Page "Anna Akhmatova" Paragraph 69

Akhmatova was widely honoured in USSR and the West.

In 1962 she was visited by Robert Frost ; Isaiah Berlin tried to visit her again, but she refused him, worried that her son might be re-arrested due to family association with the ideologically suspect western philosopher.

She inspired and advised a large circle of key young Soviet writers.

Her dacha in Komarovo was frequented by such poets as Yevgeny Rein and Joseph Brodsky, whom she mentored.

Brodsky, arrested in 1963 and interned for social parasitism, would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature ( 1987 ) and become Poet Laureate ( 1991 ) as an exile in the US.

As one of the last remaining major poets of the Silver Age, she was newly acclaimed by the Soviet authorities as a fine and loyal representative of their country and permitted to travel.

At the same time, by virtue of works such as Requiem, Akhmatova was being hailed at home and abroad as an unofficial leader of the dissident movement, and reinforcing this image herself.

She was becoming representative of both the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, more popular in the 1960s than she had ever been before the revolution, this reputation only continuing to grow after her death.

For her 75th birthday in 1964, new collections of her verse were published.