Russian poet whose early fame as the first great woman lyric poet of the 20th-century Russian tradition — the Acmeist of Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914), the woman in the famous Altman portrait — became, through five decades of Soviet life, something rarer and harder: a poet who stayed in Russia through the Stalin terror and wrote a poetry adequate to it. Her first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921. Her son, Lev, was arrested three times, spending most of the 1930s through 1956 in camps and prisons. Her close friend Osip Mandelshtam died in a transit camp in 1938. She herself was not imprisoned but was officially denounced, expelled from the Writers' Union in 1946, and for long stretches forbidden to publish.
Requiem (written 1935–40, composed in fragments memorized by friends because no written copy was safe, first published in Russian in Munich in 1963 and in the USSR only in 1987) is the great poem of the Stalinist terror — a mother's lament for a son, a nation's lament for its disappeared. Its foreword is among the most-quoted passages in Russian poetry: a woman in the prison queue outside Leningrad's Kresty prison asks, "Can you describe this?" and Akhmatova answers, "I can." Poem Without a Hero (written over twenty-five years, 1940–65) is the other major late work — a formally dense, allusive reckoning with the lost St. Petersburg of her youth and the century that destroyed it.
Isaiah Berlin's 1945 visit to her apartment in Leningrad, an all-night conversation that apparently became a life-long point of reference for both of them, is the most-discussed encounter in modern Russian literary memory. Stalin, learning of it, is said to have called her "that nun, that harlot" and tightened the screws. She survived him by thirteen years and died in Moscow in 1966, honored by the state that had almost destroyed her.