In 1940, Akhmatova started her Poem without a Hero, finishing a first draft in Tashkent, but working on " The Poem " for twenty years and considering it to be the major work of her life, dedicating it to " the memory of its first audience – my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad during the siege ".

Akhmatova modelled its principles of writing with clarity, simplicity, and disciplined form.

Akhmatova wrote, " No one in my large family wrote poetry.

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 ).

* Harrington, Alexandra ( 2006 ) The poetry of Anna Akhmatova: living in different mirrors.

Meetings with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in November 1945 and January 1946 had a powerful effect on both of them, and serious repercussions for Akhmatova ( who immortalised the meetings in her poetry ).

" He was no more a member of the group than he had been of the Symbolists, but he was personally associated with a number of them ; in the years 1910-12 he lived in the famous apartment ( called the Tower ) of Vyacheslav Ivanov, who was another formative influence on the Acmeists, and he was a friend of Anna Akhmatova, for whose first book of poetry, Vecher, he wrote a flattering preface.

She reviewed a wide range of books, but focused especially on contemporary poetry ( for instance, in perceptive reviews of Anna Akhmatova and Pound's Pisan Cantos ).

His influence on the acmeist school of Russian poetry ( Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Mandelshtam ) was paramount.

Other 2007 premieres included Symphony No. 2 " Requiem for a Poet " by Hannover's NDR Radio Philharmonic, as well as A Russian Requiem ( on Russian Orthodox sacred texts and poetry by Alexander Pushkin, Gavrila Derzhavin, Mikhail Lermontov, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Viktor Sosnora and Irina Ratushinskaya ) by the Bremen Philharmonic with the Latvian National Choir and the Estonian Opera Boys Choir.

His narrative poem Fiza was read in 1913 in author ’ s absence in St. Petersburg and gave its name to the Society of Poets, which included Anna Akhmatova, her husband Nikolay Gumilyov, and Osip Mandelstam and became the centre of Acmeism, a new trend in Russian poetry.

Akhmatova was born at Bolshoy Fontan, near the Black Sea port of Odessa.

Akhmatova wrote that by 1935 every time she went to see someone off at the train station as they went into exile, she'd find herself greeting friends at every step as so many of St Petersburg's intellectual and cultural figures would be leaving on the same train.

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.

Today her work may be explored at the Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum in St Petersburg.

* Anna Akhmatova at RT Russiapedia

She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English ( published as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1985 ), and she championed translation as an important art at which every poet should try her hand.

He described their relationship as a warm friendship, but for Akhmatova it was intensely important and inspired over 30 poems, which trace the passage of their affair from her early hopes and dreams to her bitter disappointment at their parting.

In 1916 he wrote a verse play, Gondla, which was published the following year ; set in ninth-century Iceland, torn between its native paganism and Irish Christianity, it is also clearly autobiographical, Gumilev putting much of himself into the hero Gondla ( an Irishman chosen as king but rejected by the jarls, he kills himself to ensure the triumph of Christianity ) and basing Gondla's wild bride Lera on Gumilev's wife Akhmatova.

There he published several new collections, Tabernacle and Bonfire, and finally divorced Akhmatova ( August 5, 1918 ), whom he had left for another woman several years prior.

' He spent a good deal of time with Akhmatova -- who in those years was given a very wide berth by most of the people who knew her.

Akhmatova's father did not want to see any verses printed under his " respectable " name, so she chose to adopt her grandmother's distinctly Tatar surname ' Akhmatova ' as a pen name.

Anna Akhmatova with her husband Nikolay Gumilev and son, Lev Gumilev, 1913

Akhmatova had " her first taste of fame ", becoming renowned, not so much for her beauty, as her intense magnetism and allure, attracting the fascinated attention of a great many men, including the great and the good.

She later began an affair with the celebrated Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, whose wife, Nadezhda, declared later, in her autobiography that she came to forgive Akhmatova for it in time.

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 ".

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.

At the height of Akhmatova's fame, in 1918, she divorced her husband and that same year, though many of her friends considered it a mistake, Akhmatova married prominent Assyriologist and poet Vladimir Shilejko.

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

She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove.

Bayley suggests that her period of pro-Stalinist work may also have saved her own life ; notably however, Akhmatova never acknowledged these pieces in her official corpus.

With the press still heavily controlled and censored under Nikita Khrushchev, a translation by Akhmatova was praised in a public review in 1955, and her own poems began to re-appear in 1956.

Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel to Sicily and England, in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University, accompanied by her lifelong friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya.

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (; ; – March 5, 1966 ), better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova (, ), was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.

Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaya, 1914

Anna Akhmatova c. 1925, photograph by Paul Luknitsky

( 1997 ) Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years Journal article by Roberta Reeder ; New England Review, Vol.

*" Anna Akhmatova " by John Simon

* Film About Anna Akhmatova by Helga Landauer and Anatoly Naiman ( Russian and English )

There she was visited by poets and writers, such as Anna Akhmatova, Ilia Ehrenburg, and Osip Mandelstam, dancers Bronislava Nijinska and Elsa Kruger, as well as many artists Alexander Bogomazov, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, and students, such as Grigori Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevich, and Aleksei Kapler among many others.

The literary traditions of Tsarskoye Selo were continued in the 20th century by such notable poets as Anna Akhmatova and Innokenty Annensky.

The work of Anna Akhmatova was also condemned by the regime, although she notably refused the opportunity to escape to the West.

Baumann was also an accomplished translator, having translated numerous books from Russian to German, including works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova and others.

As his invaluable diaries attest, Chukovsky used his popularity to help the authors persecuted by the regime including Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexander Galich and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

In Russia, he is associated with the Silver Age of Russian Poetry as the addressee of many beautiful poems by Anna Akhmatova, including her Tale of the Black Ring.

His mosaic Compassion ( 1952 ) is a portrait of Akhmatova, surrounded by the horrors of war.