I: Revolution and Counter-Memory
There is no present — I am proud of the past
And I suffocate from such shame.
Reading Anna Akhmatova’s first two collections of verse it can be difficult to recognise the poet who would later be viewed with such hostility and unease by the Soviet nomenklatura. The sparse, precise love lyrics of Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914) seem innocuous, apolitical, unworthy of the full arsenal of state suppression. The Bolsheviks, however, took a different view of the matter. For the new regime, engaged in a revolutionary struggle for survival, every word that Akhmatova wrote — or didn’t write — had political implications. She would become, for both the Bolsheviks and her readers, the living symbol of a lost prerevolutionary culture. She embodied what Svetlana Boym described in The Future of Nostalgia as a “counter-memory” that “laid a foundation of democratic resistance” within the Soviet sphere.
The October Revolution, for the Bolsheviks, was more than simply a change of regime: it signalled a whole new epoch. The old social system which they had overthrown had its own “official literature” and, as Leon Trotsky put it in Literature and Revolution, the “collapse” of this system “could not but be the collapse of prerevolutionary literature.” This “collapse” was, in reality, an orchestrated ideological assault on “the literature of individualism” that Akhmatova embodied. When the Bolsheviks dismissed her as the voice of a “dying class” they neglected to mention that this class was being wiped out by their own agents. In the case of her husband, the Symbolist poet Nikolai Gumilyov, he was executed by the Petrograd Cheka during the first wave of Bolshevik terror. Akhmatova’s survival was partly due to her national popularity and partly to the fact that she did not openly criticise or explicitly write about the revolution or the regime. This, however, was not necessarily enough to save her reputation or her status within the new communist order. For her Soviet critics, not writing about the revolution or the workers provided sufficient grounds for condemnation, even if it did not justify physical destruction. But this was not simply a sin of omission: she was also targeted because of the image she presented and the role she created for herself as a public poet.
In her biography of the poet, Amanda Haight writes that Akhmatova was, by the early 1920s, “already beginning to be considered as someone connected with the past. In a cultural atmosphere such as that of post-revolutionary Russia, which had its gaze firmly set on the future, this could not but bode ill.” She was now accused of being “narrow, petty, boudoir.” In 1923, the doctrinaire Soviet literary critic Grigory Lelevich laid down the party line, linking her poetic themes to her class identity: “Akhmatova’s poetry is a small and beautiful fragment of aristocratic culture,” he wrote in the Soviet literary journal On Guard,
The circle of emotions open to the poetess is exceptionally limited. She has responded to the social upheavals, basically the most important phenomenon of our time, in a feeble and, at that, hostile manner. There is no broad sweep of vision or depth of understanding in Akhmatova’s world.
This was, in primitive form, the argument that Trotsky would apply to “non-October” literature a year later: the hostile or inadequate response of the Russian intelligentsia to the revolution would condemn them not only on political but aesthetic grounds. (Thus, Blok could only be saved by his poem of October, ‘The Twelve’.)
The Lelevich-Trotsky line would be recycled by Stalin’s Central Committee Secretary Andrei Zhdanov in 1946, at the beginning of Akhmatova’s second long period of suppression. “Akhmatova’s work belongs to the distant past; it is alien to modern Soviet reality and cannot be tolerated on the pages of our magazines,” he thundered in a report to the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Writers, confirming the poet’s final expulsion from the official cultural life of the state:
The basis of her poetry is made up of amatory erotic themes, interwoven with themes of sadness, longing, death, mysticism, and doom. The feeling of doom is one we can expect to find in the social consciousness of the dying group. The gloomy tones of hopelessness before death, mystic experiences intermingled with eroticism — this is the spiritual world of Akhmatova, a left-over from the old aristocratic culture which has sunk once and for all into the oblivion of the ‘good old days of Catherine’…
In some ways, there was little that Akhmatova could do to counter this other than stay silent. Much of the Bolshevik critique was, after all, true. These were things she could not deny or renounce without sacrificing her integrity or identity. She could hardly object to being linked to a cultural past that was central to her poetic vision and the themes and images of her work. The poetry of Evening and Rosary was alien to the new Soviet reality and could not exist in any other way.
From the Bolshevik point of view, it did not help Akhmatova’s case that she had family roots in the landowning gentry and chose to emphasise and even exaggerate her tenuous aristocratic lineage. Her noble bearing and rarified aura — as much as the lace shawls draped around her shoulders and her slender, bony profile, carefully rendered and publicised by the line drawings of Modigliani and Yury Annenkov — formed part of her carefully cultivated mystique. Her position as high-profile representative of the Petersburg intelligentsia also made her vulnerable. The Stray Dog Cafe, Akhmatova’s hangout and home of the city’s bohemia, was notorious for its social discrimination, as the painter Sergei Sudeikin recalled:
The public entered from the courtyard and went through a small door, like going through a needle’s eye. The main door onto the street was opened only for “our crowd” […] Poets, musicians, artists, scholars were admitted free. Everybody else was referred to as “pharmacists,” and what they charged for entrance depended on their appearance and on the mood.
The Bolsheviks had a deep suspicion of private clubs, societies and cafes, particularly those they could not control: as Boym wrote in Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, the cafe was “a place for conversation, not conversion, a place for minor theatrical revolts, not for revolutions,” “collective in an ideologically incorrect manner, eccentric but in a wrong style, not classless but declasse (if not bourgeois).” By the time she came to compose Poem Without a Hero Akhmatova was able to recognise that the Stray Dog crowd — with its tortured love affairs, cult of suicide, literary feuds and decadent masques — had sown the seeds of its own demise. Absorbed in their own games, the “aristocratic” poet and her narcissistic friends had not even noticed that a more dangerous game was being played outside the shuttered windows of their club.
There was an important symbolism in the fact that Zhdanov delivered his judgement of Akhmatova in her spiritual home, the old city of St. Petersburg, haunted by the ghosts of Blok and Mandelstam, the Poet’s Guild and the Stray Dog. Even now, Zhdanov felt the need to bury the Russian Silver Age, which remained within living memory and still existed as an abstract threat, an apparition, a dangerous spirit. While Akhmatova lived and while her work was read, this spirit had a tangible medium. The danger was, initially at least, less to do with what she said or wrote, than what she represented: a cultural continuity that the revolutionary state claimed to have ended. In fact, as Zhdanov wrote and delivered his Leningrad report, Akhmatova was beginning to compose her own tribute to the “non-October” Petersburg writers and artists who had been ridiculed, erased, exiled or murdered by the Bolshevik regime: an epic poem to commemorate and ultimately condemn her generation.
II: From “I” to “We”: War, History and the Making of a Voice
Two wars, my generation,
Lit your terrible path.
This “generation” was both the pre-war Petersburg intelligentsia to which Akhmatova belonged and all of the Russians who came of age during the first decade of the twentieth century and lived through two wars and three revolutions. They shared the same experiences that her poems documented: this was, at least, the assumption, or conceit, that was necessary to make them work.
‘History’ was, for Akhmatova, experienced as a series of shocks: the ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 1905; the July crisis and declaration of war in 1914; the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive; the October Revolution; the Yezhov Terror; the Nazi assault on Leningrad. The destruction of the Russian naval fleet at Tsushima at the end of the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 was, Akhmatova recalled, “a shock that lasted my whole life, and since it was the first one, it was especially terrible.” In The Way of All the Earth, Akhmatova’s “great requiem for oneself” and for “old Europe,” Tsushima becomes an epochal stage in the unravelling of a continental civilisation:
The bird-cherry tree
Stole past like a dream.
And somebody said: “Tsushima!”
On the telephone.
Swiftly, swiftly —
The era ends:
The Viking and the Korean
Sailed to the East…
There, like a swallow, hovers
The old pain…
What follows is the disintegration of empire and the “Januarys and Julys” of revolution and world war:
Trenches, trenches —
You could lose your way!
Of old Europe
A scrap remains,
Where in clouds of smoke
Towns burn…
The significance of Tsushima as the herald of an apocalyptic conflagration — the annihilation of an era — is partly in Akhmatova’s own mind. It was a period, closely connected to the poetry of Evening and Rosary, when her own consciousness and ego took centre stage. Significantly, Tsushima would eventually take its own place among the “swarm of ghosts” in Poem Without a Hero (“The phantom of Tsushima’s hell/Is here as well”), Akhmatova’s final reckoning with those “shades from the year 1913,” the spirits of old St. Petersburg and prerevolutionary Russia. This was not simply a national tragedy or a family trauma, although it was both. For Akhmatova, Tsushima and the great wars and revolutions that followed cast a shadow over her own past, including her childhood memories of summers spent on the Black Sea. They also darkened and threatened her vocation as a poet, while simultaneously giving it new meaning:
Now the ridge of the Crimea
Grows dark.
And I am leading a flock
Of my own mourners.
If the awareness of “leading a flock” was absent from Evening and Rosary then it had started to emerge by the time of the First World War and the October Revolution. White Flock (1916) contained the first poems that registered the chasm that had opened in time as Akhmatova began to divine the unstable, brutal future of a country about to be cut off from its own past. In ‘July 1914’ she writes:
The sun has become God’s displeasure,
Rain has not sprinkled the fields since Easter.
A one-legged stranger came along
And all alone in the courtyard he said:“Fearful times are drawing near. Soon
Fresh graves will be everywhere.
There will be famine, earthquakes, widespread death,
And the eclipse of the sun and the moon.
Months into the war, before Russian imperial forces had faced any significant defeats or reversals, Akhmatova could sense the catastrophes to come; already, she is writing into existence the “Russian earth” that “loves, loves/Droplets of blood,” a scorched landscape that “smells of burning” peat, under a dead, silent sky (“the birds have not even sung today”). But this is not yet a song of total surrender or despair:
But the enemy will not divide
Our land at will, for himself:
The Mother of God will spread her white mantle
Over this enormous grief.”
In May 1915, the same month that the Russian army was routed in the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive, Akhmatova intones a “prayer” that “the stormcloud over darkened Russia/might become a cloud of glorious rays.” By the summer of 1916 this hope has been extinguished. Instead, she commemorates the final day of a dead era:
We aged a hundred years, and this
Happened in a single hour……The shadows of passion and songs vanished from my memory.
The Most High ordered it — emptied —
To become a grim book of calamity.
‘In Memoriam, July 19, 1914’ is Akhmatova’s elegy for a lost world: it is a retrospective acknowledgment of the passing of a threshold, a point of no return. The war, for Akhmatova, begins and ends as a national tragedy; there is no glory or romance, and if anything can be salvaged it is the survival of the Russian people as a people. Important as this is, the loss is irreparable. What Akhmatova loses is the Petersburg intellectuals’ precious conception of Russia as a European nation: distinct and exceptional, no doubt, but part of a historic civilisational project. It is a threat to the vision, the self-conception, in which she follows in the footsteps of Pushkin and Dante.
The Russian patriot, Orthodox poet, Cassandra and ‘voice of the many’ slowly emerge and merge from the ruin and chaos of war. Akhmatova’s war poems reveal a developing sense of her historic role, a self-conscious assumption of responsibility that culminates in the public testimony of Requiem and the declaration contained in ‘To the Many’ (1922):
I — am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I — am the reflection of your face,
The futile trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to the end, in any case.
Akhmatova was a consummate myth-maker, and the greatest myth that she made was herself. This tendency was already deeply embedded in the poetic and artistic culture of the Silver Age, particularly among the Symbolists, for whom the creation of the poet’s own persona was itself an artistic act. For Akhmatova, however, historical tragedy transformed this self-mythologising into something more consequential: it allowed the narrative of her own life to become connected to the broader experience of her Russian and Petersburgian generation. During the lifetime of the Soviet Union, she would come to represent what Boym described as an alternative, “unofficial” or oppositional culture within the Communist bloc. This role developed gradually as Akhmatova increasingly accepted the responsibilities attached to being a poet who preserved a historical memory at odds with the Soviet conception of the past. She had already begun to understand the possibilities of this role during the First World War: the image had been formed and her “voice” developed and tested before October gave it a new political and historical significance. Everything that followed — revolution, exile, terror, war and the destruction of the cultural world to which she belonged — served to confirm and enlarge her sense of responsibility to the Russian people and to the victims of the Stalinist regime. Historical catastrophe therefore did not simply provide Akhmatova with subjects for poetry; it transformed her self-created poetic identity into a claim to speak for a collective historical memory.
The war poems of White Flock and Plantain (1921) did not simply regret the defeat of her nation, then: they mourned a past that was social, cultural, civilisational and personal. Akhmatova’s own grief represented the grief of a generation:
Inside me still, like a song of grief,
Is the last winter before the war.Whiter than the vaults of Smolny Cathedral,
More mysterious than the splendid Summer Garden
It was. We didn’t know that soon
We would be looking back at it in exquisite pain.
This “we” merges Akhmatova’s own experiences with those of her friends, lovers and rivals in the St. Petersburg of her memory and a Russian people who would soon be silenced and exploited by a new imperial autocracy. For this reason, it may well constitute one of the most serious and subtle challenges to the Bolshevik worldview in her work. Describing the shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ that occurred in Akhmatova’s poetry at this time, Haight notes that “only because this ‘we’ was not the one favoured by the Marxist critics the shift was largely ignored or taken to refer to a very small group of people.” It is clear, however, that Akhmatova meant to apply the pronoun more broadly than the regime would acknowledge. Her “we” encompassed the “many” Russians — patriotic or not, Orthodox or not — who would be classified by the Bolsheviks as “masses,” “classes” or “enemies.” As “decades file by” (“Tortures, exiles and deaths,” Akhmatova laments in Poem Without a Hero, “I can’t sing/in the midst of this horror”) so the shadows of this “we” draw longer and become more crowded.
Akhmatova’s sense of her own historic role was therefore vast and potentially unlimited. Even her silence had significance for the fate of her people. “I have been silent, silent for thirty years,” she writes in Northern Elegies, yet another of her fractured, autobiographical epics:
My silence can be heard everywhere.
It fills the courtroom,
And it could have drowned out
The roar of rumor, and like a miracle
It puts its stamp on everything.
It is part of everything.
Her poetry had begun with the neoclassical purity of the Acmeist creed in Rosary and Evening, but the apparent impersonality of this style had barely disguised the theatricality and the dramatic effects that went into the construction of her public image, both in the poems and in her personal life. The overlap was, in many ways, complete. Her role as a “voice” for others was an extension of this conception of the self. For Akhmatova, the poetic self was a performance, supplemented and ultimately transformed by the responsibilities and demands of her historic destiny. She purposefully stepped onto the national stage in a way that other poets of her generation did not, could not, or were stopped from doing, unless they agreed to do the work of the Union of Soviet Writers. As Isaiah Berlin observed, she had a “dramatic, at times visionary sense of reality” that seemed to separate and even disqualify her from fully participating in Soviet reality. When they met, in St. Petersburg in 1945, “she seemed to see in me a fateful, perhaps doom-laden messenger of the end of the world — a tragic intimation of the future,” an impression partly confirmed by her reference to it in Poem Without a Hero:
Long enough I have frozen in fear,
Better to summon a Bach Chaconne
And behind it will enter a man,
He will not be a beloved husband to me
But what we accomplish, he and I,
Will disturb the Twentieth Century.
The immediate outcome of this meeting was Akhmatova’s expulsion from the Writer’s Union and the re-arrest of her son. This was serious and traumatic enough in itself, but, for Akhmatova, it held even greater significance. As Berlin recalled, she considered herself to be a key factor in the start of the Cold War — the secret link between Acmeism and ICBMs — simply by having met him. It was the conviction that she was an active agent in a grand national and human drama that gave her poetry its cultural and historic power, a point Berlin tacitly acknowledged, in his own backhanded way, when he remarked:
I could not protest that she had perhaps, even if the reality of Stalin’s violent fit of anger and of its possible consequences were allowed for, somewhat overestimated the effect of our meeting on the destinies of the world, since she would have felt this as an insult to her tragic image of herself as Cassandra — indeed, to the historico-metaphysical vision which informed so much of her poetry.
This “historico-metaphysical vision” was the construction of an aesthetic and personal identity that informed not only her poetry but also her life. In this sense, it was something she learned from the Symbolists, or perhaps what made her, in many ways, a Symbolist herself (as Haight notes, she “quoted with pride the critic Viktor Zhirmunsky’s statement that the Poem Without a Hero was the fulfillment of the Symbolists’ dream”). She did not simply adopt or accept her role as a “voice of the many”: she created it. It became a credible reality because of the power of her own imagination, ego and talent, and was accepted at face value by so many for the very same reasons. As a response to the collapse of the world that had shaped her, Akhmatova identified and then chose to embody an Orthodox Russian spirit that had, in her mind, separated it from the Soviet state. At the same time, she began to see herself as the custodian and symbol of a Russian culture that had grown out of an imperial power that also saw itself as a European power. If the destruction of Europe had destroyed this power, then it had left untouched, in its essentials, the historical Russian geist that could still be found in its folk tales, legends, myths, land and people.
III: Poem Without a Hero: Memory as Judgment
As the future ripens in the past
So the past rots in the future —
A terrible festival of dead leaves.
Akhmatova completed two more volumes of poetry before the Soviet censors silenced her for the first time: Plantain (1921) and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1922). Like her previous books these were collections of poems that were simultaneously dated and arranged in non-chronological order. Akhmatova’s sense of time was always exact, personal, sensitive and non-linear: a poetic time, combining memory, mythology, history, and immediate experience that would find its true form in her long poems Northern Elegies and Poem Without a Hero.
In Northern Elegies Akhmatova evoked “Dostoevsky’s Russia” and the St. Petersburg of Pushkin, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Anna Karenina and the Stile Moderne. The intention was autobiographical and the city and its culture closely woven into the fabric of her life as she saw it. The myth of Petersburg therefore had a role in her own myth; in some way, the poems suggest, they could not be separated. In her unfinished memoir, she writes
the first (lower) layer for me is the Petersburg of the 90s, the Petersburg of Dostoevsky. It was dressed from head to foot in tasteless signboards — underwear, corsets, hats, without any greenery, without grass, without flowers; drums were beating continuously, thus always recalling capital punishment; French was spoken and there were grandiose funeral processions along the thoroughfares described by Mandelstam.
This is the “prehistory” that makes up the first elegy which documents the texture of a city that would soon become a different place, the Leningrad of the seventh elegy: brutalised by war, revolution and tyranny and condemned to silence (“It is deforming my fate/It almost devoured my soul”). Like Poem Without a Hero, Northern Elegies (in its final edit) owes a debt to Eliot’s Four Quartets in its sense of time (“I am aware of beginnings and endings/And life after the end…”) but where Akhmatova breaks from Eliot is in her understanding of the individual as an agent in a collective experience of history. The elegies once again place her personal history in a wider narrative, from the immersive cultural and physical memories of the first elegy to those cries of anguish, the fifth (‘About the 1910’s’), sixth (“Everything has changed: the people, the objects, the walls”) and seventh (“…I have been silent, silent for thirty years…”). To be born at this moment, in this place, was both a blessing and a curse, but it was the people born at this time who made it so (a theme that recurs, in starker and more pitiless form, in Poem Without a Hero). There was nothing random or accidental about any of it:
This is when we decided to be born,
And timing it perfectly
So as not to miss any of those pageants
Yet to come…
Akhmatova had no fully developed theory of history, but her poems express an instinctive understanding of the interplay between the impersonal forces of history and the destiny of the individual. This understanding is not systematic, but mythic and tragic (“Soon I will need a lyre,” she writes in Part Two of Poem Without a Hero, “But that of Sophocles, not Shakespeare/At the threshold stands — Destiny”). It was her fate to be both victim and perpetrator, spectator and actor. Northern Elegies, in its own fragmented, elliptical way, tells the story of life that has been stolen and then reclaimed in a new form:
I, like a river,
Was rechanneled by this stern age.
They gave me a substitute life. It began to flow
In a different course, passing the other one,
And I do not recognise my banks.
Fate, responsibility and history are finally and fully confronted in Akhmatova’s most important work, Poem Without a Hero. Unlike The Way of All the Earth and Northern Elegies, there are no real traces of nostalgia in this poem: it is a stark reckoning with the past. The poet is haunted by “a swarm of ghosts,” those “shades from the year 1913”: Blok, the critic Mikhail Kuzmin (“the most elegant Satan”), the dancer Olga Glebova-Sudeikina and her tragic lover Vsevolod Knyazev (whose suicide is one of the pivots of the poem). Akhmatova describes how the first verses of Part One “came to me…on the night of December 27, 1940” (“I did not summon it…”) and the poem never seemed to leave her ever again: she returned to it, editing, adding, rewriting until her death in 1962. The poem itself was a kind of haunting, or even a possession.
Poem Without a Hero was about Akhmatova, her friends and what their Petersburg lives in 1913 ultimately led to. It was concerned less with what they did than with what they allowed to happen: what, through their vanity and egotism, they thought they could ignore, control or exploit. “The Petersburg delivtry” of the Stray Dog generation would, in the end, prove to be a fatal distraction, a disastrous abnegation of responsibility. As Nancy Anderson wrote in her study The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat:
In ‘Requiem,’ Akhamtova appears as the representative of a “guiltless Russia” that suffers cruel and incomprehensible torments. But in ‘Poem Without a Hero’ she appears as the representative of a guilty generation, a generation that allowed its artistic brilliance to mask a moral failure.
Looking back from the ruin and terror of 1940, Akhmatova saw what she did not, or could not, see then:
Death is somewhere near, evidently,
But thoughtless, shameless, nonchalant,
The masqueraders babble on…
If there is one thing worse than surveying the spectacle of the past in the ruins of the present, it is having to confront your younger self:
But I am afraid: I myself will enter
And not removing my lace shawl,
I will smile at them all and fall silent.
I don’t want to meet again
The woman I was then…
In ‘Chapter Three’ (Petersburg 1913) the poem presents city itself as bearing responsibility for its own destruction and for its spiritual and moral blindness to the advancing danger:
the whole mournful city floated
Toward some mysterious goal
With the Neva’s current or against it —
Only away from its graves
The Galernaya arch darkened,
In the Summer Garden the weathervane squealed,
And the silver crescent moon brightly chilled
Over the Silver Age.
Because along all the roads
Because towards all the thresholds
A shadow was slowly advancing —
Rather than facing the reality of the present and the future, “under Tsaritsa Avdotia’s curse/Dostoevskian and possessed/the city withdrew into the mist.” Petersburg could not summon the spiritual strength or the moral clarity to save itself, or forestall its doom, a turn of events for which Akhmatova held everybody who ever claimed to represent or love the city responsible, including herself:
As before an execution, the drum rolled…
And ever-present in the freezing, prewar,
Lecherous, terrible, stifling air,
Lurked an incomprehensible rumble…
But then it was barely audible,
It scarcely reached the ear
And it sank into the snowdrifts by the Neva.
Just as in the mirror of a horrific night
A man is possessed and does not want
To recognise himself
Along the legendary embankment
The real — not the calendar —
Twentieth Century draws near.
The charges made by Akhmatova in Poem Without a Hero were as unforgiving in their own way as those made by Trotsky and Zhdanov. The Bolsheviks accused the Symbolists and Acmeists of ignoring reality — specifically, the reality of the revolution — and of paying the inevitable price for doing so. From the other shore, the critique Akhmatova developed in Poem Without a Hero levelled the same accusation: their disconnection from reality, vanity and decadence led directly to the destruction of their own society and their city.
IV: From Counter-Memory to State Memory
I will preserve the past in my home,
On the past I will secretly work a charm.
Akhmatova’s major poems were acts of preservation: attempts to retain a past that the Bolsheviks sought to erase or radically redefine. They would form the basis of a ‘counter-memory’ that existed beyond the reach of the state, maintaining a cultural legacy and political consciousness that would both lead to and survive the end of the Soviet Union. With the onset of the ‘real’ twenty-first Century, however, this ‘counter-memory’ would become a valuable cultural and political resource for a very different kind of regime.
Akhmatova’s Russia was not state property: it was a land, a language, a culture and a spirit. As Isaiah Berlin observed, her “deep patriotism was not tinged by nationalism” because she did not view the Russian “soul” through the lens of state ideology or power. In 1935, she spoke of “innocent Russia” writhing “under bloody boots,” a collective body and a spiritual space under brutal psychic and physical attack by a pitiless regime imposing an alien ideology. In ‘Petrograd 1919,’ she recalled “the lakes, the steppes, the towns/And the dawns of our great native land” that “confined to this savage capital” she had “forgotten forever.” In the 1961 poem ‘Native Land,’ the nation found its true expression not in nationalist ideology, military glory, banners, flags or uniforms, but in the connection between the people and the “mud,” “grit” and “dust” — literally the “soil” — of the Russian earth:
We don’t wear her on our breast in cherished amulets,
We don’t, with wrenching sobs, write verse about her.
She does not disturb our bitter sleep,
Nor seem to us the promised paradise.
We have not made her, in our souls,
An object to be brought or sold.
Suffering, sick, wandering over her,
We don’t even remember her.
Yes, for us it’s the mud on galoshes,
Yes, for us it’s the grit in our teeth.
And we grind, and we kneed, and we crumble
This clean dust.
But we lie in her and we become her,
And because of that we freely call her — our own.
This was the voice of Akhmatova who, in 1915 and 1916, lamented the fate of the grieving mothers and their sons who had been killed on the Russian front while her husband wore his own “cherished amulet” to fight the imperial cause with enthusiasm. Gumilyov had embraced a form of state patriotism that, in Akhmatova’s view, brought only destruction and drenched the Russian soil in blood. This was an anti-propaganda poem that nevertheless extolled a physical and spiritual bond between the land and its people (Akhmatova would sometimes adopt the persona of a Russian peasant woman in the war poems of 1914-17). In her view, this land belonged to the people, who were closest to it, not the regime that violently expropriated it — the “we” that Akhmatova could address in the expectation that millions of Russians would recognise themselves in her words. Given the Soviet claim on the property and identity of the Russian people, this “we” could therefore be treated as an implicit threat to the sovereignty of the regime.
Akhmatova’s patriotism had always been at the root of her popular appeal inside Russia. This was, to some extent, a different Akhmatova to the St. Petersburg dissident adopted by the exiles as one of their own. She did not necessarily see any distinction between her Russian and Petersburgian loyalties, but neither did she fully accept the image or expectations that these emigres created for her. She had made an early connection between loyalty to the nation and refusal to leave, even when that nation had been effectively abolished by its new rulers. The October Revolution and its brutal aftermath triggered an exodus of writers and artists that seemed irresistible, and yet, very publicly, she had resisted:
A voice came to me. It called out comfortingly
It said, “Come here,
Leave your deaf and sinful land,
Leave Russia forever.
I will wash the blood from your hands,
Root out the black shame from your heart,
With a new name I will conceal
The pain of defeats and injuries.”
But calmly and indifferently,
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that my sorrowing spirit
Would not be stained by those shameful words.
What she found here, by declaring fidelity to her nation, was a public voice, and the most important discovery that she made was that so many Russians responded to it, even as the Bolsheviks tried to control and redefine Russian identity and loyalty to the nation.
The severity with which Akhmatova described the psychological and moral condition of exile and her condemnation of those who chose it was partly explained by her view of it as the physical and spiritual rejection of Russia itself. Akhmatova, in stark contrast, would rather die in her country, she told Isaiah Berlin, “no matter what horrors are in store.” To do anything else was considered a moral abdication that was the result of a spiritual sickness. “I am not one of those who abandoned their land,” she wrote in July 1922: “to me the exile is forever pitiful/Like a prisoner, like someone ill.” “But here,” she later declared, on behalf of those who stayed and suffered:
…in the blinding smoke of the conflagration
Destroying what’s left of youth,
We have not deflected from ourselves
One single stroke.
To stay loyal to your nation was to stay true to yourself: this was a moral choice. But, in 1919 and 1922, even in 1940, the nation was not the ideology or the leader or the regime; at least, they did not mean the same thing for Akhmatova.
However the moment that the Soviets found a use for Russian patriotism they also found a use for Akhmatova. As Amanda Haight writes, the Nazi invasion was a liberating event for Akhmatova as a writer and as a Russian: “the enemy was no longer within but without. People were united once again in a common aim…it was a relief to be obviously and openly at one with her fellow country-men once more.” In the face of an existential challenge to the state, Stalin and Zhdanov now considered the national loyalties evident in her work to be a potential propaganda asset rather than a threat. Exiled to safety in Tashkent, she was still expected to contribute her talents to the war effort and was more than willing to do so. “We know what lies in balance at this moment,” she wrote in 1941, in her most popular poem of the period, ‘Courage’:
And what is happening right now.
The hour for courage strikes upon our clocks,
And courage will not desert us.
We’re not frightened of the hail of lead,
We’re not bitter without a roof overhead —
And we will preserve you, Russian speech,
Mighty Russian word!
We will transmit you to our grandchildren
Free and pure and rescued from captivity
Forever!
If the land is taken, what is left of Russia? The “Russian word,” “Russian speech,” what Akhmatova calls, elsewhere, her “Native Tongue.” For Akhmatova, the Russian word was a primary vessel for Russian culture and identity. By carrying this legacy in her own verse she was preserving the continuity and existence of the Russian people.
Akhmatova’s identification with the land, people and language of Russia provided the foundations of a deep and instinctive patriotism that remained detached from the Russian state or any particular political regime. But this patriotism was not politically powerless, as both the Soviet authorities and the Putin-era educational apparatus recognised. Whereas Requiem could be claimed by dissidents and exiles as a record of state terror, ‘Courage’ is more readily available for appropriation by Russian nationalists and state propagandists. The relationship between Akhmatova and nationalism, then, cannot be separated as neatly as Berlin assumed. Akhmatova’s rehabilitation took place not only in the elite literary circles or cultural spaces of the Russian Federation, but in the post-Soviet school system itself: the poem ‘Native Land’ remains part of a revised curriculum that was designed, during the second Putin term, to emphasise and promote cultural nationalism.
As Svetlana Boym noted in The Future of Nostalgia (published in 2001) Soviet Leningrad was “the city of Vladimir Putin, for whom the Big House, the proverbial KGB building, was as important a landmark as the Winter Palace.” Boym writes that the “grassroots Petersburg nostalgia” and the “large-scale revival of the interest in the city” had grown out of the economic and political stagnation of late-period Leningrad: “The interest in Petersburg history opened up an alternative mapping of the city against the official excursions and Soviet grids.” This is what Boym called “Leningradian Petersburg…a city within a city.” “The new generation of Leningrad youth — the first ones born and educated in the Soviet Union — did not remember Petersburg culture,” she writes:
For the poets of Akhmatova’s generation, Petersburg was the “Noah’s Ark” of their past and their cultural belongings. For the postwar generation, Petersburg was the site of memory that wasn’t their own. Petersburg had to be commemorated because it no longer existed.
This “commemoration” was a form of what Boym describes as “reflective nostalgia,” a nostalgia that is “more about the individual and cultural memory” than “restorative nostalgia” which “evokes national past and future.” The “new Petersburgians didn’t naturally inherit the culture; rather, they took it over, by sheer contiguity and coexistence in space that they endowed with great illusionistic potential.” This “illusion” was creative and ironic, “inconclusive and fragmentary” and “aware of the gap between identity and resemblance,” which was fitting for a city that had always been something of a masquerade, a place with a fractured and shifting self-image. But it would not restore the lost city: a distinction that would become crucial. Boym’s reflective nostalgia acknowledged the distance between the remembered city and the city that actually existed; the restorative nostalgia of the Putin era would increasingly seek to close that distance.
Like Akhmatova, Putin was made by Petersburg — but this was a new version of the city that he also helped to shape and which, like Leningrad before it, ultimately threatened to erase the Petersburg Akhmatova remembered. If the Putin-era transformation of the city threatened Akhmatova’s Petersburg, the national project that developed during Putin’s second term could nevertheless find a place for her poetry. Putin did not simply draw on Russian history for inspiration: historical memory became central to the construction of his political and geopolitical vision. In ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ — an essay published on the Kremlin website in July 2021 that has been interpreted as providing an ideological framework for Russia’s subsequent attempt to annex Ukrainian territory — Putin sharply criticised the Bolsheviks for their “efforts to detach Russia from its historical territories,” presenting them as part of a broader assault on the nation, its history and its traditions. “The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments,” he wrote:
They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed…
In this respect, Putin’s critique of Bolshevism intersects unexpectedly with an aspect of Akhmatova’s own historical consciousness: the rejection of the idea that the revolutionary regime possessed the authority to erase the cultural and historical Russia that preceded it. For Akhmatova, the Soviet experience had separated Russia from the state; Putin, by contrast, would increasingly seek to reunite Russian historical memory, territorial sovereignty and state power within a single national narrative. The irony is therefore not simply that Akhmatova’s memory survived the state that had once condemned it, but that elements of the cultural and national loyalties for which she was condemned could later be appropriated and promoted, in transformed form, by the Russian state itself.
When Akhmatova wrote, in an unpublished poem from the 1920s, that she was “proud of the past,” it was a dangerous sentiment: an implicit rejection of the Bolshevik future. The post-Soviet Russian state, particularly during the Putin era, has defined itself by the attempt to recover the past that Akhmatova preserved. It has done so, in part, for its own ideological ends. This past has been appropriated through a form of ‘restorative nostalgia’ produced and promoted by a regime that threatens to overwhelm and obliterate Akhmatova’s own cultural and historical memory — a memory that was always more complex, ambiguous, layered, and ‘reflective.’ The irony is that the past that Akhmatova preserved against the state could now be preserved by the state, transformed from a “counter-memory” into a national mythology. Akhmatova spent her life preserving the past because the Soviet regime wanted to destroy it; the problem for those who inherited this past was that preservation was not the same thing as possession. The paradox of the post-Soviet legacy is that the survival of that memory has finally made it available for — or vulnerable to — political appropriation.
