(1899-1966) is one of Russia’s greatest poets, justly renowned as a brilliant and unflinching witness to the Stalinist terror. Her first book of poetry, “Evening,” with its classical clarity and psychological insight, forms a bridge between the elegant mysticism of the Symbolists and the raw expression of the moderns. Her poems were an overnight sensation, and were widely imitated, particularly by women.

Told, “You have given a voice to Russian women,” she replied, “Yes. But now how do I get them to shut up?”

Her first five books of poetry were characterized by a combination of photographic realism and psychological insight, which gave them an intimate, cinematic quality.

The Communists proscribed her books as bourgeois, reactionary and decadent. Her husband, Nikolai Gumilev, also an important poet, was executed for “monarchism” by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Her son, Lev, was imprisoned for nearly twenty years for the “taint” of his father’s counter-revolutionary stance. He would only be freed after Stalin’s death.

For most of her public literary life, Akhmatova turned to scholarship and translation, writing her own poetry in secret. It would not be published in Russia until after her death.  

image: portrait of Akhmatova, Nathan Altman 1914, public domain in US.