Article by Merle Grunert 10A (Published 18.02.2024)

Biographical Sketch - Anna Akhmatova's journey as a poet 

Anna Akhmatova is often described as one of Russia's greatest poets. She started her journey at the young age of eleven, under a pseudonym, as requested by her father. In 1912 she published her first collection of poems titled “Evening”. The poems addressed themes from love to grief and life as an intellectual and creative woman in the 1910s. After “Evening” her second book “Rosary” followed in 1914, which made her rise to more fame. 

Akhmatova was forced into silence from 1922 to 1940 due to her being labelled as a “bourgeois element”. During that time she spent her time translating poems and essays and focusing on researching the life and works of the Russian poet Pushkin who inspired many of her early works and was much respected by Akhmatova. She was no longer allowed to publish which made works such as “Requiem” (a sequence of poems that wasn’t fully published until 1987) fall under the radar. In “Requiem” she specifically addressed people's suffrage under Stalin's rule and drew to her own experience of having her son imprisoned. 

Akhmatova wasn’t accepting of her poetry being restricted and ensured that her poems lived on by teaching her closest friend Lydia Chukovskaya single lines of her poems at a time or slip her papers with poems on them, letting her memorize them before burning the paper. 

She was evacuated to Tashkent during the war, and it was there that the cycle From a Tashkent Notebook, the first collection of her poems, was published in 1943. 

Inspired by Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, she devoted 22 years of her life to writing Poem without Hero (1940–1962). This, her longest collection of poems, was written in Leningrad, Tashkent, and Moscow. It is a lyric chronicle, full of literary and biographical references, composed in a variety of accents and genres.

Even though Akhmatova was expelled from the Writers' Union in the USSR in 1949, Isaiah Berlin and Robert Frost celebrated her on a global scale. In 1964, she was granted the Taormina Prize in Italy, and in 1965, Oxford University awarded her with an honorary doctorate. 

Poem In Translation 

Он любил три вещи... 

(Anna Akhmatova, 1910) 

Он любил три вещи на свете: 

За вечерней пенье, белых павлинов 

И стертые карты Америки. 

Не любил, когда плачут дети, 

Не любил чая с малиной 

И женской истерики. 

...А я была его женой. 

He loved three things in life… 

(Anna Akhmatova, Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer) 

He loved three things in life: 

Evensong, white peacocks 

And old maps of America. 

He hated it when children cried, 

He hated tea with raspberry jam 

And women’s hysterics. 

...And I was his wife. 

In her poem “He loved three things in life…” Akhmatova openly displayed the struggles in her marriage, which was unconventional and unexpected at the time. Akhmatova and her husband mostly lived apart from each other as he often travelled. Their relationship was not love-based, which is emphasised when taking Akhmatova's affairs during her short marriage into consideration. “He loved three things in life…” reiterates how outspoken and transparent she was, even during a time of female oppression. Akhmatova was unabashed in publicly displaying her unconventional marriage and life, which makes her one of the most progressive and emancipated poets of the 20th century. 

Throughout her life, Anna Akhmatova thrived by expanding the meaning of womanhood and freeing herself of restrictions women faced in the USSR. Even after her death, she remains an exceptional poet and inspiring activist.