Anna Akhmatova: “I taught women to speak”

June 23, 2020 marks the 131st anniversary of the birth of Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), the Great Russian poet of the Silver Age, translator and literary critic, author of the works Requiem and Poem Without a Hero, which conveyed all the drama of the period of Stalin's repressions.

Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa in the family of a nobleman, retired mechanical engineer Andrei Gorenko. In one rough draft, the future poetess wrote: "... In my family, no one wrote poetry...". Her first rhymes, as well as her first successes in learning the French language, were noted by relatives when Anna was only five... Subsequently, the father, learning about the poetry of his seventeen-year-old daughter, asked not to shame his name. And then the poetess, as a literary pseudonym, took the maiden name of her great-grandmother - Akhmatova.

Anna received an excellent education at the Mariinsky Gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo, where at one of the literary evenings she met her future husband, poet Nikolai Gumilyov.

Akhmatova’s first book “Evening” was published in 1912. In 1914, her second collection Chyotki was published; it brought Anna Andreevna real fame. Three years later, the book of poems "The White Pack" was published - and in St. Petersburg they started talking about this as a major literary event.

“Acmeism, to which “early” Akhmatova belonged, contrasted herself with the poetics of symbolism in the sense of the priority of real being over the“ transcendental, ”“unknown”, “mythical””, - notes Zhanna Kolchina in the abstract “The Artistic World of Anna Akhmatova”. Everything is extremely “grounded” in the lyrics of Akhmatova. Natalia Kudrina writes about the same in her abstract "Subject phraseological units in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova" (2008).

However, this state of harmony with the outside world was short-lived. Whirlwinds of social upheaval destroyed it. However, firm faith in their people and personal courage in the revolutionary days of 1917 did not allow Akhmatova leaving her homeland. The poetess refused to be with those who persuaded her to emigrate.

Anna Akhmatova survived two world wars, a revolution and repression against the closest people. The first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot by order of the Petrograd GubChK, the third husband, the famous art critic Nikolai Punin, died in the camp.

Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilyov, was also arrested. For the many years he spent in the camps (he was rehabilitated only in 1956), Anna Andreevna did not abandon attempts to rescue him. She even wrote a cycle “Glory to the World” to please the authorities. But it did not help. 

Once in a prison line, a woman who recognized her asked if the poet could describe this. After which Akhmatova returned to the poem Requiem, begun in 1934: “...I was then with my people / Where my people, unfortunately, were”.

Typically, against the background of such realities, the researcher Lyubov Yakovleva, in her abstract “Apocalyptic semantics in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova” (2014), quotes her colleague Lyubov Kihney: “Apocalyptic motifs form a complex typological series in Akhmatova’s works... This interest in the problem of the end of history grew as the crisis aggravated phenomena in Russian and then Soviet society, having reached its peak by the time of the Great Terror”.

Natalya Kudrina writes about this in her abstract “Subject phraseological units in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova” (2008): “The work of the poetess who created a unique lyrical system [Kihney 1997] goes far beyond the framework of the Silver Age culture. Her poems express the inner world of a man - a contemporary of the poetess; they reflect the tragic history of Russia and its people”.

Thus, Akhmatova sewed sandbags during the siege - barricades and monuments in the squares were lined with them. Few knew about this. But all fronts read from hand to hand her poem "Courage".

The works of Anna Akhmatova as the largest cultural phenomenon of the 20th century has received worldwide recognition. Her poems have been translated into many languages. In 1964, Anna Andreevna received the Italian and international literary prize Etna Taormina - for the 50th anniversary of poetry and in connection with the publication in Italy of a collection of her selected works. In 1965, the poetess won the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from the University of Oxford. Twice, in 1965 and 1966, Akhmatova’s candidacy was considered for the Nobel Prize.

Anna Akhmatova is often called a lyric poet. The poetess, as she faced life, became the lyrics of a special, tragic writing, it was not by chance that her poems so often sounded from the stage of the best theaters performed by great actresses. Recall: “I taught women to speak...”.

Akhmatova is read and re-read all her life in an effort to understand her personal dramas and contradictions, clashes with the authorities, her creative take-offs and sins, although, according to Yaroslav Smelyakov, “there were not so many of them: some poems and verses”.

The poetess died on March 5, 1966 in a sanatorium in Domodedovo.

Anna Akhmatova was buried in the village of Komarovo near St. Petersburg.