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Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) - pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko | |
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One of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th-century, who became a legend in her own time as a poet and symbol of artistic integrity. Anna Akhmatova's work is characterized by precision, clarity, and economy. She wrote with apparent simplicity and naturalness and her rhyming was classical compared to such radical contemporary writers as Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky. No foreign sky protected me, Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko in Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, the daughter of a naval engineer. She began writing poetry at the age of 11, and adopted a pseudonym to allay her father's fears that as a"decadent poetress" she would dishonour the family. The pseudonym was the Tatar name of Akhmatova's great-grandmother. When she was sixteen, her father abandoned his family. Akhmatova attended a girls' gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo and the famous Smolnyi Institute in St. Petersburg. She continued her studies in Kiev in Fundukleevskaia gymnasium (1906) and in a law school (1907) before moving to St. Petersburg to study literature. Among her teachers were the poet, dramatist and essayist Innokenty Annensky (1856-1909), who influenced her deeply. At the age of 21 Akhmatova became a member of the Acmeist group of poets, whose leader, the poet and literature critic Nikolai Gumilyov she married in April 1910, in a church near Kiev. Nikolai was also friend of Annensky, and from Tsarskoe Selo. Nikolai, three years her senior, had fallen in love with Akhmatova when she was just fourteen. Akhmatova become "Gumi-lvitsa" (Gumi-lioness) and her husband was "Gumi-lev" (Gumi-lion). After honeymoon in Paris, Gumilyov left his young bride and went to Africa. "He loved his mother and was a good son," said Ahkmatova much later on her unfaithful husband. However, in 1912 they had a son, Lev Gumilyov. He became also a writer. Between the years 1910 and 1912 Akhmatova visited Paris, where she met the painter Amedeo Modigliani. He drew sixteen portraits of Akhmatova, some of them nudes. One of the most famous is a portrait, in an Egyptian mode, which has been reproduced on several jackets of Akhmatova's books. Akhmatova's first collection of verse, Vecher, came out in 1912. Of the first poem with the lines 'I drew my left hand glove / onto my right hand –' Marina Tsvetaeva summarized: "The whole woman, the whole poet is in these two lines; the whole Akhmatova, unique, unrepeatable, inimitable." Akhmatova gained a wider fame two years later with Chyotki. "I filled the vacancy for a woman poet," she said. With the Acmeist group Akhmatova shared their striving for simplicity and clarity in expression. Her poems dealt mostly love or examined the Russian cultural tradition. In 'Love' from 1911 she said: "It knows how to sob so sweetly / In the prayer of a yearning violin, / And how fearful to divine it / In a still unfamiliar smile." The reading public appreciated the accessibility and the conversational style of her work. At the age of twenty-three she he recorded the decadence of the time: "We're all drunkards here, and harlots: / how wretched we are together!" . Like a number of other Russian writers, she also indentified the image of Petersburg with the fate of Russia. Maria Tsverayeva, her contemporary poet, called Akhmatova "Anna Chrysostom of all the Russians." When the war broke out, Gumilyov received news enthusiastically, and enlisted in the cavalry. While in Paris he fell in love with a Russian-French woman, for whom he wrote a collection of poems. In 1918 Gumilyov returned from Paris to Petrograd, and resumed his literary activities. In the same year Akhmatova divorced him to marry Vladimir Shileiko, a distinguished Assyriologist. They separated in 1920, and divorced in 1928. Gradually Akhmatova's sense of history became a dominant theme in her writings. After her first husband was shot on charges of antirevolutionary activities in 1921 and the death of Aleksandr Blok – Gumilyov used to read out provocatively monarchist poems and make the sign of the cross – Akhmatova entered a period of silence. Her work was often mentioned in the literary disputes of the 1920s but she was not able to publish new books. Between the years 1921 and 1953 many of the people closest to her emigrated or were killed or imprisoned. Many of Akhmatova's poem were lost during these years, she also burned them herself. For a period she did not dare even to set new poems to paper. Publication of her writings was banned from 1925 to 1952, with only a brief respite during World War II in 1940, when several of her poems appeared in the literary monthly Zvezda. Akhmatova's poem "Courage" came out in 1942 on a front page of Pravda. When the siege of Leningrand had been lifted, Akhmatova returned to her home town, which she once had called her cradle. She recalled how she had been struck by the "terrible ghost that pretended to be my city." In 1946 Akhmatova was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. However, her poems eulogizing Joseph Stalin printed in weekly magazine Ogonyok in the 1950s, but they were designed to gain freedom for her son, who had been exiled to Siberia. Excluded from public life and from the Soviet Writers' Union, Akhmatova lived on a meager pension. She earned extra income by translating works of other writers, such as Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, and Giacomo Leopardi. She also wrote memoirs on Aleksandr Blok, Amedeo Modigliani, and Osip Mandelstam. In 1946 Akhmatova and the humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko were singled out as target of new attacks against artists and intellectuals. Lev, who had served in the air force, was again arrested in 1949 and sentenced 15 years of exile at hard labor. After Stalin's death Akhmatova was slowly rehabilitated, but she did not live to see the publication of her collected works in 1986 in Moscow. Lev was freed in 1956 and from the mid-1950s Akhmatova gradually became reaccepted on the literary scene. In 1964 she was permitted to travel to Italy to receive the Taormina Poetry Prize and in 1966 a book-length study was published about her. When the American national poet Robert Frost had visited her at a dacha in 1962, Akhmatova wrote: "I've had everything – poverty, prison lines, fear, poems remembered only by heart, and burnt poems. And humiliation and grief. And you don't know anything about this and wouldn't be able to understand it if I told you..." Before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was elected to the presidium of the Writers' Union, from which she had earlier been expelled in discrace. Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966, in a sanatorium at Domodedovo, near Moscow. The last book she read, more or less, was Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961). Her grave is at the Komarovo Cemetery, near St. Petersburg. "Tomorrow, her children... O, what small things rest Among Akhmatova's best-known works are Requiem, a poetic cycle on the Stalin purges, and Poema bez geroya (Poem Without a Hero), on which she began in Leningrad in 1940 and continued to revise her text for over 20 years. The Poem, divided in three parts, lacks a consistent plot as well as a conventional "hero". The first part follows the poet into a masquerade drama, there also is theme of a suicide of a young soldier, who had fallen in love with Olga Sudeikina, an actress, the lover of the poet Aleksandr Blok, and Akhmatova's close friend. In part two the poet becomes the voice of those she has outlived. In the third part the mass graves of war and destruction define the essence of the "new" century. Akhmatova's third husband, Nikolai Punin, died in the 1950s in a Siberian camp. The writer Boris Pasternak, who was married, proposed her at least twice. Pasternak, a member of the board of the Union of Soviet Writers, refused to go to the meeting which denounced Akhmatova. For this, he was expelled from the board. Requiem, Akhmatova's poem-cycle, was a literary monument to the victims of Stalin's Terror. The earliest poem dates from 1935 and the remainder was apparently written in 1938-40. In 1957 Akhmatova added a prose foreword. The work was first published in 1963 in Munich. In Russia it did not appear until 1987. The central core of Requiem consists of ten short, numbered poems. Originally the first reflected the arrest of her husband Nikolai Punin in 1935 and other close friends, but primarily the poems deal with the author's experiences and her agony following the arrest of her son Lev Gumilyov in 1938. Lev had been arrested first time in 1935 and released after Akhmatova wrote a letter to Stalin, ending with the words, "Help, Iosif Vissarionovich!" At the end, in the tenth poem, Akhmatova switches from contemporary Russia to the scene of the Crucifixion. The wails of grief reflect the voice of others who had suffered loss during the terror.
Selected works:
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