Anna Akhmatova

• 1. Introduction

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  Anna Akhmatova chose a Tatar surname for herself because her father refused to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name. The surname she took was her grandmother's: Akhmatova, carrying the lineage of Khan Akhmat, a descendant of Genghiz Khan who, as the historian Karamzin records, was killed one night in his tent by a Russian assassin. That act, Karamzin wrote, marked the end of the Mongol yoke on Russia. It is a remarkable ancestry for a woman who would herself become a kind of national martyr, outlasting one of the most brutal regimes in modern history.

  She was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko on the Black Sea coast near Odessa and would live until 1966, a span that bridged the glittering Silver Age of Russian poetry and the long machinery of Stalinist terror. Her husband was shot. Her son spent years in the Gulag. Her common-law partner died there. Her own work was banned, condemned, pulped. And yet she stayed, writing poems on scraps of paper that visitors would read and then burn in her stove, the only way to keep them alive.

  How does a poet survive in a state that wants her silent? What does it cost? And what exactly did she write that so terrified the people in power?

• 2. The Pen Name and the Family

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  Inna Erazmovna Stogova, Akhmatova's mother, came from a Russian landowning family with close ties to Kiev. Her father was a naval engineer who would later become a civil servant, a descendant of a Ukrainian Cossack noble family. When the family moved to Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg, Akhmatova was only eleven months old.

  She started writing poetry at the age of 11. By her late teens she was already being published, inspired by Nikolay Nekrasov, Jean Racine, Alexander Pushkin, and the Symbolists. None of those early juvenilia survive. Her father's objection to the family name appearing in print solved itself elegantly: she simply took her grandmother Anna Yegorovna's surname, Akhmatova, converting a private lineage into a public identity.

  She also recorded, in her own prose, that the first Russian woman poet, Anna Bunina, was the aunt of her grandfather Erasm Ivanovich Stogov. That double inheritance, poetry through the maternal line and a warrior ancestry through the Tatar name, gave the pen name a particular weight. Her thimble note is one of the few personal details she left down in writing: her grandmother's thimble did not fit her, despite her thin fingers.

• 3. The Silver Age

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  On Christmas Eve 1903, Akhmatova met the young poet Nikolai Gumilev. He proposed to her numerous times beginning in 1905. At seventeen, she published her first poem in his journal Sirius, signing it "Anna G." She married him in Kiev in April 1910; none of her family attended. The honeymoon took them to Paris, where she met and befriended Amedeo Modigliani, who would eventually paint at least twenty portraits of her, including several nudes.

  By late 1910, she and Gumilev were part of a group that included Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky. Together they formed the Guild of Poets, and over time developed what became known as the Acmeist school, favouring craft, clarity, and the concrete over the spiritual abstraction of the Symbolists. From the very first year of marriage, she later wrote, Gumilev had "lost his passion" for her. By year's end he had left on a six-month trip to Africa.

  Her debut collection, Evening, appeared in 1912, with only 500 copies printed. It sold out. She had selected just 35 of the 200 poems she had written by the end of 1911. She later noted that one of those poems, Song of the Last Meeting, dated the 29th of September 1911, was her 200th poem. The book made her famous. She recalled years later that these "naïve poems by a frivolous girl" were reprinted thirteen times and translated into several languages, and that she used to hide the journals in which they first appeared under sofa cushions.

  The Rosary came out in March 1914 and deepened her standing as one of the most sought-after poets in Russia. Thousands of women wrote poems in her honour, mimicking her style, prompting Akhmatova's exasperated remark: "I taught our women how to speak, but don't know how to make them silent." She earned the titles "Queen of the Neva" and "Soul of the Silver Age". In July 1914, she wrote, "Frightening times are approaching / Soon fresh graves will cover the land"; on the 1st of August, Germany declared war on Russia.

• 4. Staying Behind

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  The revolution of February 1917 began in Petrograd, with soldiers firing on marching protesters and others mutinying. The city lost electricity, sewage service, and reliable water and food. Friends died around Akhmatova. Others fled to Europe and America, among them the mosaic artist Boris Anrep, who had been close to her and who escaped to England.

  She had the option to leave. She considered it. Then she chose to stay, and she was proud of that choice. Her third collection, White Flock, appeared in 1917. The poet and critic Joseph Brodsky later described it as personal lyricism touched with a "note of controlled terror." The essayist John Bayley called her writing at this time "grim, spare and laconic."

  In 1918, at the height of her fame, she divorced Gumilev and married the Assyriologist and poet Vladimir Shilejko, a decision many of her friends considered a mistake. She described her reasoning plainly: "I felt so filthy. I thought it would be like a cleansing, like going to a convent, knowing you are going to lose your freedom." She then began affairs with theatre director Mikhail Zimmerman and composer Arthur Lourié, who set many of her poems to music.

  In August 1921, Gumilev was prosecuted for alleged involvement in a monarchist conspiracy. He was executed by the Cheka, shot along with 61 others. The historian Donald Rayfield links the killing to the state's response to the Kronstadt rebellion. A senior Cheka officer named Yakov Agranov had extracted names from an imprisoned professor by guaranteeing amnesty, then ignored that guarantee and sentenced dozens to death. Maxim Gorky and others appealed for leniency. By the time Lenin agreed to several pardons, the condemned had already been shot. Within days of Gumilev's death, Akhmatova wrote: "Terror fingers all things in the dark, / Leads moonlight to the axe."

• 5. Requiem and Survival

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  A party resolution in 1925 unofficially banned Akhmatova's work, though she never stopped writing. From a new Marxist critical vantage, her poetry was deemed a "bourgeois aesthetic" reflecting trivial "female" preoccupations. Many Soviet and foreign critics concluded she had died. She had little food and almost no money. Her son Lev was denied access to academic institutions because of his parents' alleged anti-state activities. She translated Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, and Giacomo Leopardi, and pursued academic work on Pushkin and Dostoyevsky.

  Her close friend Osip Mandelstam was deported and eventually sentenced to a Gulag labour camp, where he died. Her common-law partner, the art scholar Nikolay Punin, was repeatedly taken into custody. He died in the Gulag in 1953. Akhmatova stood outside prison walls, queueing for hours to deliver food packages to her son, pleading on his behalf. She described the scene in prose: a woman with lips blue from cold, someone who had never heard her name before, turned to her and whispered, "Can you describe this?" Akhmatova replied: "I can."

  Between 1935 and 1940, she composed, reworked, and carried with her the long poem Requiem, a cycle of lamentation that documented the suffering of ordinary people under Soviet terror. She kept it alive through the same methods her circle used to preserve any forbidden writing: a small, trusted group memorised poems and passed them on orally. Her friend Lydia Chukovskaya described how Akhmatova would write a poem on a scrap of paper for a visitor to read, then burn it in her stove. "It was like a ritual," Chukovskaya wrote. "Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter."

  In 1939, Stalin approved the publication of a collection called From Six Books. Within a few months it was withdrawn and pulped. In 1993 it was revealed that authorities had bugged her flat and maintained nearly 900 pages of surveillance files on her, containing denunciations, phone tap transcripts, and confessions from people close to her.

  Requiem reached its Russian readership in book form only in Munich in 1963. The work was not published inside the Soviet Union until 1987.

• 6. Condemnation and the Propagandist Poems

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  In 1945, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin visited Akhmatova's flat in Leningrad. Berlin described what he found: a barely furnished room from which almost everything had been looted or sold during the siege. He wrote of "a stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders" who rose to greet them with "unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness."

  The visit had consequences. In 1946, the Central Committee, acting on Stalin's orders, launched a campaign against Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. The official Andrei Zhdanov publicly labelled her "half harlot, half nun" and accused her work of "eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference." He banned her poems from the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, charging her with poisoning the minds of Soviet youth. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.

  Her son Lev was arrested again at the end of 1949 and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian prison camp. To try to secure his release, Akhmatova published openly propagandist poetry for the first time, including a piece titled "In Praise of Peace" in the magazine Ogoniok, explicitly endorsing Stalin. Lev remained in the camps until 1956. The critic John Bayley suggests these propagandist pieces may also have saved her own life. Notably, Akhmatova never acknowledged them in her official corpus.

  She was readmitted to the Union of Writers in 1951 and fully recognised again following Stalin's death in 1953. By 1958, her collected poems appeared in an edition of 25,000 copies. Lev, released from the camps that same year his freedom came, was embittered, believing his mother cared more for her poetry than for him and had not fought hard enough for his release.

• 7. Last Years and Legacy

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  Akhmatova was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in both 1965 and 1966. In 1964 she received the Etna-Taormina prize. In 1965 she travelled to Sicily and then to England to receive an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University, accompanied by her lifelong friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya. One of the poets she mentored at her dacha in Komarovo was Joseph Brodsky, who had been arrested in 1963 and interned for social parasitism. Brodsky would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and become Poet Laureate in 1991 as an exile in the United States.

  She refused a second visit from Isaiah Berlin, worried that contact with the ideologically suspect western philosopher might lead to Lev's re-arrest. Robert Frost visited her in 1962. Her Poem Without a Hero, begun in 1940, occupied her for twenty years; she dedicated it to "the memory of its first audience, my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad during the siege." Her essays on Pushkin and the complete text of Poem Without a Hero were published only after her death.

  In November 1965, shortly after her Oxford visit, she suffered a heart attack. She died of heart failure on the 5th of March 1966, at the age of 76. Thousands attended the two memorial ceremonies held in Moscow and in Leningrad. She was interred at Komarovo Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.

  Berlin described the impact of her life: "The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel." In 1988, Harvard University held an international conference to mark what would have been her 100th birthday. A porcelain figurine made to commemorate her at the peak of her fame, first produced in 1924, was still being reproduced after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993 and stands, the source notes, in almost every post-Soviet home.