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| Anna Andreevna Akhmatova |
On the side of her mother Inna Stogova, Anna was distantly related to Anna Bunina, a Russian poetess. Akhmatova considered the legendary Horde Khan Akhmat to be her maternal ancestor, on whose behalf she later formed her pseudonym.
She spent her childhood and youth in Pavlovsk, Tsarskoe Selo, Yevpatoria and Kyiv. In May 1907 she graduated from the Kyiv Fundukleevsky gymnasium. From 1908 to 1909 she studied at the Faculty of Law of the Kyiv Higher Women's Courses.
In 1910, Anna married the poet Nikolai Gumilyov (1886-1921), and in 1912 she had a son, Lev Gumilyov (1912-1992), who later became a famous historian and ethnographer.
- Akhmatova's first known poems date back to 1904; from 1911 she began to be published regularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg publications.
- In 1911, she joined the creative group “The Workshop of Poets,” from which in the spring of 1912 a group of Acmeists emerged, preaching a return to the naturalness of the material world, to primordial feelings.
- In 1912, her first collection “Evening” was published, the poems of which served as one of the foundations for the creation of the theory of Acmeism. One of the most memorable poems in the collection is “The Gray-Eyed King” (1910).
- Separation from a loved one, the happiness of “love torture,” and the transience of bright moments are the main themes of the poetess’s subsequent collections — “The Rosary” (1914) and “The White Flock” (1917).
Akhmatova perceived the February Revolution of 1917 as a great shock, and the October Revolution as bloody unrest and the death of culture.
In August 1918, the poetess’s divorce from Gumilyov was officially formalized; in December she married an orientalist, poet and translator
Vladimir Shileiko (1891-1930).
In 1920, Akhmatova became a member of the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets, and from 1921 she worked as a translator at the World Literature publishing house.
At the end of 1921, when private publishing houses were allowed, three books by Akhmatova were published in Alkonost and Petropolis: the collections “Podorozhnik” and “Anno Domini MCMXXI”, the poem “Near the Sea”. In 1923, five books of poems were published as a three-volume set.
In 1924, in the first issue of the magazine “Russian Contemporary”, Akhmatova’s poems “And the righteous man followed the messenger of God...” and “And the month, bored in the cloudy darkness...” were published, which served as one of the reasons for the closure of the magazine. The poetess's books were removed from public libraries, and her poems almost ceased to be published. Collections of poems prepared by Akhmatova in 1924-1926 and in the mid-1930s were not published.
In 1929, Akhmatova left the All-Russian Writers' Union in protest against the persecution of writers Yevgeny Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak.
In 1934, she did not join the established Union of Writers of the USSR and found herself outside the boundaries of official Soviet literature. In 1924-1939, when her poems were not published, Akhmatova earned her livelihood by selling her personal archive and translations, and was engaged in researching the work of Alexander Pushkin. In 1933, her translation of “Letters” by the artist Peter Paul Rubens was published, and her name is listed among the contributors to the publication “Manuscripts of A. S. Pushkin” (1939).
In 1935, Lev Gumilyov and Akhmatova’s third husband, art historian and art critic Nikolai Punin (1888-1953), were arrested and released shortly after the poetess petitioned Joseph Stalin.
In 1938, Lev Gumilyov was arrested again, and in 1939, the Leningrad NKVD opened an “Operational Investigation Case against Anna Akhmatova,” where the poetess’s political position was characterized as “hidden Trotskyism and hostile anti-Soviet sentiments.” At the end of the 1930s, Akhmatova, fearing surveillance and searches, did not write down poetry and led a secluded life. At the same time, the poem “Requiem” was created, which became a monument to the victims of Stalin’s repressions and was published only in 1988.
By the end of 1939, the attitude of the state authorities towards Akhmatova changed - she was offered to prepare books for publication for two publishing houses. In January 1940, the poetess was accepted into the Writers' Union, in the same year the magazines "Leningrad", "Zvezda" and "Literary Contemporary" published her poems, the publishing house "Soviet Writer" published a collection of her poems "From Six Books", nominated for Stalin's bonus.
In September 1940, the book was condemned by a special resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the basis of a memorandum by the head of the Central Committee about the lack of connection in the book with Soviet reality and the preaching of religion in it. Subsequently, all of Akhmatova’s books published in the USSR were published with censorship removals and corrections related to religious themes and images.
During the Great Patriotic War, Akhmatova was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Moscow; in 1941-1944, together with the family of Lydia Chukovskaya, she lived in evacuation in Tashkent, where she wrote many patriotic poems - “Courage”, “The Enemy Banner ...”, “Oath” and etc.
In 1943, Akhmatova’s book “Selected Poems” was published in Tashkent. The poetess's poems were published in the magazines Znamya, Zvezda, Leningrad, and Krasnoarmeyets.
In August 1946, a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was adopted “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”, directed against Anna Akhmatova. She was accused of having poetry “imbued with the spirit of pessimism and decadence”, “bourgeois-aristocratic aesthetics” and decadence, harms the education of youth and cannot be tolerated in Soviet literature. Akhmatova’s works were no longer published, the circulations of her books “Poems (1909-1945)” and “Selected Poems” were destroyed.
In 1949, Lev Gumilyov and Punin, with whom Akhmatova broke up before the war, were again arrested. To soften the fate of her loved ones, the poetess wrote several poems in 1949-1952 glorifying Stalin and the Soviet state.
The son was released in 1956, and Punin died in the camp.Since the early 1950s, she has worked on translations of poems by Rabindranath Tagore, Kosta Khetagurov, Jan Rainis and other poets.After Stalin's death, Akhmatova's poems began to appear in print. Her books of poetry were published in 1958 and 1961, and the collection “The Running of Time” was published in 1965. Outside the USSR, the poem "Requiem" (1963) and "Works" in three volumes (1965) were published.
The final work of the poetess was “Poem without a Hero,” published in 1989.
In August 1962, the Nobel Committee nominated Anna Akhmatova for the Nobel Prize. In 1964, the poetess was awarded the Italian Etna-Taormina Prize, and in 1965, a doctorate from Oxford University. Akhmatova was also awarded the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad" (1943).
On March 5, 1966, Anna Akhmatova died in a sanatorium near Moscow in Domodedovo, Moscow region. Her body was sent to Leningrad (St. Petersburg), where on March 10, in the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral, after a memorial service, a funeral service was held. She was buried in the village of Komarovo near St. Petersburg.In 1967, a monument was erected at Akhmatova’s grave, designed by Alexander Ignatiev and Vsevolod Smirnov.
In 1989, on the centenary of the poetess’s birth, a literary and memorial museum of Anna Akhmatova was opened in St. Petersburg in the Fountain House in the southern wing.In the spring of 2006, a monument to the poetess was unveiled in the garden of the Fountain House in St. Petersburg. In December of the same year, in the northern capital, a monument to Akhmatova was erected on the Robespierre embankment opposite the Kresty prison, where Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilyov was imprisoned during the years of Stalin’s repressions.Monuments to the poetess were also erected in the courtyard of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University and in front of the school in the garden on Vosstaniya Street.
The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources
