Anna Akhmatova In Love & Revolution Paperback Book

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa in 1889. Christened as Anna Gorenko, she adopted her penname from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo and lived most of her life in Saint Petersburg, the city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. Together they became associated with the literary movement know as Acmeism. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter revolutionary activities. Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russias leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic Warshe found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union in the wake of the notorious speech by the Communist Party cultural boss Andrey Zhdanov, in which he described her as a cross between a nun and a whore. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a... | Anna Akhmatova In Love & Revolution Paperback Book