Good morning, we are Iván and Andrea. We are students from English Studies degree. As it is
explained in the syllabus of this subject, literary criticism, we are going to explain you a little
bit of Anna Akhmatova and her poem Lot’s Wife. Here you have an index with all the
contents we are going to talk about.
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (Akhmatova) was born on 23rd June 1889 in a city nearby the
port of Odessa and she was a modernist poetess that had an essential role in the acmeist
poetry. No one in her family wrote poetry but the first Russian woman who worked as a
poetess was the aunt of her grandfather.
She studied Law at Kiev University, but she gave up one year later in order to study
Literature at St Petersburg University.
Akhmatova began writing poetry when she was only 11. However, her father was unwilling
to see any verse signed under/with his respectable name. Therefore, she took her
grandmother’s surname, Akhmatova, as a pen name.
The literary production was affected by the starting of the Russian Revolution in 1917 in
which she saw her friends and family starving to death or going to the exile. Akhmathova
decided to remain in Russia but her husband was persecuted, arrested and executed by a
firearm and her poems were banned and even it was thought that she was dead. Along this
period of time, her work was defined by represent the bourgeois aesthetic reflecting only
female preoccupations and forgetting about the political issues.
Although, her poems were forbidden, they continue being spread by word of mouth as
Requiem, for instance. Some years later, in 1945, she had an interview that lasted 5 hours
approximately. It caused the jailing of her son again. Even so, in this occasion, Akhmatova
didn’t keep quiet and diffused her poems that showed an ideological change in favour of
Stalinism to save herself and her son. In fact, she succeeded.
Finally, after Stalin’s death, she wanted to rebuild her work that had been deleted during the
repression and lately she was considered one of the most important authors of the Silver Age
by the government.
Regarding the historical context, we are in a period of political transition due to the Russian
Revolution of 1917. These started because of a strike in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to demand
the end of the I World War, and to improve the life conditions. At the end, this first revolution
ends with the tsarist system and constitutes a provisional government. However, Russia
carried on in the war and in October a new revolution, more significative than the previous
one, commenced. That revolutions was commanded by the Bolsheviks who stablished a
communist regime led by Lenin.
Lenin passed away in 1924 and Stalin took his place out, starting the more repressive epoch
of URSS history. Stalin proclaimed a personal dictatorship and he killed every single enemy
of his homeland and ancient leaders by purges.
To sum up, Akhmatova lived herself this situation: her works were banned and even the
regime thought she was dead and her son was jailed in two times by the government.
LITERARY WORK:
Her work could be divided in different stages:
