Short answers, pulled from the story.
Anna Akhmatova was a Russian and Soviet poet born near Odessa in 1889 who died on the 5th of March 1966. She is significant for her lyric poetry, her role as a founding figure of the Acmeist school, and her long poem Requiem, which documents the suffering of ordinary people under Stalinist terror. Isaiah Berlin described her as a figure not merely in Russian literature but in Russian history.
Requiem is a lyrical cycle composed by Akhmatova in secret between 1935 and 1940, documenting the suffering of common people under Soviet terror. It consists of ten numbered poems exploring suffering, despair, and devotion, and draws on biblical themes including the crucifixion and the grief of Mary, Mother of Jesus. It appeared in book form in Russian only in Munich in 1963 and was not published inside the Soviet Union until 1987.
Akhmatova's work was unofficially banned by a party resolution in 1925 and formally condemned in 1946 when the official Andrei Zhdanov accused her of eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference and banned her poems from the journals Zvezda and Leningrad. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and placed under increased surveillance. Her flat was bugged and authorities accumulated nearly 900 pages of files on her.
Lev Gumilev, Akhmatova's son born in 1912, was imprisoned multiple times by the Stalinist regime. He was arrested again at the end of 1949 and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian prison camp, remaining there until 1956. To try to secure his release, Akhmatova published overtly propagandist poetry supporting Stalin, but Lev was embittered after his release, believing his mother had not fought hard enough for him.
The Acmeist school grew from the Guild of Poets, formed in late 1910 by Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, and Sergey Gorodetsky. It promoted craft, clarity, and disciplined poetic form over the spiritual abstraction and mysticism of the Symbolist school, favouring the concrete over the ephemeral. The movement developed concurrently with the growth of Imagism in Europe and America.
Akhmatova was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and again in 1966, the year she died, but did not win. She did receive the Etna-Taormina prize in 1964 and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University in 1965. Her mentee Joseph Brodsky, whom she had advised at her dacha in Komarovo, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.