Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova

Fear and the Muse

One day in the fall of 1939, a tall middle-aged woman dressed in black slowly shuffled forward in a long line of hundreds of other women outside the Kresty prison in Leningrad. It was freezing cold, and like the others she was holding a package of food for an imprisoned relative, in this case her only son. He had already served a term of hard labor on the White Sea Canal, and was now in another part of the gulag in the far north of Russia. Suddenly someone in the line called the tall woman by name, causing a blue-lipped younger woman behind her to start with surprise. "Can you describe this?" asked the younger one. "Yes, I can," said the tall woman. "I can."

The tall middle-aged woman was Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia's greatest modern poets, and Requiem 1935- 1940, the work she wrote about her experiences during those years, became one of the greatest Russian poems of the twentieth century. It stands beside Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a very different kind of work, as a precious monument not simply to the ordeal of a single individual, but also to the unparalleled suffering of a whole people, the Russian people under the communist yoke, and especially during the worst excesses of the Stalinist terror:

At first light, they led you away,
and like
a mourner at a funeral I followed
your bier.
Children were crying in the
front room.
The candle guttered under the icon
and your lips were cold, as if painted,
your forehead deathly wet.
These moments I shall never forget.

This verse in the poem was actually written in 1935, the year Akhmatova's son, Lev, and her lover, Nikolai Punin, were arrested for the first time; but most of the work was composed in the cruel winters of 1939 and 1940, after her son's second arrest. Akhmatova continued to add to the poem until 1961, when Khrushchev's "thaw" made it seem possible that she might even publish it. Throughout those twenty years the poem's very existence was a deep secret. Akhmatova was too afraid even to write it down. She committed it to memory, and persuaded her friend Lydia Chukovskaya to do the same. It was never published in the Soviet Union in her lifetime, and finally it appeared in an émigré journal in Munich in 1963.

There was little in Akhmatova's early life and career to foreshadow the symbolic position that she later came to occupy. "This cruel age has deflected me," she wrote in 1944, "like a river from its course.../my changeling life has flowed/ into a sister channel." Her original channel had been vastly different. She was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in 1889, and spent most of her childhood in and around St. Petersburg. When she started writing poetry, her father begged her to change her name to spare the family's reputation. He was a member of the minor nobility and thought poetry was too bohemian an occupation to be respectable. Anna called herself Akhmatova, after a Tatar great-grandmother who was said to be descended from the legendary Genghis Khan. The name sounded romantic and mysterious, and there was something eye- and ear-catching about that triple rhyme with its dactylic meter. It had a self-confident ring to it, underlining a sense of vocation that she experienced early and never abandoned.

Anna's father was a bully and a womanizer, her mother a beautiful helpless victim. All of this imprinted a pattern on the young girl that she was to replicate repeatedly in her own life, though her extraordinary poetic gifts and artistic temperament were to compensate for her disappointments in love. The paradox of her dual nature was displayed in many ways. She was strikingly tall for a woman of her time, five foot eleven in her stocking feet, with gray-green eyes, pale skin, jet black hair, an aquiline nose, and a slender, athletic body. Her great beauty ensured that she would be "sketched, painted, cast, carved and photographed" (as Joseph Brodsky recalled) from an early age, most famously by Modigliani when they met in Paris. In time that noble face with its haughty gaze, even when ravaged by time and illness, would become one of the best known and most beloved in Russia.

Men flocked to her in droves. But this brilliant and commanding young woman, far from dominating the less gifted admirers who surrounded her, invariably ended up jilted and disappointed in love. Unhappy marriages and disastrous love affairs continued almost until the end of her life. She was like an exotic moth who could never resist the flame. And it was this propensity for romantic entanglements that fueled her early poetry.

Her first two collections, Evening and Rosary, published in 1912 and 1914 respectively, were overwhelmingly about unhappy or unrequited love. In 1910 she had married the tempestuous poet Nikolai Gumilyov (he had first proposed to her when she was fourteen), by whom she had her first and only son, but they had fallen out of love with each other almost as soon as they were married, and both pursued extramarital affairs. Akhmatova's poems from this period record her fluctuating emotions of hope and fear, trust and betrayal, anger and forgiveness.

What attracted the notice of discerning readers of these verses was their psychological complexity and emotional restraint. These were not the simple love lyrics or sentimental diary entries of what the Russians liked to call a "poetess," but a proud and self-confident commentary on love's vicissitudes as they affected a full-blooded woman who was fully the equal of her partners. And they were shot through with a stoic irony that was quite unusual for the genre. "A woman loved can ask whatever she wants," she wrote in one poem. "One loved no longer can ask for nothing." "I don't want happiness,/ I'll see off my husband to his sweetheart," she wrote in another poem. And in a third: "Give her my poems to read,/ Give her portraits of me."

Despite their stormy marriage, Gumilyov took his talented young wife to Vyacheslav Ivanov's "Tower," where famous Symbolist poets of Russia's Silver Age, such as Blok, Beli, Bryusov, and others, gathered to gossip, drink, and read their poetry. Soon she was reading there herself, but later she followed Gumilyov and his friend Osip Mandelstam in turning away from Symbolism to form the so-called Poets' Guild or Acmeist group of writers, who embraced classical precision of language, clarity of imagery, and traditional meters, in a rebellion against what they regarded as the debased mystical effusions and apocalyptic visions of their predecessors. When later asked to explain Acmeism, Mandelstam defined it as "a nostalgia for world culture," meaning the classical culture of Greece and Rome and the literature of the Renaissance.

As World War I, and then revolution, and then civil war raged in Russia, to be followed by Stalin's ice age, Akhmatova's personal life seems to have continued much as before. During the war she fell deeply in love with a cosmopolitan rake named Boris Anrep, who abandoned her and emigrated to London after the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Divorcing Gumilyov, she married an irascible Babylonian scholar named Vladimir Shileiko, who was considerably older than she was, and when she tired of his bullying and his jealousy, she moved on to the noted art historian Nikolai Punin. Punin was in many ways the love of her life, but he, too, was a disaster. Congenitally promiscuous, Punin was married to a doctor when Akhmatova met him, and was to remain married to her throughout their long affair--which did not stop Akhmatova from moving into Punin's Leningrad apartment (on a famous street, the Fontanka) and staying in one room (where he came at night) for fifteen years, even after Punin's wife had given birth to a baby daughter. Then Punin, still married, took another mistress to live with him, forcing Akhmatova to move to another room, and they remained that way until their evacuation during World War II. She briefly returned after the war was over, this time with the addition of Punin's granddaughter, and when Punin's new mistress had become his second wife.

These affairs of the heart, interspersed with many briefer entanglements, continued to serve as a literary inspiration for Akhmatova throughout her life, and were especially prominent in her third collection of poems, White Flock (1917), which was dedicated in large part to her relationship with Anrep. But she was aware of the existence of that "other channel" from an early age, and she was not entirely indifferent to the historical storms raging about her, as she had shown in a prophetic poem, "July 1914." Written on the eve of World War I, it describes a stranger coming to her yard and telling her: "Frightening times are approaching. Soon/fresh graves will cover the land." The stranger predicts "earthquakes, plague and famine," but the poet is not afraid. Russia's enemies will not prevail, because "the mother of God herself will spread/a white cloth over our sorrows."

In White Flock, published when thousands of upper-class Russians were streaming into exile, Akhmatova proudly asserted that she would refuse to leave her "remote and sinful country" for the "green island" where Anrep had sought refuge and "betrayed" his native land. Her attachment to the "holy body" of Russia was too strong. She was always deeply patriotic, even nationalist in her beliefs, and her Orthodox faith was equally grounded in her love of Russian tradition.

The Bolshevik coup and ensuing revolution plunged the country into the bloodbath of civil war, and some sense of her growing bitterness found its way into the title poem of Akhmatova's next collection, Anno Domini MCMXXI, which was written in the summer of 1921.

Everything has been plundered,
betrayed or sold,
the black wings of death flicker
over us.
The pain of starvation gobbles
everything.

That same year Gumilyov was executed as an "enemy of the people," and Akhmatova found her life brutally pushed from its course and deflected into its new channel. Her old world was coming to an end.

Terror fingers all things in the dark
Leads moonlight to the axe.
There's an ominous knock behind
the wall:
A ghost, a thief, or a rat....

Anno Domini MCMXXI was to be Akhmatova's last published book for nearly twenty years. Stalin's purge of Russian writers continued throughout the 1930s, and its magnitude was brought home to Akhmatova when Stalin launched his murderous terror campaign after the assassination of Kirov in 1934. Mandelstam was among the many thousands arrested, though he was lucky to be sent into exile. Akhmatova visited him there and wrote a moving poem about him:

And in the room of the disgraced
Poet
Fear and the Muse take turns
on watch.
And the night goes on
Which does not know of dawn.

Four years later Mandelstam was arrested again, and Akhmatova received the news of his death just before she began Requiem. There can be little doubt that grief over the fate of one of her dearest friends was as much a spur to write the poem as pity for her imprisoned son.

Akhmatova regarded it as almost miraculous that she was not among the physical victims of Stalin, but she by no means escaped unscathed. It was widely felt that the arrests of Punin and Lev in the post-Kirov terror campaign of 1935 were a means of getting at her, a warning to her. Though both men were quickly released after a direct appeal to Stalin, Lev was arrested again in 1938 (and Punin again after World War II), and was held as a sort of hostage against Akhmatova's good behavior. She was frightened into silence for several years, the muse helplessly conceding to fear in the face of the terror, and in 1950 she yielded, writing and publishing a handful of loyal poems "in praise of peace." Lev, having been released during the war, had been arrested again in 1949, and Akhmatova hoped that with her pen she could somehow ease his lot. But apart from that temporary and understandable lapse, she held firm, and the real fruit of Lev's persecution, and her own ordeal, was Requiem.

Akhmatova sat out the war years in Tashkent, where she started and largely finished another long poem, Poem Without a Hero, that was vastly different from Requiem. Also autobiographical in inspiration, Poem Without a Hero ranged all the way back to the Silver Age in Russia and forward to World War II, and interrogated Akhmatova's changing role as a poet in the turbulent years between. Parts were written in an almost surrealist, phantasmagorical vein, recalling long-gone friends and lovers; other parts called up the literary ghosts of Russia's past, notably Pushkin and Blok, whom Akhmatova regarded as her literary predecessors. The poem ended with a lament for the scorched earth of Russia at the time of the war:

And under my eyes unraveled
That road so many had traveled,
By which they led away my son.

...................................................

Filled with mortal dread yet
Knowing the calendar
Of vengeance, having wrung
Her hands, her dry eyes lowered,
Russia
Walked before me towards the east.

Paradoxically, the outbreak of World War II brought relief to many Russians by liberating them from Stalin's terror and the draconian grip of the party's iron hand. It re-awoke their patriotic spirit, and Akhmatova shared in the temporary euphoria. She was admitted to the Writers' Union, and there was talk of publishing some of her poems again. Indeed, a slim selection of her work, From Six Books, did appear, but it was quickly withdrawn. In the early days of the war she wrote poems on the fall of Paris, the London blitz, and the evacuation of Leningrad, and in Tashkent she worked on Poem Without a Hero. After the war, her work began to appear in magazines, and another book seemed in the offing, but in 1946 Andrei Zhdanov, the head of the party in Leningrad, launched his blistering attack on Akhmatova and the humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko, branding them reactionary throwbacks unworthy of Soviet literature. He mocked Akhmatova as "half-harlot" and "half-nun," twisting a comment that the critic Boris Eikhenbaum had made about her early love lyrics in the 1920s, and derided her subjects (her "narrow private life, her trivial experiences, and her religious-mystical eroticism") as "totally foreign to the people."

Once again Akhmatova tasted the "bitter fame" of which she had written in one of her early poems, and she disappeared from public view for another ten years, until after Stalin's death and the introduction of Khrushchev's "thaw." In 1957, Poem Without a Hero was published in its entirety in the small circulation Leningrad almanac Poetry Day, and a slim volume of her poems appeared a year later. Akhmatova was "rediscovered" by a new generation of critics and poets (notably the young Brodsky), who could hardly believe her miraculous survival. With her links to the Silver Age (emphasized in Poem Without a Hero), she truly seemed a ghost from the past, a living bridge to the era of Blok, Bely, Bryusov, and other giants of a time when literature was uncensored and pursued for its own sake.

She spent the last ten years of her life surrounded by helpers and admirers, basking in belated and deserved celebrity. Requiem still could not be published in the Soviet Union, but it began to circulate by word of mouth, and it was learned by heart by hundreds of devotees, while more and more of the marvelous and bitter poems she had written over the course of forty years found their way into print. Only then did the full extent of her achievement begin to become known, and when she died in 1966, a huge crowd overflowed the church where her body lay. Despite continuing efforts by the party to minimize her importance (her funeral was scheduled for International Women's Day), Akhmatova was escorted to her grave as a heroine, a martyr, and a great artist of her time.

It has to be said that this, the essential story of Akhmatova's tragic life, can be extracted only with great difficulty from Elaine Feinstein's wildly erratic and infuriatingly uneven biography. Indeed, Feinstein's book presents a mystery all of its own. Feinstein is a British poet and novelist who has written brief but competent and even stimulating biographies of several other poets, including Pushkin, Ted Hughes, and Marina Tsvetaeva. In those books Feinstein writes fluent English, organizes her material efficiently, unfolds the action with sufficient tension to hold the reader's interest, and offers insights and characterizations that carry considerable conviction. But here, for some extraordinary reason, the author of those earlier books is rarely to be found. The action of Anna of All the Russias proceeds in fits and starts, characterizations are perfunctory and contradictory, background information is presented in the form of wooden and mechanical digressions, and individual chapters appear as collections of anecdotes stitched together with too many non sequiturs and a large number of clichés.

As the book limps from citation to citation, every other paragraph is nailed down with a precise date and a clunkily identified source, as if to make up for the absence of connecting tissue and continuous commentary. The text sports a plethora of "buts," "howevers," and "neverthelesses" that do not contrast anything, the tenses are frequently jumbled, and the reader is constantly left to make sense of sentences that seem to end in mid-air. This book contains some of the most breathtakingly clumsy writing I have ever read, raising the question of how on earth it got through the editorial offices of its respected publishers.

Fortunately, all biographies, good, bad, or indifferent, end up benefiting from the reflected glory of their subjects. A bad biographer, like a bad translator, can dim the luster of the object of her attention, but she can never quite extinguish it, and Feinstein's book, despite its clumsiness, still manages to convey some of the magic of the Russian poet. There is, first of all, the inherent fascination of Akhmatova's paradoxical personality. Even glimpsed through the distorting lens of Feinstein's fractured prose, she emerges as a figure of immense talent and psychological complexity, while her travails, both personal and public, compel pity and awe. Feinstein mines the poetry for autobiographical content, and concentrates on Akhmatova's intimate and private life more than most critics and biographers have done; and while there is a hint of voyeurism in her probing of Akhmatova's erotic adventures (and her suggestion of a lesbian dimension to Akhmatova's love life), her approach seems justified by the subject matter of so much of Akhmatova's poetry, and by the tendency of Russian critics to shy away from such topics.

Where this attention to the poet's private life really pays off is in Feinstein's depiction of the conflicted relationship between Akhmatova and her son. It is reasonably clear that Lev's tormented life and sufferings in the gulag were largely the result of his unfortunate parentage--his father an executed counter-revolutionary, his mother a suspected sympathizer and accomplice. It is also clear that in conventional terms Akhmatova was a bad mother. Lev was handed to his grandmother in the provinces virtually from birth, and when he moved to Leningrad as an adolescent, he already blamed his mother for neglecting him. Akhmatova was certainly impractical, otherworldly, and unschooled in family relationships (having herself been neglected as a child). For long periods of her life, she was barely capable of feeding herself--hence her reliance on the men in her life for moral and material support-- let alone a son. Yet she truly loved her son, and the complexity of their mutual dependence added to the alternating feelings of guilt and resentment that Akhmatova experienced toward him, while throwing an interesting light on her poetry, particularly the treatment of the mother-son relationship in Requiem.

Feinstein achieves these understandings by paying close attention to the autobiographical writings of both Akhmatova and Lev, and to the extraordinarily rich memoirs of some of the brilliant women who surrounded them, notably Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lydia Chukovskaya, and Emma Gerstein. Most of these memoirs were not available to Amanda Haight, Akhmatova's first English language biographer (whose book remains indispensable for a fuller and more fluent account of Akhmatova's life), and one would have liked to hear more of what they wrote: their rich Russian voices would have added color and texture.

It should also be said that Feinstein is a good translator. Akhmatova has been much translated over the years. Her classical meters, concise style, and ironic voice present a formidable challenge, and her interpreters have struggled variously to cope. Feinstein seems to me to have found as good a way as any to translate Akhmatova's unique voice into idiomatic and modern English. She would do as great a service to her subject by translating more of the poems and publishing them in a separate volume.

Brodsky observed that Akhmatova was unusual among modern Russian poets in that she arrived in the world "with an already established diction and her own unique sensibility. She came fully equipped and never resembled anyone." But what finally matters is what she did with that sensibility and that diction, and the way she responded to the huge responsibility placed on her shoulders by Russian history. What makes the contemplation of her life and work so genuinely uplifting is that it demonstrates the victory of art over politics, the moral and historical superiority of truths to lies. Akhmatova was one of a quartet of great Russian poets--Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and Pasternak were the others--who overcame unbelievably savage obstacles to bear witness to the enduring resilience of the human soul.

"I am easier in my mind now," Akhmatova said at the end of her life, when Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam were published again. "We have seen how durable poetry is." Or as Brodsky put it, "Prosody always survives history." Feinstein, too, celebrates the fact that Akhmatova's name will be remembered long after the names of Stalin's henchmen are forgotten. And yet we must not come away from this tale feeling only edified. The story of Akhmatova's spectacularly difficult life is a reminder of the terrible price exacted from human beings by fundamentalist ideas and revolutionary creeds. How many poetic geniuses were silenced at an early age, or died unsung? They should not be forgotten either, even as Akhmatova and her peers are celebrated. That, after all, was one of her reasons for writing Requiem.

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