Anna Akhmatova, Russian Poet

This is the story of a famous Russian woman and author,, Anna Akhmatova. Here she is in 1924 at age 35, looking weary and seductive. By this time, Anna (neé Anna Andreyevna) had lived through fin-de-siecle Europe, the artsy cabaret scene in St Petersburg, the First World War, and the Communist Revolution.

Well might she be weary with all of that. She was a celebrated poet, taking on different lovers and husbands, and her writing reflected her times and her relationships. A sample line from one of her verses reads: “You will hear thunder and remember me/ and think:she wanted storms. The rim/ of the sky will be the color of hard crimson,/ and your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”.

But the decades after 1924 brought a new era of disaster to both Russia and to Anna Akhmatova. These were the Stalinist years, the years of the great purges and famines, and the years of the Second World War. Anna’s son was thrown into prison merely for being connected to someone under suspicion by the state. The USSR banned her poetry (much of it was only available in the 1980s), and for a time the war caused her to leave Leningrad for Central Asia.

Anna Akhmatova was known for her refusal to emigrate from Russia — she writes about how her friends had either died or left the country. In her writing, she recognized herself as someone who testified to the experiences of Russians who lived through these difficult years.

One of her greatest works, _Rekviem_/_Requiem_, was composed in secret during the Stalinist era, and gives a haunting testimony to the countless deaths suffered because of that dictator. The poem was recited to Anna’s closest friends who committed it to memory, because writing it down would have been too dangerous. Eventually in 1989 it was published, and is striking in the way it blends Russian folk song elements, popular mourning rituals, the Ancient Greek tradition of odes, and even the Christian Gospels.

Wikipedia states that porcelain figures of Anna Akhmatova exist in “almost every post-Soviet home”. It makes sense that she would be such a relatable character, since she was a witness and muse of so much of the modern Russian era.