Selected Poems

An eyewitness to terror

Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa and raised in St Petersburg. Her first poem was published in 1907. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolai Gumilev and the couple soon became leading figures of the Acmeists, a group in opposition to the prevailing Symbolist poetic movement. Her first collection, Evening, sold out quickly; her second, Rosary, was so widely imitated that she commented, ‘I taught our women how to speak, but don’t know how to make them silent.’ Wooed by Boris Pasternak, Modigliani and others, Akhmatova became known as ‘Queen of the Neva’.

By the 1917 revolution, many of Akhmatova’s contemporaries had emigrated; others would later die in the Soviet camps, or commit suicide. In 1921, her former husband (whom she divorced in 1918) was executed. Her grief over this and the later imprisonment of their son is expressed in her famous poem ‘Requiem’, a raw, startling testimony to the agonies of loss and the anguish of the Russian women who queued in vain at prison doors.

Despite being impoverished, slandered and placed under surveillance, Akhmatova neither fled abroad nor abandoned her art; instead she chose to bear witness to the horrors of Stalinist Russia. Her modernist masterpiece, ‘Poem without a Hero’, is a memorial to the victims of Stalin; other poems speak poignantly of the brutal, alien land that replaced the Russia of her youth. When she died, outliving Stalin by 13 years, thousands of people attended her funeral.

Muse

When at night I wait for her to come,
Life, it seems, hangs by a single strand.
What are glory, youth, freedom, in comparison
With the dear welcome guest, a flute in hand?

She enters now. Pushing her veil aside,
She stares through me with her attentiveness.
I question her: ‘And were you Dante’s guide,
Dictating the Inferno?’ She answers: ‘Yes.’

From Reed (1924)

About Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa in 1889. She grew up at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence, and in 1910 married Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and leader of the ‘Acmeist’ poetic movement. Her first book of verse, Evening, was published in 1912; five further collections followed over the next nine years. In 1921 Gumilev was shot for alleged involvement in an anti-Bolshevik plot. Although Akhmatova had been divorced from him for three years, her reputation remained tainted by association. Persecuted and silenced by Stalinist authorities, Akhmatova published very little poetry until 1940, but worked in secret on her poem ‘Requiem’, documenting the suffering of the Russian people during the Terror. She chose to remain in Leningrad during the siege, but was later evacuated to Tashkent; it was during this time that she worked on her masterpiece, ‘Poem without a Hero’. After Stalin’s death her poetry began to be published again, and in 1945 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford. Akhmatova died in 1966.

About Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride studied acting at Drama Centre London. Her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) received the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction 2014, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She occasionally writes and reviews for the Guardian, the TLS and the New Statesman.

About D. M. Thomas

D. M. Thomas is a novelist, poet and translator. He studied English at New College, Oxford, graduating in 1959. His fiction includes The White Hotel (1981), Pictures at an Exhibition (1993) and Hunters in the Snow (2014); his verse collections include The Puberty Tree (1992) and Mrs English and Other Women (2014). He has also produced translations of Pushkin (The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems, 1983) and the biography A Century in the Life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1998).