Bella Akhmadulina was a prominent Russian poet, one of the bold female
voices in contemporary Russian literature, whose ecstatic performances
attracted audiences of thousands to her appearances at concert halls
and stadiums.
She was born Isabella Akhatovna Akhmadulina on April 10, 1937 in
Moscow, Russia. Her father, Akhat Valeevich Akhmadulin, and mother,
Nadezhda Makarovna Lazareva, had mixed ancestry of Tatar, Russian,
Georgian, and Italian heritage. Akhmadulina finished high school and
attended the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. There she suffered
from political pressure and was temporarily expelled, because she
supported Boris Pasternak. Her talent
prevailed, and after a yearlong hiatus she returned to college,
graduating in 1960 as a writer.
Akhmadulina came to prominence during the post-Stalin thaw, when a
loosening of censorship led to a flowering of the arts. Her first poems
were published in 1955 in the official Soviet magazine "October". Her
deliciously fresh early poetry of the 1950s-60s was part of the revival
during the cultural "Thaw" initiated by
Nikita Khrushchev. Along with poets
Yevgeniy Yevtushenko,
Andrei Voznesensky,
Robert Rozhdestvenskiy and
Bulat Okudzhava, she played an important
role in the liberation of the collective consciousness after decades of
repressions under dictatorship of
Joseph Stalin. Akhmadulina was sometimes
compared with Anna Akhmatova for her
sincere feminine style. But later, after
Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed by
Leonid Brezhnev, the "Thaw" ended and
her style was misjudged by Soviet critics as eroticism. Akhmadulina was
barred from the Writer's Union and banned from publication at the same
time as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
and other Soviet dissidents. In response to the ending of the "Thaw"
she titled her next book of poetry "Oznob" (Fever, 1968), it was
published in Frankfurt, Germany, and in the USA under the title "Fever
and other poems" (1969).
Akhmadulina was a staunch proponent for freedom of speech and human
rights in the Soviet Union. She publicly defended
Andrei Sakharov,
Lev Kopelev, Georgi Vladimov',
Vladimir Voinovich and other
dissidents. When she was banned from the Soviet press and media,
Akhmadulina delivered her statements through international press and
radio. He poetry has been translated into English, Japanese, Italian,
Arabic, French, German, Polish, Czech, Danish, Armenian, Georgian,
Latvian, Kurdish, Romanian and many other languages worldwide. "There
is only one honorable reason for writing poetry - you can't do without
it," she said in an interview during her first visit to the United
States in 1977.
The main themes of Akhmadulina's works are friendship, love, and
relations between people. Her sensational public appearances, startling
images and intensely personal style, couched in classical verse forms,
established her as one of the Soviet Union's leading literary talents.
As she matured, her themes became more philosophical, even religious,
or they dwelled on the nature of poetic language. "O magic theater of a
poem,/spoil yourself, wrap up in sleepy velvet./I don't matter," she
wrote in one characteristic verse. Besides her poetry and prose, she
wrote numerous essays about Russian writers, such as
Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova,
Marina Tsvetaeva,
Vladimir Vysotskiy, Bulat
Okudzhava and Evgeni Evtushenko, among others. Nobel Prize winner
Joseph Brodsky, once placed Akhmadulina
above Russian poets of her generation and described her verses as a
"treasure of Russian poetry." Like so many Russian writers, Akhmadulina
stood for more than literary accomplishment. To Russian audiences she
embodied the soul of poetry and expressed, in her clashes with the
authorities, the moral imperative behind Russian literature.
Bella Akhmadulina received numerous awards and decorations from the
Soviet and Russian state. She was made Honorary Member of the American
Academy of Arts and Literature (1977). She was awarded the Order of
Friendship of Peoples (USSR, 1984), "Nosside" Prize (Italy, 1992),
"Pushkin" Prize (Germany, 1994), Presidential Prize (Russia, 1998). She
was awarded the U.S.S.R. State Prize in 1989 and the State Prize of the
Russian Federation in 2004. Despite her shaky official reputation, she
was always recognized as one of the Soviet Union's literary treasures
and a classic poet in the long line extending from Lermontov and
Pushkin.
Her talent, her feminine beauty and a multitude of her high profile
romantic affairs, sometimes comparable to that of
Marilyn Monroe, made her bohemian life a
stark contrast with the Soviet gloom. Beautiful and charismatic,
Akhmadulina married a series of prominent artists, starting with
Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, whom she met at
a student gathering in 1954. She made an indelible first impression,
with her "round, childish face," thick red hair tied in a braid and
"slanting Tatar eyes flashing," as he recalled in his 1963 memoir, "A
Precocious Autobiography." "This was Bella Akhmadulina, whom I married
a few weeks later." She was seventeen, and he was twenty one. Although
Mr. Yevtushenko wrote a series of love poems to her, the marriage did
not last, and Ms. Akhmadulina would later claim not to remember the
relationship. In the 1960s, she had a passionate romance with actor
Vasiliy Shukshin who was her partner in
film and TV performances. Later, she went on to marry the short-story
writer Yuriy Nagibin, then the children's
writer Gennadi Mamlin. She also had a relationship with director
Eldar Kuliyev which produced a daughter,
Elizaveta Kulieva, who also became a poet. In her later years, she was
married to Boris Messerer, a notable
Russian theater and film artist.
Bella Akhmadulina died of a heart failure on November 29, 2010, at her
home in Peredelkino, a suburb of Moscow, Russia. Her death caused a
considerable mourning in Russia. Thousands lined up to attend her
funeral service at the Central House of Writers, then she was laid to
rest near the tomb of
Andrei Voznesensky in Novodevichy
Cemetery, Moscow. Russian president Medevdev paid tribute, he wrote
that Akhmadulina's poetry was a "classic of Russian literature" and her
death was an "irreparable loss."
