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Anna Akhmatova, a wonderful woman and a renowned
poet, lived a long and difficult life, and outlived many of her contemporaries.
With her death the Silver Age of Russian culture passed into history. She
had also witnessed many historical events that had rewritten the future
– the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and World War
Two.
Akhmatova is a penname for her real name is Gorenko. Anna took the penname
at the age of 17 when her father, learning that she was writing poetry,
asked her not to disgrace the family name. Her choice was the rather unusual
name of her Tatar grandmother of her mother’s side, Akhmatova.
The youthful poet’s first serious attempts described the anguish of unrequited
love and immediately brought to her the attention of the poetic community.
And though for a time she associated herself with a decadent literary trend
much in fashion, she remained strikingly individual, a star of St.Petersburg’s
literary salons for her poetic gifts and her beauty too. An artist of the
day, Yuri Annenkov, described her as tall, slim, rather shy but casually
elegant, with a bang concealing her forehead as she recited her verses
in singsong. Her face, he says, was stamped with melancholy, even when
she smiled. And this charming sadness only added to her beauty.
Anna Akhmatova derived no comfort from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917,
but she had no wish to leave Russia. Remaining, she came to symbolize for
the Soviet authorities a fragment of the bourgeois world and émigré
in spirit with the result that in 1925 all she wrote was banned from publication.
An acquaintance of Akhmatova’s is known to have remarked on meeting her.
“My, what an important person you’ve become. The Bolshevik party has even
issued a special decision: not to arrest you, but not to publish you either.”
This was only one misfortune in a series of many. Already in 1921 the poet
Nikolai Gumilyov, then her husband, had been executed on a charge of conspiracy
against the revolution. In the thirties her son, Leo Gumilyov, was arrested
time and again as a university student. It was at that time that Anna Akhmatova
wrote her famous “Requiem”, a tribute to the millions in Russia who had
experienced the repressive actions of the Stalin regime. It was only 50
years later that the poem reached the public.
Akhmatova was never sinless, but her Christian attitudes made her survive
all the tragedies that came her way. She could detach herself from the
life around her and remain herself.
And what was she essentially? A woman with the profile of a Greek goddess
who was well educated and had taste, who knew by heart all the poetry by
Alexander Pushkin, who could describe the architecture of her native St.Petersburg
better than any art expert, and who read the works of French, English,
Italian and German poets in the original. Akhmatova also did a great deal
of translating fragments of her poetry that has come down from Ancient
Greece, poetry of the Ancient East, and poetry by her European contemporaries.
She was the personified quintessence of poetry before whom, despite everything,
Russia bowed its head and still does to this day.
Other countries too honored her. In 1964 Akhmatova was given the honorary
title of Dr. of Literature at Oxford in England, and the international
Etna Taormina Prize in Italy.
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