Walking through modern Odesa, you quickly learn that history here is never straightforward.
Streets change names, languages shift with the wind, and identities are layered like sediment on the Black Sea shore. A perfect example of this complexity is Anna Akhmatova—one of the defining poets of the 20th century, born in Odesa yet claimed almost exclusively by Russian literary tradition. Her life, however, tells a more nuanced story, one shaped equally by Ukrainian roots, imperial pressures, and the brutal machinery of the Soviet state.
Born in Odesa, Rooted in Ukraine
Akhmatova entered the world in 1889 as Anna Andriivna Horenko, in a rented summer dacha at the 11th Station of the Great Fountain—an easy stroll today from the coastal tramline. Her father, Andrei Gorenko, was a naval engineer from a Ukrainian Cossack noble family; her mother had Russian and Tatar ancestry. These early years in Odesa, filled with sea breezes and multilingual households, quietly formed the base of her identity, whether she later embraced it or not.
The family soon moved north to Tsarskoye Selo, but Anna remained tied to Ukraine. She finished secondary school in Kyiv, studied law there, and in 1910 was married in a church near Kyiv to fellow poet Nikolai Gumilev. Despite dire predictions from friends, the marriage lasted eight years and produced one son, Lev. The marriage ended in divorce in 1918. Just three years later, in 1921, the Bolsheviks accused Gumilev of participating in a monarchist conspiracy and shot him—a wound that shadowed Akhmatova for the rest of her life. In February 1934, as they walked together, Osip Mandelstam quoted a line from Gumilev's verse play Gondla "I am ready to die" to Akhmatova, and she repeated them in her "Poem without a Hero."
Choosing a Different Name, a Different Identity
When young Anna began writing poetry, her father objected to seeing the respectable Ukrainian surname Gorenko printed under literary work, which he viewed as frivolous. So Anna took the name Akhmatova, said to come from her maternal Tatar great-grandmother. In doing so, she stepped—quite deliberately—into a Russian-Tatar identity instead of a Ukrainian one.
This was not unusual for the era. During the long period of Russian imperial and later Soviet domination—what many Ukrainians call Moskal colonization—Ukrainian culture was often portrayed as provincial. Many writers, artists, and students of the time suppressed or softened Ukrainian identity to gain mobility in imperial society. Akhmatova, too, distanced herself from Ukrainian language and literature, even expressing open dislike for Taras Shevchenko. She saw herself as a Russian poet of the imperial capital, not of a Ukrainian coastal city.
Acmeism and the Silver Age
In St. Petersburg, she became a leading figure of Acmeism, a movement that sought clarity, concrete imagery, and emotional precision. Alongside Osip Mandelstam, she helped create one of the era's most distinctive poetic voices. Collections such as Evening (Vecher) – 1912, Rosary (Chetki) – 1914, and White Flock (Belaya Staya) – 1917established her as a major literary force. If you want to see the arc of her works, get The Flight of Time (Beg vremeni) – 1965, a major volume published just a year before her death, collecting much of her life's work, though still heavily censored at the time.
Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova and their son Lev Gumilev, 1913
Surviving the Soviet Night
Then came the darkness. Soviet censors attacked her work as "empty," "bourgeois," and "un-Soviet." By 1925 she was effectively banned from publication. Things grew worse in 1938, when her son Lev Gumilyov—barely 26—was arrested and eventually sent to the camps. Her son was arrested multiple times (1935, 1938, 1949) simply to pressure her. Akhmatova joined the long queues outside Leningrad's "Crosses" prison (which got its name due to the shape of the building), clutching packages, hoping for news, and pleading for mercy from officials who rarely offered any. Lev spent almost two decades in a gulag.
Her poetry from this era, especially Requiem (Rekviem), which was written secretly between 1935–1940. It is a heartbreaking cycle of poems about waiting in prison lines in Leningrad to hear news of her arrested son. She did not dare write it down for years, memorizing it instead. It was finally published in the USSR in 1987 during Perestroika.
Requiem became a quiet monument to suffering. It circulated only in whispers, memorized by trusted friends because writing it down risked arrest. She was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1946 and publicly denounced. At one point, security chief Viktor Abakumov even proposed her arrest to Stalin. She survived only by chance—and by reputation.
There is a famous historical account from 1944 where Akhmatova gave a poetry reading and received a spontaneous standing ovation. When Stalin was told about it, he reportedly asked angrily, "Who organized this standing ovation?" He saw her independent popularity as a threat, leading to a crackdown on her work under the Zhdanov Decree. Her third husband, Mykola Punin, a famous art historian, was arrested three times and died in the Gulag (Abez camp) near the Arctic Circle in 1953.
Honored Abroad, Marginalized at Home
Ironically, while Soviet authorities shunned her, the world celebrated her. In 1964 she traveled to Italy to receive the Etna-Taormina Prize. In 1965, Oxford University granted her an honorary doctorate, and she was later nominated for the Nobel Prize. She died in 1966 and was buried in Komarovo, where her son and his students built a humble stone memorial—an echo of the prison walls she had stood beside for years.
Why Her Street Remains in Odesa
In 2024, as Ukraine continued removing imperial and Soviet names from public spaces, many expected Akhmatova's street to be renamed. But Odesa chose to keep it—not to honor Russian imperial culture, but to acknowledge its own daughter, born here, shaped here, and ultimately persecuted by the same Soviet regime that targeted Ukrainians. Her poetry never praised empire; it bore witness to people crushed by it. That nuance earned her a rare exception.
Today, Anna Akhmatova Street runs quietly through Odesa's Kyivsky District, from Garshin Lane to Sumskaya Street. It is modest, lived-in, and unmistakably local—much like the fragments of Odesa still hidden in her life's story.
Two Poems for the Traveler
Here are two of Akhmatova's wartime poems—lean, haunting, and shaped by the same turbulent century Odesa endured.
"Why Is This Century Worse…" (1919)
Why is this century worse than those others?
Maybe, because, in sadness and alarm,
It only touched the blackest of the ulcers,
But couldn't heal it in its span of time.
Else, in the West, the earthly sun endows
The roofs of cities with the morning light,
But, here, the White already marks a house,
And calls for crows, and the crows fly.
"One Goes In Straightforward Ways" (1940)
One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
Waits for a girl of his gone days,
Or for returning home.
But I do go — and woe is there —
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains — off the railroad.
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver
Visiting Akhmatova's Odesa
To connect her story with the city, start at the 11th Station of the Great Fountain, where her family rented their seaside dacha. Then follow the tram up into the Kyivsky District and stroll along the street that still carries her name. Odesa remembers her not as the emblem of an empire, but as a woman born here—half-Ukrainian, half-Tatar, culturally Russian, and ultimately a survivor of the same Soviet storm that battered Ukraine itself.
In a city famous for contradictions, Anna Akhmatova fits right in.