The Plea: Can you describe this?

It's the birthday of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, born in a suburb of Odessa in 1889. She was a beautiful, fashionable, 22-year-old woman when she published her first collection of poetry in 1912. The book was filled with love poems inspired by her affair with the then-unknown Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, and no Russian woman had ever written so frankly about love. Akhmatova became a celebrity overnight.

 But within a few years, life in Russia became much more complicated, and Akhmatova had a lot more to write about than love affairs. In her poem "In Memoriam July 19, 1914" — about the start of World War I — she wrote, "We grew a hundred years older in a single hour." After the Bolshevik Revolution, most writers and intellectuals tried to flee the country, but Akhmatova and her husband decided to stay. Her husband was shot in 1921 for allegedly participating in an anti-Bolshevik plot, and the following year, the government informed Akhmatova that she would no longer be able to publish her poetry.

She began working on translations and more or less stopped writing her own poems.

Then Akhmatova's son was arrested by the government. For 17 months, she went to the prison in Leningrad every day to try to get news about her son's well-being. There were crowds of other women there, doing the same thing, and one day a woman recognized Akhmatova as the formerly famous poet. Akhmatova later described the incident, writing, "A woman with bluish lips standing behind me … woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear, 'Can you describe this?'"

That woman's question helped inspire Akhmatova to begin writing her 10-poem cycle "Requiem," which many Russians consider the greatest piece of literature written about Stalinist Russia. 

The Writer's Almanac