by Viv Groskop
And yet. Akhmatova can still be regarded as inconsequential or unimportant because she is a woman. (Whenever I think about this, I want to summon Tolstoy from beyond the grave to throw eggs at her detractors. He would do it because, as we have established, he would do practically anything as long as it involved eggs.) This is even more insulting when you consider the subtext of Requiem, her greatest work: it is a written record of the thoughts and feelings of the women who suffered the consequences of the Stalinist purges, waiting outside the prisons for news:
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one they almost had to drag at the end,
And the one who tramps her native land no more,
And the one who, tossing her beautiful head,
Said, ‘Coming here’s like coming home.’
…
And if they gag my exhausted mouth
Through which a hundred million scream,
Then may the people remember me
On the eve of my remembrance day.
To reduce Akhmatova’s work to ‘women’s poetry for women’ (which is often what happens) is to miss the point entirely: she wrote this to make sure this experience was never forgotten.
But in Russia, even as recently as the mid-1990s, people remained accustomed to a sort of deference towards women that verged on something out of Jane Austen’s time, as I discovered when I lived there. It was common for men to kiss you on the hand upon meeting you, to pull your chair out for you, light your cigarette, pour your wine. There’s a 1997 documentary made in St Petersburg about a group of people all turning forty on the same day, and at one of the birthday parties a man says humbly to his lady friend, almost lisping with obsequiousness: ‘Please, may I cut you a thinner gherkin?’ If people were drinking, the first toast would be to the person hosting the party. The second would be ‘to the lovely ladies’. At parties, there was a general assumption that ‘the ladies love sweet things’, and people made a great show of bringing out cakes and chocolates at every social event ‘for the ladies’. Because ladies must have a sweet tooth! And ladies must love poetry written by another lady! This was the context in which people read Akhmatova during the Soviet era, and in the period immediately afterwards.
This is all nonsense, of course. Akhmatova has bigger balls than Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway combined. When I think of her playing the KGB at their own game, carefully recruiting the right circle of trusted people to learn her poems by heart and scribbling things on paper only to set light to them minutes later, all to avoid being killed for writing poetry … Well, it makes me want to scream. Or wield a samurai sword. The highest expression of femininity? I don’t think so. This is the bravest of human acts. It has nothing to do with being a lady. It’s about being someone who ‘stood for three hundred hours/And where they never unbolted the doors for me’.
Those who appreciate Akhmatova know that to understand her is to understand – deeply – what it was to survive the Soviet era. Requiem itself is beautiful and intense. And, although I would always be wary of disparaging work in translation of any kind, it has to be said that Akhmatova’s poetry works particularly well in translation, compared to a lot of Russian poetry. It can be read without you remotely feeling that it was written in another language. The themes of the pre-revolution poetry are love, passion, sex, betrayal. After the revolution, Akhmatova has little choice but to write about Russia’s past and future, the difficulties of the everyday Soviet experience and the thing she’s best known for: her testimony about life outside the prison gates, waiting for news of relatives. Akhmatova uses clear, sharp images, flashes of sound, light and feeling, biblical references mixed in with snippets of dialogue. If you read her in English, you don’t necessarily get the rhythm and the rhyme, but you can get a vivid picture and a measure of her impact. I will happily read any of her poetry in English. It’s different to the original but no less beautiful.
Akhmatova’s reputation as the glamorous face of women’s literature is tricky, though. It’s wrong, in a way, to mythologize Akhmatova, as she really did have the most awful life. Her first husband was killed by the secret police. Her son and common-law husband both spent many years in the Gulag. She was never arrested or imprisoned herself, but she lived with the burden of having caused suffering to those closest to her. She was also under constant surveillance. Stalin took a particular interest in her.
Despite all this, it would be unfair not to point out that she was ridiculously, impossibly, chic. She even resembled Virginia Woolf physically (down to the same nose), and she dressed like a member of the Bloomsbury set, even if her clothes were threadbare and worn. She had an aristocratic bearing. It became her mission to capture the unspoken, subconscious schism in Soviet life. Akhmatova became the mouthpiece for what she called ‘the two Russias’ that were staring each other in the eye: ‘the ones in the camps and the ones who had put them there’. This was something she said to her friend Lydia Chukovskaya. It’s a perfect description of the Soviet system. She wrote poems that reflected the dualities of Russia’s story over the last hundred years: people who support the system and people who inwardly resist it; people who want things to change and people who fear change; the public face versus the private face.
Even before this era of horror, Akhmatova had not had an easy life. Her earlier poetry, which had made her famous, marked her out as bourgeois, pro-Tsarist, Western, a traitor. And yet she had no desire to leave Russia. She was rejected from the accepted list of Soviet writers, which meant she had no hope of any kind of income. She became a sort of non-person. For a long time, she had no idea what to write about, and the poems did not come. ‘My name was struck off the list of the living … And after accepting the experience of those years – terror, weariness, emptiness, deathly isolation – in 1936 I began to write again, but my handwriting had changed, my voice sounded different.’ It was during this time that Requiem surfaced, a collection which bridged the gap between the romantic poet she had always been and the political poet she was forced to become by circumstance. ‘There could be no return to my earlier manner. Which is better, which worse … It’s not for me to say.’ She hated that Requiem, when it eventually came out, was criticized in the West for being an example of her being past her best, having had too big a gap in her writing. They didn’t understand anything about how difficult it had been for her to go on at all.
She was also forced to become a more practical person than she probably ever wanted to be. She certainly adopted a ‘diva’ stance when she didn’t want to deal with people. But the reality of Soviet life obliged her to engage with the mundane. When she hears the news that her son, Lev, is being sent to the camps in the north in 1939, she does a whip-round to find warm clothes: ‘… getting a hat from one person, a scarf from another, gloves from another’. (There is nothing to buy in the shops, even if she has the money.) The next day, she has to wait so long in line at the prison to hand over the parcel that her feet swell up and she can barely walk. One account has her taking her shoes off to walk barefoot across the prison courtyard. After this visit she wrote ‘To Death’, the eighth poem of Requiem, where she asks death to come for her: ‘You will come in any case – so why not now?’
Despite the gloomy themes of Akhmatova’s work and the appalling personal tragedy she was living through, somehow she found some kind of weak but sustainable optimism. It’s a quiet inner self-belief that nurtures your integrity and says: ‘The external circumstances are what they are. Deep inside me, there is a part of me that will never be crushed.’ This was reflected in her elegance and her glamour, which she exuded both in her appearance and in her work. Optimism requires some kind of control. To take control over your thoughts is the start of optimism. Just the other day, I was telling a friend who was feeling upset about not being in a relationship that digging deep to find optimism would be a good move. I’m sure she wanted to hit me. But, unfortunately, it’s true: when we are at our lowest and feel that we have no contro
l, we need to find advantages in our situation, however creative we need to be to do so. It gives us back control.
Akhmatova survived by being alluring, courageous and haughty. She also had an attractive wit about her. Perhaps the person with whom Akhmatova had the most jocular relationship was her friend Mandelstam. He had known her for many years. As Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda, writes in her wonderful memoir, Hope against Hope, Akhmatova used to come and stay with them in their apartment and, in her honour, they would cover their stove with a tarpaulin to serve as a tablecloth so that it looked like they had done something special for their guest. One time Akhmatova came to visit, Mandelstam went out to scrounge food from neighbours for some supper for her. He came back with one egg. Later, after the secret police had been round to search the apartment for manuscripts, the lone egg was still sitting on the makeshift table. (Good job Tolstoy was not around.) ‘You eat it,’ Akhmatova told Mandelstam, drily. On another occasion, he met her at the station. Her train was very late and he said to her, teasing, ‘You travel at the same speed as Anna Karenina.’ As if she had taken so long to arrive that she had come from the nineteenth century.
Akhmatova was ‘allowed’ to live while others around her were rounded up and sent to the camps or to their execution from the early 1930s onwards. Mandelstam had written an extremely risky poem directly referencing Stalin. It was later referred to as a ‘sixteen-line death sentence’. Akhmatova would have heard this poem. It was as if Mandelstam was tempting fate, having said, ‘Poetry is respected only in this country – people are killed for it. There’s no place where more people are killed for it.’ To be fair, a writer could be killed for their work whether they had written something directly referencing Stalin or not. It was arbitrary and unpredictable. But when Mandelstam read the incriminating lines to Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago said: ‘What you just read … is not poetry, it is suicide. You didn’t read it to me, I didn’t hear it, and I beg you not to read this to anyone.’ It was this poem that was supposed to have played a role in the arrests of Mandelstam, Akhmatova’s common-law husband Punin and her son, Lev Gumilev – and led indirectly to the experiences which Akhmatova wrote about in Requiem. Mandelstam was initially put under the order of ‘isolate but preserve’. He died under house arrest, not long afterwards.
The pressure he was under during this time must have been unbearable. Akhmatova had a temper on her and did not suffer fools gladly. Nadezhda writes of the time when the secret police were constantly coming for people: ‘This was why we had outlawed the question, “What was he arrested for?” “What for?” Akhmatova would cry indignantly whenever, infected by the prevailing climate, anyone of our circle asked this question. “What do you mean, what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!” ’
Even setting aside the psychological impact of the punishment dealt out to others related to her (who were essentially arrested in her place), it’s hard to imagine how Akhmatova kept her mind together throughout all the years of surveillance. When her KGB file was released in the 1990s, there were over nine hundred pages detailing phone-tapped and recorded conversations, denunciations and confessions from people she knew. At one point, Akhmatova lived with Nadezhda in Tashkent, and the two of them would return to their apartment to find things disturbed in some way, as if a search had taken place. Once, Nadezhda found a lipstick out on a table, next to a mirror that had been moved from another room. Brilliantly, she takes great pleasure in saying that she knew the lipstick wasn’t hers or Akhmatova’s because it was ‘of a revoltingly loud shade’. Nadezhda herself writes so evocatively, and even humorously, of this appalling time, describing Akhmatova as having lived through an era that was ‘vegetarian’ before things turned nasty under Stalin.
Akhmatova, like other writers such as Bulgakov and, to some extent, Pasternak, had a relationship with Stalin of sorts, although they never had a direct encounter with him or a phone call from him. Stalin knew of her existence and made it his business to make sure she suffered. On one particularly bad occasion, she went to Bulgakov for help, knowing that he had once written a letter to Stalin which had its desired effect. (This may be the one and only instance of anyone ever writing a letter to Stalin that ended in a positive result. In general, writing letters to Stalin was at best foolish and a waste of time, and at worst, dangerous.) Bulgakov’s wife, Yelena Sergeyevna, writes of that time in her diary: ‘During the day there was a ring at the door. I went out and there was Akhmatova with such a dreadful face, and so much thinner, that I scarcely recognized her; nor did Misha [Bulgakov]. It turned out that in one and the same night both her husband and her son had been arrested. She had come to deliver a letter to Yosif Vissarionovich [Stalin]. She was quite clearly in a confused state and was muttering things to herself.’
What kept Akhmatova going, of course, was her work. The circumstances in which she composed her poetry were ridiculous, unbelievable and depressing. And yet she remained proud and stylish, almost until the end. (By the end of her life, in 1966, she had put on a lot of weight and, according to some accounts, was drinking a bit too much. Really, I do not think we can blame her for this. Any normal person would have given up years before.) I wonder if she sometimes relished the drama of it all, while hating it at the same time. According to the theatre critic Vitaly Vilenkin, even in the thick of all this Akhmatova never really lost her glamorous touch. At a reading in 1938, he writes: ‘At first I imagined she was wearing something very elegant. But what I mistook for an original gown for special occasions turned out to be a black silk dressing gown with some kind of white dragon embroidered on it and very old – the silk was in places quite threadbare.’ Another account mentions her wearing a black silk dressing gown split along the seam from the shoulder to the knee. In my mind’s eye, Akhmatova is like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, always ready for her close-up, clinging on to the limelight, despite knowing deep inside that times have moved on. Back in 1915, writing about the time in her life when she had tuberculosis, she said: ‘Every morning I got up, put on a silk peignoir and went to bed again.’ She never quite gave up being that person, and thank God for that.
In her youth, Akhmatova had been one of the gilded youth of the pre-revolutionary era, a celebrated poet and doyenne of the nightclub scene and the Stray Dog literary café, dressed all in black and wearing a necklace of black agate. As Elaine Feinstein writes in her superb biography, Akhmatova was in her element among a clientele who ‘took pleasure in chilled Chablis’. She wrote poems that celebrated and cursed her ‘open marriage’ with Gumilev, a fellow poet. She wrote about wearing ‘my tightest skirt, to look even more svelte’ at evenings at the Stray Dog, where she hung out with a crowd who were, basically, all sleeping with each other, then constantly threatening to commit suicide when, every now and again, the details blew wide open. (Several of this circle did commit suicide before 1917, in dramatic, poetic ways.)
She wrote about love, sex (often phrased as ‘intimacy’), betrayal, adultery, about what it was like to be a mistress and to be cast aside as a mistress. For her, this became the stuff of great poetry. But it was also the stuff of being middle class (if not virtually of the aristocratic class), of being bohemian, intellectual and, to a greater or lesser extent at different times, moneyed. This was in direct contrast to the poetry she was to write during the Stalin era and to the degrading conditions, both financial and social, in which she then found herself. As a young woman, she might have identified at least partly as being European (she spoke French). But she later made her choice and was dubbed ‘Anna of all the Russias’ by fellow legendary poetess Marina Tsetaeva.
She always comes across in everything that has been written about her as someone who would have loved to ignore politics and focus purely on the romance and tragedy of life. Her world is one of emotions. Politics forces its cold reason and logic on her. (Not that there was much logic and reason in the Soviet system. Or, if there was, it was often applied erratically and sometimes nonse
nsically.) It’s impossible to imagine for a second that Akhmatova relished her role as a witness to a historical era. She would much rather have been writing a sonnet about tight black skirts that make you look slimmer. But the Soviet experience was about forcing people to be serious and to live with a life-and-death situation even if they were not remotely interested in politics. Ironically and stupidly, to be uninterested was of course in itself a political act.
Appropriately enough, though, I was first introduced to Akhmatova’s work by one of my most feminine and sweetest Russian friends. Halfway through my student year in Russia, I got to know a nurse called Tanya. She was a quiet but self-possessed figure, not physically unlike Julie Christie as Lara in Doctor Zhivago. She wasn’t like a lot of my other friends: she was very softly spoken, shy, not keen to drink too much (completely uncharacteristic of the group I was hanging out with) and had very little interest in my status as a foreigner. In short, she was a breath of fresh air and felt like a true friend. I very quickly took to her as someone genuine, kind and selfless. In view of her professional qualifications, our friendship was especially handy for me as, shortly after we got to know each other, I contracted dysentery. It was not as appalling a life experience as seeing everyone you love sent to the Gulag, but it was still horrible. I caught it from eating in an Indian restaurant, which was, I seem to remember, the only Indian restaurant in St Petersburg at the time. A Russian friend said solemnly, only part-joking: ‘This is what happens when you eat in bourgeois restaurants.’ Tanya’s ability to nurse me back to health endeared her to me (she barely knew me, and no one was forcing her to do this), and she was also wonderful to listen to when talking about poetry. She was the gateway drug to Akhmatova, with whom Tanya was obsessed, with me following, puppy-like, swiftly behind.