biography
| name: |
Akhmatova, Anna
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| |
pseudonym of Anna Andreeyevna Gorenko
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pronunciation:
[akhmahtofa]
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1889–1966)
|
| biography:
| Poet, born in Odessa, S Ukraine. She studied in Kiev before moving to St Petersburg. In 1910 she married Nicholas Gumilev, and with him started the Neoclassicist Acmeist movement. After her early collections of lyrical poems, including Evening (1912) and Beads (1914), she developed an Impressionist technique. Her work was condemned by the authorities for its ‘eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference’, but she continued to write. Following the publication of Anno Domini (1922), she was officially silenced until 1940, when she published The Willow. Among her best-known works is Requiem, written in the late 1930s, an elegy for the prisoners of Stalin, including her son. In 1946 her verse was again banned. She was ‘rehabilitated’ in the 1950s, and is now recognized as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature. |
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