Natalia Danilovna Anufrieva (26 November 1905, Saint Petersburg — date of death not established) was a Russian poet, a representative of spiritual and camp (Gulag) poetry of the 20th century. Her work is linked to the tradition of religious lyric poetry and to the experience of the Stalinist repressions.[1]

Biography and arrest

Crimea, in Simferopol, together with her mother and stepfather. On her mother's side she was a great-grandniece of Nikolai Fyodorovich Arendt — Pushkin). She began writing poetry early; her first poetic attempts won the approval of Maximilian Voloshin. After finishing school she worked as a statistician, and in 1931 Moscow — for personal reasons connected with the then well-known film actor and director Konstantin Vladimirovich Eggert (1883–1955): in her unpublished memoirs "The History of One Soul" he appears under the name Mikhail Danin.[1]

On 25 May 1936 Anufrieva was arrested following a denunciation by the poet, translator, and Vakhtangov Theatre actor Nikolai Vladimirovich Stefanovich, whom she trusted, not knowing of his NKVD. The investigation charged her with anti-Soviet statements, possession of Voloshin's poems, and a cycle of four poems dedicated to Admiral A. V. Kolchak, which she had read to Stefanovich. The same case involved the mathematician Daniil Zhukovsky, son of the poet Adelaida Herzyk; he was later shot under a new case opened while already in the camp. Anufrieva's youthful diary notebooks ended up in the FSB archive on Lubyanka.[1]

Poetry in imprisonment and exile

Researchers place Anufrieva's work among the key phenomena of Russian spiritual and prison-camp poetry of the 20th century, ranking her alongside Alexander Solodovnikov, Daniil Andreyev, Archbishop John Shakhovskoy, Anna Barkova, and Varlam Shalamov. Her best-known cycle is the poems from her period of exile (1949–1954), published under the title "The Silent Joy of the Cross."[1][2] The Alexander Solzhenitsyn Library of Russia Abroad holds several editions of her poems.[2]

The fate of Eggert, to whom Anufrieva was attached, was similar: from 1938 to 1946 he was held in a camp near Ukhta, where he ran the camp theatre, and afterward lived in exile in Ulan-Ude, where he died.[1]

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Natalia Danilovna Anufrieva. Poems. (archive)
  2. elibrary.domrz.ru — Electronic catalogue -Directory of Authors- Absopac (archive)
  3. dic.academic.ru — Anufrieva, Natalia Danilovna — What is Anufrieva, Natalia Danilovna? — Natalia Danilovna Anufrieva died on 13 December 1990. (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — By court sentence Anufrieva received eight years in the camps and served her term in Kolyma near Magadan. In the camp she found… (archive)
  5. azbyka.ru — Anufrieva Natalia Danilovna, poet, Those Who Suffered for Christ. Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church 1917–1956, Books (1-2) — read, download — During a search in 1936…