Mirra Lokhvitskaya

Mirra Lokhvitskaya was a Russian poet who rose to fame in the late 1890s. In her lifetime she published five books of poetry, the first and the last of which received the prestigious Pushkin Prize. Due to the erotic sensuality of her works, Lokhvitskaya was regarded as the "Russian Sappho" by her contemporaries, which did not correspond with her conservative life style of dedicated wife and mother of five sons. Forgotten in Soviet times, in the late 20th century Lokhvitskaya's legacy was reassessed and she came to be regarded as one of the most original and influential voices of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry and the first in the line of modern Russian women poets who paved the way for Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva.