O Muse of Lament, the most beautiful of Muses! wrote Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, in a poem dedicated to Anna Akhmatova in 1916. Much later, Joseph Brodsky, dedicated to Anna Akhmatova his essay entitled Muse of Lament.
Anna Akhmatovas fate was both tragic and beautiful, and she shared it with the fate of her country. But few would deny that Anna became one of Russias greatest modern poets, and Requiem, the work she wrote over a 5 year period about her own experinces, has become one of the greatest Russian poems of the 20th Century. It encapsulates the unparalleled suffering of a whole people, especially during the worst years of the Stalin repressions.
Poetess from Tsarskoye Selo, St. Petersburg
Anna was a strikingly tall woman of her time, 5 11 in her stockings, with beutiful gray-green eyes, pale skin, jet black hair, a distinguished nose and a slender althletic body. Together she represented a great and yet unique beauty.
Anna Gorenko (that is the real name of Anna Akhmatova) was born on June 23 (old calendar - June 11), 1889 at Bolshoy Fontan, near the city of Odessa, in the family of the retired navy engineer Andrey Gorenko. Her ancestor on the maternal line was the famous Russian poet Anna Bunina; there was a legend in the family that one of her mothers ancestors was Ahmad Khan, from family of Ghengis Khan. Later, in adolescence, Anna was told by her father, that being a poet is not good for a girl from a noble family, and he asked her not to shame his name. Anna answered him: I do not need your name, and began to print her poems under the pseudonym Akhmatova.
The family moved to Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg, when Anna was only one year old. She saw there the waterfalls glorified by the young Pushkin as well as the green, raw grandeur parks and she felt the atmosphere of the Pushkin period. In Tsarskoye Selo Anna started writing poetry at the age of 11, inspired by her favorite poets: Racine, Pushkin, and Baratynsky.
Marina Tsvetaeva, who was renown for her own great poetry, tragic life and sometimes lesbian realitonships, also called Akhmatova the Muse of Tsarskoye Selo in a poem addressed to Anna in 1916:... Ah, I am happy that ... at the first time ... I named you Muse of Tsarskoye Selo. Marina and Anna were not to meet until much later in their lives.
An image of Muse of inspire, whom Anna called a sister, appeared in Akhmatovas poem, which was included in the book Evening (1912): Muse, my sister, looked in face ...
Annas father was said to have been both a womanizer and a bully, her mother a beautful but helpless victim. After the divorce of her parents and the death of one of her sisters from tuberculosis in 1905 Akhmatova left Tsarskoe Selo with her mother, as they moved south to the Black Sea and then to Kiev. Akhmatova had her last schooling in Kiev, and then she went to the Legal Faculty of Higher Women Courses, where she learned Latin. This enabled her to speak the Italian language freely and to read Dante in the original. Akhmatova had grown to dislike the legal disciplines and studies and instead in 1910 continued a different postschool education in Saint-Petersburg.
While she was in Tsarskoe Selo, Anna had met poet Nikolai Gumilev, who later became her first of her 3 husbands and many partners. His first proposal for marriage came when Anna was only 14. Anna rejected his early overtures to become his wife, so he tried to commit suicide, and he then travelled to Africa in order to forget the bitterness of her refusal. When he returned to Russia, he repeated his suggestions, and they married in 1910. Their son, Lev, born in 1912, was to become a famous Neo-Eurasianist historian.
Later Akhmatova was to recall that in 1910 she had read the collection of poems given to her by Gumilev, and at that moment she had realized her own destiny in poetry. In the same year her verses became like a wave: nothing had felt like this before, she wrote. Her husband, a well-known poet, did not initially take her poems seriously, being shocked when famous poet Alexander Blok declared that he preferred Annas poems to Gumilevs.
Muse! Do you see how happy everyone is...
At the beginning of 1910-s, three important events happened in Annas life: she married Nikolai Gumilev, gained friendship with the artist Amadeo Modigliani and completed her first book, Evening, which when later published brought her instant fame.
Anna and Nikolai were equal in poetic talent, which of course had an effect on their life, already complicated by the difference in senses Gumilev was constantly passionate and Akhmatova was more restrained.
A close friend of Akhmatova wrote in her memories: ... Of course, they were each too big and free, to become a pair of cooing doves. Their relations looked like a secret duel...
Gumilevs last book was published in 1910 and was dedicated to Akhmatova. He did not have wide fame yet, but in literary circles he had already been considered as a Master of Poetics, and colleagues paid attention to his opinion. At that time no one was even aware of Akhmatova, but one of her poems was published in a Parisian magazine Sirius (under the initials AG) by Gumilev. He also helped her to select her poems for her first book Evening. Akhmatovas lyrics of this period were often about unrequited love. But Annas words were not simple love lyrics. They were proud and confident commentary on loves vicissitudes as they affected a full-blooded woman who was the equal of her partners. She wrote in one poem: A woman loved can ask for whatever she wants. One loved no longer can ask for nothing. Anna also was very critical of her own poetry. She did not really consider herself as a poet, even after her first book Evening was published.
In the same 1910, immediately after the wedding, Anna and Nikolai left for Paris. Anna met Amedeo Modigliani there and became the friends with him, then a totally unknown young artist. Their friendship continued in 1911, and the artist painted 16 portraits of Akhmatova. At that time, Amedeo was passionate about sculpture, but he painted Anna constantly, and presented the paintings to Anna. At that time Akhmatova wrote a lot of poems. There seemed to be no romantic relationship between them; Akhmatova claimed that it was friendship only. Nonetheless, it was reported that Anna and Gumiliev feel out of love soon after their marraige, with both then said to have pursued extramarital affairs of the heart.
The book of poems Evening and later the book Rosary (1914), brought glory to Akhmatova. In those years a special, independent poetic style was elaborated by Akhmatova. And her manners and style became queenly and majestic.
You cannot call her beautiful,
But all my happiness is in her.
So Gumilev wrote about Anna. However, contrary to Gumilevs words, soon Akhmatovas queenly manners and striking apperance made her a standard of beauty: women began to emulate her manner and dress style, and imitators of her poetry appeared. Akhmatovas appearance and writing inspired the artists: N. Altmann, K. Petrova-Vodkin, Z. Serebryakova and others.
On the night of January 1, 1912 a literary-artistic cafe cabaret, titled Stray Dog, was opened in St. Petersburg this was the first cafe of its kind in Russia, maybe in the world; a cafe like this did not even exist in Paris. Here Russian modernist aesthetics were translated into life itself, as well as to the stage, where visitors, who were all extremely talented artistic played tricks on each other and themselves. At its opening the cafe cabaret gathered such well-known poets as Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam (who became a dear friend of Annas and some say also a spur to her wrting Requiem after he was killed). Ballet dancers, composers, musicians
and artists of opera and the drama theatres also attended Stray Dog.
A concert program would be composed, but was the participants immediately engaged in improvisation, and this improvisation predetermined the success of this new venture. Colourful, dimmed with smoke, always a bit mysterious: Stray Dog, a close circle of visitors creating a sense of closeness, fraternity of masters of different genres, times, people, recalled Anna Akhmatova later. Once she dedicated a poem to the Stray Dog cafe cabaret, where included the words:
All we are drunkards and prostitutes here...
A bohemian lack of manners prevailed in the cafe cabaret. Gumilev is said to have had a few romances with the actresses here, which Anna apparently knew about. Anna always had a lot of fans herself, with men flocking to her energy there were the rumours that earlier a young man called Mikhail Lindeberg had committed suicide because of the hopeless love he had for Akhmatova. Akhmatovas romantic relationship with composer Arthur Lurje began here. Lurje was married. Later he said that Anna Andreyevna devastated my nest like a kite, and destroyed all of my young familys lives, recalled Irene, one of the last friends of Arthur Lurje. In March 1915 Stray Dog was closed by the order of the police: and so part of the Silver Age (as the first decades of the XX Century in Russia were later called) passed away. In 2007 visitors to St Pete can visit the exact same locale as Stray Dog, by going to the downstairs Art Cafe on the corner of Italianskaya/Art Square, to get a feel of this earleir Silver Age, especially if there is a poetry reading taking place in this cafe at the time.
During the Soviet era the period around the 1910s were described as a time of reaction and decadence, which gave nothing to Russian art; but worldwide Russian art, literature and overall creativity is known primarily due to the flowering which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Akhmatova wrote in her essay 1910s: Someone told me: 1910s is the most colourless time. Perhaps it is necessary now to talk in this manner. But nevertheless I respond: Above all, this time was the time of Stravinsky and Blok, Anna Pavlova and Skriabin, Rostovtsev and Shalyapin, Meyerhold and Dyagilev ...
In fact, Akhmatova remarked once, no one knows what the era he lives in is. And we did not know in those early years of the 20th century that we lived on the eve of the First World War and the Russian revolution. Against this insight, Anna did write a prophetic poem about the coming first world war, titled July 1914.
The voice of Muse was hardly audible...
In 1918, following the Russia Revolution of October 1917, a mass emigration from Russia began: one after another people who were close to Akhmatova were leaving Russia. Akhmatovas choice was different she stayed and remained in god-forsaken and sinful Russia. In 1917 painter Boris Anrep, whom Anna had fallen deeply in love with during the war, went to England. Later Anrep had no doubt about the mission of Akhmatova, who remained in Bolshevik Russia: he painted her as a lady of Compassion in his mosaic at the National Gallery in London and gave her the appearance of St. Anne in the Cathedral of Lord Christ in the Irish town of Mullingar.
In 1918 Akhmatova divorced from Gumilev, in order to marry Vladimir Shileyko who was a well-known specialist in Assyrian history. Anna called this marriage, which continued for three years, an obscure misunderstanding. Her new husband was much older than Anna, but he was very jealous and like her father a bully. He prohibited Anna to write poems and stoked the samovar with Akhmatovas handwritings. Anna was saved by her friend Arthur Lurje, who helped her to avoid the insane and extremely jealous Shileyko. Shileyko was placed in hospital, and while he was there Akhmatov a was given the position of librarian in the Agricultural Institute and was also provided with an apartment. In that house Anna hosted previous husband Gumilev for the last time. Nikolai Gumilev was shot by Government order in 1921; after he was accused of involvement in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy (some reports suggest that the trial was concocted, in order to execute more of the intelligentsia). The place of Gumilevs burial remains unknown. In 1922 Anna was dismissed from her libraryrole, the reason being due to the need for reduction of staff .
Akhmatova in 1922 settled in house 18 on the Fontanka, along with Annas close friend Olga Afanasevna Glebova- Sudeykina (they were friends since 1910) and Arthur Lurje current husband of Olga. At first, while Olga was on tour in Vologda, Anna settled there temporarily, and then moved and lived there with Olga and Arthur until the autumn of 1923. Arthur Lurje received a rather high position after the revolution he was the Head of the Musical Department of Narkompros (People Committee of Education). His real name was Naum Lurya, but he, as the poet Benedict Livshits wrote, called himself Arthur, in honor of Schopenhauer. To add intrigue to this new home for Anna it is noted that Akhmatova had already had a wild romance with Arthur in 1913.
Olga Glebova-Sudeykina, Fairy of St. Petersburg, was a symbolic person of the earlier Silver Age, a woman of many talents: theatre actress, poet, translator, reciter, ballet dancer, painter on porcelain, sculptor... In her circle of friends, she was called Colombina. After many years, speaking about Olga, Anna confessed: We both loved the same man.
In the 1922 Commissar Lurje ran abroad, leaving Russia. I am very calm regarding this, recalled Akhmatova, ... When he left it became so easy!
In 1924 Olga also left Russia, going to Berlin with a suitcase full of porcelain dolls and statues, declaring the purpose of organizing the exhibition of her works. Later she moved to Paris, and never returned to Russia. She died in Paris at the beginning of 1945, in poverty and solitude. In her work titled Poem without Hero Anna called Olga one of my tweedledum and described her in the poem under the name Putanitsa-Psikheya (Mishmash-Psyche) being a combination of two of Olgas stage roles, O my blonde miracle, Colombina of tenth years.
The most gentle and anxious lines of this severe poem are devoted to Olga.
Did Anna have a lesbian realtionship with Olga during this menage a trois? History does not record such. In her book Anna of All the Russias, Elaine Feinstein writes about Annas intimate private life and she suggests that there was a lesbian dimension to Annas erotic adventures and love life. However reviewer Michael Scammmell records his view about Feinsteins biography of Anna. He says: the essential story of Akhmatovas tragic life can be extracted only with great difficulty from Feinstiens wildy erractic and infuriatingly unveven boiography. So on this topic history is inconclusive. But does it matter exactly how one lived, when one had the courage of Anna and her enduring talent?
By 1924 Anna was now alone, as all her close friends had left Russia. After a divorce from Vladimir Shileyko some say she married Nicholai Punin, while other reports suggest he became the love of her life, sharing about 17 years together without marriage. He was a specialist in Ancient Asian art and a Russian museum employee. Another repetitive aspect to this relationship was that Anna shared Punin with other women. Punins prior wife gave birth to a baby daughter during the relationship with Anna and later Punin took another mistress to live with him in their home, being rooms in a residential wing of the former Sheremetevsky Palace (then called Fountain House) at 34 Fontanka, forcing Akhmatova, it was suggested, to move to another room.
In 1925 the Central Committee of Bolshevists Party published the decision which prohibited the publication of bourgeois authors. Akhmatova was not able to publish her poems for the next 14 years. She earned her living by translating the works of Italian poet Leopardi and publishing essays, including some brilliant essays about Pushkin published in scholarly periodicals. She received an order to translate Rubens letters. At the same time, in anticipation of other orders, she was studying the architecture of 19th century Petersburg.This work was closely linked to Pushkin, whose works interested Akhmatova. She earned a high reputation in this field, with outstanding research such as (Pushkin and Nevsky Seaside, Death of Pushkin, etc.).
Anna did not leave Russia, staying in Petersburg-Leningrad. She wrote about this city, many times including as far back as in 1915:
But we would not change for any thing this splendid
Granite City of glory and misery
And the voice of Muse was hardly au dible...
The terrible Stalin repressions of the 1930-s befell most friends of Akhmatova: son Lev, was arrested and exiled; and later her partner and love Nikolai Punin was arrested. In the eyes of the authorities, she was a suspect person: she was the ex-wife of contra-revolutionary Nikolai Gumilev, who was executed in 1921, she was the mother of the arrested conspirator Lev Gumilev and, finally, she was the common law wife of prisoner Punin.
Akhmatova lived all those years in constant suspense, aware that her own life was constantly hanging by a thread. Like millions of other people, suppressed by incredible terror, listening for any knock on the door she wrote:
Terror fingers all things in the dark
Leads mooonlight to the axe.
Theres an ominous knock behind the
wall: A ghost, a thief, a rat.....
Lydia Chukovskaya (daughter of writer Korney Chukovsky), was a life-long friend and secretary of Anna and wrote in her Notes about Anna Akhmatova how carefully Anna whispered her poems, and sometimes she even had no courage to whisper. In those years, explains Lydia, in her preface to Notes Anna visited me, and read verses from the Requiem very quietly, and at her home in Fountain House sometimes she did not even whisper. Suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, she stopped and moved her eyes to the ceiling and walls, then took piece of paper and pencil to write; then pronounced something normal with a very loud voice like: Do you want tea?, then rapidly wrote her words of poetry on the piece of paper and gave to me. I read the poems and silently returned the paper to her. It is very early for autumn, spoke Anna loudly, and she took the matches, and burned the paper in an ashtray.
Anna spent 17 months in long queues, outside Kresty Prison in St Pete to pass parcels to her son and to learn about his fate. He had earlier spent time in a White Sea Gulag. She wrote a letter to Stalin and showed the draft to Bulgakov, who already had experience of such appeals. The letter to the Kremlin, however, had no lasting effect. For a time, until the next arrest, it may have eased the fate of Lev.
Anna recorded that in the queues outside Kresty Prison someone recognized her. Then a woman whispered:
Can you describe this?
And Anna replied: Yes I can. I can.
In her poem Requiem Anna mentioned exactly the place where the monument for her must be installed: ...where I stood for three hundreds of hours,
And the lock was not opened to me.
Requiem was created not at once, but over many years, much being written in the years 1935 to 1940.The Instead of Forward and the Epigraph are marked by the year 1957 and 1961 respectively.
In 1939 the name of Akhmatova was returned to the pedestal of Soviet literature for 7 years. At a ceremonial reception for awarded writers Stalin asked about Akhmatova, whose poems were loved by his daughter Svetlana: Where is Akhmatova? Why she writes nothing? Akhmatova was admitted to the Union of Writers, and in 1940 her compilation From Six Books was published; Akhmatova called it Daddys gift to Daughter.
The hour of courage is on our clock...
The Second World War caught Akhmatova in Leningrad.
During the war years, readers knew about her through her writings Oath and Courage. In the first days of war, lots of poets left to the war-fronts, as soldiers, officers, war correspondents.Those who could not participate in the war affairs directly, participated in the hard labour of these war years. Olga Bergholtz remembers Akhmatova during the beginning of the siege of Leningrad:
On lined sheets of paper from the office-book, were dictated by Akhmatova and later corrected by her own hand, the text of her statement for the radio broadcast for the city in these dire days of the storming attacks on Leningrad and Moscow. As I recall her, near the old forged gates... in front of Fountain House, the former Sheremetevsky Palace. With her face close-mouthed in severity and anger, with a gas mask bag hanging on her shoulder, she undertook the duty of an ordinary private of air defence. She sewed the sand bags, which were to be used for the edging of trench-shelters in the garden of Fountain House, under the maple, which was glorified in her Poem without a Hero. At the same time she wrote poetry: passionate, short-spoken quatrains.
Akhmatova saw the beginning of the siege; she saw the first violent attacks against her city. Already in July the now famous poem Oath appeared:
We promise to children, we promise to graves,
What no one will force us to obey!
She did not want to leave Leningrad, but she was evacuated and lived for three years in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. She never stopped thinking and writing about Leningrad. Anna received the news about the Leningrad siege from letters and stories in newspapers. She felt herself still part of the city.
The hour of courage is on our clock,
And courage will not leave us.
Akhmatovas poem Courage became a symbol of resistance and fearlessness. In 1943 Akhmatova received the medal For the Defence of Leningrad.
Annas son, Lev Gumilev, stayed in Siberia after his prison sentence, without the right to leave the place. In autumn 1944 he voluntarily entered the Soviet army, fought as an ordinary soldier at the Byelorussian front, then finished the war in Berlin. Moon at a Zenith, a book of poems which reflects Annas life during the time of the evacuation of Leningrad is one of the most beautiful works of Akhmatova. Mysterious, these Eastern tales take the reader from the war to the world of Eastern Peace.
To resurrect in blue ether...
In April 1946 Anna Akhmatova spoke in public in Moscow, in the Pillar Chamber of Unions House. Her appearance caused standing ovations, which lasted for 15 minutes. The audience stood up and applauded. However, in September 1946, Anna was excluded from the Union of Writers, and was deprived of ration cards. In 1947 a Resolution to the papers Star and Leningrad was issued by the Central Committee. The Resolution said: To stop access for Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and others like them to the Journals. Zhdanov, the then head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, appreciated Annas creativity in his report saying: Akhmatovas topics are completely individualistic. But he mocked Anna with the words: half harlot and half nun, adding her poetry is of a mad mistress, who tosses between boudoir and chapel and he concluded that her poetry is totally foreign to the people.
Anna was to disappear from public view for another 10 years, until the thaw introduced after Stalin`s death by new leader Krushchev.
During the late 1940s the authorities installed listening devices in Annas home and conducted physical searches repeatedly. In 1949 her son Lev Gumilev was arrested again. The Special Council sentenced him to 10 more years of labour in Siberian camps. In order to help her son, Akhmatova wrote a selection of poems praising Stalin: such as Glory to Peace (1950). This Akhmatovas sacrifice (in reality she hated Stalin) was not reciprocated by Stalin: Lev Gumilev was released from labour camps only in 1956. He was rehabilitated because of an absence of corpus delicti. He never forgave his mother for his childhood, which was spent mostly away from her (he was raised by Grandmother Anna Gumileva, the mother of Nikolai Gumilev, in their family village Slepnevo, in the Tver area). Later he also could not understand why upon his return to St. Petersburg her son Lev received a job as librarian in the Hermitage. Later he became a Doctor of Science in the field of history, developed a unique theory of ethnogenesis, and worked in the Research Institute of Geography. He died in 1992 in St. Pete.
The latest years of Akhmatovas life (after her sons return from prison) were relatively quite. Akhmatova finally received another apartment. She got permission to publish a big collection Time Run, which included 50 years of her poems. She decided to write down Requiem, which was written in memory of loved ones, family and friends, and had been unwritten for over twenty years. By early 1960, Magic Chorus appeared being about Akhmatovas students, who had made her latter years relatively happy. One of the students introduced his friend Joseph Brodsky to Anna. Anna greeted young Brodsky with her friendship and later predicted his brilliant poetic future. She always remained an ideal for Brodsky, Akhmatova playing a crucial role in Brodskys life. She helped him to realize the seriousness of what he was doing. Close communication with Akhmatova became absolutely necessary, a sort of addiction for Brodsky, but it was interrupted by the arrest of Brodsky. Akhmatova felt guilty because she thought that I was arrested because of our friendship... I do not think so, said Brodsky. Akhmatova tried to protect him, referring his case to the most influential persons ... Eventually, thanks to her diligence and to the noise which was raised in the West, one and a half years later Brodsky was released.
In 1962, her country house was visited by Robert Frost. In 1963, a two volume collected edition of Akhmatovas prose and poetry was published by Inter-Language Literary Associates of West Germany. In honour of Annas 75th birthday. In 1964, special observances were held and new collections of her verses were published. Akhmatova got a chance to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel to Sicily and England, in order to receive the Etna Taormina prize and the Honorary Doctoral Degree from Oxford University. In her last years Akhmatova worked very intensively: in addition to poetry, she made many translations, wrote memoirs and essays, and was going to publish another book about Pushkin...
On March 5, 1966 Akhmatova died. The death of Akhmatova in Moscow, a sermon in St. Petersburg and the funeral in the village of Komarovo caused huge responses in Russia and abroad.
There are monuments of Akhmatova in St. Petersburg including in the yard of the State University Philological Faculty and in the garden near the Fountain House. Recently a monument to Anna Akhmatova, located across the Neva from the city jail was opened.
In Annas poem published after her death we see our Muse for the last time:
And Muse was becoming deaf and blind,
Putrefied in ground as a grain,
In order to resurrect afterwards, as a
Phoenix from the ashes,
In blue ether.
