Anna Akhmatova.

Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko in 1889 in Odessa and raised in Tsarskoe Selo, the elite royal suburb of St. Petersburg. Her father, Andrey Gorenko, was a Navy engineer, and her mother, Inna Stogova, belonged to Russian nobility. After her parents divorced in 1905, she moved to Kiev, graduated from the Fundukleev Women’s Gymnasium in 1907, and attended law school at Kiev University for two years. She later studied at the St. Petersburg Women’s Higher Courses from 1911 to 1913.

Akhmatova began writing poetry at age 11, and by 1910 had adopted the pseudonym Akhmatova, claiming a connection to the Tatar Khan Akhmat, which she invented. Her education and exposure to the literary circles of St. Petersburg set the stage for her poetic career.

Anna Akhmatova’s first poetry collection, Vecher, was published in 1912, followed by Rosary in 1914 and The White Flock in 1917, which earned her literary fame. In 1910, she married poet Nikolai Gumilev, founder of Acmeism, and traveled to Paris, where she met the artist Amedeo Modigliani, who sketched her fifteen times. Her son Lev was born in 1912.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Akhmatova’s world collapsed. Her ex-husband Gumilev was executed in 1921 for anti-Soviet activities, and her poetry was banned from 1925 to 1953. During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, she was evacuated to Tashkent, and her poem Courage was published in Pravda during the war. Her later major works include Poema bez geroya and Requiem, the latter a poignant account of the Great Terror, which was not published until 1987.

Akhmatova faced further persecution after a 1945 meeting with Isaiah Berlin, leading to her expulsion from the Union of Writers in 1946. She continued to write and mentor young poets like Joseph Brodsky. In 1962, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1964 she received the Etna-Taormina Prize. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965.

Anna Akhmatova married three times: first to poet Nikolai Gumilev in 1910 separated, he was executed in 1921; then to Assyriologist Vladimir Shileiko; and finally to art historian Nikolai Punin, who was arrested in 1935 and again in 1949, dying in a Vorkuta Gulag camp in 1953. Akhmatova intervened with Stalin to save Punin in 1935, but failed in 1949.

Her only child, Lev Gumilev, born in 1912, became a historian and philosopher but spent many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova maintained friendships with artists Modigliani, composers Shostakovich to whom she dedicated the poem Muzika, and writers Pasternak and Bulgakov. In the 1950s-60s, her home in Komarovo became a meeting place for young intellectuals, including Joseph Brodsky.

Anna Akhmatova’s work defied Soviet censorship. Her poem Requiem became a symbol of survival during Stalin’s Great Terror, although it was only published in the USSR in 1987. She influenced a generation of poets, most notably Joseph Brodsky, who became her apprentice in Leningrad. Akhmatova’s poetry has been set to music by composers such as Alexei Kozlovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and John Tavener. In 1964, she received the Etna-Taormina Prize, and in 1965 an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Her legacy endures as a voice of courage and humanity in the face of oppression.