Second husband of Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova's strange husband

In my monumental work “Anti-Akhmatova” (about which I already had the opportunity to write:

about the most mysterious Kataeva, see.
http://community.livejournal.com/antiakhmatova/3224.html ;
For some reason, she did not develop her success of 2007 - spring 2008 at the end of 2008 - beginning of 2009. Maybe she decided that she had completed her mission?)

So, in this essay, Tamara Kataeva, among other true and false statements, repeatedly states that Shileiko cohabited with Akhmatova, but never married her, she, Akhmatova, falsely counted him among herself husbands. Kataeva writes on this topic with expression, believing that she has made a significant discovery:

“Deleting Shileiko and Punin from the list of husbands - those whom the most conscientious researchers of Akhmatova’s life consider to be legal husbands - I do not at all rest on the fact that they were not “registered” - they were not in a registered marriage. All times and cultures have their own customs. However, Akhmatova did not have a marriage with these men that was recognized by society at that time.”

As we see, the generous Kataeva would even be ready to count Shileiko as Akhmatova’s husband, even though they, according to Kataeva, were not in a registered marriage, but here’s the problem - they were not in any other form of marriage, but got married under a bush. I quote Kataeva:

“A strange form of cohabitation with Vladimir Shileiko - ... his false assurance that he registered their relationship, “converted to Orthodoxy for Anya’s sake - an offering to her” (which, of course, did not happen, and only she talks about it), a real divorce with screams Akhmatova: “What name will they put in my passport now?!” … “…The book “Last Love” - Shileiko’s correspondence with Akhmatova and Vera Andreeva - puts everything in its place. I am opening… the marriage of Vladimir Kazimirovich Shileiko with Vera Andreeva…. Correspondence of the newlyweds themselves, poetry. Life together, child. All this happens in those years when Anna Akhmatova attributed to herself a second marriage, with him [Shileiko].
This is the story with Shileiko.” (p. 417 ff.).

In the photograph of Tamara Kataeva we see a pretty, somewhat squirrel-like and somewhat grinning face. She is a defectologist by profession. It would be nice if she, using her special knowledge, could improve her reading skills, because the way she does it, it’s impossible to read books. Even Trauberg doesn’t translate the way Kataeva reads.

For in this very book “Vladimir Shileiko. Last Love” (M., 2003, hereinafter VSPL), to which Kataeva refers, the following is indicated in black and white (and reflected in detail in Shileiko’s correspondence with his last wife Vera Andreeva):

1) that he met Andreeva in 1924, their regular correspondence began at the beginning of 1926, the wedding was on June 18, 1926.

Akhmatova was married to Shileiko in PREVIOUS years, since 1918. At the end of 1922, she left Shileiko for N.N. Punin, a Bolshevik esthete, and in the fall of 1924 she moved in with him. However, she came to Shileiko to feed his dog and keep an eye on his apartment during his trips to Moscow. She did not receive a divorce from Shileiko due to its complete uselessness - for Punin also did not want to divorce his wife for the sake of Akhmatova, and they all lived with the Punins as a whole regiment - Punin, his wife, his daughter and Akhmatova.
Thus, there can be no talk of any chronological coincidence between Shileiko’s marriage to Andreeva and his cohabitation with Akhmatova, about which Kataeva so vaguely writes. And, naturally, in no nightmare did it occur to Akhmatova after 1926 to describe herself as Shileiko’s wife and “attribute marriage to him during these years,” as Kataeva writes (in particular, on May 20, 1926, she detailed the history of her marriage to Lukntsky with Shileiko as completely completed and left in the past, VSPL. P.67), especially since -

2) in the letters of Shileiko, Vera Andreeva and her mother E. Andreeva, in Akhmatova’s conversations, it is stated in every detail how, in order to marry Andreeva, Shileiko had to obtain a formal divorce from a previous, equally clearly formalized marriage with Akhmatova.
- 05/31/1926 Shileiko writes to Akhmatova: “Good little elephant... If you enclose your consent to the divorce and the marriage certificate itself, taking it from Ilminsky, then this will facilitate and speed up the matter...” (VSPL: 69);
- To Luknitsky 06/1/1926 Akhmatova says that she “received... a summons from the people’s court for divorce” (Luknitsky’s diary, VSPL: 70)
- the court itself, which formally terminated the state of marriage between Sheel. and Akhm., took place in Moscow on June 8, 1926 (Luknitsky’s diary, VSPL: 71)
- in the same VSPL the decision of this very court was published (with the archive number given), and in that decision it is stated that “the marriage of the spouses Shileiko and Akhmatova-Shileiko took place in December 1918 in the city. Leningrad at the notary office of the Liteinaya part, which [the marriage] they asked to dissolve” (VSPL: 71). This is what the court did, formally divorcing the spouses and deciding “they should keep their premarital surnames - Shileiko for him, and Akhmatova for her” (ibid.). In fact, the court made an inaccuracy - which is not surprising, since the Moscow district court did not particularly follow the Leningrad cases; in fact, she married Shileiko Akhmatova as “Gorenko”, and not in the Liteinaya part, but in Vasileostrovskaya (VSPL: 73).

But that's not all. Georgy Ivanov in his memoirs also remembers the wedding of Shileiko with Akhmatova in 1918 in the Vladimir Cathedral (Georgy Ivanov. Collected Works. M.. 1994. Vol. 3 P. 377); Ivanov himself, out of curiosity, said that he made up a lot of things in his memoirs, and gullible literary scholars believed him, so Ivanov’s message in polite society would not pass for an argument. However, Vera Andreeva herself, in correspondence with Shileiko, discusses the need for him to obtain not only a civil, but also a church divorce in order to marry her (VSPL: 61); Thus, he really got married to Akhmatova.

So, Shileiko and Akhmatova registered their marriage in 1918 in front of the state, and at the same time they also entered into a church marriage, and all this is covered in detail in the VSPL. And now Kataeva, with reference to THIS SAME VSPL, declares that Shileiko’s marriage to Akhm. It was NOT registered or registered in any other “socially recognized” way.

One of the brightest, most original and talented poets of the Silver Age, Anna Gorenko, better known to her admirers as Akhmatova, lived a long life full of tragic events. This proud and at the same time fragile woman witnessed two revolutions and two world wars. Her soul was seared by repression and the death of her closest people. The biography of Anna Akhmatova is worthy of a novel or film adaptation, which was repeatedly undertaken by both her contemporaries and the later generation of playwrights, directors and writers.

Anna Gorenko was born in the summer of 1889 in the family of a hereditary nobleman and retired naval mechanical engineer Andrei Andreevich Gorenko and Inna Erazmovna Stogova, who belonged to the creative elite of Odessa. The girl was born in the southern part of the city, in a house located in the Bolshoi Fontan area. She turned out to be the third oldest of six children.

As soon as the baby was one year old, the parents moved to St. Petersburg, where the head of the family received the rank of collegiate assessor and became a State Control official for special assignments. The family settled in Tsarskoe Selo, with which all Akhmatova’s childhood memories are connected. The nanny took the girl for a walk to Tsarskoye Selo Park and other places that were still remembered. Children were taught social etiquette. Anya learned to read using the alphabet, and she learned French in early childhood, listening to the teacher teach it to older children.

The future poetess received her education at the Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium. Anna Akhmatova began writing poetry, according to her, at the age of 11. It is noteworthy that she discovered poetry not with the works of Alexander Pushkin and, whom she fell in love with a little later, but with the majestic odes of Gabriel Derzhavin and the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” which her mother recited.

Young Gorenko fell in love with St. Petersburg forever and considered it the main city of her life. She really missed its streets, parks and Neva when she had to leave with her mother for Evpatoria, and then for Kyiv. Her parents divorced when the girl turned 16.

She completed her penultimate grade at home, in Evpatoria, and finished her last grade at the Kyiv Fundukleevskaya gymnasium. After completing her studies, Gorenko becomes a student at the Higher Courses for Women, choosing the Faculty of Law. But if Latin and the history of law aroused a keen interest in her, then jurisprudence seemed boring to the point of yawning, so the girl continued her education in her beloved St. Petersburg, at N.P. Raev’s historical and literary women’s courses.

Poetry

No one in the Gorenko family studied poetry, “as far as the eye can see.” Only on the side of Inna Stogova’s mother was a distant relative, Anna Bunina, a translator and poetess. The father did not approve of his daughter’s passion for poetry and asked her not to disgrace his family name. Therefore, Anna Akhmatova never signed her poems with her real name. In her family tree, she found a Tatar great-grandmother who supposedly descended from the Horde Khan Akhmat, and thus turned into Akhmatova.

In her early youth, when the girl was studying at the Mariinsky Gymnasium, she met a talented young man, later the famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov. Both in Evpatoria and in Kyiv, the girl corresponded with him. In the spring of 1910, they got married in the St. Nicholas Church, which still stands today in the village of Nikolskaya Slobodka near Kiev. At that time, Gumilyov was already an accomplished poet, famous in literary circles.

The newlyweds went to Paris to celebrate their honeymoon. This was Akhmatova's first meeting with Europe. Upon his return, the husband introduced his talented wife into the literary and artistic circles of St. Petersburg, and she was immediately noticed. At first everyone was struck by her unusual, majestic beauty and regal posture. Dark-skinned, with a distinct hump on her nose, the “Horde” appearance of Anna Akhmatova captivated literary bohemia.

Soon, St. Petersburg writers find themselves captivated by the creativity of this original beauty. Anna Akhmatova wrote poems about love, and it was this great feeling that she sang all her life, during the crisis of symbolism. Young poets try themselves in other trends that have come into fashion - futurism and acmeism. Gumileva-Akhmatova gains fame as an Acmeist.

1912 becomes the year of a breakthrough in her biography. In this memorable year, not only was the poetess’s only son, Lev Gumilyov, born, but her first collection, entitled “Evening,” was also published in a small edition. In her declining years, a woman who has gone through all the hardships of the time in which she had to be born and create will call these first creations “the poor poems of an empty girl.” But then Akhmatova’s poems found their first admirers and brought her fame.

After 2 years, a second collection called “Rosary” was published. And this was already a real triumph. Fans and critics speak enthusiastically about her work, elevating her to the rank of the most fashionable poetess of her time. Akhmatova no longer needs her husband's protection. Her name sounds even louder than Gumilyov’s name. In the revolutionary year of 1917, Anna published her third book, “The White Flock.” It is published in an impressive circulation of 2 thousand copies. The couple separates in the turbulent year of 1918.

And in the summer of 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov was shot. Akhmatova was grieving the death of her son’s father and the man who introduced her to the world of poetry.

Since the mid-1920s, difficult times have come for the poetess. She is under close surveillance of the NKVD. It is not printed. Akhmatova’s poems are written “on the table.” Many of them were lost during travel. The last collection was published in 1924. “Provocative”, “decadent”, “anti-communist” poems - such a stigma on creativity cost Anna Andreevna dearly.

The new stage of her creativity is closely connected with soul-debilitating worries for her loved ones. First of all, for my son Lyovushka. In the late autumn of 1935, the first alarm bell rang for the woman: her second husband Nikolai Punin and son were arrested at the same time. They are released in a few days, but there will be no more peace in the life of the poetess. From now on, she will feel the ring of persecution around her tightening.

Three years later, the son was arrested. He was sentenced to 5 years in forced labor camps. In the same terrible year, the marriage of Anna Andreevna and Nikolai Punin ended. An exhausted mother carries parcels for her son to Kresty. During these same years, the famous “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova was published.

To make life easier for her son and get him out of the camps, the poetess, just before the war, in 1940, published the collection “From Six Books.” Here are collected old censored poems and new ones, “correct” from the point of view of the ruling ideology.

Anna Andreevna spent the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War in evacuation in Tashkent. Immediately after the victory she returned to the liberated and destroyed Leningrad. From there he soon moved to Moscow.

But the clouds that had barely parted overhead—the son was released from the camps—condensed again. In 1946, her work was destroyed at the next meeting of the Writers' Union, and in 1949, Lev Gumilyov was arrested again. This time he was sentenced to 10 years. The unfortunate woman is broken. She writes requests and letters of repentance to the Politburo, but no one hears her.

After leaving yet another prison, the relationship between mother and son remained tense for many years: Lev believed that his mother put creativity in first place, which she loved more than him. He moves away from her.

The black clouds over the head of this famous but deeply unhappy woman disperse only at the end of her life. In 1951, she was reinstated in the Writers' Union. Akhmatova's poems are published. In the mid-1960s, Anna Andreevna received a prestigious Italian prize and released a new collection, “The Running of Time.” The University of Oxford also awards a doctorate to the famous poetess.

At the end of his years, the world-famous poet and writer finally had his own home. The Leningrad Literary Fund gave her a modest wooden dacha in Komarovo. It was a tiny house that consisted of a veranda, a corridor and one room.

All the “furniture” is a hard bed with bricks as a leg, a table made from a door, a Modigliani drawing on the wall and an old icon that once belonged to the first husband.

Personal life

This royal woman had amazing power over men. In her youth, Anna was fantastically flexible. They say she could easily bend over backwards, her head touching the floor. Even the Mariinsky ballerinas were amazed at this incredible natural movement. She also had amazing eyes that changed color. Some said that Akhmatova’s eyes were gray, others claimed that they were green, and still others claimed that they were sky blue.

Nikolai Gumilyov fell in love with Anna Gorenko at first sight. But the girl was crazy about Vladimir Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a student who did not pay any attention to her. The young schoolgirl suffered and even tried to hang herself with a nail. Luckily, he slipped out of the clay wall.

It seems that the daughter inherited her mother’s failures. Marriage to any of the three official husbands did not bring happiness to the poetess. Anna Akhmatova's personal life was chaotic and somewhat disheveled. They cheated on her, she cheated. The first husband carried his love for Anna throughout his short life, but at the same time he had an illegitimate child, about whom everyone knew. In addition, Nikolai Gumilyov did not understand why his beloved wife, in his opinion, not a genius poetess at all, evokes such delight and even exaltation among young people. Anna Akhmatova's poems about love seemed too long and pompous to him.

In the end they broke up.

After the breakup, Anna Andreevna had no end to her fans. Count Valentin Zubov gave her armfuls of expensive roses and was in awe of her mere presence, but the beauty gave preference to Nikolai Nedobrovo. However, he was soon replaced by Boris Anrepa.

Her second marriage to Vladimir Shileiko exhausted Anna so much that she said: “Divorce... What a pleasant feeling this is!”

A year after the death of her first husband, she breaks up with her second. And six months later she gets married for the third time. Nikolai Punin is an art critic. But Anna Akhmatova’s personal life did not work out with him either.

Deputy People's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky Punin, who sheltered the homeless Akhmatova after a divorce, also did not make her happy. The new wife lived in an apartment with Punin’s ex-wife and his daughter, donating money to a common pot for food. Son Lev, who came from his grandmother, was placed in a cold corridor at night and felt like an orphan, always deprived of attention.

Anna Akhmatova’s personal life was supposed to change after a meeting with the pathologist Garshin, but just before the wedding, he allegedly dreamed of his late mother, who begged him not to take a witch into the house. The wedding was cancelled.

Death

The death of Anna Akhmatova on March 5, 1966 seems to have shocked everyone. Although she was already 76 years old at that time. And she had been ill for a long time and seriously. The poetess died in a sanatorium near Moscow in Domodedovo. On the eve of her death, she asked to bring her the New Testament, the texts of which she wanted to compare with the texts of the Qumran manuscripts.

They rushed to transport Akhmatova’s body from Moscow to Leningrad: the authorities did not want dissident unrest. She was buried at the Komarovskoye cemetery. Before their death, the son and mother were never able to reconcile: they did not communicate for several years.

At his mother’s grave, Lev Gumilyov laid out a stone wall with a window, which was supposed to symbolize the wall in the Crosses, where she carried messages to him. At first there was a wooden cross on the grave, as Anna Andreevna requested. But in 1969 a cross appeared.

The Anna Akhmatova Museum is located in St. Petersburg on Avtovskaya Street. Another one was opened in the Fountain House, where she lived for 30 years. Later, museums, memorial plaques and bas-reliefs appeared in Moscow, Tashkent, Kyiv, Odessa and many other cities where the muse lived.

Poetry

• 1912 – “Evening”
• 1914 – “Rosary”
• 1922 – “White Flock”
• 1921 – “Plantain”
• 1923 – “Anno Domini MCMXXI”
• 1940 – “From six books”
• 1943 – “Anna Akhmatova. Favorites"
• 1958 – “Anna Akhmatova. Poems"
• 1963 – “Requiem”
• 1965 – “The Running of Time”

Phaedra with a shawl, a witch, a sea princess...
Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova

At the beginning of the last century, not all men loved women poets. Some people didn’t like them, to put it more modestly, because they dared to write poetry. This violated all patriarchal traditions and bon ton attitudes. About one of these adherents of antiquity, Akhmatova even composed the following lines: “He spoke about summer and that it is absurd for a woman to be a poet...” That’s what some not very smart gentleman said, he was not even ashamed to blurt out such vulgarity in the face of a lady . Perhaps it was none other than the first husband of the author of “The Rosary” - Nikolai Gumilyov. We think so, because he was also indignant when he saw ladies with notebooks - those who claimed to be involved in high poetry. He made an exception only for Irina Odoevtseva, and only because she was supposedly his student, although only God knows what that meant.

And from Akhmatova, Gumilyov had nothing but grief: he had barely returned from the heroic fields of Abyssinia, and here - right on the platform - was his wife with a notebook. “Did you write?” – the poet asked doomedly. “I wrote, Kolya,” the trembling wife confessed. No rest for you, no drinking tea from the samovar - silently listen to your wife recite poetry out loud. Probably, he was ashamed in front of the railway employees that he could not rein in his wife. But it was not for nothing that Gumilyov was a gallant warrior - he clenched his teeth and remained silent.

But these were all rather fans of men's poetry. Detractors of verse bendings. And there were also detractors, so to speak, of the intimate curves of the body - these all strove to quietly reveal something indecent about the ladies. Ivan Bunin, for example, completely lost his grip. If you don’t love a woman, don’t love her, but why indiscriminately criticize her? So he took it and, without a bit of hesitation, wrote: “A love date with Akhmatova always ends in melancholy. No matter how you grab this lady, the board will remain a board.”

First of all, this is all fiction. We assert this boldly, because, according to contemporaries, Ivan Alekseevich did not have any such meetings with Akhmatova. And he didn’t grab anything there, no matter how much he wanted to.

And secondly, this generalization is generally strange and does not find confirmation in reality. Others didn't talk about anything like that. About shot down birds and witches - as much as your heart desires. About Phaedra with a shawl - if you please. They even compared it to a white night. And with a dog.

We ask you not to be horrified by such an unfavorable comparison - this was all invented by Anna Akhmatova’s second husband, Assyrologist Voldemar Shileiko. After the break with the author of “The White Pack,” he was, apparently, not himself and so compared the poet to a dog. So he said: they say, in my house there was a place for all the stray dogs, so there was one for Anya. He said nasty things, in general. But maybe he meant a bohemian hangout with the indecent name “Stray Dog”, who can tell... And then Akhmatova herself was not shy about saying nasty things about him (while she was still married to this master of cuneiform writing!). She probably deliberately composed the following poems: “Your mysterious love, like pain, makes me scream. I became yellow and fitful, I could barely drag my legs.” Fucking hell, we say with disgust, is it really possible to drive a woman through like this? And we won't be entirely right. It’s not for nothing that the Russian people say: two people fight, the third one doesn’t interfere. Let's not judge, then.

And then there was the art critic Nikolai Punin, the third husband. He was also a considerable size. He loved Akhmatova and called her “the sea princess.” He wasn’t going to think publicly about any “hidden twists” - but in vain, it’s always interesting. Although he admitted that Akhmatova somehow made his life “secondary.” And we are sad to hear this.

True, he was not afraid to get married, but, for example, professor-pathologist Vladimir Garshin for some reason refused at the last moment. He was probably afraid of the greatness of the author of “Requiem.” Akhmatova was very angry with him and in anger spoke out like this: “I haven’t forgotten such people yet, I forgot, imagine, forever.” It sounds unpleasant and somehow contemptuous. But here, what goes around comes around. Especially when it comes to women poets.

But all this happens in a brilliant, so to speak, succession of those who loved Akhmatova very much, and she loved them, depending on how.

But those who Akhmatova herself adored were two foreign people - and she was not the least bit shy about talking about it.

The first (in time) was composer Arthur Lurie. He, of course, emigrated somewhere from the Land of the Soviets in 1922 (and did the right thing), but this did not stop the author of “Poem without a Hero” from writing the following inspired lines: “And in a dream it seemed to me that I was writing a libretto for Arthur , and there’s no end to music┘” And our composer, once abroad, also wrote a lot: in particular, he composed music for the poem and, one might say, turned out to be one of its heroes. (Although the poem bears the mysterious title “Without a Hero,” there are so many heroes there that it’s simply impossible to talk about them all.)

The second beloved person was, as you know, Sir Isaiah Berlin, an Englishman, embassy employee and philosopher. He even appears in this very poem as a “guest from the future,” and it is to him that the exclamations “really” and “really” refer - by all appearances, he was an amazing gentleman. True, he did not manage to live up to the poetic myth, he himself admitted this. If Gumilev was an “arrogant swan”, Shileiko was a “dragon with a whip”, and Punin, according to contemporaries, was “the poet’s third matrimonial misfortune”, then Sir Isaiah is a catastrophe incarnate, according to Akhmatova, bringing her sorrows and “love infection." Sir Isaiah himself denied such a role as best he could and generally did not want to admit any forbidden love for the author of “The Flight of Time.”

And he did it stupidly. Myths are power. Especially those myths about the love of different goddesses. After all, they don’t favor unsuccessful admirers: if anything happens, they can hunt them down with dogs (not stray ones, but hunting dogs) and turn them into something like that. So the love of celestials is an insidious thing. It’s better to correspond to her, otherwise something might not work out.

Name: Anna Akhmatova

Age: 76 years old

Place of Birth: Odessa

A place of death: Domodedovo, Moscow region

Activity: Russian poetess, translator and literary critic

Family status: was divorced

Anna Akhmatova - biography

The name of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (nee Gorenko), a remarkable Russian poetess, was unknown to a wide circle of readers for a long time. And all this happened only because in her work she tried to tell the truth, to show reality as it really is. Her work is her fate, sinful and tragic. Therefore, the entire biography of this poetess is proof of the truth that she tried to convey to her people.

Biography of Anna Akhmatova's childhood

In Odessa, on June 11, 1889, a daughter, Anna, was born into the family of the hereditary nobleman Andrei Antonovich Gorenko. At that time, her father worked as an engineer-mechanic in the navy, and her mother Inna Stogova, whose family went back to the Horde Khan Akhmat, was also related to the poetess Anna Bunina. By the way, the poetess herself took her creative pseudonym – Akhmatova – from her ancestors.

At the age of 16, the girl’s fate changes dramatically. Her mother, after divorcing her husband, takes the girl and goes to live in Evpatoria. This event took place in 1805, but they did not live there for long and again moved again, but this time to Kyiv.

Anna Akhmatova - education

The future poetess was an inquisitive child, so her education began early. Even before school, she not only learned to read and write in Tolstoy’s ABC, but also French, listening to the teacher who came to teach the older children.

But classes at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium were difficult for Akhmatova, although the girl tried very hard. But over time, the problems with studying did recede.

Anna Akhmatova's career

The career of the future poetess began at the age of 11, when she herself wrote her first poetic creation. In the future, her creative destiny and biography are closely connected.

In 1911, she met Alexander Blok, who had a huge influence on the work of the great poetess. In the same year she published her poems. This first collection is published in St. Petersburg.

But fame came to her only in 1912 after her collection of poems “Evening” was published. The collection “Rosary Beads,” published in 1914, was also in great demand among readers.

The ups and downs in her poetic life ended in the 20s, when the review did not miss her poems, she was not published anywhere, and readers simply began to forget her name. At the same time, she begins work on Requiem. From 1935 to 1940 turned out to be the most terrible, tragic and miserable for the poetess.

In 1946, her poems were again not published, and the talented poetess herself was expelled from the Writers' Union for meeting with a foreign writer. And only in 1965 her collection “Running” was published. Akhmatova becomes read and famous. When visiting theaters, she even tries to meet the actors. This is how the meeting took place, which he remembered for the rest of his life. In 1965, she was presented with her first award and first title.

Anna Akhmatova - biography of personal life

She met her first husband, a poet, at the age of 14. For a very long time the young man tried to win the favor of the young poetess, but every time he received only a refusal to his proposal of marriage. In 1909, she gave her consent, thereby an important event took place in the biography of the great poetess. On April 25, 1910 they got married. But Nikolai Gumilyov, loving his wife, allowed himself to be unfaithful. In this marriage, a son, Lev, was born in 1912.

And Nna Akhmatova wrote about herself that she was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and the Eiffel Tower. She witnessed the change of eras - she survived two world wars, a revolution and the siege of Leningrad. Akhmatova wrote her first poem at the age of 11 - from then until the end of her life she did not stop writing poetry.

Literary name - Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova was born in 1889 near Odessa into the family of a hereditary nobleman, retired naval mechanical engineer Andrei Gorenko. The father was afraid that his daughter’s poetic hobbies would disgrace his family name, so at a young age the future poetess took a creative pseudonym - Akhmatova.

“They named me Anna in honor of my grandmother Anna Egorovna Motovilova. Her mother was a Chingizid, the Tatar princess Akhmatova, whose surname, not realizing that I was going to be a Russian poet, I made my literary name.”

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova spent her childhood in Tsarskoe Selo. As the poetess recalled, she learned to read from Leo Tolstoy’s “ABC,” and began speaking French while listening to the teacher teach her older sisters. The young poetess wrote her first poem at the age of 11.

Anna Akhmatova in childhood. Photo: maskball.ru

Anna Akhmatova. Photos: maskball.ru

Gorenko family: Inna Erasmovna and children Victor, Andrey, Anna, Iya. Photo: maskball.ru

Akhmatova studied at the Tsarskoye Selo Women's Gymnasium “at first it’s bad, then it’s much better, but always reluctantly”. In 1905 she was home schooled. The family lived in Yevpatoria - Anna Akhmatova’s mother separated from her husband and went to the southern coast to treat tuberculosis that had worsened in children. In the following years, the girl moved to relatives in Kyiv - there she graduated from the Fundukleevsky gymnasium, and then enrolled in the law department of the Higher Women's Courses.

In Kyiv, Anna began to correspond with Nikolai Gumilyov, who courted her back in Tsarskoe Selo. At this time, the poet was in France and published the Parisian Russian weekly Sirius. In 1907, Akhmatova’s first published poem, “On His Hand There Are Many Shining Rings...”, appeared on the pages of Sirius. In April 1910, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev got married - near Kiev, in the village of Nikolskaya Slobodka.

As Akhmatova wrote, “No other generation has had such a fate”. In the 30s, Nikolai Punin was arrested, Lev Gumilyov was arrested twice. In 1938, he was sentenced to five years in forced labor camps. About the feelings of the wives and mothers of “enemies of the people” - victims of repressions of the 1930s - Akhmatova later wrote one of her famous works - the autobiographical poem “Requiem”.

In 1939, the poetess was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers. Before the war, Akhmatova’s sixth collection, “From Six Books,” was published. “The Patriotic War of 1941 found me in Leningrad”, - the poetess wrote in her memoirs. Akhmatova was evacuated first to Moscow, then to Tashkent - there she spoke in hospitals, read poetry to wounded soldiers and “greedily caught news about Leningrad, about the front.” The poetess was able to return to the Northern capital only in 1944.

“The terrible ghost pretending to be my city amazed me so much that I described this meeting of mine with him in prose... Prose has always seemed to me both a mystery and a temptation. From the very beginning I knew everything about poetry - I never knew anything about prose.”

Anna Akhmatova

"Decadent" and Nobel Prize nominee

In 1946, a special Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” - for “providing a literary platform” for “unprincipled, ideologically harmful works.” It concerned two Soviet writers - Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. They were both expelled from the Writers' Union.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Portrait of A.A. Akhmatova. 1922. State Russian Museum

Natalia Tretyakova. Akhmatova and Modigliani at an unfinished portrait

Rinat Kuramshin. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova

“Zoshchenko portrays Soviet orders and Soviet people in an ugly caricature, slanderously presenting Soviet people as primitive, uncultured, stupid, with philistine tastes and morals. Zoshchenko’s maliciously hooligan portrayal of our reality is accompanied by anti-Soviet attacks.
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Akhmatova is a typical representative of empty, unprincipled poetry, alien to our people. Her poems, imbued with the spirit of pessimism and decadence, expressing the tastes of the old salon poetry, frozen in the positions of bourgeois-aristocratic aesthetics and decadence, “art for art’s sake,” which does not want to keep pace with its people, harm the education of our youth and cannot be tolerated in Soviet literature".

Excerpt from the Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”

Lev Gumilyov, who after serving his sentence volunteered to go to the front and reached Berlin, was again arrested and sentenced to ten years in forced labor camps. Throughout his years of imprisonment, Akhmatova tried to achieve the release of her son, but Lev Gumilyov was released only in 1956.

In 1951, the poetess was reinstated in the Writers' Union. Having never had her own home, in 1955 Akhmatova received a country house in the village of Komarovo from the Literary Fund.

“I didn’t stop writing poetry. For me, they represent my connection with time, with the new life of my people. When I wrote them, I lived by the rhythms that sounded in the heroic history of my country. I am happy that I lived during these years and saw events that had no equal.”

Anna Akhmatova

In 1962, the poetess completed work on “Poem without a Hero,” which she wrote over 22 years. As the poet and memoirist Anatoly Naiman noted, “Poem without a Hero” was written by the late Akhmatova about the early Akhmatova - she recalled and reflected on the era she found.

In the 1960s, Akhmatova's work received wide recognition - the poetess became a Nobel Prize nominee and received the Etna-Taormina literary prize in Italy. Oxford University awarded Akhmatova an honorary doctorate of literature. In May 1964, an evening dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the poetess was held at the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow. The following year, the last lifetime collection of poems and poems, “The Running of Time,” was published.

The illness forced Anna Akhmatova to move to a cardiological sanatorium near Moscow in February 1966. She passed away in March. The poetess was buried in the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral in Leningrad and buried at the Komarovskoye cemetery.

Slavic professor Nikita Struve