Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa in 1889. Christened as Anna Gorenko, she adopted her penname from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo and lived most of her life in Saint Petersburg, the city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. Together they became associated with the literary movement know as Acmeism. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter revolutionary activities.