Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a Russian poet and one of the most important voices of the Silver Age of Russian literature. Together with Nikolai Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam she led Acmeism, a movement that asked poets to value craft, precision and concrete detail over the mystical haze of the Symbolists. She wrote in Russian through almost the whole of the twentieth century, a period of revolution, war and harsh repression, and for that reason her poems are now read as a testimony to their time as much as for their artistry.

She was born on 23 June 1889 in Bolshoy Fontan, a resort suburb of Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire and today in Ukraine. Her family moved north to Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, when she was still a baby. She began writing verse as a child and started publishing in her late teens. Her father did not want any poems printed under his respectable surname, so she chose Akhmatova as a pen name. She studied law in Kiev and then literature in Saint Petersburg. In 1910 she married Gumilev, a poet and a founder of Acmeism, and in 1912 she published Evening, her first book, which was warmly received. Two years later The Rosary made her one of the most widely read poets of the day. Her manner was spare, built from short phrases and exact details, and in her early love poems the feeling is always tense, ambiguous and touched with sadness.

The revolution of 1917 changed everything. In 1921 Gumilev was accused of conspiracy and shot. Her son Lev was arrested and sent to Siberia more than once, and her last partner, the art historian Nikolai Punin, died in a labour camp in 1938. Her poems were banned, and fearing for her son's life she burned much of her personal papers. During the 1930s she wrote Requiem, a cycle about the Stalinist terror that could not be published inside the Soviet Union. In 1946, after a harsh report by the party ideologist Andrei Zhdanov, she was expelled from the Writers' Union together with Mikhail Zoshchenko, which blocked her publishing and left her in great hardship. It was also around this time that she spent twenty hours in conversation with the young British thinker Isaiah Berlin.

In her final years she received recognition abroad: an international poetry prize in Taormina in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966. She died on 5 March 1966 near Moscow and was buried in Komarovo. Her complete works did not appear in Russia until 1990. Joseph Brodsky, who visited her at Komarovo, was among the younger poets who carried her tradition forward, and her refusal to fall silent under censorship remains one of the most cited parts of her legacy.