Anna Akhmatova, the formidable poet who became the moral compass of Russia through decades of revolution and terror, has died aged 76 following a long illness, per vocal.media.
Born Anna Gorenko in 1889, she rose to fame before the 1917 Revolution as a leader of the Acmeist movement. Her early work was celebrated for its crystalline clarity, a sharp departure from the era’s penchant for mystical vagueness. However, the Bolshevik rise to power soon traded her literary acclaim for personal tragedy.
While many of her peers fled into exile, Akhmatova famously chose to remain. This loyalty came at a staggering cost. In 1921, her former husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed for “counterrevolutionary activities”.
Her son, Lev, was sent to the Gulags, and Akhmatova herself was officially silenced by the Stalinist regime in the 1930s. During these “years of silence,” she composed her masterpiece, Requiem. Too dangerous to commit to paper, the poem, a tribute to the women mourning outside Soviet prisons, was memorised by a circle of trusted friends who then burned the manuscripts to evade the secret police.
Following Stalin’s death, Akhmatova’s status underwent a slow rehabilitation. By the 1960s, her work returned to print, and she was finally permitted to travel abroad to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1965.
Her final major work, Poem Without a Hero, solidified her reputation as a historical witness who recorded the soul of St Petersburg not through political slogans, but through the enduring human spirit.
Akhmatova’s passing marks the end of an era. She leaves a legacy defined by her own famous words: “I was then with my people, there where my people, unfortunately, were.”
