Bella Akhmadulina

Bella (Izabella) Akhatovna Akhmadulina (Russian: Белла Ахатовна Ахмадулина) is a Russian poet who has been cited by Joseph Brodsky as the best living poet in the Russian language. Bella was born on the 10 April 1937 in Moscow. Akhmadulina was the only child of a Tatar father and a Russian-Italian mother. Her literary career began when she was a school-girl working as a journalist on the Moscow newspaper "Metrostroevets" and improving her poetic skills at a circle organized by a poet Yevgeny Vinokurov.

Bella (Izabella) Akhatovna Akhmadulina (Russian: Белла Ахатовна Ахмадулина) is a Russian poet who has been cited by Joseph Brodsky as the best living poet in the Russian language. Bella was born on the 10 April 1937 in Moscow. Akhmadulina was the only child of a Tatar father and a Russian-Italian mother. Her literary career began when she was a school-girl working as a journalist on the Moscow newspaper "Metrostroevets" and improving her poetic skills at a circle organized by a poet Yevgeny Vinokurov. Her first poems were published in 1955 in a magazine "October" and approved by orthodox Soviet poets. After finishing school she entered the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute from which she graduated in 1960.

During her studying at the institute she published her poems & articles in different newspapers, both official and handwritten. In 1962 the first collection of her poems named "String" was a resounding success. In spite of being expurged a lot of collections of verses were published later: "Music lessons" (1969), "Poems" (1975), "Candle" (1977), "Dreams on Georgia" (1977), "Coastline" (1991) and others. Some of her poems have become popular songs. Bella's first marriage was to Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1954); her second husband was Yuri Nagibin (1960); in 1974, she married her current husband, the famous Russian artist Boris Messerer.

They have a house in Peredelkino and a studio in Moscow. The main themes of Akhmadulina's works are friendship, love, and relations between people. She is the author of numerous essays about Russian poets and translations. Some of them were devoted to her close friend, Bulat Okudzhava. Akhmadulina avoids writing political poems, but she took part in political events of her youth supporting the movement of so-called dissidents. In 1977, Bella Akhmadulina became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL..