Bella Akhmadulina

Early life, education and works Bella Akhmadulina was born in Moscow on 10 April 1937, the only child of Akhat Valeevich Akhmadulin, a Tatar father and Nadezhda Makarovna Lazareva, a Russian-Italian mother. They underwent evacuation to Kazan when World War II broke out.

After finishing school, Akhmadulina entered the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute from which she graduated in 1960. While studying at the institute, she published her poems and articles in different newspapers, both official and handwritten. She was the subject of criticism in Komsomolskaya Pravda in 1957. In 1962 the first collection of her poems, titled Struna (The String), was published

"Many dogs and one dog", a short story written in a surreal style, was published in 1979 in Samizdat's Metropol Almanac. She assisted in the creation of Metropol. She wrote essays about Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. In October 1993, she signed the Letter of Forty-Two.

She was a journalist in a 1964 film.

After the Soviet Union she published Casket and Key (1994), A Guiding Sound (1995) and One Day in December (1996).

Translations The main themes of Akhmadulina's works are friendship, love, and relations between people. She wrote numerous essays about Russian poets and translators, some devoted to her close friend, Bulat Okudzhava. Akhmadulina avoided writing overtly political poems, but took part in political events in her youth, supporting the so-called "dissident movement". She translated Russian poetry from France, Italy, Chechnya, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, and many others.

Akhmadulina wrote in a "resolutely apolitical" style. F.D. Reeve compared Akhmadulina to Alexander Pushkin, saying that she “cloaked her spirit with his”. In 1974, she married her last husband, the famous artist and stage designer Boris Messerer. They had homes in Peredelkino and Moscow. They were married from 1974 to her death in 2010. Akhmadulina spoke of having a "guiding light" and believing that "something or someone looks after us”. with Medvedev writing on his blog that the death was an "irreparable loss".

Filmography

Cameo I Am Twenty (1961), directed by Marlen Khutsiev

Screenwriter Clean Ponds (1965), based on the works of Yuri Nagibin Stewardess (1967)