Discover the work of Ukrainian poet Anna Akhmatova.
Anna Akhmatova was born in the Ukraine on the Black Sea, near Odessa, in 1889. As a young woman she was tall, her hair was long and dark, and she had finely shaped white hands. One of her biographers, Ronald Hingley, has written of her that she wore “a perpetual look of sadness even when she smiled; she bore herself like an empress nursing some secret sorrow”. She reveals in an early poem:
To my very self I seemed, right from the outset,
To be someone’s dream, or raving,
Or a reflection in a mirror not my own,
Without name, without flesh, without cause.
I already knew the list of crimes
Which I had to commit
Akhmatova lived for most of her early life, until she was sixteen, not far from Petersburg, in the town of Tsarskoye Selo, where the Russian Tsars had a summer palace and often came to stay. This town was the site of her youngest recollections:
“the green damp magnificence of the parks, the meadow where my nanny used to take me, the hippodrome where the little dappled horses used to gallop, the old concert-hall.”
Her summers were spent near Sevastopol, where, she wrote, she “made friends with the sea”.
