Anna Akhmatova lived through everything a life can be made to hold — and wrote about it in a way that keeps her read to this day. A husband shot. A son arrested. Years spent standing in the prison lines. Requiem is the poem she never committed to paper: a handful of people carried its verses in memory, in case of searches.
She was born in 1889 near Odessa and grew up in Tsarskoye Selo. Her early poems — sharp, personal, nothing like the Symbolist opulence of the era — brought instant success with Rosary and White Flock. Nikolai Gumilyov, her husband and a poet, was shot in 1921 on a charge of conspiracy.
Under Stalin she was in disgrace and went unpublished. Her son, Lev Gumilyov, was arrested twice and spent more than ten years in the camps. It was after his second arrest that she wrote Requiem.
She died in 1966. Thousands came to her funeral.