Eloquent lines of resistance

Biography : Anna Akhmatova was unlucky in life. Her time as a poet criss-crossed with war and Stalin's terror

Biography: Anna Akhmatova was unlucky in life. Her time as a poet criss-crossed with war and Stalin's terror. Her first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed in 1921. Her only son languished in camps and prisons. Publication was proscribed and her reputation as a poet depended, for decades, on a corrupt political climate.

There were years of extraordinary hardship: of hunger, displacement and fear. Only towards the end of her life did she emerge into the sunlight of recognition and honour.

But she has been lucky in her biographers. Disproving John Arbuthnot's wisdom that "biography is one of the new terrors of death", she has fared well. One of the earliest accounts of her achievements was an eloquent, haunting book called Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage by Amanda Haight, published in 1976. Haight went to Russia to find Akhmatova when she was still a graduate student. She was among the first to introduce Western readers to a compelling narrative and a defining body of poetry. Roberta Reeder's exhaustive biography, Anna Akhmatova, Poet and Prophet, came out in 1994. It elaborated on the struggles and achievements, and widened understanding of the historical context. Reeder's remains one of the finest biographies I have read of any poet.

Given that Reeder's biography is relatively recent, a reader might ask, why the need for another one? But in fact Feinstein is splendidly qualified to add to the story. She has translated Pushkin. She has translated Bella Akhmadulina. She wrote a poignant, revealing biography of Marina Tsvetaeva, and translated her poems. All the translations of Akhmatova in this book are her own, and they are clear and powerful. Her acknowledgements state that, for the purposes of this book, she had conversations with Ardov, Nayman and Rein, key associates of Akhmatova in her last years. She also had access to important letters and archives - especially of Akhmatova's son and Emma Gerstein's recollections - which were not yet available to Reeder.

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In addition, her final sections here, called Aftermaths and Epilogue, provide a fresh, informative glimpse of how Akhmatova is seen now, how she has fared in the thicket of memoirs and revisions which have emerged in the last few decades. And how a new post-Soviet Russia has come to terms with her stature. "Akhmatova remains an iconic figure," writes Feinstein, "not of dissidence and resistance alone but as a poet of womanly feeling in a brutal world."

But if Feinstein's book adds to the story, it also, like previous ones, bumps up against a recurring problem. Akhmatova, as Feinstein says, is an iconic figure, almost canonised and certainly canonical. From her earliest years in Paris, where she was sketched by Modigliani, to her stature before her death, her story commands a shadow land between the real and the mythic. It assumes the shape of legend almost without trying. This makes the biographer's job harder. The truth is, Akhmatova's struggle is moving, instructive and almost impossible to turn away from. Just as she became an example to younger poets in her circle such as Joseph Brodsky, she became a hero to countless readers well beyond it.

Yet it may be essential to resist that story. Otherwise, the narrative of a woman trapped by love and history - fighting almost grotesque odds - will consume and simplify something more important: the progress of a complicated lyric poet who translated herself from private artist to public voice in ways which are fascinating and crucial to the study of modern poetry.

Anna Akhmatova was born as Anna Gorenko in 1889. In a memoir she writes, "I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, the Eiffel Tower."

As a young woman of the educated classes she inhabited the last, shadowy, glamorous days of Tsarist Russia. In her 20s, she came to what she describes as "Dostoyevsky's Petersburg". As she found it, the city was still anchored in an earlier existence, still redolent of Pushkin's time, with its bells, its organ grinders, its boats crowding the Neva river. Here, Akhmatova became part of a group of artists who congregated in The Stray Dog, a basement cellar. From here she became celebrated for her first volume of poetry, called Evening. When Feinstein describes these as "laconic, intimate lyrics" she suggests the limitation of the early and romantic Akhmatova: for all her eloquence and music, she was almost a fin de siècle artist, almost a coterie poet.

With scrupulous detail, Feinstein follows Akhmatova from this world to her crucible: the days of the Terror. By then, in the late 1930s, her son Lev had been arrested and imprisoned. The beautiful, inviting city of her youth was now Leningrad, patrolled by secret police, inhospitable to artists. In her great poem Requiem, which reflects on that time, Akhmatova describes how she lined up outside the Kresty prison, hour upon hour, hoping for news of her child. By making this experience a text for an artistic manifesto, she shows the power and authority she has acquired, and her distance from the enclosed world of her youth. In the last lines of the epilogue to Requiem, she asks that, should anyone build a memorial to her, they should build it not by the sea nor in the Tsar's park, but "here where I stood for three hundred hours" outside those prison gates that never opened for her.

Akhmatova is by no means the only poet to make public poetry from private suffering. But her sense of that act and its responsibility is peculiarly acute, and also deeply communal. And this is the poet who is rightly remembered, and rightly honoured.

Elaine Feinstein's new biography may not solve the problems of balance between Akhmatova's legend and her poems. But there is fresh information here. There is a strong and vivid context provided for the poems. The poems themselves are offered with a clear and clean eloquence. Akhmatova's luck has held.

Eavan Boland is a professor at Stanford University. Her New and Collected Poems will be published by Carcanet in November of this year

Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova By Elaine Feinstein, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 322pp. £20