Poetic Obituaries: For more than 40 years,

the poet Bella Akhmadulina, who has died aged 73, was a regal, even sainted presence on the Moscow literary scene. She was practically unique, because it was simply not done to speak ill of her, no matter what one's position in official or unofficial hierarchies. She had an aura to which everyone deferred.

Akhmadulina was born in Moscow to a father of Tartar lineage and a mother of Russian-Italian stock, both of them well-placed servants of the Soviet bureaucracy. Her good looks, slightly exotic with a touch of vulnerability, did no harm to her literary progress. She was a teenage prodigy, and earned the distinction of having her poetry denigrated in the newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda at the age of 20.

from The Guardian: Bella Akhmadulina obituary

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