Akhmatova, Anna Andreyevna

AKHMATOVA, ANNA ANDREYEVNA

(1889–1966), leading Russian poet of the twentieth century; member of the Acmeist group.

Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreyevna Gorenko) was born on June 23, 1889, near Odessa, and grew up in Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence, where Pushkin had attended the Lyceum. She studied law in Kiev, then literature in St. Petersburg. She married poet Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev in 1910, and the couple visited western Europe on their honeymoon. She made a return visit to Paris in 1911, and Amedeo Modigliani, still an unknown artist at the time, painted sixteen portraits of her.

In 1912, Akhmatova published her first collection of poetry, Vecher (Evening ), and gave birth to her son Lev. The clarity, simplicity, and vivid details of her poetry amazed her contemporaries. For instance, in 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva praised Akhmato's "Poem of the Last Meeting," extolling the lines "I slipped my left-hand glove/Onto my right hand" as "unique, unrepeatable, inimitable."

Also in 1912, Gumilev founded the Poets' Guild, a group whose opposition to the Symbolists led to the name "Acmeist," from the Greek akme, "perfection." The Acmeists, including Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelshtam, advocated simplicity, clarity, and precision over the vagueness and otherworldliness of the Symbolists.

Akhmatova's marriage with Gumilev was unhappy and ended in divorce. Her second collection, Chetki (Rosary ), published in 1914, revolves around the decline of the relationship, her sense of repentance, and her identity as a poet. In her following collections, Belaya Staya (White Flock, 1917), Podorozhnik (Plantain, 1921), and Anno Domini (1922), Akhmatova assumed the role of poetic witness, responding to the chaos, poverty, and oppression surrounding the Revolution and civil war.

In 1921, Gumilev was charged with conspiracy and executed. None of Akhmatova's work was published in the Soviet Union between 1923 and 1940. Yet, unlike many of her contemporaries, Akhmatova refused to emigrate. Her view of emigration is reflected in her 1922 poem from Anno Domini, "I am not one of those who left the land."

Between 1935 and 1940 Akhmatova wrote the long poem Requiem, a lyrical masterpiece. Dedicated to the victims of Josef Stalin's terror, and largely a maternal response to her son Lev's arrest and imprisonment in 1937, it recalls the Symbolists in its use of religious allegory, but maintains directness and simplicity. Akhmatova's next long poem, the complex, dense, polyphonic Poema bez geroya (Poem without a Hero, 1943) interprets the suicide of poet and officer Vsevolod Knyazev as a sign of the times. Some critics place it alongside Requiem as her finest work; others see it as the beginning of Akhmatova's poetic decline.

At the outbreak of World War II, Stalin briefly relaxed his stance toward writers, and Akhmatova was published selectively. In 1946, however, Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee, denounced her and expelled her from the Writers' Union. In 1949, her son Lev was arrested again and exiled to Siberia. In a desperate and futile effort to secure his release, Akhmatova wrote a number of poems in praise of Stalin. She later requested the exclusion of these poems from her collected work.

After Stalin's death, Akhmatova was slowly "rehabilitated." Publication of her work, including her essays and translations, resumed. She received international recognition, including an honorary degree from Oxford in 1965. She died on March 5, 1966, and is remembered as one of Russia's most revered poets.

See also: dissident movement; gumilev, lev nikolayevich; gumilev, nikolai stepanovich; intelligentsia; mandelshtam, osip emilievich; purges, the great

bibliography

Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna. (1973). Poems of Akhmatova: Izbrannye Stikhi, ed. and tr. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Boston: Little, Brown.

Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna. (1990). The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer, ed. Roberta Reeder. Somerville, MA: Zephyr.

Amert, Susan. (1992). In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ketchian, Sonia. (1985). "Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna." In Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Leiter, Sharon. (1983). Akhmatova's Petersburg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Diana Senechal