Few artists or politicians have served as the voice of their country as completely as Anna Akhmatova did for Russia and the Soviet Union through the greater part of the 20th Century. Akhmatova was born in Czarist Russia in 1889 and lived through the Russian Revolution, the evolution of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist Era, World War II and the period before Perestroika. Akhmatova died in 1966 having been one of the three great Russian poets of the century. Her first collection of poetry appeared in Russia in 1912 and she wrote poetry of significance throughout her entire life. Her personal history is profoundly interwoven with the life of Russia and the Soviet Union throughout the 20th Century. Her first husband, Gumilov, was executed as a counter-revolutionary in 1921. Both her son and her lover, Punin, were arrested and both were sent to Stalinist labor camps. She herself, for all her poetic achievement, was under close scrutiny by forces of the Soviet Union for virtually all of her adult life.

Akhmatova lived a life of intense emotional and personal complexity while she developed poetry both of her country and of her gender. Her early poetry includes sophisticated love poems, self-reflective assessments and cultural and political interest. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who survived a period of enormous historical and social change. Her poetry reveals her intelligence, sensibility and womanliness. She speaks for herself and for women in many ways. In one poem from 1922, Lot’s Wife, she writes of the woman turned to a pillar of salt for looking back at the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Where traditional theology condemns Lot’s wife, Akhmatova the woman sees the woman and her natural curiosity and pathos. She writes in D.M Thomas’s translation:

Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
Of pain shot through them were instantly blind;
Her body turned into transparent salt,
And her swift legs were rooted to the ground.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she never will be lost,
She who gave up her life to steal one glance.

Along with her friends, Osip, Mandelstam and his wife Nadia, Akhmatova embodied the life of the word and poetry, which as profound significance in Russian culture. The oppressiveness of the Soviet Era and the tyranny of Stalinism were felt by her very keenly. She once said: “I would have written prose if I had not lived in such a terrible time.”

While her early work was celebrated, like so many artists she was censored and put under surveillance in the Stalinist Era. For many years, her most important poetry was not allowed to be printed, or even acknowledged in her native land. Perhaps her most memorably work is the great sequence, Requiem (1938-1957). When Akhmatova’s son had been arrested and imprisoned in what was known as the “Yezhov Terror” in 1938, Akhmatova stood in line with hundreds of others outside the prison, day after day, awaiting a message about her son, which did not come. In Requiem, Akhmatova both presents and embodies the pathos, compassion and courage of the single person within a regime of oppression and terror. Her emotional trial is her own life and yet, it is also the life of all those who stood with her and all those who stand in similar circumstances, physically impotent, but spiritually central to the dark events of our time.

Requiem was so dangerous in the Stalinist Era that it could not be written down. To be caught with a page of this poem would be to surrender oneself to arrest, deportation and perhaps death. Akhmatova and her closest friends made a pact to remember the poem until it could be written down. Requiem was in fact, not published in the Soviet Union or Russia until after her death in 1989. Akhmatova prefaces the sequence with her personal memory of what inspired her to create the poem. In a prose paragraph that she dates 1 April 1957, Leningrad, she explains:

“In the fearful years of the Yezhov Terror, I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘can you describe this?’ and I said: ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.”

Akhmatova embodies the centrality of language and art in the human condition.  Her poetry derives from her own life and reflections on it, much as so much of poetry has done since Wordsworth, but she knows and those she encounters know that the poet’s work is not solitary but part of a world of history and society. Through Akhmatova we come to understand the value of a single woman’s life and the importance of a single true word. As she knows or learned, honesty about her own life, however difficult the circumstances, will confirm the importance of other lives. Akhmatova remains a woman in her physical and emotional world throughout her life, but she also becomes the voice of her people. Akhmatova allows us to see how the life of a sole human being can be the touchstone of meaning for her language and her society and in some sense, for the whole of human nature.