Anna
Akhmatova: A Biography
Akhmatova
began writing verse at the age of 11 and at 21 became a member of the Acmeist group of poets, whose leader, Nikolay
Gumilyov,
she married in 1910 but divorced in 1918. The Acmeists,
through their magazine ‘Apollon’ rejected the
esoteric vagueness and affectations of Symbolism and sought to replace them
with "beautiful clarity," compactness, simplicity, and perfection of
form--all qualities in which Akhmatova excelled from the outset.
Her
first collections, Vecher (1912; "Evening")
and Chyotki (1914; "Rosary"), especially
the latter, brought her fame. While exemplifying the best
kind of personal or even confessional poetry. Akhmatova's
principal motif is love, mainly frustrated and tragic love, expressed with an
intensely feminine accent and inflection entirely her own. However, Soviet
critics proclaimed her "bourgeois and aristocratic," condemning her
poetry for its narrow preoccupation with love and God, and characterizing her
as half nun and half harlot.
In
1921 her former husband, Gumilyov was executed on
charges of participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy (the Tagantsev
affair), this further complicated her position. She entered a period of almost
complete poetic silence in 1923 and literary ostracism, publishing no further
volumes until 1940. In that year several of her poems were published in the
literary monthly Zvezda ("The Star"),
and a volume of selections from her earlier work appeared under the title Iz shesti knig
("From Six Books"). A few months later, however, it was abruptly
withdrawn from sale and libraries. Nevertheless, in September 1941, following
the German invasion, Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio
address to the women of
Evacuated
to
In
August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central Committee of the
Communist Party for her "eroticism, mysticism, and political
indifference." Her poetry was castigated as "alien to the Soviet
people," and she was again described as a "harlot-nun," by Andrey Zhdanov, Politburo member and the director of
Stalin's program of cultural restriction. She was expelled from the Union of
Soviet Writers; an unreleased book of her poems, already in print, was
destroyed; and none of her work appeared in print for three years.
Then,
in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet communism were
printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok ("The Little Light") under the title Iz tsikla "Slava miru" ("From the
Cycle 'Glory to Peace' "). This uncharacteristic capitulation to the
Soviet dictator - in one of the poems Akhmatova declares: "Where Stalin
is, there is Freedom, Peace, and the grandeur of the earth" - was
motivated by Akhmatova's desire to propitiate Stalin
and win the freedom of her son, Lev Gumilyov, who had
been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. The tone of these poems (those
glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet editions of Akhmatova's
works published after his death) is far different from the moving and
universalized lyrical cycle, Rekviem
("Requiem"), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by Akhmatova's grief over an earlier arrest and imprisonment
of her son in 1937. This masterpiece, a poetic monument to the sufferings of
the Soviet peoples during Stalin's terror, was published in
In
1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry prize
awarded in
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