Anna Akhmatova - TV Tropes

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (23 June 1889 - 5 March 1966) known as her pen name Anna Akhmatova, was a Russian poet and translator. She was born in Odessa, Kherson Governate, in the Russian Empire (current day Ukraine) to a wealthy family, and grew up in the aristocratic suburbs of St. Petersburg. Initially, she studied to be a lawyer, but abandoned it to pursue a literary career, in which she chose the pseudonym Anna Akhmatova after her grandmothers surname. She also translated French, Italian, Armenian, and Korean poetry into Russian.

Her works ranged from lyrical poems to long, complex cycles, and her original style and female perspective separated her from her contemporaries. Akhmatova was one of the proponents of Acmeism, a school of poetry that reacted against vague symbols and put more emphasis on clarity of meaning. Most scholars separate her work into two eras: the early years (1912 - 1926) and the later years (1936 - 1966), which were divided by a dry spell where she wrote very little because the government suppressed all of her publications. Her work was condemned and censored under Stalinism, and her first husband Nikolay Gumilov, was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son and common law husband were imprisoned in the Gulag system. Despite this, she chose to stay in the Soviet Union until her death, a heart attack in 1966.

She wrote a lot of poetry and autobiographical memoirs over the course of her life, but she didn't become recognized as a Russian national poet until the 1980s, when all of her previously unpublished works were available to the public. She's now considered to be one of Russia's greatest poets, and her former apartment in St. Petersburg is now the Anna Akhmatova Museum.

Tropes

• Epic Poem: Requiem is a long elegy about the Great Purge.
• I Choose to Stay: Long wondered if she should have left the USSR, but chose to stay in her homeland.
• Propaganda Piece: "In Praise of Piece" was a cycle of poems she wrote sucking up to Stalin to try and get to her son released from prison. She later repudiated it.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov basically called her a whore and accused her of trying to poison the minds of Soviet youth with her writing.