Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Anna Akhmatova was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko at Bolshoi Fontan in Odessa in 1889. Bot she spent the first 16 years of her life in the town of Tsarskoye Selo, the site of the Imperial summer residence. She wrote her first poetry in 1900 and married the poet Nikolai Gumilyev in 1910. The couple honeymooned in Paris that year and visited it again in 1911, when Akhmatova met Modigliani. He drew 16 portraits of her, one of which she kept with her all her life. Along with Gumilyev, Akhmatova becase a member of the Acmeist group of poets, in revolt along with the Russian Futurists against the influence of Symbolism. Osip Mandelshtam was the other important member of this group. Akhmatova’s first volume, ‘Evening’, appeared in 1912, her second, ‘Beads’, in 1914 and her third, ‘White Flock’, In 1917. in 1921 Gumilyev, whoa she had divorced in 1918, was shot by the Bolsheviks. This fact both compromised the Acmeist group and was also a stigma on Akhmatova and her son, Lev. In that year also, she published her fourth book, ‘Plantain’. ‘Anno Domini MCMXXI’ appeared the following year, with an expanded version in 1923. In 1925 her work was condemned by the Central Committee of the Party and she was not allowed to publish again until 1940 when ‘The Willow’ came out, followed by a selection of previous poems called ‘From Six Books’ in 1946. But in that year the Central Committee, under the notorious Zhdanov, again banned her poetry and expelled her from the Writers’ Union. She was rehabilitated in 1959 and her collected poems were published in Moscow in 1965. Anna Akhmatova died in Leningrad in 1966. Some interesting details of her life and her friendship with the Mandelshtams can be found in Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s memoir of her husband, ‘Hope Against Hope’, recently published by Penguin Books.

     Amadeo Modigliani was born in Leghorn, Italy, in 1884 and studied at the academies of Venice and Florence. In 1906 he settled in Paris, becoming a member of the Société des Indépendents in 1907. Between 1907 and 1914, the period when Akhmatova knew him, he produced only sculpture. Financial difficulties forced him to take up painting again and in all his painting career he executed only portraits and nudes he painted no still lives and only two or three landscapes. Modigliani had his first one-man show at the Gallery Berthe Weill in 1917. This caused a scandal and the police ordered his nudes to be removed from the gallery’s front window. Between 1914 and 1916 Modigliani had a stormy relationship with the English poetess Beatrice Hastings; but in 1917 he met Jeanne Hébuterne, a pupil at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, who bore him a daughter in November 1918. Modigliani’s health, which had never been good, declined rapidly after 1918. By this time he had also become strongly addicted to alcohol and drugs. He died of tuberculosis in the Hôpital de la Charité on 25 January 1920. The following day Jeanne Hébuterne leapt from a window killing both herself and her unborn child.