Anna Akhmatova

Born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in 1889, she took the pen name Akhmatova and by 1912 had begun publishing lyric poetry marked by economy and emotional restraint - a clear, strong female voice that broke new ground in Russian verse. Her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was executed by the Cheka; her son Lev and common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent years in the Gulag, where Punin died. Between 1935 and 1940 she composed Requiem, her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror, written in secret while her work was condemned and censored. After a decade of reduced output, she resumed writing in 1936 and continued until her death, her later work haunted by time, memory, and the shadow of the regime. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966, and died in March 1966.