Poet, born in Odessa, S Ukraine. She studied in Kiev before moving to St Petersburg. In 1910 she married Nicholas Gumilev, and with him started the Neoclassicist Acmeist movement. After her early collections of lyrical poems, including Evening (1912) and Beads (1914), she developed an Impressionist technique. Her work was condemned by the authorities for its eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference, but she continued to write. Following the publication of Anno Domini (1922), she was officially silenced until 1940, when she published The Willow. Among her best-known works is Requiem, written in the late 1930s, an elegy for the prisoners of Stalin, including her son. In 1946 her verse was again banned. She was rehabilitated in the 1950s, and is now recognized as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature.
Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece on the Stalinist terror.
Early life
Akhmatova was born in Bolshoy Fontan near Odessa.
Grey-Eyed King (1910)
Hail to thee, o, inconsolate pain!
The young grey-eyed king has been yesterday slain.
That autumnal evening was stuffy and red.
My husband, returning, had quietly said,
"He'd left for his hunting; they carried him home;
They found him under the old oak's dome.
I pity his queen. He, so young, passed away!...
During one night her black hair turned to grey."
He picked up his pipe from the fireplace shelf,
And went off to work for the night by himself.
Now my daughter I will wake up and rise --
And I will look in her little grey eyes...
And murmuring poplars outside can be heard:
Your king is no longer here on this earth.
In 1910, she married the boyish poet Nikolay Gumilyov, who very soon left her for hunting lions in Africa, the battlefields of the World War I, and the society of Parisian grisettes.
Silver Age
In 1912, she published her first collection, entitled Evening.
By the time her second collection, the Rosary, appeared in 1914, there were thousands of women composing their poems "after Akhmatova".
Together with her husband, Akhmatova enjoyed a high reputation in the circle of Acmeist poets.
The accursed years
Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for activities considered anti-Soviet;
My Way (1940)
One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
Waits for a girl of his gone days,
Or for returning home.
But I do go -- and woe is there --
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains -- off the railroad.
During the whole period from 1925 to 1952, Akhmatova was effectively silenced, unable to publish poetry.
Only a few people in the West suspected that she was still alive, when she was allowed to publish a collection of new poems in 1940.
Upon learning about Isaiah Berlin's visit to Akhmatova in 1946, Stalin's associate Andrei Zhdanov publicly labelled her "half harlot, half nun", and had her poems banned from publication.
The thaw
After Stalin's death, Akhmatova's preeminence among Russian poets was grudgingly conceded even by party officials.
Akhmatova got a chance 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 the honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University (in the trip she was accompanied by her life-long friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya).
Song of the Last Meeting (1911)
My breast grew helplessly cold,
But my steps were light.
I pulled the glove from my left hand
Mistakenly onto my right.
It seemed there were so many steps,
But I knew there were only three!
Amidst the maples an autumn whisper
Pleaded: "Die with me!
I'm led astray by evil
Fate, so black and so untrue."
I answered: "I, too, dear one!
I, too, will die with you..."
This is a song of the final meeting.
I glanced at the house's dark frame.
Only bedroom candles burning
With an indifferent yellow flame.
Akhmatova's reputation continued to grow after her death, and it was in the year of her centenary that one of the greatest poetic monuments of the 20th century, Akhmatova's Requiem, was finally published in her homeland.
There is a museum devoted to Akhmatova at the Fountain House (more properly known as the Sheremetev Palace) on the Fontanka Embankment, where Akhmatova lived from the mid 1920s until 1952.
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