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tions and political persecution in the Stalin years
to become one of the great 20th-century Russian
poets. Educated in Tsarskoe Selo (Pushkin), near
St. Petersburg, and Kiev, she married the poet
Nikolai
GUMILEV
in 1910 (they divorced in 1918).
With Gumilev and Osip
MANDELSTAM
, she started
the Acmeist movement, advocating clarity and
concreteness as a response to the diffuseness and
mysticism of the reigning Symbolist poets. First
published in 1912, over the next decade she
established her reputation among the intelli-
gentsia with a lyrical poetry of spiritual under-
tones that was intimate, yet detached. The first
four decades of Soviet power brought Akhma-
tova personal suffering (Gumilev was executed
in 1921 and her son, Lev Gumilev, spent 14 years
in labor camps) and ostracism by Soviet cultural
authorities. She earned a living from translations,
all the while writing masterful poems such as
Rekviem
(Requiem, 1935-40) that would not be
published in Russia until after her death. A brief
respite from official censure in 1940 saw the pub-
lication of 20 new poems, “Selections from Six
Books.” She experienced the siege of
LENIN
-
GRAD
before being evacuated to Tashkent,
where she wrote her most avant-garde poem:
“The Way of All Earth.” After the war, she and
Mikhail
ZOSHCHENKO
became the main targets of
Andrei
ZHDANOV
's vicious xenophobic cultural
campaign, and in 1946 she was expelled from the
Writers' Union. Akhmatova entered a final
period of great creativity and international recog-
nition after 1956 with her son's return from the
camps and the temporary relaxation of cultural
norms after Stalin's death in 1953. During this
last decade she published translations of Yiddish
poems by Jewish poets shot in the anti-Semitic
campaigns of 1952, as well as two of her own col-
lections,
Poems
and
Poems, 1909-60.
In 1962, she
finally completed her masterpiece,
Poema bez
geroya (Poem without a Hero),
begun in 1940. Inter-
national recognition in the form of an honorary
doctorate from Oxford University, the Italian Lit-
erary Prize, and translations of her work came in
the 1960s and 1970s. At the time of her death in
Domodedovo, near Moscow, Akhmatova had
succeeded in her goal to give witness to a “cruel
age,” becoming in the process a voice of Russia's
conscience.
Akhmed
(unknown-1481)
(also Akhmat)
Mongol ruler
As khan (r. 1459-81) of the
GOLDEN HORDE
,
Akhmed tried to reassert control over the
increasingly powerful Muscovite state. In 1472
Akhmed, having concluded an agreement
with the king of Poland-Lithuania, Casimir IV,
attacked Russian territory but was unsuccessful.
In 1476, he sent an emissary to the grand prince
of Moscow,
IVAN III
, demanding tribute, but was
categorically refused. This set the stage for the
Battle of the
UGRA RIVER
, 150 miles to the south-
west of Moscow, which took place in 1480
between Muscovite and Mongol forces. Akhmed
arrived at the southern bank of the river, pre-
pared for a decisive confrontation. However,
faced with the failure of expected Polish-Lithua-
nian reinforcements, distracted by Ivan's ally, the
Crimean khan Mengli-Girei, to arrive, and with
reports of domestic problems near his capital of
SARAI
, Akhmed chose to withdraw. His retreat
marks the formal end of Muscovite subservience
to the Mongols, even though this had been in
progress for several decades and even though
military confrontations between the two sides
continued for almost another century. Akhmed
was killed the following year by one of his sub-
ordinates, the khan of Tiumen, Ibak.
Aksakov family
writers
The Aksakov family produced two generations
of influential intellectuals who made important
contributions to the development of
SLAVOPHILE
thought in mid-19th century Russia. The elder
Aksakov, Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov (1791-
1859), made his name as a novelist who special-
ized in rural themes, and is considered one of the
founders of Russian realism. From 1827 to 1832
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