Memory Of Sun. A Poem By Anna Akhmatova

Описание: Anna Akhmatova is the pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (1889 - 1966), a Russian poet, credited as one of the most acclaimed poets of the 20th century. Her style, characterized by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries and with her strong female voice, she struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Besides poetry, she wrote prose that includes memoirs, autobiographical pieces, and literary scholarship on Russian writers besides translations of Italian, French, Armenian, and Korean poetry. In her lifetime, Akhmatova experienced both pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia. Even under the repressive regime, despite many of her friends and contemporaries choosing to emigrate, she refused to leave the Soviet Union. The entire trajectory of her life and work changed course because of this one decision. Like many of her brilliant contemporaries such as Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities. She faced immense difficulties living in the shadow of Stalinism and meticulously wrote about it. Her writing can be broadly said to fall into two periods—the early works (1912–25) and the later works (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory.


Primary sources of information about Akhmatova's life are relatively scant, as war, revolution and the Soviet regime caused much of the written record to be destroyed. For long periods, she was in official disfavour and many of those who were close to her died in the aftermath of the revolution. Akhmatova's first husband, the famous poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son Lev Gumilyov and her common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, where Punin died. Although she lived a long life, Akhmatova’s life was darkened disproportionately by many such calamitous moments. Isaiah Berlin, who visited Akhmatova in her Leningrad apartment in November 1945 while serving in Russia as first secretary of the British embassy, is said to have described her as a “tragic queen”. Berlin’s assessment has echoed through generations of readers who understand Akhmatova—her person, poetry, and, more nebulously, her poetic persona as the iconic representation of noble beauty and catastrophic predicament.

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