Why did Anna Akhmatova use that last name?

Question

When I heard the name "Anna Akhmatova", I assumed she'd be from Central Asia, with a surname consisting of a typical Muslim name as a root followed by the Russian-style "-ova" ending, similar to the Azerbaijani name Ahmadova but presumably from some other Turkic language rather than Azerbaijani, given the variant spelling. However, reading her Wikipedia page, I discovered that she and her family were Russian and Ukrainian, and her real name was Anna Andreyevna Gorenko with "Akhmatova" being a pseudonym, presumably inspired by her ancestor Ahmed Khan:

Khan Akhmat, my ancestor, was killed one night in his tent by a Russian killer-for-hire. Karamzin tells us that this marked the end of the Mongol yoke on Russia. [...] It was well known that this Akhmat was a descendant of Genghiz Khan. In the eighteenth century, one of the Akhmatov Princesses – Praskovia Yegorovna – married the rich and famous Simbirsk landowner Motovilov. Yegor Motovilov was my great-grandfather; his daughter, Anna Yegorovna, was my grandmother. She died when my mother was nine years old, and I was named in her honour.

_{— as quoted on Wikipedia (I couldn't verify the primary source)}

Why did she use Akhmatova instead of her real surname in her writing? Did she desire pseudonymity when writing, or was there a cultural aspect of embracing her Turkic ancestral origins? More context on the above quote might help to answer this, but I couldn't find an original source for it.

Answer 1

It seems we can’t know that for sure.

Akhmatova adopted this pseudonym as a teenager since her father didn’t want her to use his last name. Lydia Chukovskaya remembers her conversation with Akhmatova in Записки об Анне Ахматовой (The Akhmatova Journals):

Я спросила, кто придумал ей псевдоним.
— Никто, конечно. Никто мной тогда не занимался. Я была овца без пастуха. И только семнадцатилетняя шальная девчонка могла выбрать татарскую фамилию для русской поэтессы. Это фамилия последних татарских князей из Орды. Мне потому пришло на ум взять себе псевдоним, что папа, узнав о моих стихах, сказал: «Не срами мое имя». — «И не надо мне твоего имени» — сказала я.

I asked who came up with her pseudonym.
— No one, of course. No one took care of me then. I was a sheep without a shepherd. And only a crazy seventeen-year-old girl could choose a Tatar name for a Russian poetess. This is the surname of the last Tatar princes from the Horde. That's why it occurred to me to take a pseudonym for myself, because Dad, when he found out about my poems, said: "Do not disgrace my name." "And I don't need your name," I said.

Praskovia Akhmatova was the poet’s great-grandmother. However, as Silver Age scholar Alexandra Chaban comments, she was not a Tatar princess, but a Russian noblewoman (of Tatar origin), and it’s impossible to confirm or disprove any relation to Genghisid rulers (perhaps it was a family legend?). As for the choice of this particular pseudonym, Chaban says it just sounded good:

such a move was not so reckless for the era of the Silver Age: that time demanded artistic behavior, vivid biographies and sonorous names from new writers. In this sense, the name Anna Akhmatova perfectly met all the criteria (poetic — it created a rhythmic pattern in a dactylic dimeter, and featured an assonance with the "a"; and life-crafting — it carried a touch of mystery).

One site lists the surnames of her other relatives she could’ve used: Stogova, Motovilova, Evseeva, Voronina. They have much more mundane connotations in Russian: e.g. “Stogova” comes from the word “stack” (as a haystack), and “Motovilova” reminds of the process of winding threads in a loom.

Joseph Brodsky, who knew Akhmatova personally and was sort of under her mentorship, expressed a similar opinion in his introduction to her poetry:

All the same, the five open a’s of Anna Akhmatova had a hypnotic effect and put this name’s carrier firmly on top of the alphabet of Russian poetry. In a sense, it was her first successful line; memorable in its acoustic inevitability, with its Ah sponsored less by sentiment than by history. This tells you a lot about the intuition and quality of the ear of this seventeen-year-old girl who soon after publication began to sign her letters and legal papers as Anna Akhmatova. In its suggestion of identity derived from the fusion of sound and time, the choice of the pseudonym turned out to be ргоphetic.