Page "Anna Akhmatova" Paragraph 45

The murders had a powerful effect on the Russian intelligentsia, destroying the Acmeist poetry group, and placing a stigma on Akhmatova and her son Lev ( by Gumilev ).

Lev's later arrest in the purges and terrors of the 1930s was based on being his father's son.

From a new Marxist perspective, Akhmatova's poetry was deemed to represent an introspective " bourgeois aesthetic ", reflecting only trivial " female " preoccupations, not in keeping with these new revolutionary politics of the time.

She was roundly attacked by the state, by former supporters and friends, and seen to be an anachronism.

During what she termed " The Vegetarian Years ", Akhmatova's work was unofficially banned by a party resolution of 1925 and she found it hard to publish, though she didn't stop writing poetry.

She made acclaimed translations of works by Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi and pursued academic work on Pushkin and Dostoyevsky.

She worked as a critic and essayist, though many critics and readers both within and outside USSR concluded she had died.

She had little food and almost no money ; her son was denied access to study at academic institutions by dint of his parents ' alleged anti-state activities.

The impact of the nation-wide repression and purges had a decimating effect on her St Petersburg circle of friends, artists and intellectuals.

Her close friend and fellow poet Mandelstam was deported and then sentenced to a Gulag labour camp, where he would die.

Akhmatova narrowly escaped arrest, though her son Lev was imprisoned on numerous occasions by the Stalinist regime, accused of counter-revolutionary activity.

She would often queue for hours to deliver him food packages and plead on his behalf.

She describes standing outside a stone prison: