Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova was a Russian poet known for addressing many different issues facing modern Russians including political oppression and the struggles of the poor. She chose not to emigrate during the Stalin regime and much of her work covers her experiences and the experiences of those around her during that time.
==Youth and Writing==
Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko on June 23, 1889, in Bolshoy Fontan, nearby the port of Odessa on the Black Sea, at the time part of the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. Andrey Antonovich Gorenko, her father, worked as a naval engineer. Gorenko and Inna Erazmovna Stogova, her mother, descended from Russia’s nobility. The Gorenko family moved to Tsarskoye Selo, outside of St. Petersburg, when Anna was almost a year.Harrington, 2006 She spent her summers from ages 7-13 in a dacha, Russian for a second home, in Sevastopol on the Baltic Sea.Martin, 2007 Anna Gorenko began writing poetry at 11-years-old and, by her late teens, she had already been published. None of these early writings survive.Wells, 1996 Her father did not approve of her dream to become a member of the Russian poets. Andrey Gorenko forced his daughter to use a pen name, and she chose the surname of her maternal great-grandmother, Akhmatova.Poets.org, 2015 In 1903, Akhmatova met Nikolay Gumilev on Christmas Eve. In
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She continued to circulate her work in secret. Groups of poets would memorize each others work and Akhmatova wrote on scrap paper for guests, making them burn the paper before leaving. She witnessed the Siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and this inspired her Poem without a Hero, began in 1940. It would be another 20 years before she finished it.The pro-Stalin work done by Anna Akhmatova in attempt to secure her son’s release may have saved her life as well as