Matriarch Of Russian Poets

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31005, 10 March 1966, Page 2

Matriarch Of Russian Poets

(If.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) MOSCOW, Mar. 9. Anna Akhmatova, a leading poet who was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union under Stalin but lived to win recognition as “the matriarch of Russian poets,” died this week, aged 76. Reporting her death, the Soviet news agency Tass said it came after a long illness Born into a middle class Ukrainian family in 1889, she j was one of the leading figures I in Russian literary circles in | the immediate post-revolution-ary period. i She and her husband, Niko- 1 lai Gumilyov, led a break- 1 away from the then dominant school of symbolists to i

form the Acmeists movement which preached clarity of expression in poetic work. Gumilyov, whom she divorced in 1918, was shot for

I counter-revolutionary activity I in 1921. Within a year AkhI matova herself fell silent, reI appearing in Russian publicaI tions at the start of World I War 11. Patriotic Verse I Her patriotic verses writ- | ten from beseiged Leningrad I won her a temporary recogniI tion from the Kremlin, and I for a while her verse was I published freely in literary I publications. I But after the war, Stalin’s ? ideological chief, Andrei A. Zhdanov, launching a sweep- ; ing campaign to get rid of Western “bourgeois” influence from Soviet art. termed her “a cosmopolitan" and “literary prostitute” whose poetry concentrated on “the drawing room, the bedroom and the chapel.” With another “cosmopolir tan,” the satirist Mikhail Zosh- < • chenko. she was expelled ’ from the Writers’ Union, os- ■ tracised, and according to

' some reports almost died of . hunger. After Stalin’s death in 1953, she reappeared on the liter- ' ary scene, and soon her verse began to appear in literary publications. Second Eclipse Miss Akhmatova again suffered a temporary eclipse during the last years of Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev, but soon after his replacement she was elected, in March, 1965, to the presidium of the Russian Federation Writers’ Union. Last summer she visited England to receive an honorary doctorate at Oxford University. At the same time one of her poem cycles, “Requiem,” was published in the West in translation.

Very popular among Russia’s poetry-loving youth, she was termed recently by Andrei Voznessensky, considered the brightest star in the Soviet poetic firmament, as “the matriarch of Russian poets.”