Authors: Anna Akhmatova

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In 1912 Akhmatova published her first poetry collection, Vecher (evening), dealing with a woman who is either unloved or has lost her lover—Gumilyov had spent most of 1911 in Africa without her. The style is laconic and conversational, with emotions expressed through gestures. In her second volume, Chetki (rosary), she accepts the loss of love and consoles herself with poetry. This text went into nine editions and started what was called an “Akhmatova School” among young Russian poets. Her third collection, Belaya staya (white flock), often contrasts friendship with sexual feelings, as in, “There is a sacred line in human intimacy / That love and passion cannot cross.” These first three works renounce mystical aims and instead dramatize a narrow range of intimate subjects in lucid, graphic, colloquial language.

After her separation from Gumilyov, Akhmatova was briefly married (1918-1921) to Vladmir Shileyko, a brilliant Assyriologist and minor poet. Shileyko was possessively jealous of her and refused to respect her work, sometimes burning her poems. Meanwhile, Gumilyov incurred the ill will of the Soviet regime by openly expounding monarchist views. In 1921 he was arrested, charged with counterrevolutionary activity, and shot.

In 1921 Akhmatova published the slim volume Podorozhnik (plantain), the contents of which were soon included in the much larger collection Anno Domini MCMXXI. These poems render not only private experiences but also stirring public events from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the end of Russia’s civil war in 1922. Her response to them is largely negative; she views St. Petersburg as “a city of sorrow and anger” and compares her country, where homes are marked with crosses of death, with the Western world, where “the sun above keeps shining.” Her private poems picture a harsh husband who deprives the heroine of her freedom, detesting her smiles, prayers, and poems. The style is dry, terse, and aphoristic.

From 1923 to 1940 Akhmatova published no poetry, although she continued to write. The Communist Party’s Central Committee banned publication of her work for seventeen years, condemning it as “a bourgeois relic.” She held herself aloof from literary battles, choosing by her silence to join the “inner migration.” Her son, Lev Gumilyov, was arrested at the age of twenty in 1934, released, rearrested in 1937, permitted to join the army in 1941, once more arrested in 1949, and not freed again until 1956. Desperately seeking Lev’s freedom, Akhmatova tried to appease the authorities by writing a mediocre cycle of poems, “In Praise of Peace” (1950), that praised Joseph Stalin. Later, she requested that this text be omitted from her collected works.

During World War II, Akhmatova remained in Leningrad for much of its terrible siege and wrote some magnificent patriotic poems that were widely copied and recited. Nevertheless, she was singled out in 1946 for an official attack by the minister for cultural affairs, Andrey Zhdanov, as a decadent poet of mysticism and eroticism. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, and the galleys of a book she was about to publish were destroyed. This quarantine did not end until Stalin’s death in 1953.

Akhmatova spent her remaining years in poverty and poor health. In 1964, she bravely came to the defense of Joseph Brodsky, a brilliant young poet who had been her protégé. He had been sentenced to five years’ exile with compulsory labor for the crime of “parasitism.” Akhmatova mobilized so much support for Brodsky that the authorities permitted him to leave the country; he subsequently settled in the United States and won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In December, 1964, she was, at last, fully “rehabilitated” and permitted to travel to Italy, France, and England. Two years later, she died of a heart attack.

The magnificent cycle Requiem contains some of her most moving lyrics; it centers on her years of suffering as her son was imprisoned. In it she uses religious language to mark a progression of sorrows similar to Mary the Mother’s laments at the foot of the cross. Besides Requiem, Akhmatova’s greatest achievement is A Poem without a Hero, on which she labored for twenty-two years. It can be read as an autobiographical memoir, a reflection on the nature of time, a lament on human destiny, and a poetic fantasy featuring many references to Western writers. Its extraordinary verbal and formal beauty has caused some critics to consider it the richest Russian poem of the twentieth century.

Since Akhmatova's death in 1966, numerous collections of her poems and prose writings have been published in Russian. Her correspondence and diaries have also appeared in print, and some of her works have been translated into English, German, and French, making her better known outside the former Soviet Union as well.