The 1930s were especially hard for Akhmatova. Her son, Lev Gumilyov (1912–92), and her third husband (she was married from 1918 to 1928 to the Assyriologist Vladimir Shileiko), art historian and critic Nikolay Punin (1888–1953), were arrested for political deviance in 1935. Both were soon released, but her son was arrested again in 1938 and subsequently served a five-year sentence in the Gulag. Her friend Mandelshtam was arrested in her presence in 1934 and died in a concentration camp in 1938.
In 1940, however, several of her poems were published in the literary monthly Zvezda (“The Star”), and a volume of selections from her earlier work appeared under the title Iz shesti knig (“From Six Books”)—only to be abruptly withdrawn from sale and libraries. Nevertheless, in September 1941, following the German invasion, Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the women of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Evacuated to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, soon thereafter, she read her poems to hospitalized soldiers and published a number of war-inspired poems; a small volume of selected poetry appeared in Tashkent in 1943. At the end of the war she returned to Leningrad, where her poems began to appear in local magazines and newspapers. She gave poetic readings, and plans were made for publication of a large edition of her works.
In August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference.” Her poetry was castigated as “alien to the Soviet people,” and she herself was publicly insulted as a “harlot-nun” by none other than Andrey Zhdanov (Zhdanov, Andrey Aleksandrovich), a Politburo member and the director of Stalin's program of cultural repression. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers; an unreleased book of her poems, already in print, was destroyed; and none of her work appeared in print for three years.
Then, in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok (“The Little Light”) under the title Iz tsikla “Slava miru” (“From the Cycle ‘Glory to Peace' ”). This uncharacteristic capitulation to the Soviet dictator—in one of the poems Akhmatova declares: “Where Stalin is, there is Freedom, Peace, and the grandeur of the earth”—was motivated by Akhmatova's desire to propitiate Stalin and win the freedom of her son, who again had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. The tone of these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet editions of Akhmatova's works published after his death) is far different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle, Rekviem (“Requiem”), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by Akhmatova's grief over the earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son in 1938. This masterpiece—a poetic monument to the sufferings of the Soviet people during Stalin's terror—was published in Russia for the first time in 1989.
In the cultural thaw following Stalin's death, Akhmatova was slowly and ambivalently rehabilitated, and a slender volume of her poetry, including some of her translations, was published in 1958. After 1958 a number of editions of her works, including some of her brilliant essays on Pushkin, were published in the Soviet Union (1961, 1965, two in 1976, 1977); none of these, however, contains the complete corpus of her literary productivity. Akhmatova's longest work and perhaps her masterpiece, Poema bez geroya (“Poem Without a Hero”), on which she worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. This difficult and complex work, in which the life of St. Petersburg bohemia in pre-World War I years is “double-exposed” onto the tragedies and suffering of the post-1917 decades, is a powerful lyric summation of Akhmatova's philosophy and her own definitive statement on the meaning of her life and poetic achievement.
Akhmatova executed a number of superb translations of the works of other poets, including Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets. She also wrote sensitive personal memoirs on Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok (Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), the artist Amedeo Modigliani (Modigliani, Amedeo), and fellow Acmeist Mandelshtam.
In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honours were her first travel outside her homeland since 1912. Akhmatova's works were widely translated, and her international stature continued to grow after her death. A two-volume edition of Akhmatova's collected works was published in Moscow in 1986, and The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, also in two volumes, appeared in 1990 and was updated and expanded in 1992.
Gregory Freidin
Additional Reading
Sam N. Driver, Anna Akhmatova (1972), combines a brief biography with a concise survey of the poetry. Amanda Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (1976, reissued 1990), is a critical biography analyzing the relation of the poet's life to her poetry. Ronald Hingley, Nightingale Fever: Russian Poets in Revolution (1981), defines the historical and social background of the four poetical titans of 20th-century Russia. Anatoly Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova (1991; originally published in Russian, 1989), is a work of the poet's literary secretary who witnessed her last years. Later biographies include Jessie Davies, Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova (1988); Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (1994); and Konstantin Polivanov, Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle (1994), trans. by Patricia Beriozkina. Among the memoirs of note are Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals (1994, reissued 2002; originally published in Russian [Paris] in 1974), trans. by Milena Michalski, Sylva Rubashova, and Peter Norman; and Sophie Kazimirovna Ostrovskaya, Memoirs of Anna Akhmatova's Years, 1944–1950 (1988), with an appendix of memoirs by Margarita Aliger, trans. by Jessie Davies. Also of value are Emma Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs (2003; originally published in Russian, 1998), trans. and ed. by John Crowfoot; and the chapter “Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak” in Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism (2004).Gregory Freidin
Acmeist
▪ Russian poets
Russian Akmeist, plural Akmeisty,
member of a small group of early-20th-century Russian poets reacting against the vagueness and affectations of Symbolism. It was formed by the poets Sergey Gorodetsky and Nikolay S. Gumilyov (Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich). They reasserted the poet as craftsman and used language freshly and with intensity. Centred in St. Petersburg, the Acmeists were associated with the review Apollon (1909–17). In 1912 they founded the Guild of Poets, whose most outstanding members were Anna Akhmatova (Akhmatova, Anna) and Osip Mandelshtam (Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich). Because of their preoccupation with form and their ivory-tower aloofness, the Acmeists were regarded with suspicion by the Soviet regime. Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for his alleged activities in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. Akhmatova was silenced during the most productive years of her life, and Mandelshtam died either in or en route to a Siberian labour camp.