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Anna Akhmatova is widely regarded as the greatest Russian female poet.
Born Anna Andreevna Gorenko on June 23, 1889, in Bolshoi Fontan, a suburb of Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), her father, Andrei Antonovich Gorenko, was a Navy Engineer, and her mother, Inna Erazmovna (née Stogova), came from Russian nobility. From 1890 to 1905, her father served at the Imperial Trade Fleet and Ports Headquarters in St. Petersburg under Grand Prince Aleksander Mikhailovich. The family resided in Tsarskoe Selo, an elite royal suburb of St. Petersburg. Anna received an excellent private education and attended the Tsarskoselky Gymnasium for Ladies. After her parents' divorce in 1905, she lived in Kiev for four years, graduating from the Fundukleevsky Gymnazium in 1907, and studied law at Kiev University for two years. She returned to St. Petersburg to attend the St. Petersburg Classes for Women (Zhenskie Kursy) from 1911 to 1913.
Akhmatova began writing poetry at age 11, initially publishing under her real name, Anna Gorenko. Her father objected to her using the family name, as he was also a writer who had met Fyodor Dostoevsky and corresponded with Anton Chekhov. Consequently, Anna adopted the pseudonym "Akhmatova," creating a poetic myth linking herself to the Tatar Khan Akhmat; this name was a product of her imagination. In 1910, in Kiev, she married Nikolai Gumilev, a prominent Russian poet and critic who founded the Acmeism literary movement. The couple honeymooned in Paris, where she met the then-unknown artist Amedeo Modigliani. She returned to Paris in 1911 and visited Italy in 1912, maintaining her friendship with Modigliani, who painted fifteen portraits of her, some nude. Inspired by love, Akhmatova published her first poetry collection, "Evening" (Vecher, 1912). Around this time, she met Vladimir Mayakovsky at the St. Petersburg literary club "Brodyachaya Sobaka" (Stray Dog). Her son Lev Gumilev was born in October 1912. Subsequent collections, "Rosary" (Chyotki, 1914) and "The White Flock" (Belaya Staya, 1917), earned her literary acclaim, with praise from Yuri Tynyanov and Boris Pasternak.
Her life was marked by terror following the 1917 Russian Revolution, as thousands of intellectuals were killed by the communists. Her estranged husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was executed in 1921 for alleged "anti-Soviet plotting." After publishing "Plantain" (Podorozhnik, 1921) and "Anno Domini MCMXXI" (1922), she was branded bourgeois and ostracized. She witnessed the arrest of poet Osip Mandelstam, who criticized Stalin and later died in a Siberian prison camp. From 1925 to 1953, her works were banned. A modest poetry collection published in Leningrad in 1940 was immediately banned and removed from Soviet libraries and bookstores. Despite her hardships, Akhmatova supported young writer Olga Berggolts. During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, she suffered starvation and helplessness and was evacuated to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where she stayed with Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy's family. In the midst of World War II, her poem "Courage" was published in Pravda.
Her second husband, Nikolai Punin, was chief curator of the Hermitage and a notable art historian and writer. Arrested in 1935 for criticizing Soviet life under Stalin, Punin condemned the loss of civilized values and the tasteless portraits of Lenin that flooded Leningrad. Akhmatova burned his documents and photographs to protect him. With help from friends Mikhail A. Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak, she petitioned Stalin for his release, which was granted. In 1949, Punin was arrested again after stating that Cézanne and Van Gogh were great artists and dismissing a Lenin portrait as a "bootleg, not a painting." He was exiled to a Gulag camp and died in Vorkuta in 1953. Akhmatova was powerless to help this time, as she was under KGB surveillance.
After World War II, Akhmatova was interviewed in Leningrad by Sir Isaiah Berlin during his 1945 visit from London. In August 1946, the Communist Party Central Committee attacked her amid Stalin's intensified repression of intellectuals, labeling her "alien to the Soviet people" due to her "eroticism, mysticism, and political impartiality." She faced censorship alongside Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Sergei Prokofiev, and other prominent figures, with all her publications and public performances banned, and she was denied a livelihood until Stalin's death.
Expelled from the Union of Writers in 1946 and left destitute, Akhmatova was threatened by Soviet authorities and moved from Leningrad to Moscow with Viktor Ardov's family. Ardov, Chukovsky, and Fadeev later helped reinstate her Union membership. Boris Pasternak gave her a private reading of the unpublished novel "Doctor Zhivago." In 1955, she received a small dacha in Komarovo, near Leningrad, where she spent summers writing major works including "Poema bez geroya" and "Requiem." Her masterpiece "Requiem," a monumental poem about the survival of people during Stalin's Great Terror, was not published until 1987.
Her only son, Lev Gumilev (1912–1992), was a historian and philosopher who endured multiple arrests and years in Soviet Gulag camps. In the 1950s and 1960s, Akhmatova and her circle in Leningrad served as an unofficial haven for talented youth, including her protégé Joseph Brodsky. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 and received the Etna-Taormina Prize for poetry in 1964, along with an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965.
Anna Akhmatova passed away on March 5, 1966, in Domodedovo, a suburb of Moscow. Her funeral service was held at St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral in St. Petersburg, and she was buried in Komarovo cemetery near St. Petersburg, Russia.
