Poems

23 June 1889 – 5 March 1966

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko was born at Bolshoy Fontan, near the Black Sea port of Odessa, and moved with her family to Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg when she was eleven months old. Her parents were both descended from Russian nobility. From age 7 to 13 she and her family spent their summers in a dacha near Sevastopol. She started writing poetry at the age of 11, and was first published at age 17. Her father did not want poetry published under his name, so she adopted her grandmother's surname "Akhmatova" and published under the name Anna Akhmatova. In 1905 her parents separated, and in 1906 she moved to Kiev. In 1910, she married another poet, Nikolay Gumilev and began attending Kiev U…