“The purest sample of purest fascination”

Aleksandr Pushkin

Areader, who is somewhat versed in Russian classical poetry, will not find it hard to name this lady. Quite right, it is Anna Akhmatova. She stands on equal footing among male poet luminaries. Her muse, though, particularly expresses women’s roles and fates. A passionate lover, loyal spouse, solicitous and suffering mother – all these touching-heroic sides of the female soul were conveyed by Akhmatova’s universal talent.
Akhmatova entered Russia’s literary world as a refined chamber-like diva. Her poems were recited and sung in the Bohemian circles of St. Petersburg, her profile was painted by Amedeo Modigliani, and Aleksandr Blok in person blessed her for service to poetry.
Speaking in general terms, Akhmatova’s list of lovers is staggering. In different periods, most varied but invariably the most interesting personalities of the epoch lay at her feet. Her female charm competed only with her captivating verse.
Anna Akhmatova’s very first poetry collections Evening and Rosary brought her the fame of Nordic Sappho. She literally created an encyclopedia of women’s loving feeling and had every right to immortalize herself in this ironical and aphoristic distich:

I taught the women how to speak...
But, oh, Lord, how can I silence them!

When the October Revolution broke out, almost all of the Russian writers fled abroad: Ivan Bunin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksandr Kuprin, Aleksey Tolstoy – were some who couldn’t hold out against the harsh revolutionary reality. The thin-fingered humanists, who called for the liberation of the “God-bearing people” from tsarist tyranny and were, for the first time, confronted by the people, were horrified. Ruin, plunder, anarchy, war of all against all – read Aleksey Tolstoy’s immortal trilogy The Road to Calvary – and you will find already in the title of the book this confusion of the Russian intelligentsia in the face of the real rather than bookish truth about the October days.
Considering her early poetic preferences, Akhmatova should have been among the first to leave the rebellious country among the first. The lyrical space of her poems was trampled completely. The Russian workers’ and peasants’ idols preferred to speak in the voice of “the agitator and rabble-rouser” said Mayakovsky. “My poetry is no longer needed here, and, perhaps, I myself am no longer needed,” the finest and most lyrical poet Sergey Yesenin dolefully stated.
Akhmatova remained, however. She explained her decision in another poetical masterpiece:

I heard a voice. It promised solace.
“Come here,” it seemed to softly call,
“Leave Russia, sinning, lost and graceless,
Leave your land, pray, for good and all.
I’ll cleanse your hands of blood that stains you,
And from your heart draw out black shame,
The hurts of failure, wrongs that pain you
I’ll veil with yet another name.”
With even, calm deliberation
I raised my hands to stop my ears,
Lest that ignoble invitation
Defile a spirit lost in tears.

There is an extreme and radical formula of patriotic feeling that reads, “It might be a bad country, but it’s my country.” It is exactly this maxim that was articulated in the above poem. To affirm that it cost Anna Akhmatova great courage is tantamount to saying nothing.
The subsequent decades of her life became her own Calvary. The shooting of her husband, two subsequent arrests of her son and her own victimization by the orthodox communist press muffled Akhmatova’s poetic voice for 15 years to come. Between 1924 and 1939, her name was put away in a coffin of silence.
The World War II broke out. Russia’s survival as nation was put into question. And Anna Akhmatova again lived up to a civic and patriotic height:

Only Narva gates were behind us,
Only death was facing us...
Soviet soldiers were pushing forward
Right into Bertas’ yellow muzzles.
You’ll be honored in books entitled
“Own Life Sacrificed for His Friends,”
Unpretentious guys like Vankas,
Vaskas, Alyoshkas, Grishkas –
Grandsons, little brothers and sons!

“Grandsons, little brothers and sons...” were new addresses and characters of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry. Yesterday’s patrician turns into a fighter and people’s tribune. It would seem that she had regained her place on the domestic Parnassus once and forever. Alas. The war was over, and she became untouchable again. Remaining a Russian, Anna Akhmatova stubbornly failed to fit the image of a Soviet poetess. We affirm that throughout her whole life she has written no single opportunist or hypocritical line.
Anna Akhmatova’s fragile female nature concealed a steel pivot of such strength that any man would envy it. The political and party beau monde did not pardon such challenges. The ill-famed Ruling of the Orgburo of the CC of the All-Union CP (B) “On the Reviews Zvezda and Leningrad” of 1946 banned Anna Akhmatova from literature for the next 20 years. “Is she a nun or a harlot?” In this way the red-cheeked Soviet political commissars bitingly criticized her (by the way, they very accurately deliniated the poles of Akhmatova’s early muse!).
Akhmatova did not regain the right to be published until the years of Khrushchev’s “thaw.” It could seem she had every reason to lead the chorus of denouncers of Stalin’s regime that was destroying her not only as a poetess but also as a human being, woman and mother for half a century. But even then Akhmatova resisted the temptation. Only once she wrote about her motherly Calvary, but she did it in such a way that her personal tragedy resounded as the tragedy of all Russian women:

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected –
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
The cold of an icon was on your lips,a death-cold sweat
On your brow – I will never forget this;I will gather
To wail with the wivesof the murdered streltsy
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.

It is even hard to imagine that these lines were written by the poetess whose pre-revolutionary muse exhaled only a sensual-erotic aroma. The fact remains, however: the Bohemian Gray-Eyed King and ascetic Requiem belonged to the same pen. Only Pushkin could accomplish something like that in Russian poetry. It is therefore not mere chance that he was Anna Akhmatova’s constant and absolute idol. Maybe the reader will smile, yet there is documentary and memoir evidence that Akhmatova was not indifferent to him... as a woman. A close and long-time friend of hers, Lidiya Ginzburg, put it candidly and precisely: “She simply was jealous of him!”
Fame and recognition came to Akhmatova only in her declining years. Her countrymen who suddenly regained their senses, began compiling dissertations about her. She began to be translated into many foreign languages. In 1964, Anna Akhmatova was awarded the Etna-Taormina International Prize for Poetry, and one year later, Englishmen conferred the title of honorary doctor of literature of Oxford University on her.
And in conclusion, here are some heretical ideas of Boris Zaitsev, the patriarch of Russian literature abroad. In the same year 1964 he wrote to Akhmatova:
“One day, Dostoyevsky told young Dmitry Merezhkovsky, ‘Young man, to write, you need to suffer.’ Had Dostoevsky not been at the death pillar and in ‘the Dead House,’ would he have managed to become a complete Dostoevsky?
“You are born with the gift of poetry. At first, you thoughtlessly squandered it, yet fate decreed otherwise:

The Goddess of sadness offered
A chalice with dark poison.

“Thus, ‘the joyful sinner’ grew from the young Elegant Lady into the first poetess of the native Land, with a strong and mature voice that resounded sadly. She became a sort of herald of the defenseless and suffering, a formidable denouncer of ferocity and evil.”
Nothing can be added to what has been cited. Indeed, only those reach the stars whose road is strewn with thorns. Anna Akhmatova is among them.