Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (23 June [O.S. 11 June] 1889 – 5 March 1966), known by her pen name Anna Akhmatova, was a Russian and Soviet poet. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966.
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. 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. 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. Akhmatova's first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was executed by the Cheka, and her son Lev Gumilev and her common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, where Punin died.
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko was born on 23 June [O.S. 11 June] 1889 at Bolshoy Fontan, a resort suburb of the Black Sea port of Odessa, then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. Her father, Andrey Gorenko, was a descendant of a Ukrainian Cossack noble family, a naval engineer, later a civil servant in the rank of collegiate assessor, and her mother, Inna Erazmovna Stogova, was from a Russian pomeshchik (landowner) family with close ties to Kiev. She wrote:
No one in my large family wrote poetry. But the first Russian woman poet, Anna Bunina, was the aunt of my grandfather Erasm Ivanovich Stogov. The Stogovs were modest landowners in the Mozhaisk region of the Moscow Province. They were moved here after the insurrection during the time of Posadnitsa Marfa. In Novgorod they had been a wealthier and more distinguished family. Khan Akhmat, my ancestor, was killed one night in his tent by a Russian killer-for-hire. Karamzin tells us that this marked the end of the Mongol yoke on Russia. [...] It was well known that this Akhmat was a descendant of Genghiz Khan. In the eighteenth century, one of the Akhmatov Princesses – Praskovia Yegorovna – married the rich and famous 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.
Her family moved north to Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, when she was eleven months old. The family lived in a house on the corner of Shirokaya Street and Bezymyanny Lane (the building is no longer there today), spending summers from age 7 to 13 in a dacha near Sevastopol. She studied at the Mariinskaya High School, moving to Kiev (1906–10) and finished her schooling there, after her parents separated in 1905. She went on to study law at Kiev University, leaving a year later to study literature in Saint Petersburg.
Akhmatova started writing poetry at the age of 11, and was published in her late teens, inspired by the poets Nikolay Nekrasov, Jean Racine, Alexander Pushkin, Yevgeny Baratynsky and the Symbolists; however, none of her juvenilia survive. Her sister Inna also wrote poetry though she did not pursue the practice and married shortly after high school. Akhmatova's father did not want to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name, so she chose to adopt her grandmother's distinctly Tatar surname 'Akhmatova' as a pen name.
She met a young poet, Nikolai Gumilev, on Christmas Eve 1903. Gumilev encouraged her to write and pursued her intensely, making numerous marriage proposals starting in 1905. At 17 years old, in his journal Sirius, she published her first poem which could be translated as "On his hand you may see many glittering rings" (1907), signing it "Anna G." She soon became known in Saint Petersburg's artistic circles, regularly giving public readings. That year, she wrote unenthusiastically to a friend, "He has loved me for three years now, and I believe that it is my fate to be his wife. Whether or not I love him, I do not know, but it seems to me that I do." She married Gumilev in Kiev in April 1910; however, none of Akhmatova's family attended the wedding. The couple honeymooned in Paris, and there she met and befriended the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.
In late 1910, she came together with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky to form the Guild of Poets. It promoted the idea of craft as the key to poetry rather than inspiration or mystery, taking themes of the concrete rather than the more ephemeral world of the Symbolists. Over time, they developed the influential Acmeist anti-symbolist school, concurrent with the growth of Imagism in Europe and America. From the first year of their marriage, Gumilev began to chafe against its constraints. She wrote that he had "lost his passion" for her, and by the end of that year he left on a six-month trip to Africa.
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.
She later began an affair with the celebrated Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, whose wife, Nadezhda, declared later, in her autobiography that she came to forgive Akhmatova for it in time. Akhmatova's son, Lev, was born in 1912, and would become a renowned Neo-Eurasianist historian.
In 1912, the Guild of Poets published Akhmatova's book of verse Evening (Vecher) – the first of five in nine years. The small edition of 500 copies quickly sold out and she received around a dozen positive notices in the literary press. She exercised a strong selectivity for the pieces – including only 35 of the 200 poems she had written by the end of 1911. (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, 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".
At the time of the publication of her first collection, Akhmatova began to frequent the cabaret Brodyachyaya sobaka (English: Stray Dog) where she befriended the playwrights Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the writer and composer Mikhail Kuzmin, and the composer Arthur Lourié. Her 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. Later that same year, Lourié became the first composer to set her poetry to music; selecting several verses from The Rosary. Akhmatova and Lourié had a romantic affair which began around this same time.
In response to The Rosary, 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". 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.