From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhma
tova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Paster
nak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter o
f life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, we
re executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's fir
st collection, "Evening", appeared in 1912.
"Rosary" (1914) made her a househ
old name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authoritie
s, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now m
ost celebrated in the West for "Poem Without A Hero and Requiem", a sequence mou
rning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside
Russia) in 1963.
