Anna Akhmatova

Based on Wikipedia: Anna Akhmatova

The Poet Who Refused to Leave

In the late 1930s, a woman stood in a prison queue in Leningrad, waiting to deliver a food package to her son. She had been standing there for seventeen months, returning again and again. The city had changed names twice in her lifetime—from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad—and would change again. But she stayed. She always stayed.

Another woman in the queue, lips blue from cold, recognized her. In a whisper—because everyone whispered there—she asked: "Can you describe this?"

"I can," Anna Akhmatova replied.

Something like a smile passed over what had once been the woman's face.

That exchange captures everything essential about Anna Akhmatova. She was one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But her significance extends far beyond literary achievement. She was a witness. When millions fled Russia after the revolution, when her friends were executed or exiled, when her own son was imprisoned and her work was banned, she remained. And she wrote.

A Name Borrowed from Mongol Khans

She was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in 1889, in a resort suburb of Odessa on the Black Sea—then part of the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. Her father was a naval engineer descended from Ukrainian Cossack nobility. Her mother came from Russian landowners with ties to Kiev.

When she began publishing poetry as a teenager, her father objected. He didn't want to see verses printed under his "respectable" name. So she adopted her grandmother's surname: Akhmatova.

It was a distinctly Tatar name, and she embraced its exotic ancestry with characteristic drama. She claimed descent from Khan Akhmat, a ruler of the Golden Horde who was assassinated in his tent in 1480—an event that traditionally marks the end of Mongol rule over Russia. Whether this genealogy was accurate or embellished, it suited her. The young poet who would become the "Queen of the Neva" wanted a name that sounded like something from the deep past, not from the respectable middle class.

The family moved to Tsarskoye Selo, near Saint Petersburg, when Anna was eleven months old. This was the town of the imperial summer palace, where Pushkin had studied, where the aristocracy summered. She grew up surrounded by the architecture and atmosphere of Russian high culture at its most refined.

The Silver Age and Its Magnetism

She started writing poetry at eleven. By her late teens, she was being published and had caught the attention of literary circles. On Christmas Eve 1903, when she was fourteen, she met a young poet named Nikolai Gumilev.

He pursued her for years. He proposed repeatedly, starting in 1905. She was ambivalent. "He has loved me for three years now," she wrote to a friend at seventeen, "and I believe that it is my fate to be his wife. Whether or not I love him, I do not know, but it seems to me that I do."

That uncertainty would characterize her approach to love and marriage throughout her life. She married Gumilev in Kiev in April 1910—notably, none of her family attended the wedding. They honeymooned in Paris, where she met and befriended Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian artist. He painted her at least twenty times, including several nudes.

From the first year of their marriage, Gumilev began chafing against its constraints. She wrote that he had "lost his passion" for her. By year's end, he left on a six-month trip to Africa.

But her fame was rising independently of her husband. The period from roughly 1890 to 1917 became known as the Silver Age of Russian poetry—a flowering of artistic innovation before the catastrophe. Akhmatova became one of its central figures, renowned not so much for beauty as for what contemporaries called her "intense magnetism and allure."

She attracted the fascinated attention of many men, including some of the most celebrated artists of the era. She had an affair with Osip Mandelstam, another great poet of the age. His wife Nadezhda later wrote that she eventually forgave Akhmatova for it. Boris Pasternak, though married, proposed to her many times. Rumors circulated about an affair with Alexander Blok, the influential lyrical poet.

The Acmeists Against the Symbolists

In late 1910, Akhmatova joined with Mandelstam, her husband Gumilev, and others to form the Guild of Poets. They developed what became known as the Acmeist movement—a direct challenge to the Symbolists who then dominated Russian poetry.

To understand what they were rebelling against, consider how Symbolist poetry worked. The Symbolists believed poetry should gesture toward hidden, mystical realities through suggestion and atmosphere. Their verse was often vague, ethereal, reaching for transcendence.

The Acmeists rejected this. They promoted craft over inspiration, the concrete over the ephemeral. An Acmeist poem should be like a well-made object—precise, clear, present in the physical world. Where a Symbolist might write about longing for some unnameable beyond, an Acmeist would write about a glove left on a table, using that specific image to convey complex emotion.

This approach shaped Akhmatova's distinctive style: economical, emotionally restrained, startlingly precise. A strong female voice that struck, as critics noted, "a new chord in Russian poetry."

Her first book, Evening, appeared in 1912. The small edition of 500 copies quickly sold out. She had written some 200 poems by then but included only 35—exercising what would become her characteristic selectivity. The poems "Grey-eyed King," "In the Forest," and "Song of the Last Meeting" made her famous.

She was dismissive of her early success. "These naïve poems by a frivolous girl for some reason were reprinted thirteen times," she later wrote, with characteristic false modesty. "The girl herself (as far as I recall) did not foresee such a fate for them and used to hide the issues of the journals in which they were first published under the sofa cushions."

Her second collection, The Rosary, appeared in 1914 and established her as one of the most popular poets of the day. Thousands of women began writing poetry in imitation of her style. "I taught our women how to speak," Akhmatova remarked, "but don't know how to make them silent."

She acquired titles: "Queen of the Neva," "Soul of the Silver Age." In July 1914, she wrote: "Frightening times are approaching / Soon fresh graves will cover the land."

On August 1st, Germany declared war on Russia. The dark storm was beginning.

Revolution, and the Choice to Stay

World War One led to the Russian Revolution. In February 1917, soldiers fired on marching protesters in Petrograd; others mutinied. The Romanov dynasty, which had ruled for three centuries, collapsed. The Bolsheviks seized power in October.

What followed was civil war, famine, terror. The city lost electricity, sewage service, water, food. Akhmatova's friends died around her or fled in droves to Europe and America. Boris Anrep, a mosaic artist with whom she'd had a relationship (he created mosaics featuring her), escaped to England.

She had the option to leave. She considered it.

But she stayed. And she was fierce about her decision. She wrote of those who left:

You are a traitor, and for a green island,
Have betrayed, yes, betrayed your native
Land,
Abandoned all our songs and sacred
Icons,
And the pine tree over a quiet lake.

And of her own temptation:

A voice came to me. It called out comfortingly.
It said, "Come here,
Leave your deaf and sinful land,
Leave Russia forever,
I will wash the blood from your hands,
Root out the black shame from your heart,"
[...] calmly and indifferently,
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that my sorrowing spirit
Would not be stained by those shameful words.

This was not patriotism in any simple sense. It was something more complicated: a determination to witness, to remain present, to refuse the easier path.

The Execution of Gumilev

At the height of her fame in 1918, Akhmatova divorced Gumilev and married Vladimir Shilejko, an Assyriologist and poet. Many of her friends considered it a mistake. She later explained her motivation with brutal honesty: "I felt so filthy. I thought it would be like a cleansing, like going to a convent, knowing you are going to lose your freedom."

In August 1921, her former husband Nikolai Gumilev was arrested. The Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police, precursor to the NKVD and KGB—accused him of involvement in a monarchist conspiracy. Within weeks, he was executed by firing squad along with 61 others.

The circumstances were particularly cruel. According to historian Donald Rayfield, the executions were part of the state's response to the Kronstadt rebellion, when sailors who had supported the Bolsheviks turned against them. The Cheka blamed Petrograd's intellectuals. A senior officer named Yakov Agranov extracted names of "conspirators" from an imprisoned professor by promising amnesty from execution.

The promise meant nothing. Agranov sentenced dozens of the named people to death. Maxim Gorky and others appealed for leniency. By the time Lenin agreed to pardons, the condemned had already been shot.

Within days of Gumilev's death, Akhmatova wrote:

Terror fingers all things in the dark,
Leads moonlight to the axe.
There's an ominous knock behind the wall:
A ghost, a thief or a rat...

The execution shattered the Acmeist movement and placed a permanent stigma on Akhmatova. More importantly, it marked her son Lev for life. He would later be arrested during Stalin's purges specifically because he was Gumilev's son.

The Vegetarian Years

From the new Marxist perspective, Akhmatova's poetry represented everything the revolution opposed. Her introspective lyrics were dismissed as "bourgeois aesthetic," reflecting trivial "female" preoccupations. The state attacked her. Former supporters and friends turned on her. She was declared an anachronism.

In 1925, a party resolution unofficially banned her work. She called the years that followed "The Vegetarian Years"—a dark joke, since it was a time of relative restraint before the full carnivorous terror of the 1930s.

She couldn't publish poetry but didn't stop writing it. She made acclaimed translations of Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, and Giacomo Leopardi. She pursued academic work on Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. She worked as a critic and essayist.

Many concluded she had died.

She had little food, almost no money. Her son was denied access to academic institutions because of his parents' alleged anti-state activities. The purges decimated her circle of friends. Her close friend Mandelstam was deported to a Gulag labor camp, where he died. Of the poets in her circles, Mayakovsky and Yesenin committed suicide. Marina Tsvetaeva would follow in 1941 after returning from exile.

By 1935, Akhmatova wrote, every time she went to see someone off at the train station as they departed for exile, she would find herself greeting friends at every step—so many of Saint Petersburg's intellectuals and artists were leaving on the same train.

Requiem: One Hundred Million Voices

Her son Lev was imprisoned multiple times by the Stalinist regime. Each time, she queued for hours to deliver food packages and plead on his behalf. She stood outside stone prisons, waiting.

She had a common-law husband during this period, Nikolai Punin, an art scholar. He too was repeatedly arrested. He died in the Gulag in 1953.

From this experience came her masterpiece: Requiem, a cycle of poems written between 1935 and 1940. It documents the terror not as politics but as lived experience—the experience of mothers and wives standing in endless queues, waiting for news of sons and husbands who might already be dead.

Seventeen months I've pleaded
for you to come home.
Flung myself at the hangman's feet.
My terror, oh my son.
And I can't understand.
Now all's eternal confusion.
Who's beast, and who's man?
How long till execution?

The work was far too dangerous to write down. For years, she composed it in her head, memorizing each new section, then reciting it to trusted friends who also memorized it. The poem was preserved in multiple minds, like a secret distributed across a network. It wasn't published in Russia until 1987, more than two decades after her death.

She wrote that through her "tortured mouth," "one hundred million voices shout." This was not metaphor. She understood herself as speaking for those who could not speak, recording what could not be officially recorded.

Brief Rehabilitation, Then Denunciation

In 1939, Stalin personally approved publication of a volume called From Six Books. Perhaps he saw propaganda value in demonstrating the regime's cultural tolerance. Perhaps it was mere caprice.

The collection was withdrawn and pulped after only a few months.

During World War Two—what Russians call the Great Patriotic War—Akhmatova was briefly rehabilitated. Her poems about the siege of Leningrad, where nearly a million civilians died of starvation, were broadcast on the radio. Her voice became identified with Russian resistance.

But in 1946, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a decree specifically denouncing her. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural enforcer, called her "half nun, half harlot" whose poetry was "completely alien to Soviet literature." She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, which meant she could not publish at all.

Her son Lev was arrested again in 1949 and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. Desperate to free him, Akhmatova wrote poems praising Stalin—a decision that haunted her. The poems didn't help. Lev wasn't released until after Stalin's death in 1953.

He blamed his mother for not doing enough to save him. Their relationship never fully recovered.

The Long Poem and the Late Recognition

In her final decades, Akhmatova worked on Poem Without a Hero, a dense, allusive long poem that took her over twenty years to complete. It looked back to the Silver Age, to 1913, to everything that had been destroyed. Critics consider it among the most important Russian poems of the twentieth century, though its difficulty makes it less accessible than Requiem.

International recognition came slowly. In 1964, she was allowed to travel to Italy to receive the Taormina Prize. In 1965, she visited Oxford to receive an honorary doctorate. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in both 1965 and 1966.

She died on March 5, 1966—exactly thirteen years after Stalin, on the same date.

The Weight of Witness

Akhmatova's achievement is inseparable from her choice to remain. Many great Russian writers of her generation went into exile—Nabokov, Bunin, Tsvetaeva for a time. They preserved themselves and their art. There is no dishonor in survival.

But Akhmatova chose differently. She stayed through revolution, civil war, famine, terror, world war, and decades of repression. She lost friends to execution and exile. She lost years to official silence. She lost her son to the Gulag and then, in a different way, to the bitterness that imprisonment bred in him.

What she gained was the authority of presence. When she wrote about the terror, she wrote as someone who had stood in prison queues, who had lived in a city under siege, who had buried her dead. Her poems are not reports from the outside but testimony from within.

Joseph Brodsky, who knew her in her final years and would win the Nobel Prize himself, called her "the keening muse." The phrase captures something essential: her poetry was a form of mourning, a ritual lamentation for the dead and the living dead, for an entire world that had been destroyed.

She understood this role clearly. When that woman in the prison queue asked, "Can you describe this?"—Akhmatova's answer was not just "I can." It was a vow. She would describe it. She would make sure it was not forgotten.

The poems in Requiem were kept alive for decades in the memories of trusted friends, recited in whispers, never written down until it was safe. This is literature as resistance—not the loud resistance of manifestos, but the quiet resistance of remembering what power wants forgotten.

"I taught our women how to speak," she once said of her early influence on Russian poetry. But her greatest teaching was about something other than craft. She taught what it means to stay, to witness, to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.