Anna Akhmatova

1) Her Biography:

One of Russia’s best poets is thought to be Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). She was born in Odessa into a noble Tatar and Russian family. She received her education outside of St. Petersburg in Tsarskoe Selo. She began composing poetry at the age of eleven, using a pseudonym her father had chosen for her, and was inspired by writers like Racine, Pushkin, and Baratynsky. She married Nikolay Gumilev in 1910; he was a WWI hero and co-founder of the Acmeist poetry movement; he was assassinated for his anti-Soviet actions. Her son was detained numerous times and interned in Soviet work camps for 18 years.

Later, she married Nikolai Punin, who was also taken to the camps and died there in 1953. Akhmatova released her debut collection, titled Evening, in 1912. Her writings touch on a number of subjects, such as loss, time and memory, the fate of creative women, and a woman’s vision of love, particularly sad and unfulfilled love. The novelty of the feminine voice reflecting a woman’s experience of love, in addition to the Acmeist poetics, is what makes Akhmatova’s poetry unique. Rosary, her second book, became even more well-known in 1914. Through the use of a variety of masks, Akhmatova converted her personal experiences into parts of her poems. In other verses, she drew on folkloric language and imagery, which brought her works closer to the Russian folk tradition of the women’s lament.

Akhmatova expanded the thematic spectrum in her third collection, White Flock (1917), by including numerous poems with fervent nationalistic fervor. Because Akhmatova was labeled a “bourgeois element” by the authorities, she was seldom ever published between 1923 and 1930. She published essays and translated poetry from other languages to support herself. Akhmatova studied Pushkin’s life and works while she was compelled to remain silent (1922–1940), penning scholarly pieces that were later published under the title On Pushkin. Akhmatova’s works were prohibited from publication and circulation between 1925 and 1952.

Requiem, a collection of poetry that she wrote between 1935 and 1940, was not fully published in Russia until 1987, despite having been started around the time of her son’s incarceration. During the Stalinist repression, a mother’s agony over her son’s captivity is depicted in this terrible masterwork. Akhmatova describes the suffering of the Russian people during the Stalinist era, particularly the struggles of the ladies who stood in line behind her outside the prison walls.

Stalin was particularly preoccupied with literature, thus Akhmatova had excellent reason to be concerned about his power. She taught her best female friend Lydia Chukovskaya the poem so that she would remember it after she passed away, so ensuring the poem’s existence. In her own bugged apartment, Akhmatova would point to the ceiling and ask loudly, “Will you have some tea?” while passing over a handwritten page. When Akhmatova visited Lydia, she would whisper portions of it for Lydia to remember. Lydia would recite the poems on it from memory. Then, after lighting a match and setting the paper on fire over the ashtray, Anna would remark, “How early autumn has come this year.”

She was evacuated to Tashkent during the war, and in 1943, the cycle From a Tashkent Notebook appeared in a volume of her poetry. She spent 22 years of her life writing the poem ‘Poem without Hero’ (1940-1962) after being inspired by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. This is the longest of her compositions, a collection of poems that was written in Leningrad, Tashkent, and Moscow and features a variety of voices and poetic styles to create a lyric chronicle that is laced with literary and biographical allusions.

Although Isaiah Berlin and Robert Frost shouted Akhmatova’s praises abroad, she was expelled from the Writers’ Union in the USSR in 1949. In 1964, she was given the Italian Taormina Prize, and in 1965, Oxford University bestowed an honorary degree upon her. On March 5, 1966, she passed away due to heart failure.

2) Main Works:

Requiem:

One prose passage that serves as the introduction to the collection of poems briefly describes how she and many other ladies waited outside Leningrad Prison for months in hopes of catching a glimpse of dads, brothers, or sons who had been abducted by the NKVD in Soviet Russia. Following the introduction, Requiem’s main collection of poems consists of 10 brief, numbered poems, with the first one reflecting on Akhmatova’s third husband Nikolay Punin and other close friends being detained. The first nine main poems discuss her anguish and sadness after her son Lev Gumilev was detained by the NKVD in 1938.

The final group of poems are left to explore the voices of those who endured losses during this period of horror, whereas the first set of poems are about her personal life. The main character in the poems progresses through many stages of agony. A few of the emotions that persist throughout the entire cycle include mute anguish, rising disbelief, rationalization, deep loss, and steely resolution. Ahkmatova universalizes her personal suffering and makes an effort to connect with other people who have gone through similar tragedies by writing occasionally in the first person and occasionally in the third person.

Evening:

Her debut poetry collection, Evening, helped launch her writing career by garnering praise from numerous influential literary critics of the day. She was a pioneer of the Acmeism movement, which emphasized strict form and directness of speech, and a master at capturing genuine emotion in her depictions of commonplace events. Her writings range from brief pieces of lyric love poetry to lengthier cycles that are more sophisticated, including Requiem, which is a terrible portrayal of the fear under Stalin. Her poems provided the Russian people a voice throughout the harsh censorship and persecution.

Rosary:

The “Rosary’s” poems are elegant and a tad arrogant. They float across the surface of the soul, shimmering with subtle tones and erratic kinks. The delicate pleasure of Akhmatov’s poetry is created by light tonic meters, surprise sharpness of the finale, and astonishing simplicity of sentences. These poems discuss beautiful inconsistencies, aesthetic joys, and regrets. The poet’s imagination is captured by the world of things with its distinct shapes, vibrant hues, and plastic and dynamic diversity.

Because the external and internal are so interwoven, the landscape frequently reflects the mental condition. Pain and misery have not yet established the reasons behind unrequited love, longing, and expectation. The poet portrays the plastic characteristics of emotion, including its gestures and posture. Narcissism is evident in this image. There is manner but no style in the Rosary, only a sharp expressiveness of the word that has already been discovered.

White Flock:

Her poems provided the Russian people a voice throughout the harsh censorship and persecution. In 1917, Anna Akhmatova released the collection “White Flock.” This book was later characterized by Joseph Brodsky as personal lyricism with a “tone of controlled dread.” It is still one of her most well-known publications today.

3) Main Themes in Her Writings:

Acmeism:

The young poets established Acmeism, a school that affirmed “beautiful clarity” (Kuzmin’s term) in place of the haziness and abstraction of Russian Symbolism, in part as a reaction to the manifestos of the Russian Futurists (1912–13). Acmeists codified their own poetry method, demanding tangible depiction, precise form, and a wide-ranging erudition (Classical antiquity, European history and culture, including art and religion).

The psychological sophistication of a young cosmopolitan lady, fully in possession of the nuanced verbal and gestural lexicon of modern intimacies and romance, was added by Akhmatova to them, giving them her own unique stamp of beautiful colloquialism. “You are drawing on my soul like a drink through a straw,” is one example of how a minor detail may elicit a wide range of feelings. Vecher (1912; “Evening”) and Chyotki (1914; “Rosary”), in particular the latter, were her first collections. They made her famous and established her lyrical voice as a representative of her generation’s experience. Her attraction was based on the aesthetic and emotional integrity of her poetry, as well as her lyrical identity, which was accentuated by her own stunning beauty. The main theme in Akhmatova’s writing is a frustrated, sorrowful, and distinctly feminine expression of love.

Patriotism and Religion:

She incorporated certain civic, patriotic, and religious aspects to her major theme during World War I and after the Revolution of 1917, but she didn’t compromise her personal intensity or artistic conscience. Her subsequent collections, Belaya staya (1917; “The White Flock”), Podorozhnik (1921; “Plantain”), and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1921), were especially notable for her artistic ability and her mastery of her craft.

Despite the fact that Akhmatova’s thematic range had expanded, communist cultural watchdogs continued to label her as “bourgeois and aristocratic” and criticize her poetry for its limited focus on love and God, even as her position as the leading poet of her generation was being recognized by important critics of the 1920s (such as Korney Chukovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum, who in 1922 described Akhmatova’s poetic persona as a blend of “a harlot and a nun”).

Her situation was made more challenging by her ex-husband Gumilyov’s execution in 1921 on false claims of involvement in an anti-Soviet conspiracy (the Tagantsev affair). She began a period of nearly total poetic silence and literary exclusion in 1923, and it wasn’t until 1940 that a collection of her poetry was published in the Soviet Union. Her studies of AlexanderPushkin were the extent of her public existence at this point.

4) Her Influence:

Ivana Marburger Themmen, an American composer, adapted Akhmatova’s words to music. Iris DeMent’s 2015 CD The Trackless Woods features music that was composed from Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin’s translations of some of her poems. The Woman in the Window by Alma De Groen, an Australian play, had its world premiere in 1998 at Fairfax Studio in Melbourne. Marjo Tal, a Dutch musician, adapted Akhmatova’s poetry to music. Inna Abramovna Zhvanetskaia, a Ukrainian composer, adapted a number of Akhmatova’s poetry to music.

To celebrate Anna Akhmatova’s 35th birthday in 1924, when she was at the height of her fame, a porcelain figurine of her wearing a grey dress with a red shawl was mass-produced. The figurine was repeatedly produced over the years for various events: once in 1954, on her 65th birthday, as she was fully recognized and praised once more after Stalin’s death, and once more in 1965 as a tribute to her being nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1965 as well as for her 75th birthday the year before.

The porcelain figurine wasn’t made again during her lifetime after this. The figurine was so well-liked that it was remade after her death, once for the year that she would have turned 85, in 1974, and once more for the year she turned 100, in 1988, making it one of the most wellliked and readily accessible porcelain figurines in the USSR. Akhmatova’s fame skyrocketed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1993, and her porcelain figurine was once more mass made, this time dressed in a simple grey outfit with a yellow shawl. Now, her statue may be found in practically every post-Soviet residence.

During Akhmatova’s lifetime, Requiem was published abroad (tamizdat), but not in her native nation, where the poem persisted in clandestine circulation. Simply being concealed gave it more relevance, gradually undermining the legitimacy of the authority. Requiem wasn’t released until the 1980s, a decade before Mikhail Gorbachev officially restored Akhmatova’s reputation and one year before the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Anna Akhmatova realized she would not be able to publish her lengthy poem Requiem when she started writing it somewhere in the 1930s. Stalin was tightly controlling the printing process and would not support a poem that dealt with the massive prison system known as the gulag that his administration had established throughout the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Akhmatova persisted in writing the poem, combining her memories of life under Stalin with her experience of waiting outside the prison with other desperate women in the hopes of catching a sight of a loved one or some good news.

Requiem still captivates me when I read it now because of its potent imagery, voice that captures the repercussions of dread in daily life, and small fragments of overheard conversation that are organized in separate vignettes to provide a potent effect of hopelessness and resiliency. The poem’s background and the challenges that were encountered in order for it to be published and come into my possession move me. I am most amazed by the unequal conflict between Akhmatova and the state, and by the fact that Akhmatova prevailed.