Happy Birthday, Anna!

Back when I first was learning Russian, I had an old teacher who was introducing us to the plethora of Russian gendered occupational nouns (uchitel, teacher; uchitelnitsa, woman teacher). He said that some of these distinctions were going away - a woman could be a "doktor" instead of a "doktorsha" nowadays, he said; but some weren't: women weren't "poety" but only "poetessy".

What about Akhmatova, I asked.

"Akhmatova!" he said. "Ah. Akhmatova - ona nastoyachiy poet!" (She is a true poet!)

Born this day in Odessa (then part of the Soviet Union), in 1889, Akhmatova lived through the Revolution and Purges and de-Stalinization. She wrote love poetry, nspired by her affair with the then-unknown Italian painter Amedeo Modiglia, and became a sensation in Russia. She wrote more complicated stuff about WWI, and then was banned from publishing by the Bolsheviks. Her husband was shot, and her son arrested ... Famously, she was asked by a woman outside the prison where she, and Akhmatova, and hundreds of others, went daily for news of their imprisoned loved ones, "Could anyone describe this?" Akhmatova answered, "I can" - and she did, in the cycle she called "Requiem". It went unpublished for years, while she earned her living as a translator and wrote poems praising Stalin to keep her still-imprisoned son alive... Eventually she outlived the dictator and was able to publish her own works again, works she had kept alive by having friends memorize them while she was under house arrest.

Эпиграф

Нет, и не под чуждым небосводом,
И не под защитой чуждых крыл,
Я была тогда с моим народом,
Там, где мой народ, к несчастью, был.

Epigraph to 'Requiem'

No, I was not safe under foreign skies,
Nor covered by some stranger's shielding wing:
Then I was there, with my people,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.

(and, for those who don't read Cyrillic; notes: i=ee, u=oo, o=oh, t'= a soft or palatalized t, ya/ye/yu=y+vowel, as in 'yak' etc)

Ehpigraf

Nyet, i nye pot chuzdhym nyebosvodom,
I nye pot zashchitoy chuzhdykh kryl,
Ya byla tokda s moyim narodom,
Tam, gdye moy narod, k nyeschastyu, byl.