Volume 53, Number 11 · June 22, 2006
Anna the Great
By Orlando Figes
Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova
by Elaine Feinstein
Knopf, 331 pp., $27.50
Of all the Russian poets of the twentieth century, none voiced the suffering of their people more directly than Anna Akhmatova. The drama of her life is an intimate reflection of her country's tragic history, the passion of her poetry drawn from both. Born in 1889, Akhmatova was already at the height of her success just before the outbreak of World War I, an extraordinary poetic talent and celebrated beauty in the bohemian world of imperial St. Petersburg. But then her life was caught up in the storm of the Russian Revolution and the civil war, the mass terror of the 1930s, the siege of Leningrad from 1941–1944, and the repressions of the postwar years, when she was singled out for particular attack by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's chief of ideology. All of this Akhmatova endured with the stoicism that is perhaps the main hallmark of the Russian people in the twentieth century. As Elaine Feinstein writes in the preface to her moving new biography, Akhmatova 'needed exceptional courage in the quarter of a century when she was not allowed to publish, especially in the years when her son and her third husband were held in the Gulag.'
Review, 4062 words
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