Odessa is a port city on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, renowned for 19th-century architecture, including the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater. 

The initial Russian airstrikes took place in Odesa early on 24 February 2022, the first day of the invasion. The targets were city warehouses as well as radar and air defense systems, leading to 22 deaths and several injuries.

The literary world knows about the city because of Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s most brilliant poets. She began writing poetry at the age of 11, but her father didn’t want any of her work published under his respectable name (Gorenko); therefore, the poet adopted her grandmother’s Tartar name: Akhmatova. 

In 1921, her first husband, along with 61 others, was executed for alleged participation in an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. As a result, Akhmatova and her son were stigmatized, and she was unable to publish her works, while her son was not accepted into schools. 

Later, her second husband was arrested and eventually executed. Akhmatova spent many hours waiting in line to deliver food parcels and petition for their release. 

She has memorialized these events in her renowned poem, Requiem.

Like other bourgeois writers, Akhmatova was also condemned, and her poems banned from publication for ‘poisoning the mind of the Soviet youth.’ 

She was shortlisted for a Nobel Prize in 1965.

I share one of her poems here titled Death -- 

You'll come to me some day, - why not come now, at once?

I wait for you, can't stand this anymore. 

So, I put out the light and opened the door 

To you, so simple and so wondrous. 

You may assume whatever guise or form you wish: 

Come as a jagged shrapnel sliver, 

Or strike me down as a bandit with a kosh, 

Or poison me with typhoid fever, 

Or with the tale that you have spun to trap 

Us all - we've heard it until we're sick and tired. 

That I might see again the blue-topped caps 

And pale house-manager half-dead with fright.

It's all the same to me. The Yenisei's aboil, 

The North Star feverishly shines. 

The silent horror of the last hour veils 

The blue light of beloved eyes.

(The blue-topped caps were those of the secret police. House-managers were used as eyewitnesses during the night arrests.)