Anna “Saint Voice” Akhmatova, the walking history of Russian history, antihistory... the woman whose voice cuts specific and sideblades gender. Sexy, political, and pure, she was one of the tribe of eight poets in our first Survivor Poet game here at About.com Poetry. She was voted off the island by our readers in the first round of the game.
Akhmatova’s Early Life:
Anna was born in 1889 near Odessa in the Ukraine. Her family name was actually Gorenko, but when her father found out she wanted to become a poet, he forced her to take a pen name, and she chose the Tatar surname of her maternal great-grandmother. She married “Acmeist” poet Nikolai Gumilev in 1910 and they honeymooned in Paris, but he left for Africa soon after. It was while she was alone that she wrote the poems in her first book, Evening, published to great acclaim in 1912, the same year her son Lev was born. Nikolai insisted that his mother raise their son; Anna became a star in the St. Petersburg intelligentsia.
Suppression and Silence:
In 1921 Nikolai Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks, and though she had divorced him several years earlier, Akhmatova suffered greatly from her association with him. She was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union, her writings were banned from publication and she was essentially silenced for nearly 40 years. When she published a small group of poems in 1940, not many people outside of Russia even knew she was still alive—and the publication was soon withdrawn. Her son was imprisoned and exiled to Siberia; she wrote poems praising Stalin in an unsuccessful effort to secure his freedom.
Akhmatova’s Reemergence:
After the death of Stalin in 1953, Akhmatova began again to make her work public, and young Russian poets like Joseph Brodsky gathered around her, seeing her as a link to the pre-Revolutionary culture destroyed by the Communists. In the early 1960s Robert Frost visited her in Russia, and she travelled outside the country for the first time in 50 years to receive two awards: the Etna-Taormina Prize and an honorary Oxford doctorate. Akhmatova died at home in Leningrad in 1966.
Akhmatova in the Center of Russian History:
From her first readings at Mayakovsky’s Stray Dog cafe in St. Petersburg to the end of her life when Joseph Brodsky would later call her “the muse of keening,” Anna Akhmatova was in the center of history. She linked the pre-Revolutionary and post-Stalin eras, and despite terrible persecution and censorship, she never gave up on her country. Her work, original and strikingly modern, gave voice to the Russian people during times of great upheaval—her masterpiece is Requiem, dedicated to the victims of Stalin’s purges. Akhmatova outlived her persecutors, and her life has become a symbol of truth and integrity.
Here’s an untitled poem, translated by the poet Jane Kenyon:
Wild honey has the scent of freedom,
dust—of a ray of sun,
a girl’s mouth—of a violet,
and gold—has no perfume.
Watery—the mignonette,
and like an apple—love,
but we have found out forever
that blood smells only of blood.
