Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening , published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia’s leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who opted to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953—with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic War—she found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in the wake of the notorious speech by the Communist Party cultural boss Andrey Zhdanov, in which he described her as a ‘cross between a nun and a whore’. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted exclusion from publication as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem , her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 the restrictions on Akhmatova’s work were gradually relaxed and a selection of her poems, entitled The Course of Time , was published in 1958. She died in Moscow in 1966, and in 1976 a more comprehensive selection of her poetry was published in the prestigious Poet’s Library series.