А. А. Маркова. Биографический очерк

Anna Markova was born in Saint Petersburg on November 6 (October 24) 1895. Asya, as her family used to call her, graduated from the grammar school and continued her education at the Courses of Foreign Languages, where she studied English and German.

The first years following the revolution brought about many losses and hardships. In 1927 she managed to get the job of a room attendant at the Hermitage. Some time later, however, Markova, as she notes in her autobiography, “was offered the position of a research offi cer”. She owed it partly to the scholarly reputation of her father A. Markov (1858–1920) and to the good memory he left in the museum.

From the very first days of the Great Patriotic War Anna Markova took an active part in preparing the museum collection for evacuation: she worked on registering and conserving the items that were to be left in Leningrad. Apart from museum work Markova, as many other citizens, participated in air-defense, organizing bomb-shelters and digging trenches on the outskirts of the city. In October 1942 she was transported to Sverdlovsk in dystrophic condition. For the heroic labour during the war she was awarded the medal “For the Defence of Leningrad”.

After the war Markova continued to work on the Hermitage catalogue of West European coins. She wrote twenty four volumes of the catalogue. For this work Markova was awarded several Hermitage diplomas.

Anna Markova died in Leningrad in January 1975, at the age of seventy nine.