Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova
Acmeism
Spouse	Nikolay Gumilev ​ ​ (m. 1910; div. 1918)​ Vladimir Shilejko ​ ​ (m. 1918; div. 1926)​
Partner	GULAG labour camp in 1953)
Children	Lev Gumilev
Signature

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko^{[Notes 1]} (23 June [O.S. 11 June] 1889 – 5 March 1966), better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova,^{[Notes 2]} was a Russian poet, one of the most significant of the 20th century. She reappeared as a voice of Russian poetry during World War II. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965^[2] and received the second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year.

Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935–40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry.^[3] Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work (1912–25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output.^[3] Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities, and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate and remaining in the Soviet Union, acting as witness to the events around her. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism.

Primary sources of information about Akhmatova's life are relatively scant, as war, revolution and the Soviet regime caused much of the written record to be destroyed. For long periods she was in official disfavour and many of those who were close to her died in the aftermath of the revolution.

No one in my large family wrote poetry. But the first Russian woman poet,

Simbirsk landowner Motovilov. Yegor Motovilov was my great-grandfather; his daughter, Anna Yegorovna, was my grandmother. She died when my mother was nine years old, and I was named in her honour. Several diamond rings and one emerald were made from her brooch. Though my fingers are thin, still her thimble didn't fit me.^[6]

She had "her first taste of fame", becoming renowned, not so much for her beauty, but for her intense magnetism and allure, attracting the fascinated attention of a great many men, including the great and the good. She returned to visit Modigliani in Paris, where he created at least 20 paintings of her, including several nudes.[13]

She later began an affair with the celebrated Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, whose wife,

In 1912, the Guild of Poets published Akhmatova's book of verse Evening (Vecher) – the first of five in nine years.^{[Notes 3]} The small edition of 500 copies quickly sold out and she received around a dozen positive notices in the literary press.^[18] She exercised a strong selectivity for the pieces – including only 35 of the 200 poems she had written by the end of 1911.^[18] (She noted that Song of the Last Meeting, dated 29 September 1911, was her 200th poem). The book secured her reputation as a new and striking young writer,^[19] the poems Grey-eyed king, In the Forest, Over the Water, and I don't need my legs anymore making her famous. She later wrote "These naïve poems by a frivolous girl for some reason were reprinted thirteen times [...] And they came out in several translations. The girl herself (as far as I recall) did not foresee such a fate for them and used to hide the issues of the journals in which they were first published under the sofa cushions".^[20]

Akhmatova's second collection, The Rosary (or Beads – Chetki) appeared in March 1914 and firmly established her as one of the most popular and sought after poets of the day.^{[18][Notes 4]} Thousands of women composed poems "in honour of Akhmatova", mimicking her style and prompting Akhmatova to exclaim: "I taught our women how to speak, but don't know how to make them silent".^[19] Her aristocratic manners and artistic integrity won her the titles "Queen of the Neva" and "Soul of the Silver Age," as the period came to be known in the history of Russian poetry. In Poem Without a Hero, the longest and one of the best known of her works, written many decades later, she would recall this as a blessed time of her life. ^{[Notes 5]}

Akhmatova became close friends with

Akhmatova had a relationship with the mosaic artist and poet Boris Anrep; many of her poems in the period are about him and he in turn created mosaics in which she is featured.^{[Notes 6][Notes 7][24]} She selected poems for her third collection, Belaya Staya (White Flock), in 1917, ^{[Notes 8]} a volume which poet and critic Joseph Brodsky later described as writing of personal lyricism tinged with the "note of controlled terror".^[23] She later came to be memorialised by his description of her as "the keening muse".^[25] Essayist John Bayley describes her writing at this time as "grim, spare and laconic".^[26]

In February 1917, the revolution started in Petersburg (then named Petrograd); soldiers fired on marching protestors, and others mutinied. They looked to a past in which the future was "rotting". In a city without electricity or sewage service, with little water or food, they faced starvation and sickness. Akhmatova's friends died around her and others left in droves for safer havens in Europe and America, including Anrep, who escaped to England.^[27] She had the option to leave, and considered it for a time, but chose to stay and was proud of her decision to remain.:^[26]

You are a traitor, and for a green island,
Have betrayed, yes, betrayed your native
Land,
Abandoned all our songs and sacred
Icons,
And the pine tree over a quiet lake.

— Green Island, trans. Jane Kenyon^[28]

Akhmatova wrote of her own temptation to leave:

A voice came to me. It called out comfortingly.
It said, "Come here,
Leave your deaf and sinful land,
Leave Russia forever,
I will wash the blood from your hands,
Root out the black shame from your heart,
[...] calmly and indifferently,
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that my sorrowing spirit
Would not be stained by those shameful words.

— When in suicidal anguish, trans. Jane Kenyon^[29]

At the height of Akhmatova's fame, in 1918, she divorced her husband and that same year, though many of her friends considered it a mistake, Akhmatova married prominent Assyriologist and poet

Terror fingers all things in the dark,
Leads moonlight to the axe.
There's an ominous knock behind the wall:
A ghost, a thief or a rat...[34]

The executions had a powerful effect on the Russian intelligentsia, destroying the

She had little food and almost no money; her son was denied access to study at academic institutions because of his parents' alleged anti-state activities.[34] The nationwide repression and purges decimated her St Petersburg circle of friends, artists and intellectuals. Her close friend and fellow poet Mandelstam was deported and then sentenced to a Gulag labour camp, where he would die. Akhmatova narrowly escaped arrest, though her son Lev was imprisoned on numerous occasions by the Stalinist regime, accused of counterrevolutionary activity.^[36] She would often queue for hours to deliver him food packages and plead on his behalf. She describes standing outside a stone prison:

One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):'Can you describe this?'
And I said: 'I can.'
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.^[25]

Akhmatova wrote that by 1935 every time she went to see someone off at the train station as they went into exile, she'd find herself greeting friends at every step as so many of St Petersburg's intellectual and cultural figures would be leaving on the same train.

In 1939, Stalin approved the publication of one volume of poetry, From Six Books; however, the collection was withdrawn and pulped after only a few months.[41] In 1993, it was revealed that the authorities had bugged her flat and kept her under constant surveillance, keeping detailed files on her from this time, accruing some 900 pages of "denunciations, reports of phone taps, quotations from writings, confessions of those close to her".^[42] Although officially stifled, Akhmatova's work continued to circulate in secret.^[16][43] Akhmatova's close friend, chronicler Lydia Chukovskaya described how writers working to keep poetic messages alive used various strategies. A small trusted circle would, for example, memorise each other's works and circulate them only by oral means. She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove. The poems were carefully disseminated in this way, but it is likely that many compiled in this manner were lost.^[44] "It was like a ritual," Chukovskaya wrote. "Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter."^[25]

During

She regularly read to soldiers in the military hospitals and on the front line; her later pieces seem to be the voice of those who had struggled and the many she had outlived. She moved away from romantic themes towards a more diverse, complex and philosophical body of work and some of her more patriotic poems found their way to the front pages of Pravda.^[47]

In 1946 the

Berlin described his visit to her flat: "It was very barely furnished—virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away—looted or sold—during the siege .... A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness."[51]

Akhmatova's son Lev was arrested again at the end of 1949 and sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian prison camp.

During the last years of Akhmatova's life, she continued to live with the Punin family in Leningrad, still translating, researching Pushkin, and writing her own poetry.

As one of the last remaining major poets of the Silver Age, she was newly acclaimed by the Soviet authorities as a fine and loyal representative of their country and permitted to travel.^[54] At the same time, by virtue of works such as Requiem, Akhmatova was being hailed at home and abroad as an unofficial leader of the dissident movement, and reinforced this image herself. She was becoming a representative of both the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, more popular in the 1960s than she had ever been before the revolution, this reputation only continuing to grow after her death.^[54] For her 75th birthday in 1964, new collections of her verse were published.^[56]

Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel to

In November 1965, soon after her Oxford visit, Akhmatova suffered a heart attack and was hospitalised. She was moved to a sanatorium in Moscow in the spring of 1966 and died of heart failure on 5 March, at the age of 76. Thousands attended the two memorial ceremonies, held in Moscow and in Leningrad. After being displayed in an open coffin, she was interred at Komarovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg.^[58]

Isaiah Berlin described the impact of her life, as he saw it:

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. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure [...] not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in [the twentieth] century.^[59][60]

In 1988, to celebrate what would have been Akhmatova's 100th birthday, Harvard University held an international conference on her life and work.^[61] Today her work may be explored at the Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum in St. Petersburg.

Work and themes

Akhmatova joined the

Akhmatova often complained that the critics "walled her in" to their perception of her work in the early years of romantic passion, despite major changes of theme in the later years of The Terror. This was mainly due to the secret nature of her work after the public and critical effusion over her first volumes. The risks during the purges were very great. Many of her close friends and family were exiled, imprisoned or shot; her son was under constant threat of arrest, she was often under close surveillance.[62] Following artistic repression and public condemnation by the state in the 1920s, many within literary and public circles, at home and abroad, thought she had died.^[30][34] Her readership generally did not know her later opus, the railing passion of Requiem or Poem without a Hero and her other scathing works, which were shared only with a very trusted few or circulated in secret by word of mouth (samizdat).

Between 1935 and 1940 Akhmatova composed, worked and reworked the long poem Requiem in secret, a lyrical cycle of lamentation and witness, depicting the suffering of the common people under Soviet terror.

• American composer Ivana Marburger Themmen set Akhmatova's poetry to music.^[65]
• Translations of some of her poems by Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin are set to music on the 2015 album The Trackless Woods by Iris DeMent.^[66][67]
• Anna Akhmatova is the main character of the Australian play The Woman in the Window by
  ISBN 978-0-86819-593-3.^[68][69]
• Dutch composer Marjo Tal set Akhmatova's poetry to music.^[70]
• Ukrainian composers
  Inna Abramovna Zhvanetskaia and Yudif Grigorevna Rozhavskaya
  set several of Akhmatova's poems to music.
• Porcelain figurine: When Anna Akhmatova was at the peak of her popularity, to commemorate her 35th birthday (1924), a porcelain figurine resembling her in a grey dress with flower pattern covered in a red shawl was mass-produced. Throughout the following years, the figurine was reproduced multiple times on different occasions: once in 1954, on her 65th birthday, as she was fully recognised and praised again following Stalin's death, and again in 1965 as both a tribute to her being short-listed for the Nobel Prize in 1965^[2] and for her 75th birthday a year earlier. This was the last time the porcelain figurine was produced during her lifetime. The figurine was so popular that it was reproduced after her passing, once for what would have been her 85th birthday in 1974, and again for her 100th birthday in 1988, making it one of the most popular and widely available porcelain figurines in the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993, there was an immense surge in Akhmatova's popularity and her porcelain figurine was mass-produced yet again, this time in a plain grey dress with a yellow shawl. Her figure now stands in almost every post-Soviet home.^{[citation needed]}
• Akhmatova appears prominently in Hélène Cixous's play "Black Sail White Sail"

Honours

• 1964 – Etna-Taormina prize^[71]
• 1965 - honorary doctorate from
  Oxford University^[71]

• 1912 - Vecher/Вечер (Evening)[Notes 3]^[72]
• 1914 – Chetki/ Чётки (Rosary or literally Beads)^{[Notes 4]}
• 1917 – Belaya Staya/ Белая Стая (White Flock)^{[Notes 11]}
• 1921 – Podorozhnik/ Подорожник (Wayside Grass/Plantain). 60 pages, 1000 copies published.^{[Notes 12]}
• 1921 – Anno Domini MCMXXI^{[Notes 8]}
• Reed – two-volume collection of selected poems (1924–1926); compiled but never published.
• Uneven – compiled but never published.
• 1940 – From Six Books (publication suspended shortly after release, copies pulped and banned).^{[Notes 13]}
• 1943 – Izbrannoe Stikhi/ Избранные Стишки (Selections of Poetry). Tashkent, government-edited.^{[Notes 14]}
• Iva/ Ива – not separately published^{[Notes 15]}
• Sed'maya kniga/ Седьмая Книга (Seventh Book) – not separately published^{[Notes 15]}
• 1958 – Stikhotvoreniya/ Стихотворения (Poems) (25,000 copies)^[52]
• 1961 – Stikhotvoreniya 1909–1960/ Стихотворения 1909-1960 (Poems: 1909–1960)^[52]
• 1965 – Beg vremeni/ Бег Времени (The Flight of Time: Collected Works 1909–1965)^{[52][Notes 15]}

Later editions

• 1967 – Poems of Akhmatova. Ed. and trans. Stanley Kunitz, Boston
• 1976 – Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems (trans. D. M. Thomas); Penguin Books
• 1985 – Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (trans.
  ISBN 0-915408-30-9
• 1988 – Selected Poems (trans. Richard McKane); Bloodaxe Books Ltd;
  ISBN 1-85224-063-6
• 2000 – The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (trans. Judith Hemschemeyer; ed. Roberta Reeder); Zephyr Press;
  ISBN 0-939010-27-5
• 2004 – The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory (Annals of Communism) (trans. Nancy Anderson). Yale University Press.
  ISBN 0-300-10377-8
• 2006 – Selected Poems (trans. D. M. Thomas); Penguin Classics;
  ISBN 0-14-042464-4
• 2009 – Selected Poems (trans. Walter Arndt); Overlook TP;
  ISBN 0-88233-180-9

• Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum
• Akhmatova's Orphans

Notes

References

1. ISBN 978-0-521-15255-6
   .
2. ^ ^{a b} "Candidates for the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. 4 January 2016. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
3. ^ ^{a b} Harrington (2006) p. 11
4. ^ Wells (1996) p. 2
5. OCLC 866835267. She was born Anna Gorenko by the sea in Bolshoi Fontan, near Odessa in Ukraine, to an unexceptional gentry family. Akhmatova's mother, Inna Stogova, was a descendant of a rich Russian landing family with strong ties to Kyiv, and her father, Andrei Gorenko, was a Ukrainian naval engineer descended from Ukrainian cossacks.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
   )
6. ^ Polivanov (1994) pp. 6–7
7. ^ Harrington (2006) p.13
8. ^ ^{a b c d e} Martin (2007) p.2
9. ^ Wells (1996) p. 4
10. ^ Wells (1996) p.3
11. ^ Harvard Book Review, 2008 Reinventing a Good Thing: Anderson Fails to Improve on Older Translations of Akhmatova. Reviewed: The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Akhmatova's Poems of Memory, Anderson, Nancy; Yale University Press
12. ISBN 9780299173340
    .
13. ^ ^{a b c} Martin (2007) p. 3
14. ISBN 978-1-4516-0315-6
    .
15. ^ ^{a b} Wells (1996) p.8
16. ^ ^{a b c d} Slate Magazine, "Anna Akhmatova: Assessing the Russian poet and femme fatale" by Clive James, 5 February 2007.
17. ^ Harrington (2006), p. 14
18. ^ ^{a b c d e} Wells (1996) p. 6
19. ^ ^{a b} Harrington (2006) p. 15
20. ^ Martin (2007) p. 4
21. ^ Wells (1996) p.10
22. ^ Profile of Anna Akhmatova, Academy of American Poets
23. ^ ^{a b} Martin (2007) p. 5
24. ^ In “Ana Achmatova [sic] and Mullingar Connection”. Broadcast on RTÉ, 4 May 2008, the poet Joseph Woods recounts the story of the mosaics. Relevant section begins at timestamp 40'43".
25. ^ ^{a b c} Michael Specter (6 June 1995). "St. "Petersburg Journal; If Poet's Room Could Speak, It Would Tell of Grief"". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 June 2011.
26. ^
    ISBN 0-521-27845-7
27. ^ ^{a b} Martin (2007) p.6
28. ISBN 0-915408-30-9
29. ^ From Akhmatova, Anna (1918) When in suicidal anguish. These lines of the poem were not published in Russia until the 1990s. Published in Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years; Journal article by Roberta Reeder; New England Review, Vol. 18, 1997
30. ^ ^{a b c d} Harrington (2006) p.16
31. ^ Wells (1996) p.11
32. ^ Feinstein (2005) p. 83
33. ISBN 0375757716
    .
34. ^ ^{a b c d e} Martin (2007) p.7
35. ^ Akhmatova, Trans. Kunitz and Hayward (1973) pp.15–16
36. ^ Harrington (2006) p. 17
37. ^ Wells (1996) p.15
38. ^ Monas (1999) p. 216
39. ^ Monas (1999) pxli
40. ^ Monas (1999) pxi
41. ^ Harrington (2006) p.18
42. ISBN 1-57607-208-8
43. ISBN 0-313-32939-7
44. ^ Wells (1996) p. 67
45. ^ Martin (2007) p.10
46. ^ Anna of All The Russians: The Life of Anna Akhmatova by Elaine Feinstein retrieved 13/8/2018
47. ^ ^{a b} Wells (1996) p.18
48. ^ Akhmatova, Trans. Kunitz and Hayward (1998) p. 115
49. ^ ^{a b c d} Martin (2007) p. 12
50. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Akhmatova, Anna" Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online.
51. ^ ^{a b} Martin (2007) p. 11
52. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Wells (1996) p.21
53. ISBN 0-914086-24-3
54. ^ ^{a b c} Wells (1996) p.22
55. ^ ^{a b} (1996) Wells p.23
56. ISBN 9781438119069
57. ^ ^{a b} Harrington (2006) p.20
58. ISBN 0822327902
    .
59. ^ Martin (2007) p.13
60. ^ Hemschemeyer and Reeder (1992) p.46
61. ISBN 978-1-880909-70-6
62. ^ ^{a b} Reeder, Roberta Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years Journal article by Roberta Reeder; New England Review, Vol. 18, 1997
63. ^ Wells (1996) pp. 70–74
64. ^ "Akhmatova, Anna" The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online.
65. OCLC 16714846.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
66. ^ Ken Tucker (12 August 2015). "Poetry Is Set To Melody in Iris DeMent's 'The Trackless Woods'". NPR. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
67. ^ Erin Lyndal Martin (6 August 2015). "Anna Akhmatova Beckons Iris DeMent Toward 'The Trackless Woods'". No Depression. Archived from the original on 2 May 2016. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
68. ^ "AusStage". www.ausstage.edu.au. Retrieved 20 August 2018.
69. ISBN 9780868195933
    .
70. ^ trilobiet, acdhirr for. "Marjo Tal". www.forbiddenmusicregained.org. Retrieved 4 September 2021.
71. ^
    ISBN 978-0816064571
    .
72. ^ Original Akhmatova poems in Russian at niv.ru Archived 25 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine

Sources

• Akhmatova, Anna, Trans. Kunitz, Staney and Hayward, Max (1973) Poems of Akhmatova. Houghton Mifflin;
  ISBN 9780316507004
• Akhmatova, Anna, Trans. Kunitz, Staney and Hayward, Max (1998) Poems of Akhmatova. Houghton Mifflin;
  ISBN 0-395-86003-2
• Akhmatova, Anna (1989) Trans. Mayhew and McNaughton. Poem Without a Hero & Selected Poems. Oberlin College Press;
  ISBN 0-932440-51-7
• Akhmatova, Anna (1992) Trans. Judith Hemschemeyer The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Ed. R. Reeder, Boston: Zephyr Press; (2000);
  ISBN 0-939010-27-5
• Feinstein, Elaine. (2005) Anna of all the Russias: A life of Anna Akhmatova. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson;
  ISBN 1-4000-4089-2
• Harrington, Alexandra (2006) The poetry of Anna Akhmatova: living in different mirrors. Anthem Press;
  ISBN 978-1-84331-222-2
• Martin, Eden (2007) Collecting Anna Akhmatova, The Caxtonian, Vol. 4 April 2007 Journal of the Caxton Club; accessed 31 May 2010
• Monas, Sidney; Krupala, Jennifer Greene; Punin, Nikolaĭ Nikolaevich (1999), The Diaries of Nikolay Punin: 1904–1953, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series, University of Texas Press;
  ISBN 9780292765894
• Polivanov, Konstantin (1994) Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle,
  ISBN 1-557-28309-5
• Reeder, Roberta. (1994) Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet. New York: Picador;
  ISBN 0-312-13429-0
• Reeder, Roberta. (1997) Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years Journal article by Roberta Reeder; New England Review, Vol. 18, 1997
• Wells, David (1996) Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry Berg Publishers;
  ISBN 978-1-85973-099-7

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Anna Akhmatova.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anna Akhmatova.

• Profile and poems at Academy of American Poets
• Anna Akhmatova poetry at Stihipoeta (rus)
• Profile and poems at Poetry Foundation
• Poetic translations
• Freidin, Gregory. "Anna Akhmatova". 300 Women Who Changed the World. Encyclopedia Britanna.
• Simon, John (1994). "Anna Akhmatova".
• Landauer, Helga; Naiman, Anatoly (2008). "Film About Anna Akhmatova". Archived from the original on 13 February 2009.
• The Anna Akhmatova File (1989)- English Subtitles on
  YouTube
• Zholkovsky, Alexander. "The Obverse of Stalinism: Akhmatova's self-serving charisma of selflessness". Archived from the original on 28 April 2005.
• "Anthology of Russian Minimalist and Miniature Poems; Part I, The Silver Age". Off Course (41). Translated by Alex Cigale. State University at Albany (SUNY): 3. Spring 2010. 5 miniature poems (1911–1917){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• Kneller, Andrey. "Anna Akhmatova". 200+ poems translated into English
• Works by or about Anna Akhmatova at Internet Archive
• Works by Anna Akhmatova at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)