I: The October Epoch
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) — filled with anguish and yearning, frosty mornings and white nights — seem innocuous, apolitical, unworthy of the full arsenal of state suppression. The Bolsheviks, however, took a different view. 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 and the embodiment of what Svetlana Boym described in The Future of Nostalgia as a “counter-memory” within the Soviet sphere that “laid a foundation of democratic resistance.” Only with the “memory boom” of glasnost and the fall of Soviet Communism would Akhmatova’s work receive full rehabilitation in a reconstituted Russian state with its own use for patriotism, cultural nostalgia, national mythology and the Orthodox Church.
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.” There was very little that a poet like Akhmatova could do in this environment other than to leave it or stop writing altogether. The “collapse” that Trotsky described was, in reality, an orchestrated ideological assault on “the literature of individualism” that she embodied, both in her work and in her life, which were largely inseparable. When the Bolsheviks dismissed her as the voice of a “dying class” they neglected to mention that this class was in fact being wiped out by their own agents; in the case of Akhmatova’s husband, the Symbolist poet Nikolai Gumilyov, he was executed by the Petrograd Cheka during the first wave of Bolshevik terror. Although Trotsky did not focus on Akhmatova in his critique of what he called “non-October” literature, she would eventually become the most potent living link to “the culture of Old Russia” partly by the simple fact of having survived most of her contemporaries (her only true rival in this regard being Boris Pasternak).
Akhmatova’s survival was partly due to her popularity and partly to the fact that she did not directly criticise or openly write about the revolution or the regime, not that this would necessarily be enough to save her reputation or her status within the new communist order. For the Soviet critics, not writing about the revolution, the workers or the collective struggle provided a clear enough reason to condemn her work, if not to actually kill her. 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. From the Bolshevik point of view, it did not help Akhamtova’s case that her family were land-owning gentry with some very distant and sketchy aristocratic claims, and not only did she fail to disown or hide this, she deliberately wove it into her public identity (Isaiah Berlin described her “distant, somewhat regal manner” and wrote that “she looked and moved like a tragic queen”). This was further aggravated by the elitism of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia, which she partly represented and which was symbolised by the social discrimination enforced by city’s most important cultural institution, the Stray Dog Cafe, as described by the painter and club member Sergei Sudeikin:
Everyone who entered had to register in an enormous book lying on a lectern in front of a tall red lit candle. 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.” There were shutters over the windows, and on the shutters fantastic birds were painted. On the wall between the windows I painted Baudelaire’s ‘Flowers of Evil’…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, in general, a deep suspicion of private clubs, societies and cafes: as Svetlana 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 understood 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 in the new social order being constructed by the Bolshevik regime.
In her biography of the poet, Amanda Haight notes 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.
Bolshevik critics would accuse her of being “narrow, petty, boudoir” and writing about nothing except “love from the bedroom to the croquet lawn”; of emerging from a “nest of gentry” and remaining morbidly attached to the old culture of the estates and nobility. As early as 1923, the doctrinaire Soviet literary critic Grigory Lelevich would lay 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’. (Trotsky at least had the taste to recognise that the more “political” Mayakovsky’s poems became, the worse they got.)
It was also the core of the argument recycled by Stalin’s Central Committee Secretary Andrei Zhdanov in 1946, at the beginning of Akhmatova’s second long period of suppression. “Acmeists, like the Symbolists, Decadents, and other trumpeters of aristocratic-bourgeois ideology, were the propagators of decadence, pessimism, and a belief in the other world,” Zhdanov thundered in a report to the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Writers that would confirm Akhmatova’s expulsion from the official cultural life of the state:
Akhmatova’s themes are completely individualistic. The range of her poetry is so limited as to seem poverty-stricken…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’…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…
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. (Mayakovsky would eventually face the same problem and resolve it by committing suicide.) 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.
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. 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 poema, written in defiance of the October Epoch, to commemorate and ultimately condemn her generation.
II: The Death of Europe
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.” Amanda Haight comments that “coming as she did from a naval family, this senseless destruction struck her closely,” but the defeat had a wider significance: it fed into the general sense of crisis and despair that led directly to mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin, a portent of the revolutions to come and a founding myth of the Soviet state.
In ‘The Way of all the Earth,’ Akhmatova’s “great requiem for oneself” and for “old Europe,” Tsushima is considered 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…
This is the defining moment in Russian — and therefore European — history: both an end and a beginning. 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. The tragedy of the Russian fleet affects her personally, disturbing her own sense of security and becoming the harbinger of even greater tragedies to come. Significantly, it has its 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 of these. For Akhmatova, Tsushima and the great wars and revolutions that followed cast a shadow over her own past, her childhood memories of summers spent on the Black Sea, and darkened, threatened, her vocation as a poet, while also 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. While her estranged husband Nikolai Gumilyov was an enthusiastic and patriotic cavalry officer and a bitter opponent of both 1917 revolutions, Akhmatova was initially more hesitant and apprehensive in the face of war and as a witness to the political and social experiments unfolding all around her. 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.”
The Russian patriot, Orthodox poet, Cassandra and “voice of the many” slowly begin to emerge (and merge) out of 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.
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 concept, so precious to the Petersburg intellectuals, 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 ruin of the monarchy and the society of the aristocracy, the assault on the culture of Old Russia and the Bolshevik’s erasure of the past, the critical eclipse of the European imagination of St. Petersburg: all of this strikes at the root of her understanding of the world and herself.
The war poems of White Flock and Plantain (1921) do not simply regret the defeat of her nation, then: they mourn a past that is social, cultural, civilisational and personal. Akhmatova’s own grief represents 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 the most serious and subtle challenge to the Bolshevik worldview in all of 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 ever acknowledge: to the “many” Russians, patriotic or not, Orthodox or not, who would be classified as “masses” or “classes” or “enemies” by the Bolsheviks. 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. Generational, national, local, unspoken, suppressed, betrayed, valorised, defeated, awarded a final if deferred victory by the record of her poems: Akhmatova’s Russian generation is both a figment of her imagination and a real collective body that responds to her work and sustains her reputation.
Like Mayakovsky and Blok, Akhmatova was a consummate myth-maker, and the greatest myth that she made was herself. This would be elevated beyond the narcissism of the Stray Dog years by a procession of historical tragedies that gave Akhmatova the opportunity to entwine the narrative of her own life with that of her Russian and Petersburgian generation. Her role as a living symbol of the prerevolutionary culture was the very thing that the Bolsheviks attacked her for. During the lifetime of the Soviet Union she represented what Boym described as an alternative, “unofficial” or oppositional culture in the Communist bloc that became, once again, in the case of Akhmatova, Russian culture following the fall of Communism. Beyond a certain point she could only choose to accept and embody a national cause that was at odds with the Soviet conception of history. To do otherwise would be to abandon her vocation. Her biography does not identify a moment when this choice was made. As we have seen, she had already conceived this role before the events of October: the image had been burnished and her prophetic and collective voice developed and tested. Everything that happened afterwards served to confirm and enlarge the scope of her responsibility to the Russian people and the victims of the Stalin regime.
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 theatrically 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 simply an extension of this: a conception of the self as a poetic performance supplemented or enhanced 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:
…in her view we — that is, she and I — inadvertently, by the mere fact of our meeting, had started the Cold War and thereby changed the history of mankind. She meant this quite literally; and, as Amanda Haight testifies in her book, was totally convinced of it, and saw herself and me as world historical personages chosen by destiny to begin a cosmic conflict…
Berlin only slightly exaggerates. Haight writes the following:
There was a direct link, she was convinced, between their meeting and the beginning of the Cold War. Stalin by this time was subject to irrational furies often sparked off by seemingly insignificant occurrences. Akhmatova never claimed that this was the only cause of the Cold War but, whereas the 1925 ban had been a secret affair, for the most part only affecting her personally, now the ban was entirely public with endless repercussions both in the Soviet Union and abroad. If, as she was convinced, this had been caused by her meeting with Berlin, then what had seemed part of their personal lives was in fact part of history…
Even Akhmatova’s friends could only recall this with mild or amusement or pity, but 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 did not just inform her poetry, but also her life; this is what she learnt from the Symbolists, or 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. Haight, discussing the composition (or accretion) of ‘Poem without a Hero,’ writes that, “working from the position of the Acmeist through life and experience into a deeper understanding of the language of the living symbol, she could not only set her early life in the larger context of her country’s fate, but also in that of world literature.” It was Nikolai Gumilyov who had first created the image of Akhmatova as “a living symbol,” but it seems clear that this was a persona that she cultivated for herself. She was a “living symbol” for the Bolsheviks too — which showed the danger in playing this game and the courage required to play it — and for them she symbolised an old, decayed, aristocratic, bourgeois, European and Russian Orthodox cultural and social order that their revolution had dedicated itself to destroying and replacing.
As a response to the collapse of the world that had shaped her, Akhmatova identified and then chose to embody an Orthodox Russian spirit; 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: “Shades from the year 1913”
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 ‘Poem Without a Hero.’
These were the first post-October books and they were (in Trotsky’s schema) both non-October and anti-October works. The 1917 revolutions, whatever their initial potential and promise, were now clearly viewed as part of a continuum of destruction and collapse running from Tsushima to the Bolshevik coup d’etat. For Akhmatova, the revolution was never betrayed; from early on, from, at least, the moment of Gumilyov’s execution, she was in the enemy camp. She didn’t need to write explicit anti-Bolshevik verse or to go into exile for the Bolsheviks to know this or to make her meaning clear to her readers. If there was one reason why she was against the Bolsheviks then it was, like Solzhenitsyn after her, precisely because of their war on culture. In the 1920s, this was a war on the immediate past. If they attacked the Symbolists and the Acmeists and all her friends in Petersburg then they also, in effect, attacked Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky. A key element of the Soviet cultural blitzkrieg was an assault on the idea of St. Petersburg itself. “Zhdanov’s attack on Akhmatova…had a distinct anti-Petersburgian flavour and targeted directly the persistence of the Petersburg myth,” Svetlana Boym writes in The Future of Nostalgia. “The last wave of the great terror of 1949 to 1953 hit the city particularly hard.”
This was the wave that Akhmatova believed that she had triggered by her meeting with Berlin, “the man from the future” who would wander in and out of ‘Poem Without a Hero.’ There was, in fact, some foundation to her paranoia. Zhadnov had, after all, made a special journey to Leningrad in order to denounce her. That denunciation itself was no casual affair: it was both a revival and summation of the Bolshevik case against her. The “St. Petersburg myth” was at the heart of this case: Akhmatova was not only a “living symbol” of the past, or a “dying class,” or a group of murdered or exiled poets, but of an old artistic tradition that viewed itself and Russia as part of the cultural civilisation of Europe. There is a way in which the Bolshevik revolution could be seen as the culmination of Russian Europeanism: an internationalist ideology founded on German and French texts and incubated in Switzerland and Petrograd that dissolved an autocratic, Orthodox empire. But this was not necessarily how the Bolsheviks themselves saw it: they drew on the resources of this world in order to overturn it. Their revolution was the result of the disintegration of the Old European civilization upon which Peter the Great’s tradition of ‘Europeanism’ had been founded and that the intellectuals and artists of Petersburg admired and emulated. Their own small city “civilisation” would not survive its extinction intact.
The Bolsheviks did two things to defenestrate St. Petersburg-Petrograd and neuter its myth: first, they gave it a new name, Leningrad, which served to subordinate it to their own ideological identity; second, they moved the seat of government to Moscow thereby denying it any symbolic or political power. As Boym writes, “the move was due not merely to reasons of military strategy but also to a new geopolitical imagination that placed the heartland of Russian absolutism, not the marginal European city, at the centre of postrevolutionary Bolshevik ideology.” But, in the end, this backfired: “it is precisely at the time when Petrograd-Leningrad stopped being the capital of the Russian empire and lost its political importance to Moscow that the Petersburg myth acquired a new life, becoming a spiritual retreat of Soviet outsiders, a place where a nostalgia for world culture was possible.” (It is significant that Boym gets this last phrase from Osip Mandelstam, a key symbolic figure of the Silver Age alongside Blok and Akhmatova.) The old Petersburg was progressively erased by the new Leningrad, partly due to the ravages of war and largely due to deliberate Soviet policies, but it continued to contain and protect and incubate, deep within itself, the “alternative culture” and “countermemory” that Boym credits for fatally undermining the Communist regimes. Akhmatova, remaining in the city, was the living link between the Silver Age and the new generations of Petersburg poets — among them ‘Akhamtova’s Orphans’ Joseph Brodsky, Anatoly Naiman, Dmitry Bobyshev and Yevgeny Rein — who would make a conscious attempt to keep this old literary and cultural tradition alive. Her poetry was the golden thread that linked the prerevolutionary Russian imagination of Petersburg to the “memory boom” of glasnost, “where there was almost as much euphoria about the past as there was about the future.” This “euphoria” was the result of the liberation of memory, but it was an emotion that was alien to Akhmatova’s own work, in which memory was always ambiguous or dangerous and the past a source of regret and pain as much as nostalgia and longing. Akhmatova knew what had been lost and did not live to see it reclaimed.
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. She assigned herself — and the ‘poet’ — a public role and a moral duty that would strike a discordant note with Eliot’s more abstract and impersonal persona. 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, in a sense, 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…
Unlike Tolstoy, Akhmatova had no fully developed theory of history but her poems do express an instinctive feel for the interplay between the impersonal forces of history and the destiny of the individual; it 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 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 and her friends and what their Petersburg lives in 1913 ultimately led to: not what they did so much as what they allowed to happen; what, as a result of their vanity and egotism, they thought they could ignore, or 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 city itself seems to bear 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.” Like Berlin in 1934, 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 the Acmeists of ignoring reality — the reality that was the revolution — and paying the inevitable and appropriate price. From the other shore, Akhmatova levelled the same accusation: their disconnection from reality, their vanity and their decadence led directly to the destruction of their own society and their city.
IV: The Past that Refused to Die
I will preserve the past in my home,
On the past I will secretly work a charm.
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.” What she meant by this was that Leningrad was the city that created Putin, rather than the St. Petersburg of Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Blok. The Soviet Union had shaped his imagination, but, as in many other cases, what actually came out of this experience was a commitment to Russian imperialism rather than international communism.
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. It was therefore, by implication, a reaction to the failure of the entire Soviet project and the creation of an alternative reality that would eventually become an escape route.
This was by no means limited to intellectuals and writers; it was not simply a matter of wounded pride but a way of cultivating a different kind of civic conscience. The interest in Petersburg history opened up an alternative mapping of the city against the official excursions and Soviet grids.
This was Petersburg as an underground dream metropolis built on traces of the past and existing in silent opposition to the “official” city: 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.
The newly christened Saint Petersburg to which Putin returned in 1991 was another place altogether: a city defined by its wild sea port (crucible of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions) as much as its fading avenues and boulevards, Art Nouveau facades and cultural heritage; a regional capital that was simultaneously secret and official, governed by an underground alliance between the mayor’s City Hall and the Tambov gang. Like Akhmatova, Putin was made by Petersburg — but this was a new post-Soviet Saint Petersburg that he also helped to shape and which, like Leningrad before it, ultimately threatened to erase Akhmatova’s city forever. “In the late 1990s,” Boym writes, “Petersburg was frequently called the capital of crime, rife with mafia-style groups (now dubbed “violent entrepreneurships”) with Petersburgian names such as Northern Palmyra. Good old Peter and the mythical free Petersburg are now buried under layers of dust.” This was Putin’s city, remodeled by the links formed between state actors and organised crime during the post-Soviet period, a model of power that would have wider applications — and implications — when he became Russian president.
But if Putinism in its local form was a threat to the city and culture of Akhmatova, then the national project that would begin to take shape during his second term could still find a place for her poetry. The key development of the Putin Era has been the return of imperial history: a renewed interest in the work of the White emigres and Russian nationalist writers and the promotion of the concept of the ‘Russian World’ that would come to underpin the geopolitical ambitions of Putin’s administrations. This was an ideological rehabilitation of a past that had long been beyond the pale; even the glasnost and post-Soviet “memory boom” had confined these legacies to the nationalist margins. In the early years of the twenty first century Putin and his advisers and the ex-KGB siloviki who had risen to power with him internalised a neo-imperialist ideology that absorbed aspects of Pan-Slavism and Eurasianism. Like Akhmatova, Putin developed a cultural, linguistic and spiritual conception of Russian identity that did not recognise the separate national aspirations of Ukraine and Belarus. ‘The Russian World’ would be both an organic national entity — “one people” forming “a single whole” across the former Rus territories — and a multi-ethnic empire with a civilisational mission: a “historico-metaphysical vision” (to paraphrase Berlin) applied to statecraft. Restorative nostalgia with global ambition.
This “vision” was defined by and rooted in a contested and semi-mythical national past. Putin did not just draw on Russian history for inspiration: it was central to the construction of his personal and geopolitical mission. In ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ — an essay published on the Kremlin website in July 2021 and correctly interpreted as the theoretical foundation for the actual attempt to re-annex Ukraine — Putin sharply criticised the Bolsheviks for their “efforts to detach Russia from its historical territories” which he viewed as part of their ultimate goal of dissolving nation states and the history and traditions on which they were founded. “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…
This was a rejection of the same doctrine that would condemn Akhmatova as a “living symbol” of a dead past that the Bolsheviks were trying to erase and replace. It was the ideology of this regime and its elite that was at fault (“a world revolution that would wipe out national states”), both Putin and Akhmatova claimed, rather than the nation itself or the people in it. “Communism vividly demonstrated its inaptitude for sound development, dooming our country to steadily lag behind economically advanced countries,” Putin declared in a speech delivered on the eve of his first presidency: “it was a road to a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilisation.” Within the space of a few years, having been snubbed by the key powers of the West, he would go further and see himself as destined to revive and safeguard a Pan-Slavic, Orthodox civilisation instead: all things with deep roots in Russian history that the Bolsheviks considered mortal enemies of their own anti-historical, anti-nationalist project. It is significant that in rejecting this project and definitively detaching it from Russian identity, Putin and his inner circle would find inspiration and recourse in the White side of the Russian Civil War. From Ivan III to Catherine the Great to Ivan Illich to Putin, this was a resurrection of the national narrative that the Bolsheviks had tried to end. Putin chose to serve an eternal Russian: the same people with their distinct history and culture that Akhmatova had addressed in her own poetry. The religious and national loyalties that she had been condemned for holding in the 1920s were now being promoted by the Russian state of the 2020s. (It is a peculiar irony — and testament to the complexity of Putin’s position — that he did not reject all of the Soviet legacy: as Boym was early to point out, the Putin years would also be characterised by cultural nostalgia for the Soviet era and a reluctance to examine or even open the archives.)
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. They had ultimately made a choice that she rejected and her refusal to leave Russia became a central part of her own overlapping public and poetic identity inside the country itself. 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 undermine, subordinate or exploit the concepts of Russian identity and loyalty to the nation. Both the exiles and the Bolsheviks, in their different ways and for different reasons, had suggested that the Russia they had all known had run its course as an ideal, an idea, and, finally a reality; all that was left was a new start, in a foreign country or a new communist society at home (a foreign country of a different kind).
But it was precisely this denial or disavowal of the Russian nation that Akhmatova refused to accept. The severity with which she 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.
Akhmatova’s Russia was a land, a language, a culture, and a spirit. In the judgement of Berlin, her “deep patriotism was not tinged by nationalism,” and this was largely 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 on the Russian people. 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 is the authentic voice of the 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 surrendered himself to 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, written against the abstract and romantic use of patriotism for the ends of state power 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 (she also considered Ukraine to be ‘Russian land’ in this context) — the “we” that Akhmatova freely addressed in her poems with the (correct) assumption that she had an audience of millions who would recognise themselves in her words. Given the Soviet claim on the property and identity of the Russian people, this “we” would always be treated as an implicit threat to the sovereignty of the regime.
But 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 her 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.” Haight quotes Pavel Luknitsky, who visited Akhmatova at this time and observed: “She is a patriot and the knowledge that at the same moment she and everyone else are thinking and feeling alike cheers her.” 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.” This was not simply a linguistic question — although that was very important, and Akhmatova had no sympathy for the claims of the Ukrainian language — but of the Russian word as the primary vessel for Russian culture and identity. But when Akhmatova spoke about her “native tongue” she did not mean regional dialects or local speech, she meant the Russian of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. The Russian spirit was expressed in its poetry and literature and this is what gave her mission its special significance and character. By carrying this legacy in her own verse she was preserving the continuity and existence of the Russian people.
Akhmatova’s sense of both belonging to and speaking for a people, her identification with the land, her role in persevering the literature and language of Russia, provided the foundations of a deep and instinctive patriotism that remained detached, to a degree, from the Russian state or any particular political regime. This did not mean that it did not have some political power or, even, application — as the Soviets knew from the very beginning and as the educational apparatus of the Putin regime also understands. Whereas a poem like ‘Requiem’ could (and still can) be claimed by dissidents and exiles, a poem like ‘Courage’ can always be used by Russian nationalists and state propagandists. The question of Akhmatova and nationalism cannot, then, be as easily or cleanly separated as Berlin assumed. Akhmatova’s rehabilitation took place not only in the literary circles or the cultural space of the Russian Federation, but in the post-Soviet school system: the poem ‘Native Land’ remains part of a revised curriculum that was designed, during the second Putin term, to emphasise and promote cultural nationalism. It was not just Akhmatova who was rehabilitated in the Yeltsin and Putin eras but her whole family — including her son, Lev Gumilyov, whose Eurasianist, ultra-nationalist ethno-historical theories have had some influence on the revisionist ideology and expansionist policies of the later Putin terms.
The historical ambiguity of Akhmatova’s position is, in a sense, as ambiguous as Russia’s own position in the world, caught between the competing poles of Eurasianism and Europeanism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the desire to belong to Western civilisation and the temptation to reject it. It is, of course, difficult to make these kind of judgements, but, given her own statement and positions, it is possible to believe that while Akhmatova would have no theoretical objection to Putin’s view of Ukraine, she would instinctively revolt against his “civilisational” conflict with the West. This would be to pit the two things she loved most against each other. The divisions and complexities evident in Akhmatova’s own work and life could also, at different moments and sometimes only in specific poems or parts of poems, find a form of resolution. This is why, despite the patriotic ideas which do retain — superficially at least — political and ideological utility for the Putin regime, Akhmatova’s work ultimately offers a more subtle alternative: a different understanding and conception of Russia and another route that it can take.
