page_title: Anna Akhmatova
section_title: Silver Age
hierarchical_section_title: Anna Akhmatova / Silver Age
context_page_description: Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most nominations for the award the following year.
  Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem, her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work and her later work, divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities, and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate and remaining in the Soviet Union, acting as witness to the events around her. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism.
context_section_description: In 1912, the Guild of Poets published Akhmatova's book of verse Evening (Vecher) – the first of five in nine years. The small edition of 500 copies quickly sold out and she received around a dozen positive notices in the literary press. She exercised a strong selectivity for the pieces – including only 35 of the 200 poems she had written by the end of 1911. (She noted that Song of the Last Meeting, dated 29 September 1911, was her 200th poem). The book secured her reputation as a new and striking young writer, the poems Grey-eyed king, In the Forest, Over the Water and I don't need my legs anymore making her famous. She later wrote "These naïve poems by a frivolous girl for some reason were reprinted thirteen times [...] And they came out in several translations. The girl herself (as far as I recall) did not foresee such a fate for them and used to hide the issues of the journals in which they were first published under the sofa cushions".
  Akhmatova's second collection, The Rosary (or Beads – Chetki) appeared in March 1914 and firmly established her as one of the most popular and sought after poets of the day. Thousands of women composed poems "in honour of Akhmatova", mimicking her style and prompting Akhmatova to exclaim: "I taught our women how to speak, but don't know how to make them silent". Her aristocratic manners and artistic integrity won her the titles "Queen of the Neva" and "Soul of the Silver Age," as the period came to be known in the history of Russian poetry.  In Poem Without a Hero, the longest and one of the best known of her works, written many decades later, she would recall this as a blessed time of her life. 
  Akhmatova became close friends with Boris Pasternak (who, though married, proposed to her many times) and rumours began to circulate that she was having an affair with influential lyrical poet Alexander Blok. In July 1914, Akhmatova wrote "Frightening times are approaching/ Soon fresh graves will cover the land"; on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia, marking the start of  "the dark storm"  of world war, civil war, revolution and totalitarian repression for Russia. The Silver Age came to a close.
  Akhmatova had a relationship with the mosaic artist and poet Boris Anrep; many of her poems in the period are about him and he in turn created mosaics in which she is featured. She selected poems for her third collection, Belaya Staya (White Flock), in 1917,  a volume which poet and critic Joseph Brodsky later described as writing of personal lyricism tinged with the "note of controlled terror". She later came to be memorialised by his description of her as "the keening muse". Essayist John Bayley describes her writing at this time as "grim, spare and laconic".
  In February 1917, the revolution started in Petersburg (then named Petrograd); soldiers fired on marching protestors, and others mutinied. They looked to a past in which the future was "rotting". In a city without electricity or sewage service, with little water or food, they faced starvation and sickness. Akhmatova's friends died around her and others left in droves for safer havens in Europe and America, including Anrep, who escaped to England. She had the option to leave, and considered it for a time, but chose to stay and was proud of her decision to remain.:
  You are a traitor, and for a green island,	
  
  Have betrayed, yes, betrayed your native	
  
  Land, 	
  
  Abandoned all our songs and sacred	
  
  Icons,	
  
  And the pine tree over a quiet lake.
  — Green Island, trans. Jane Kenyon
  Akhmatova wrote of her own temptation to leave:
  A voice came to me. It called out comfortingly.	
  
  It said, "Come here,	
  
  Leave your deaf and sinful land,	
  
  Leave Russia forever,	 	
  
  I will wash the blood from your hands,	
  
  Root out the black shame from your heart,		
  
  [...] calmly and indifferently,	
  
  I covered my ears with my hands,	
  
  So that my sorrowing spirit 	
  
  Would not be stained by those shameful words.
  — When in suicidal anguish, trans. Jane Kenyon
  At the height of Akhmatova's fame, in 1918, she divorced her husband and that same year, though many of her friend
caption: Anna Akhmatova in 1914
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