Akhmatova anna biography

Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa and died in Moscow. In her long career as a poet, she rarely engaged directly with St. Petersburg as a subject of inquiry in her mostly highly personal verse.

Nonetheless, her life and work were so tightly interwoven with the tragic and tumultuous fate of Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad in the 20th century that few other cultural figures are so widely and instantly identified with the city.

The measured, incisive authority of her mature poetry upheld the moral and aesthetic values of the pre-Revolutionary liberal intelligentsia, cementing poetry's role as the human conscience of an often inhuman and amoral urban environment.

Akhmatova was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in 1889 in the Odessa suburb of Bolshoy Fontan. Her parents were both from minor noble families, her father a naval engineer and her mother a distant relative of Anna Bunina, acclaimed as Russia's f