Literary Birthday – 23 June – Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova Quotes

1. Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree.
2. You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms…
3. If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.
4. There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.
5. Rising from the past, my shadow, Is running in silence to meet me.
6. I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.
7. Real tenderness can’t be confused, It’s quiet and can’t be heard.

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was a Russian modernist poet. She is regarded as one of the most acclaimed Russian writers. Her poetry ‘is known for its intensely feminine accent, exploring themes of tragic and frustrated love. Her earlier works display the psychological sophistication of a cosmopolitan woman, using small details to evoke a range of emotions.’ In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966. She is the author of  Requiem and Poem without a Hero.

Source for image: I, Sailko, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons