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Anna
Andreyevna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko into an upper-class family
in Odessa, the Ukraine, in 1889. Her interest in poetry began in her
youth, but when her father found out about her aspirations, he told her
not to shame the family name by becoming a "decadent poetess". He
forced her to take a pen name, and she chose the last name of her
maternal great-grandmother. She attended law school in Kiev and married
Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and critic, in 1910. Shortly after the
marriage, he travelled to Abyssinia, leaving her behind. While Gumilev
was away, Akhmatova wrote many of the poems that would be published in
her popular first book, Evening. Her son Lev was also born in 1912. He
was raised by his paternal grandmother, who disliked Akhmatova.
Akhmatova protested this situation, but her husband supported his
family. She would visit with her son during holidays and summer. Later,
Akhmatova would write that "motherhood is a bright torture. I was not
worthy of it."
Upon Evening's publication in 1912, Akhmatova became a cult figure
among the intelligentsia and part of the literary scene in St.
Petersburg. Her second book, Rosary (1914), was critically acclaimed
and established her reputation. With her husband, she became a leader
of Acmeism, a movement which praised the virtues of lucid,
carefully-crafted verse and reacted against the vagueness of the
Symbolist style which dominated the Russian literary scene of the
period. She and Gumilev divorced in 1918. Akhmatova married twice more,
to Vladimir Shileiko in 1918, whom she divorced in 1928, and Nikolai
Punin, who died in a Siberian labor camp in 1953. The writer Boris
Pasternak, who was already married, had proposed to her numerous times.
Nikolai Gumilev was executed in 1921 by the Bolsheviks, and, although
Akhmatova and he were divorced, she was still associated with him. As a
result, after her book Anno Domini MCMXXI was published in 1922, she
had great difficulty finding a publisher. There was an unofficial ban
on Akhmatova's poetry from 1925 until 1940. During this time, Akhmatova
devoted herself to literary criticism, particularly of Pushkin, and
translations. During the latter part of the 1930s, she composed a long
poem, Requiem, dedicated to the memory of Stalin's victims. In 1940, a
collection of previously published poems, From Six Books, was
published. A few months later it was withdrawn.
Changes in the political climate finally allowed her acceptance into
the Writer's Union, but following World War II, there was an official
decree banning publication of her poetry and Andrey Zhadanov, the
Secretary of the Central Committee, expelled her from the Writer's
Union, calling her "half nun, half harlot". Her son, Lev, was arrested
in 1949 and held in jail until 1956. To try to win his release,
Akhmatova wrote poems in praise of Stalin and the government, but it
was of no use. Later she requested that these poems not appear in her
collected works. She began writing and publishing again in 1958, but
with heavy censorship. Young poets like Joseph Brodsky flocked to her.
To them, she represented a link with the pre-Revolutionary past which
had been destroyed by the Communists.
Though Akhmatova was frequently confronted with official government
opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and
lauded by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her
country during difficult political times. Her most accomplished works,
Requiem (which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987)
and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of the Stalinist
Terror, during which time she endured artistic repression as well as
tremendous personal loss.
Akhmatova also translated the works of Victor Hugo, Rabindranath
Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets, and
she wrote memoirs of Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok, the artist Amedeo
Modigliani, and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandelstam. In 1964 she was awarded
the Etna-Taormina prize and an honorary doctorate from Oxford
University in 1965. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these
honors were her first travels outside Russia since 1912. Two years
before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was chosen president of
the Writers' Union. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent
most of life, in 1966.
-- from Poets.org
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