Anna Akhmatova: “Art is a dangerous business”
"I understand parents who wish to protect their children from poetry or the theatre."
Letters from Vienna #89
Anna Akhmatova: “Art is a dangerous business”
“Art is a dangerous business” Anna Akhmatova stated in 1940. “When one’s young, one doesn’t know it; it’s a horrible fate with snares and wolf pits. Now I understand parents who wish to protect their children from poetry or the theater…”[1]
“I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Hitler, the Eifel Tower and, I think, Eliot (T.S. Eliot was in fact born in 1888)“[2] wrote Anna Akhmatova of the beginnings of her life (it also happened to be the same year in which Wittgenstein was born but that is neither here nor there). “I was born on June 11th, 1889, in Bolshoi Fontan near Odessa. My father had been a mechanical engineer in the Navy but was no longer in the service. When I was one years old, the family moved north – to Tsarskoye Selo. I spent the first sixteen years of my life there.“[3] When she was eleven she began to write poetry[4], published her first poem at the age of seventeen, and in April 1910 (although she had her own, serious doubts about it), married the founder of the Acmeist movement and explorer of Africa: Nikolay Gumilyov, in Kiev.
Modigliani
The couple honeymooned in Paris, where Akhmatova hung out with Modigliani of whom she wrote: “Everything divine about Modigliani only shimmered through an indefinite darkness. He didn’t resemble anyone in the whole world. His voice stayed with me forever. He was destitute when I knew him and it was unfathomable what he lived on. He didn’t find the slightest recognition as an artist either.“[5] A year later Akhmatova’s talent was celebrated in Russia and her husband had no choice but to be jealous of her success.[6] The emotional turmoil of their difficult marriage undoubtedly played a role in why she became consumptive.
“Of course, both were far too free and important people to become a cooing pair of doves. Their relationship was more like a secret duel. She sought to assert herself, to be a woman free of shackles; he sought to assert himself against every spell, with the will to independence, independence and power over this woman who was forever slipping away from him, who had many faces and who never once submitted.”[7]
The birth of their son, Lev, in 1912, failed to bring them any closer: ““Akhmatova’s heart lived a big and complicated life…” wrote her best friend, “but Nikolai Stepanovich, the father of her only child, occupied a very humble place in her heart’s life.””[8] Boris Pasternak courted her and thrice asked for her hand in marriage[9] while Osip Mandelstam was counted among her lovers.
War and Revolution
In 1914 Nikolay Gumilyov went off to war and in 1917 the Bolsheviks attained power in Russia. Sinaida Hippius wrote: “As soon as the revolutionary troops – the Kexholm regiment and others – flooded the palace, they immediately began to destroy and loot, broke down the storerooms and gathered up the silver. Anything they couldn’t take they destroyed. They smashed valuable china, cut up carpets, dismembered and stabbed a portrait of Serov, and finally found the wine cellar…” After that: “they dragged the women’s battalion, including many wounded, to the Pavlovsky barracks and raped them all…”[10]
“For Anna Akhmatova the state of general destruction was far worse than for others, for she had no roof over her head. She left Gumilyov’s house before their divorce became final (1918), which by now was a mere formality. “I haven’t had a home” she once said “since I left Gumilyov’s house.” In the 1920s her address changed frequently – she lived now with one friend, now another.”[11]
The Deaths of Gumilyov and Blok
Gumilyov, who returned to Russia from London in 1918, tried to continue life as though neither his divorce nor the revolution had actually happened. One day he was arrested, tortured and shot. Alexander Blok, one of the leading poets of the day, also died due to a “general weakness of the nerves”[12] in the very same year: 1921.
“I found out about the death of Nikolai Stepanovich,” Akhmatova wrote “on September 1st in Tsarskoye Selo (I read the newspaper at the train station), where I was staying for a cure…half hospital, half sanatorium. I was so weak that I couldn’t once walk in the park...
That summer the forests around Petersburg burned. Plumes of noxious yellow smoke billowed through the streets and in the fall, the Field of Mars became a huge, desolate vegetable garden, with flocks of countless crows overhead.”[13]
“The poet Nikolai Ozup wrote: “After August 1921 one couldn’t breathe in Petersburg, the terminally ill city died with the last breath of Blok and Gumilyov.” For Mandelstam the beloved city became, after the shooting of Gumilyov, a “city of the dead.””[14]
Russia was reduced to poverty; the brutal regime was repressive and the Bolsheviks blamed the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921 on the intelligentsia. Many poets elected to leave: “The mass emigration of the Russian intelligentsia had less to do with the revolution than the developments of 1921 and 1922. At that time, Remizov, Khoasevich, Georgy Ivanov, Andrei Bely, Alexei Tolstoy, Marina Tsvetaeva and even Gorky left Russia...”[15]
“In the autumn of 1922, Lenin had 170 leading professors, scientists and artists (among them the philosophers Nikolai Berdayev, Sergei Bulgakov and others), an intellectual elite, summarily arrested by the secret police, put on a ship and exiled.”[16]
The Arrest of Mandelstam
In the 1930s the brutal repression grew even worse. Both Akhmatova’s son: Lev, and her common-law husband: Nikolai Punin were repeatedly arrested and sent to concentration camps. In 1934 it was the turn of Mandelstam: “We were walking down Prechistenka (in February 1934), talking – I don’t remember about what, we turned into Gogol Boulevard, and Osip said: “I’m ready to die.”...”
“I hadn’t seen Osip and Nadia for a long time. In 1933 the Mandelstams accepted an invitation to Leningrad. They checked into the Hotel Europa. Osip gave two readings. He’d just learned Italian and was obsessed with Dante, reciting him for pages on end. We got to the “Purgatorio” and I read a passage from the XXX canto (The Apparition of Beatrice)...Osip wept. I was startled – “What’s going on?” – “It’s nothing, no. Just these words, you, your voice…” Osip recited the poem: “The Art Despisers” by Nikolai Alexeyevich. When I spoke disapprovingly of Yesenin, Osip replied that he could forgive Yesenin anything for the line: “He never shot unfortunate people in dungeons...””
“I remember one of our conversations about poetry at the time. Osip Emilyevich, who reacted very sensitively to what is now called a personality cult, said to me: “Poems must be socially relevant”, and recited to me: “We now live without feeling the land under our feet”...”
“On May 13, 1934 he was arrested. On the same day, after a storm of telegrams and phone calls from Moscow, I went to the Mandelstams. We were all so poor then that, in order to buy a return ticket, I took with me the Order of the “Monkey Chamber” that had been bestowed on me, the last one Remisov had bestowed in Russia...and a small sculpture to sell...”
“The arrest warrant was personally signed by Jagoda. They searched all night, looked for poems and trampled over manuscripts torn from a chest. We all sat in one room; it was very quiet; behind the wall…someone was playing Hawaiian guitar. The examining magistrate found the “Wolf” before my eyes and showed it to Osip Emilievich. He nodded silently. When he said goodbye, he kissed me. It was seven in the morning when they took him away...””[17]
[1] p.81 Anna Achmatowa, Jelena Kusmina
[2] p. 16
[3] p.9 Ibid
[4] p.27 Ibid
[5] p.49 Ibid
[6] p. 57 Ibid
[7] pp.67-68 Ibid
[8] p.68 Ibid
[9] p.123 Pasternak, Ronald Hingley
[10] p.97 Anna Achmatowa, Jelena Kusmina
[11] p.103 Ibid
[12] p.118 Ibid
[13] p.124 Ibid
[14] p.227 Meine Zeit, mein Tier, Ossip Mandelstam, eine Biographie, Ralph Dutli
[15] p.125 Anna Achmatowa, Jelena Kusmina
[16] p.202 Meine Zeit, mein Tier, Ossip Mandelstam, eine Biographie, Ralph Dutli
[17] pp.171-172 Anna Achmatowa, Jelena Kusmina