There were three things we see that Anna Akhmatova loved with a raging fervency: Her country, her son and ability to write. There is very little biographical data available about Anna Akhmatova. She was born in 1888 in Odessa, the daughter of a naval officer. The accomplishment of her youth she was most proud of was swimming." She started writing poetry as a child and her first verse was published in Paris by Gumilyov whom she married in 1910. In the years before and during the first World War she lived with her husband in a large, comfortable house in Pushkin and participated in the gay bohemian literary life of St. Petersburg (Leningrad). And most of what we know about her life in those years we derive from her poetry in which imaginary themes are often inter twined with…show more content… The poetic consolation, which Akhmatova writes does not immediately betray the suffering or fervent love it portrays, is the memorialization of the events as they truly happened. Akhmatova's overarching goal in the ten central poems is to immortalize an entire nation victimized by the Terror.
Anna does not simply present the atrocity to us, but she incorporates it into herself. She succumbs together with the other victims to the Terror, knows first-hand their suffering, but then overcomes the silence, resurrects herself, and presents herself verbally, not only on behalf of the victims but also for her own sake. When in "Instead of a Foreword" Akhmatova answers the nameless woman's question "Can you describe this?", Akhmatova is accepting the call to be a prophet and taking upon herself the burden of not forgetting nor allowing history to forget. She accepts the call to perpetually relive the pain through her poetry and, above all, to speak