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, more pitiless and paranoid 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, the embodiment of what Svetlana Boym described in The Future of Nostalgia as a “counter-memory” that “laid a foundation of democratic resistance” within the Soviet sphere. 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.
From the beginning, the Bolsheviks had condemned Akhmatova and her Acmeist and Symbolist confrères as products of the old regime, or, as Leon Trotsky put it in Literature and Revolution, “leftovers of a culture created by the blood of others.” October, for the Bolsheviks, was more than simply a change of regime. As Trotsky wrote, the revolution
did not overthrow Kerensky alone, it overthrew the whole social system that was based on private property. This system had its own culture and its own official literature, and its collapse could not but be the collapse of pre-Revolutionary literature.
This “collapse” was, in reality, the result of revolutionary terror, censorship, exile and collaboration, of decisions made by active agents — an orchestrated ideological assault on “the literature of individualism, of symbolism and of mysticism” — which Trotsky chose to interpret as the inevitable outcome of historical forces. Consequently, Literature and Revolution gave no quarter, even, to those who embraced the Bolshevik regime or tried to find accommodation with it. His broad and pitiless categories of “non-October” and “anti-October” literature swallowed a generation of Russian writers whole: Symbolists, Imagists, Acmeists, Formalists and pro-Bolshevik Futurists were all dismissed as relics of “the very thick atmosphere of the culture of Old Russia, of its landlords and intelligentsia.”
Although Trotsky did not focus on Akhmatova herself in Literature and Revolution, 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. As the Bolsheviks began to recognise her power as a writer and as a symbol of the past — of a politically threatening nostalgia — so they would mark her out for special treatment. The Soviet regime, until the last days of its existence, maintained a complex and largely hostile attitude to the memory of the society that preceded it. Every cultural and social tradition that was external or counter to the Soviet mythos was, at different times and in different ways, suppressed or discredited.
St Petersburg’s pre-1914 bohemia, in which Akhmatova played a central role, was one fragment of Old Russian history that remained ideologically off-limits. The Stray Dog Cafe, Akhmatova’s hangout and home of the city’s cultural intelligentsia, was notorious for its social discrimination: the painter Sergei Sudeikin recalled that “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 that they could not control. As Boym noted 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.” 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. 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 shutter
The Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky quickly grasped the political significance of the aesthetic divisions being drawn by the Bolshevik regime and used the opportunity to advance his own position within it. “As literary landmarks, as the last remnants of a crumbling order,” he wrote in a tirade aimed at Akhmatova and the Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, “they will find their place in the pages of histories of literature, but for us, for our age, they are pointless, pathetic and comic anachronisms.” “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky are as hostile one to the other as the epochs which gave them birth,” Korney Chukovsky observed in a lecture that displayed a sensitivity to Akhmatova’s position while also working decisively in Mayakovsky’s favour:
Akhmatova is the careful heir to all that is most precious in Russian pre-revolutionary literary culture…In her we find that refinement of spirit and charm which is the result of centuries of cultural tradition. But in every line, every letter of Mayakovsky we find the birth of the present revolutionary age…Behind her stand the many splendid centuries of the past, in front of him the many centuries of the future.
While these distinctions were being drawn by Soviet critics and Mayakovsky himself, Trotsky argued that the differences were illusory and the revolutionary claims of Russian Futurism superficial and even delusional. Trotsky saw both Akhmatova and Mayakovsky as products of the same bohemian subculture. Both poets cultivated a public image through their private behaviour and became the popular face of their respective aesthetic movements. Akhmatova’s physical appearance — her regal bearing, the lace shawls draped around her shoulders and slender, bony profile, best captured by the line drawings of Modigliani and Yury Annenkov — were as recognisable and symbolically resonant as Mayakovsky’s large bulk, booming voice and gold-topped cane. Both were prone to what Nancy Anderson in her study The Word that Causes Death’s Defeat described in Akhmatova as “a thoroughly romantic strain of self-consciousness, a sense of herself as someone special, someone fated to live a consuming drama, whether personal or historical,” and their fundamental inability to abandon subjective individualism would always prevent them from truly belonging to the new collectivist society being built by the party.
While Mayakovsky would finally fail to fit the mould of the future and pay his own personal price for this, Akhmatova, as a symbol of the culture of Old Russia, would be made to suffer in every way possible short of exile, incarceration or execution. In her biography of Akhmatova, Amanda Haight notes that she 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.” 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’. (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 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:
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 a strident echo of Trotsky’s description of the “desolation and decay of the individualism of the intelligentsia” in Literature and Revolution, Zhdanov diagnosed Akhmatova’s “individualism” as a symptom of social reaction. Yet, in cases like Akhmatova’s first husband Nikolai Gumilyov, executed by the Petrograd Cheka during the first wave of Bolshevik terror, or Osip Mandelstam, who perished en route to a Siberian labour camp, the “social group” did not simply die out: it was systematically exterminated. 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. They were things she could not deny or renounce without sacrificing her integrity or identity.(The same problem Mayakovsky would eventually face — and resolve by committing suicide.) She was proud of her aristocratic family ties and consciously wove them into her public 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. Her poetry was alien to the modern Soviet reality and could not exist in any other way.
It is significant 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 Poetry 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, 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 revolution could not kill.
II: The Death of Europe
Two wars, my generation,
Lit your terrible path.
‘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 is presented as 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 followed by 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…
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. 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 she 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, a retrospective acknowledgment of a point of no return. The war, for Akhmatova, is 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 Russian patriot, Orthodox poet, Cassandra and ‘voice of the many’ slowly begin to emerge from the ruin and chaos of conflict. 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. Historical tragedy ultimately transformed self-mythologising into something more consequential: the claim to speak for a collective historical memory. 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. As we have seen, she had already conceived this role before the events of October: the image had been burnished and her public “voice ”developed and tested. Everything that followed served to confirm and enlarge the scope of her responsibility to the Russian people and the victims of the Stalin regime.
In the war poems of White Flock and Plantain (1921), Akhmatova’s grief had become 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” merged 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. 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.” In fact, her “we” encompassed the “many” Russians — patriotic or not, Orthodox or not — whom the Bolsheviks would instead define 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. Her role as a “voice” for others was a deliberate extension of this conception of the self. 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. Isaiah Berlin observed 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.
As Berlin recalled, Akhmatova 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:
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 part of a constructed persona that informed not only her poetry but also her life. 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 — of a culture that had grown out of an imperial power that also saw itself as a European power — Akhmatova chose to embody an Orthodox Russian spirit that, in her mind, retained its autonomy from the Soviet state. Her role, as a poet, would be to protect this autonomy: a task that would finally lead her to pass judgement on the past that made her.
III: 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 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 personal 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. In her unfinished memoir, she vividly described the “Petersburg of the 90s”:
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” of a city that would soon become something else: 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”). 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…
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 a 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”: the Symbolist poet Alexander 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. As Nancy Anderson wrote:
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 the 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.” 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 Acmeists of ignoring reality — the reality of the revolution — and of paying the inevitable price for doing so. Poem Without a Hero reversed the accusation: their disconnection from reality, vanity and decadence helped produce the destruction they failed to foresee.
IV: The Past that Refused to Die
I will preserve the past in my home,
On the past I will secretly work a charm.
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:
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 an anti-propaganda poem that nevertheless extolled a physical and spiritual bond between the land and its people. In her view, this land belonged to the people, who were closest to 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 a different Akhmatova to the St. Petersburg dissident adopted by the exiles as one of their own. 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.
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. “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!
Akhmatova’s sense of belonging to, and speaking for, a people; her identification with the land; and her role in preserving Russian literature and language formed the foundations of a patriotism independent of any particular regime. But this did not mean that it lacked political power or, even, application — as the Soviets knew from the very beginning and as the leaders of the Russian Federation did in their revival of state nationalism. While Requiem could still be claimed by dissidents and exiles, ‘Courage’ remained available for use by state propagandists. The question of Akhmatova and nationalism could not, then, be as easily separated as Berlin assumed. Her rehabilitation took place not only in elite literary circles or cultural spaces of the Russian Federation, but in the post-Soviet school system itself: ‘Native Land’ would be incorporated into a revised curriculum that placed renewed emphasis on Russian cultural identity during the second Putin term.
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. Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, notes that 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.” “The new generation of Leningrad youth — the first ones born and educated in the Soviet Union — did not remember Petersburg culture,” Boym 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.
Putin, a member of this “new generation of Leningrad youth,” did not remember or display any interest in the cultural inheritance of Akhmatova’s Petersburg; he was not among the poets and dreamers who commemorated the historic city of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Gogol. For Putin, the city’s history was important for its imperial legacy, for reasons of power; it would, consequently, become a laboratory for a new style of national autocracy that Putin would develop and which would reclaim Russia’s past on behalf of the state. While this Russia did have important overlaps with the Russia that Akhmatova preserved in the face of Bolshevik erasure, the cultural preservation that her work attempted was of a very different order and origin to the political possession that Putin claimed.
Putin did not just draw on Russian history for inspiration: it was an active component in the construction of his geopolitical mission. In his essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ — published on the Kremlin website in July 2021 and correctly interpreted as the theoretical foundation for the actual attempt to re-annex Ukraine — he sharply criticised the Bolsheviks for their “efforts to detach Russia from its historical territories.” He viewed this as part of their ultimate goal of dissolving nation states and the history and traditions on which they were founded: of sacrificing the past to redefine the future in their own image. “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…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. Akhmatova and Putin both believed that it was the ideology of the Soviet elite that was at fault rather than the nation itself or the people in it. In this sense, Putin’s critique of Bolshevism unexpectedly converged with something central to Akhmatova’s own historical consciousness: the refusal to accept that the revolutionary regime had acquired the authority to define, or erase, the cultural and historical Russia that preceded it. But there remained a basic distinction between Akhmatova and Putin’s reclamation of Russia’s past: whereas Akhmatova inherited and protected it in the name of cultural continuity, Putin sought to own and exploit it for his own ideological ends. Putin’s Russia was, therefore, a mutation of Akhmatova’s: deformed by power, resentment, violence and ambition.
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 partly defined itself by the attempt to recover the past that Akhmatova preserved. This past has been appropriated through a form of ‘restorative nostalgia’ that was produced and promoted by the state and that threatened to overwhelm Akhmatova’s own cultural and historical memory — a memory that was more complex, ambiguous, layered and reflective. The final irony was that the past Akhmatova preserved against the state was now preserved by the state: transformed from “counter-memory” into national mythology.