Anna Akhmatova

Born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in 1889 in Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, she adopted the surname Akhmatova from a Tatar great-grandmother because her father forbade her to disgrace the family name with poetry. At twenty-one she married the poet Nikolai Gumilev, and her first collection, Evening (1912), announced a voice of startling intimacy that broke from the symbolist haze then dominant in Russian verse. Rosary (1914) made her the most popular poet in Russia. The revolution destroyed everything: Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921, her son Lev was arrested repeatedly and spent fourteen years in the Gulag, and her work was banned under a 1946 decree by Andrei Zhdanov that called her "half nun, half harlot." For sixteen years she published almost nothing. She composed Requiem (1935-1940), her cycle of poems about the Terror, largely in secret, memorizing lines and burning manuscripts, while friends committed stanzas to memory to ensure the work survived. Poem Without a Hero (1940-1965), her modernist masterwork, occupied her for a quarter century of revision. The ban was partially lifted after Stalin's death, and in 1964 she traveled to Italy to receive the Etna-Taormina Prize, her first trip outside the Soviet Union in decades. She died in a sanatorium near Moscow on March 5, 1966, and thousands lined the streets of Leningrad for her funeral.