Biography

ANNA AKHMATOVA was born Anna Gorenko near Odessa on June 11, 1889. She grew up in St. Petersburg, where she mostly lived (except for brief absences before World War I in Western Europe and during part of World War II in Tashkent) until her death on March 5, 1966, the 13th anniversary of Stalin’s death.

She adopted the name “Akhmatova” from her mother’s family because her father did not wish to have his name “disgraced by poetry.” Throughout her career, she had a mythopoetic sense of acting, an understanding that enabled her to counter the myth of Stalin with a performance of Cassandra-like resistance. In “Requiem” (1935-1940) that responded to the Great Terror, she created a mythopoesis of witness: “your names were scattered,” she says of the millions who speak through her voice, but “for each of you I weave protections, a great covering/from the destitute, poor words I overheard.”

Akhmatova believed that her intimacy with Mandelshtam had not been dissolved by death. Her relationship to Tsvetaeva was distant, and to Pasternak more competitive; later in life, she told friends that he had twice asked to marry her. “Voronezh” was first published in 1940, but without the last quatrain for Mandelshtam; Akhmatova had visited him while he was living in exile in 1936.

Mythopoetic existence is never easy on companions, but as Joseph Brodsky says extraordinarily of Akhmatova, she was “someone who by her intonation alone transform[ed] you… Akhmatova transformed you into Homo sapiens with just the tone of her voice or the turn of her head… [you] became a human being in the Christian sense of the word, because you felt forgiven without asking, even when you did not know you’d been forgiven.”

TONY BRINKLEY teaches at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flat Bay Collective. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, The New Review of Literature, and Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002).