[2] Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935–40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror.

[3] Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities, and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate and remaining in the Soviet Union, acting as witness to the events around her.

[7] The family lived in a house on the corner of Shirokaya Street and Bezymyanny Lane (the building is no longer there today), spending summers from age 7 to 13 in a dacha near Sevastopol.

[9] Akhmatova started writing poetry at the age of 11, and was published in her late teens, inspired by the poets Nikolay Nekrasov, Jean Racine, Alexander Pushkin, Evgeny Baratynsky and the Symbolists; however, none of her juvenilia survive.

At 17 years old, in his journal Sirius, she published her first poem which could be translated as "On his hand you may see many glittering rings", (1907) signing it "Anna G."[13] She soon became known in St Petersburg's artistic circles, regularly giving public readings.

[13] She later began an affair with the celebrated Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, whose wife, Nadezhda, declared later, in her autobiography that she came to forgive Akhmatova for it in time.

The book secured her reputation as a new and striking young writer,[19] the poems Grey-eyed king, In the Forest, Over the Water, and I don't need my legs anymore making her famous.

[19] Her aristocratic manners and artistic integrity won her the titles "Queen of the Neva" and "Soul of the Silver Age", as the period came to be known in the history of Russian poetry.

[Notes 5] Akhmatova became close friends with Boris Pasternak (who, though married, proposed to her many times) and rumours began to circulate that she was having an affair with influential lyrical poet Alexander Blok.

There's an ominous knock behind the wall: A ghost, a thief or a rat...[34] The executions had a powerful effect on the Russian intelligentsia, destroying the acmeist poetry group, and placing a stigma on Akhmatova and her son Lev (by Gumilev).

[35] From a new Marxist perspective, Akhmatova's poetry was deemed to represent an introspective "bourgeois aesthetic", reflecting only trivial "female" preoccupations, not in keeping with these new revolutionary politics of the time.

During what she termed "The Vegetarian Years", Akhmatova's work was unofficially banned by a party resolution of 1925 and she found it hard to publish, though she did not stop writing poetry.

Akhmatova narrowly escaped arrest, though her son Lev was imprisoned on numerous occasions by the Stalinist regime, accused of counterrevolutionary activity.

[38][39][40][Notes 9] Her tragic cycle Requiem documents her personal experience of this time; as she writes, "one hundred million voices shout" through her "tortured mouth".

[41] In 1993, it was revealed that the authorities had bugged her flat and kept her under constant surveillance, keeping detailed files on her from this time, accruing some 900 pages of "denunciations, reports of phone taps, quotations from writings, confessions of those close to her".

[16][43] Akhmatova's close friend, chronicler Lydia Chukovskaya described how writers working to keep poetic messages alive used various strategies.

She moved away from romantic themes towards a more diverse, complex and philosophical body of work and some of her more patriotic poems found their way to the front pages of Pravda.

[47] In 1946 the Central Committee of CPSU, acting on the orders from Stalin, started an official campaign against the "bourgeois", individualistic works by Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko.

[49][50] Berlin described his visit to her flat: "It was very barely furnished—virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away—looted or sold—during the siege .... A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us.

[51] She spent much of the next years trying to secure his release; to this end, and for the first time, she published overtly propagandist poetry, "In Praise of Peace", in the magazine Ogoniok, openly supporting Stalin and his regime.

[26][52] Akhmatova's stature among Soviet poets was slowly conceded by party officials, her name no longer cited in only scathing contexts and she was readmitted to the Union of Writers in 1951, being fully recognised again following Stalin's death in 1953.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk, and the air drunk, like wine, late sun lays bare the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

[54] Though still censored, she was concerned to re-construct work that had been destroyed or suppressed during the purges or which had posed a threat to the life of her son in the camps, such as the lost, semi-autobiographical play Enûma Elish.

[54] At the same time, by virtue of works such as Requiem, Akhmatova was being hailed at home and abroad as an unofficial leader of the dissident movement, and reinforced this image herself.

[56] Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel to Sicily and England, in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University, accompanied by her lifelong friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya.

[58] Isaiah Berlin described the impact of her life, as he saw it: The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel.

But [...] her poetry marks a radical break with the erudite, ornate style and the mystical representation of love so typical of poets like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely.

[30][34] Her readership generally did not know her later opus, the railing passion of Requiem or Poem without a Hero and her other scathing works, which were shared only with a very trusted few or circulated in secret by word of mouth (samizdat).

Between 1935 and 1940 Akhmatova composed, worked and reworked the long poem Requiem in secret, a lyrical cycle of lamentation and witness, depicting the suffering of the common people under Soviet terror.

[49][57] It consists of ten numbered poems that examine a series of emotional states, exploring suffering, despair, devotion, rather than a clear narrative.