Russian poet. Living at a time of war, revolution and the Soviet regime, she was often out of favour with the powerful. Her first husband was executed by the Soviet secret police. Her son and her common-law husband both spent many years in the Gulag, her husband dying there.
c.1914 she met and began a relationship with Boris Anrep: both writing poems about the other. She features in many of his mosaics. English Buildings has: "She and Anrep were close when they were young, but did not see one another for decades once Anrep had left for western Europe. They met again in old age."
This portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin shows Akhmatova in 1922.
