Akhmatova, Anna

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was born as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in Odessa, but she spent most of her childhood in Tsarskoye Selo, a village near the imperial summer palace outside St Petersburg. Her parents divorced when she was sixteen years old and she moved with her mother to southern Russia where she attended school. She then studied law in Kiev before returning to St Petersburg to read literature. Her favourite authors included Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Dante, Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. She started to write poetry at the age of twelve when she was still living at Tsarskoye Selo. Her father, who was an officer, did not oppose his daughter's desire to write. The only thing he asked of her was to publish her work under a pseudonym to protect the family name.