"Anna of All the Russias": The voice of Russian people's suffering

"Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova"
by Elaine Feinstein
Knopf, 331 pp., $27.50

Anna Akhmatova is one of the most revered poets in Russia, yet she is regrettably little known, and much less read, in the West.

Elaine Feinstein's splendid new biography, "Anna of All the Russias," will go a long way toward rectifying this situation by introducing to readers the woman Marina Tsvetaeva, Russia's other extraordinary female poet, called (with unmistakable reference to tsarist grandeur) "Anna of all the Russias."

Born Anna Gorenko in 1889 in a small town outside Odessa on the Black Sea, she adopted the pen name Akhmatova from a distant princely ancestor of her mother, in response to her father's comment that writing poetry would bring shame on the family.

While still a girl, the family moved to Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg. By 11 she had begun writing poems, and when she once found a pin in the shape of a lyre, her governess told her she was destined to become a poet.

From that early age until well into her 60s she displayed an exotic beauty that exerted a powerful hold over scores of men. In 1910, Akhmatova married the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, less out of love than a wish to escape her family for the seductive life of the capital.

Her first book of poems, "Evening," was published in 1912. It was an enormous success and brought Akhmatova instant fame. That same year she gave birth to her only child, a son named Lev. The story of their troubled relationship, chronicled by Feinstein with sensitivity and fairness, makes for painful reading.

Lev believed her lovers and poetry came before him, and Akhmatova nursed a sense of guilt over her shortcomings as a mother that often found expression in her poems: "The lot of a mother is a bright torture./I was not worthy of it."

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought an end to the carefree bohemian world of salons and cabarets that had been Akhmatova's home.

For the next four years she wrote almost nothing. She fell ill with tuberculosis and survived on handouts of rice. Akhmatova typically gave most of this away, evidence of what Feinstein calls the "reckless generosity" that was so much of her character.

In 1921, Gumilyov was arrested by the secret police and executed. By then their marriage had died and Akhmatova had begun a series of wounding relationships with men who found it impossible to love her without humiliating her. The Soviet regime turned against Akhmatova as well. It had no need of her love poems and prohibited Akhmatova from publishing.

While waiting with a group of wives and mothers outside a prison where Lev was being held in the 1930s, a woman approached Akhmatova and asked in a whisper: "Can you describe this?"

She did in her epic poetic cycle "Requiem," a testament to the horrors of Stalin's Great Terror that for years she kept in her head, too fearful to set it down on paper. "Requiem" marked Akhmatova's transformation from a poet of intimate personal emotions to "the voice of a whole people's suffering."

Only with Khrushchev's Thaw in the 1950s was the dark shadow lifted. Akhmatova was finally permitted to publish again and became the object of adulation at home and abroad up until her death in 1966.

What had sustained Akhmatova throughout her life was the hope that her poetry would live on:

"And learning my unhappy story/Let them smile at it, however slyly./Since I can't have love, and I have no peace,/Allow me a bitter glory."

With her vivid, immensely readable biography, Elaine Feinstein gives us Akhmatova in all her profound, complicated and deeply moving glory.

Douglas Smith is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington's Jackson School.