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Anna Akhmatova (Russian and Ukrainian: А́нна Ахма́това; June 23 [O.S. June 11] 1889 – March 5, 1966) was the pen name of the modernist poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (Russian: А́нна Андре́евна Горе́нко; Ukrainian: А́нна Андрі́ївна Горе́нко) of partially Ukrainian origin, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon. 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 Russia, acting as witness to the atrocities 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 totalitarian 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 was born at Bolshoy Fontan, near the Black Sea port of Odessa. Her father, Andrey Antonovich Gorenko, a civil servant, and her mother, Inna Erazmovna Stogova, were both descended from the Russian nobility. Akhmatova wrote,
Her family moved north to Tsarskoye Selo, near St. 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 St Petersburg. Akhmatova started writing poetry at the age of 11, and published in her late teens, inspired by the poets Nikolay Nekrasov, Racine, Pushkin, Baratynsky and the Symbolists however none of her juvenilia survives. 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 the young poet, Nikolay Gumilev on Christmas Eve 1903, who encouraged her to write and pursued her intensely, making numerous marriage proposals from 1905. At 17 years old, in his journal Sirius, she published her first poem which could be translated as On his hand are many shiny rings, (1907) signing it ‘Anna G.’ She soon became known in St 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 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, Gumilyov 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. Akhmatova had "her first taste of fame", becoming renowned, not so much for her beauty, as 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 go on to become a renowned Neo - Eurasianist historian. In 1912, the Guild of Poets published her 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". 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. 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. She became close friends with Boris Pasternak (who,
though married, proposed to her many times) and rumours began to
circulate that she was having an affair with influential lyrical poet Alexander Blok. In
July 1914, Akhmatova wrote “Frightening times are approaching/ Soon
fresh graves will cover the land"; on August 1, Germany declared war on
Russia, marking the start of "the dark storm" of world war, civil war, revolution and totalitarian repression for Russia. The Silver Age came to a close. 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 features. She selected poems for her third collection Belaya Staya (White Flock) in 1917, a volume which poet and critic Joseph Brodsky later described as writing of personal lyricism tinged with the “note of controlled terror”. She later came to be memorialised by his description of her as "the keening muse". Essayist John Bayley describes her writing at this time as "grim, spare and laconic". 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. Her friends died around her and others
left in droves for safer havens in Europe and America, including Anrep,
who escaped to England. She had the option to leave, and considered it for a time, but chose to stay and was proud of her decision to remain. That summer she wrote: She wrote of her own temptation to leave: 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 Vladimir Shilejko. She
later said “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 began affairs with theatre director Mikhail Zimmerman and composer Arthur Lourié, who set many of her poems to music.
In 1921, Akhmatova's former husband
Nikolay Gumilyov was prosecuted for his alleged role in a monarchist anti - Bolshevik conspiracy and on 25 August was shot along with 61 others. According to the
historian Rayfield, the murder of Gumilev was part of the state response to the Kronstadt Rebellion. The Cheka (secret police) blamed the rebellion on Petrograd's intellectuals, prompting the senior Cheka officer Agranov to
forcibly extract the names of 'conspirators', from an imprisoned
professor, guaranteeing them amnesty from execution. Agranov then
pronounced death sentences on a large number of them, including Gumilev. Gorky and others appealed, but by the time Lenin agreed to several pardons, the condemned had been shot. Within a few days of his death, Akhmatova wrote: Terror fingers all things in the dark, The
murders had a powerful effect on the Russian intelligentsia, destroying
the Acmeist poetry group, and placing a stigma on Akhmatova and her son
Lev (by Gumilev). Lev's later arrest in the purges and terrors of the
1930s were based on being his father's son. From
a new Marxist perspective, Akhmatova's poetry was deemed to represent
an introspective "bourgeois aesthetic", reflecting only trivial
"female" preoccupations, not in keeping with these new revolutionary
politics of the time. She
was roundly attacked by the state, by former supporters and friends,
and seen to be an anachronism. During what she termed "The Vegetarian
Years", Akhmatova's work was unofficially banned by a party resolution
of 1925 and she found it hard to publish, though she didn't stop
writing poetry. She made acclaimed translations of works by Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi and pursued academic work on Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. She worked as a critic and essayist, though many critics and readers both within and outside Russia concluded she had died. She
had little food and almost no money; her son was denied access to study
at academic institutions by dint of his parents' alleged anti - state
activities. The
impact of the nation wide repression and purges had a decimating effect
on 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 counter - revolutionary activity. 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): 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 her poetry circles Mayakovsky and Esenin committed suicide and Akhmatova's sister poet Marina Tsvetaeva would follow them in 1941, after returning from exile. Akhmatova married an art scholar and lifelong friend, Nikolai Punin, whom she stayed with until 1935. He too was repeatedly taken into custody and died in the Gulag in 1953. Her tragic cycle Requiem documents her personal experience of this time; as she writes, "one hundred million voices shout" through her "tortured mouth". Seventeen months I've pleaded 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. 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". Although officially stifled, Akhmatova's work continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden, passed and read in the gulags. Akhmatova's close friend and chronicler Lydia Chukovskaya described
how writers working to keep poetic messages alive used various
strategies. A small trusted circle would, for example, memorise each
others' 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, however it is likely that many complied in
this manner were lost. "It was like a ritual," Chukovskaya wrote. "Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter." During World War II, Akhmatova witnessed the 900 day Siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg). In 1940, Akhmatova started her Poem without a Hero, finishing a first draft in Tashkent,
but working on "The Poem" for twenty years and considering it to be the
major work of her life, dedicating it to "the memory of its first
audience - my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad
during the siege". She was evacuated to Chistopol in the autumn of 1941 and then to greener, safer Tashkent in Uzbekistan, along with other artists, such as Shostakovitch. During her time away she became seriously ill with typhus (she had suffered from severe bronchitis and tuberculosis as
a young woman). On returning to Leningrad in May 1944, she writes of
how disturbed she was to find "a terrible ghost that pretended to be my
city".
She
regularly read to soldiers in the military hospitals and on the front
line; indeed, her later pieces seem to be the voice of those who had
struggled and the many she has 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. She was condemned for a visit by the liberal, western, Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1946, and Official Andrei Zhdanov publicly
labelled her "half harlot, half nun", her work "the poetry of an
overwrought, upper class lady", her work the product of "eroticism,
mysticism, and political indifference". He banned her poems from publication in the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, accusing her of poisoning the minds of Soviet youth. Her surveillance was increased and she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. 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. Akhmatova's son Lev was arrested again at the end of 1949 and sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian prison camp. She
spent much of the next years trying to ensure his release, to this end,
and for the first time, she published overtly propagandist poetry, “In
Praise of Peace,” in the magazine Ogoniok, openly supporting Stalin and his regime. Lev
remained in the camps until 1956, well after Stalin's death, his final
release potentially aided by his mother's concerted efforts. Bayley
suggests that her period of pro-Stalinist work may also have saved her
own life; notably however, Akhmatova never acknowledged these pieces in
her official corpus. Akhmatova's
stature among Russian poets was slowly conceded by party officials, her
name no longer cited in only scathing contexts and she was readmitted to Union of Writers in
1951, being fully recognised again following Stalin's death in 1953.
With the press still heavily controlled and censored under Nikita Khrushchev,
a translation by Akhmatova was praised in a public review in 1955, and
her own poems began to re-appear in 1956. In this year Lev was released
from the camps, embittered, believing that his mother cared more about
her poetry than her son and that she had not worked hard for his
release. Akhmatova's status was confirmed by 1958, with the publication of Stikhotvoreniya (Poems) and then Stikhotvoreniya 1909 - 1960 (Poems: 1909 - 1960) in 1961. Beg vremeni (The flight of time), collected works 1909 - 1965, published in 1965, was the most complete
volume of her works in her lifetime, though the long damning poem Requiem,
condemning the Stalinist purges, was conspicuously absent. Isaiah
Berlin predicted at the time that could never be published in the
Soviet Union.
During
the last years of her life she continued to live with the Punin family
in Leningrad, still translating, researching Pushkin and writing her
own poetry. Though
still censored, she was concerned to re-construct work that had been
destroyed or suppressed during the purges or which had posed a threat
to the life of her son in the camps, such as the lost,
semi-autobiographical play Enûma Elish. She worked on her official memoirs, planned novels and worked on her epic Poem without a hero, 20 years in the writing. Akhmatova was widely honoured in Russia and the West. In 1962 she was visited by Robert Frost;
Isaiah Berlin tried to visit her again, but she refused him, worried
that her son might be re-arrested due to family association with the
ideologically suspect western philosopher. She inspired and advised a large circle of key young Soviet writers. Her dacha in Komarovo was frequented by such poets as Yevgeny Rein and Joseph Brodsky, whom she mentored. Brodsky, arrested in 1963 and interned for social parasitism, would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987) and become Poet Laureate (1991) as an exile in the US. 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. 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 reinforcing this image herself. She was
becoming representative of both Russias, more popular in the 1960s than
she had ever been before the revolution, this reputation only
continuing to grow after her death. For her 75th birthday in 1964, new collections of her verse were published.
Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel to
Sicily and England, in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University, accompanied by her life long friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya. Akhmatova's Requiem in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963, the whole work not published within Russia until 1987. Her long poem The Way of All the Earth or Woman of Kitezh (Kitezhanka) was published in complete form in 1965. 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 March 5, at the age of
76. Thousands attended the two memorial ceremonies which were held in
Moscow and in Leningrad. After being displayed in an open coffin, she
was interred at Komarovo Cemetery in St Petersburg. 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. In
1988, to celebrate what would have been Akhmatova's 100th birthday, the
University of Harvard held an international conference on her life and
work. Today her work may be explored at the Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum in St Petersburg.
Akhmatova joined the Acmeist group of poets in 1910 with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky, working in response to the Symbolist school, concurrent with the growth of Imagism in
Europe and America. It promoted the use craft and rigorous poetic form
over mysticism or spiritual in-roads to composition, favouring the
concrete over the ephemeral. Akhmatova modelled its principles of writing with clarity, simplicity, and disciplined form. Her first collections Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914) received wide critical acclaim and made her famous from the
start of her career. They contained brief, psychologically taut pieces,
acclaimed for their classical diction, telling details, and the skilful
use of colour. Evening and her next four books were mostly lyric miniatures on the theme of love, shot through with sadness. Her early poems
usually picture a man and a woman involved in the most poignant, ambiguous moment of their relationship, much imitated and later
parodied by Nabokov and others. Critic
Roberta Reeder notes that the early poems always attracted large
numbers of admirers: "For Akhmatova was able to capture and convey the
vast range of evolving emotions experienced in a love affair, from the
first thrill of meeting, to a deepening love contending with hatred,
and eventually to violent destructive passion or total indifference.
But [...] her poetry marks a radical break with the erudite, ornate
style and the mystical representation of love so typical of poets like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely.
Her lyrics are composed of short fragments of simple speech that do not
form a logical coherent pattern. Instead, they reflect the way we
actually think, the links between the images are emotional, and simple
everyday objects are charged with psychological associations. Like
Alexander Pushkin, who was her model in many ways, Akhmatova was intent
on conveying worlds of meaning through precise details."
She 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 thread of arrest, she was often under close
surveillance. 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. Her readership generally didn't 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. She
carried it with her as she worked and lived in towns and cities across
the Soviet Union. It was conspicuously absent from her collected works,
given its explicit condemnation of the purges. The work in Russian
finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963, the whole work not
published within Russia until 1987. It
consists of ten numbered poems that examine a series of emotional
states, exploring suffering, despair, devotion, rather than a clear
narrative. Biblical themes such as Christ's crucifixion and the
devastation of Mary, Mother of Jesus and Mary Magdelene, reflect the
ravaging of Russia, particularly witnessing the harrowing of women in
the 1930s. It represented, to some degree, a rejection of her own
earlier romantic work as she took on the public role as chronicler of
the Terror. A role she holds to this day. Her essays on Pushkin and Poem Without a Hero,
her longest work, were only published after her death. This long poem,
composed between 1940 and 1965, is often critically regarded as her
best work and also one of the finest poems of the twentieth century. It
offers a complex analysis of the times she lived though and her
relationship with them, including her significant meeting with Isaiah
Berlin (1909 – 97) in 1945. Her
talent in composition and translation is evidenced in her fine
translations of the works of poets writing in French, English, Italian,
Armenian, and Korean. |