Akhmatova’s poetic persona as a blend of “a harlot and a nun”). The execution in 1921 of her former husband, Gumilyov, on trumped-up charges of participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy (the Tagantsev affair) further complicated her position. In 1923 she entered a period of almost complete poetic silence and literary ostracism, and no volume of her poetry appeared in the Soviet Union until 1940. Her public life was now limited to her studies of Aleksandr Pushkin.

The 1930s were especially hard for Akhmatova. Her son, Lev Gumilyov (1912–92), and her third husband (she was married from 1918 to 1928 to the Assyriologist Vladimir Shileiko), art historian and critic Nikolay Punin (1888–1953), were arrested for political deviance in 1935. Both were soon released, but her son was arrested again in 1938 and subsequently served a five-year sentence in the Gulag. Her friend Mandelshtam was arrested in her presence in 1934 and died in a concentration camp in 1938.

In 1940, however, several of her poems were published in the literary monthly Zvezda (“The Star”), and a volume of selections from her earlier work appeared under the title Iz shesti knig (“From Six Books”)—only to be abruptly withdrawn from sale and libraries. Nevertheless, in September 1941, following the German invasion, Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the women of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Evacuated to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, soon thereafter, she read her poems to hospitalized soldiers and published a number of war-inspired poems; a small volume of selected poetry appeared in Tashkent in 1943. At the end of the war she returned to Leningrad, where her poems began to appear in local magazines and newspapers. She gave poetic readings, and plans were made for publication of a large edition of her works.

In August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference.” Her poetry was castigated as “alien to the Soviet people,” and she herself was publicly insulted as a “harlot-nun” by none other than Andrey Zhdanov, a Politburo member and the director of Stalin’s program of cultural repression. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers; an unreleased book of her poems, already in print, was destroyed; and none of her work appeared in print for three years.

Then, in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok (“The Little Light”) under the title Iz tsikla “Slava miru” (“From the Cycle ‘Glory to Peace’ ”). This uncharacteristic capitulation to the Soviet dictator—in one of the poems Akhmatova declares: “Where Stalin is, there is Freedom, Peace, and the grandeur of the earth”—was motivated by Akhmatova’s desire to propitiate Stalin and win the freedom of her son, who again had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. The tone of these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet editions of Akhmatova’s works published after his death) is far different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle, Rekviem (“Requiem”), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by Akhmatova’s grief over the earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son in 1938. This masterpiece—a poetic monument to the sufferings of the Soviet people during Stalin’s terror—was published in Russia for the first time in 1989.

In the cultural thaw following Stalin’s death, Akhmatova was slowly and ambivalently rehabilitated, and a slender volume of her poetry, including some of her translations, was published in 1958. After 1958 a number of editions of her works, including some of her brilliant essays on Pushkin, were published in the Soviet Union (1961, 1965, two in 1976, 1977); none of these, however, contains the complete corpus of her literary productivity. Akhmatova’s longest work and perhaps her masterpiece, Poema bez geroya (“Poem Without a Hero”), on which she worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. This difficult and complex work, in which the life of St. Petersburg bohemia in pre-World War I years is “double-exposed” onto the tragedies and suffering of the post-1917 decades, is a powerful lyric summation of Akhmatova’s philosophy and her own definitive statement on the meaning of her life and poetic achievement.

Akhmatova executed a number of superb translations of the works of other poets, including Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets. She also wrote sensitive personal memoirs on Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok, the artist Amedeo Modigliani, and fellow Acmeist Mandelshtam.

In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honours were her first travel outside her homeland since 1912. Akhmatova’s works were widely translated, and her international stature continued to grow after her death. A two-volume edition of Akhmatova’s collected works was published in Moscow in 1986, and The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, also in two volumes, appeared in 1990 and was updated and expanded in 1992.