The Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) is the best-known member of the Acmeist movement. Her work is characterized by subtle understatement, careful variations in rhythm, and spontaneous recording of everyday emotions.

Anna Akhmatova, the pen name of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, was born on June 23, 1889, near the Black Sea port of Odessa. Her father, a retired naval officer, moved the family to St. Petersburg when Anna was a young girl. She attended the Tsarskoe Selo Women's Gymnasium near St. Petersburg, where she met Nikolai Gumilev, whom she married in 1910. He was also a poet of the Acmeist movement, which proclaimed a return to precise, direct expression of poetic emotion.

Anna Akhmatova lived mainly in St. Petersburg and at her nearby country home, Komarovo, but traveled abroad several times: in 1910-1911 to Paris; in 1912 to northern Italy; and in 1965 to Oxford, England, where she was awarded an honorary degree. Throughout...