russian icon; Amid grand love affairs, artistic fame, and political upheaval, poet Anna Akhmatova became the voice of a lost generation.(Biography)

Byline: Megan O'grady

Rarely does poetic ambition cut so glamorous a figure as that of Anna Akhmatova. A shawl over her shoulders, a cigarette in one hand, she was barely in her 20s when she began reading at the Stray Dog, the watering hole of St. Petersburg literati. Nearly everyone who met her was transfixed: Men attempted to kill themselves when spurned by her; artists clamored to capture her "black angel" beauty-among them Modigliani (or Modi, as she called him), who drew her in the nude.

The image of Akhmatova that lives on, however-_especially in Russia, where no home library would be complete without a volume of her poetry-is not of a _sultry young beatnik but of an eloquent witness to many of twentieth-century Europe's darker moments. Exceptional in talent as well as in the very fact of her survival, she is unaccountably less known than her contemporaries (including Boris Pasternak, with whom she was very close)-a state of affairs that may finally be remedied by the first comprehensive biography of her in 30 years: Elaine Feinstein's Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova (Knopf).

Born Anna Gorenko to a bourgeois family in 1889, Akhmatova adopted the surname of a Tatar ancestor on her mother's side after her father warned her not to embarrass him with her writing-an act Joseph Brodsky called "her first poem." She married one of her lovesick admirers, the poet and explorer Nikolai Gumil_yov. Together with Osip Mandelstam, another Stray Dog alum, they developed a school of poetry called Acme_ism-a restrained alternative to Futurism, the movement associated with the flamboyant Vladimir Mayakovsky.

The success of her first collection, Evening, gave Akhmatova a cult following, but overnight fame left her feeling "indecent, as if I had left a stocking or brassiere on the table." Readers took her psychologically taut poems about doomed love-which, despite losing some lyricism in translation, remain startlingly fresh-as personal confessions. And many of them were. Of her new husband she wrote:

He loved three things in this world:

White peacocks, evensong