Anna of All the Russias : A Life of Anna Akhmatova - Hardcover

Elaine Feinstein

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297643096 ISBN 13: 9780297643098

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

Synopsis

Anna Akhmatova is recognised as the greatest woman poet of Russian literature. Her work has a classical perfection, drawn from Pushkin, and a passionate voice, which rises directly out of the drama of her own life. Many men fell in love with her beauty, yet all three of her marriages were brutally unhappy. Her life has a particular resonance for women. She began writing at a time when 'to think of a woman as a poet was absurd,' as she remarked ironically. Her genius soared above any such category; yet the human price she had to pay for that triumph was as a wife and mother. Her first husband was executed by the Bolsheviks; her only son spent sixteen years in the Gulag during Stalin's terror; her third husband died there. Although banned from publishing poetry for a quarter of a century this did not stop her writing in secret, which as Feinstein says 'gave voice to the suffering of the Russian people'. Her stubborn loyalty to friends in danger - Shostakovich, Mandelstam, Pasternak and the playwright Bulgakov - showed a courage few possess, and she became an iconic figure for those whom the Soviet regime repressed.This heroic role was sustained through illness (she had TB for much of her adult life), poverty and a lifelong conflict between womanly affections and the demands of her art. Another great Russian poet of the twentieth century, Marina Tsvetayeva, called her 'Anna of all the Russias' as if she were a Tsarina.

About this title

About the Author:

Elaine Feinstein is a prize-winning poet, novelist and biographer. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1980 and her work has been translated into many languages. She is the author of highly praised lives of Pushkin and Ted Hughes (the first biography).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

St. Petersburg  ·  1913

The whole mournful city was drifting

Towards a destination nobody guessed.

—AKHMATOVA

Let me begin in 1913. The dark and glittering verses which open Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero circle about her memories of that year, the final moments of a corrupt and glamorous world. In the poem, Akhmatova is waiting for guests to celebrate New Year 1941. Candles have been lit, wine and crystal set out when, instead of her expected visitors, a sinister phantasmagoria of dead friends crowd in upon her, dressed as mummers. Their presence calls up St. Petersburg as it once was, when Akhmatova was twenty-four, a fashionable young woman already famous as a poet, with the violent upheavals of the twentieth century not yet under way.

In 1913 St. Petersburg was an Imperial capital, with a black and yellow flag flying over the Winter Palace, private carriages pulled by thoroughbred horses with footmen in uniform who rode on the running-boards. There were trams and trolleys and occasional motor cars. Enticing shop windows on the Nevsky Prospekt had oysters from Paris, lobsters from Ostend and “fruitcakes, smelling salts, Pears soap, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers . . . and football jerseys in the colours of Oxford and Cambridge.” On the sunny side of Nevsky Prospekt bookstores sold the latest poetry.

Built below sea level, at the edge of the Baltic, St. Petersburg was always an unnatural city. Thousands of slave labourers died of disease and hunger to realise Peter the Great’s grand design of a window on the West. Even after he had declared St. Petersburg his new capital, wolves boldly entered the city at night as late as 1712, and occasionally devoured their prey in broad daylight. Floods constantly overwhelmed the islands, and in 1721 Peter himself was nearly drowned on Nevsky Prospekt. It is the city of Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman,” where a poor clerk’s lover is carried away by the waters and Falconet’s grand statue of Peter pursues him when he dares to protest. It was Gogol’s city of shadows and phantoms. The poverty and squalor of the streets and squares still remained much as in Dostoevsky’s nightmare vision.

Akhmatova called St. Petersburg her cradle, even though she was not born there. In her autobiographical jottings, she describes childhood streets filled with organ-grinders, Tatar ragmen and tinsmiths, the houses painted different shades of red, front entrances scented with the perfume of ladies and the cigarettes of passing gentlemen, back staircases smelling of coffee, bliny, mushrooms and, frequently, cats.

1913 was the Jubilee of three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty, and in February all the main streets of the city were decorated, statues garlanded and portraits of a long line of tsars pasted to the front of buildings. Everything was done to impress foreign and provincial visitors. Electricity illuminated the Winter Palace, the golden spire of the Admiralty arch, other columns, arches and double-headed eagles. The rich dressed with flamboyance. At one opera house, in 1913, for a performance of Glinka’s patriotic A Life for the Tsar, the boxes blazed with jewels and tiaras. For the nobility, most of whom lived on or near the Nevsky Prospekt, there were balls and banquets. Everywhere military music celebrated the absolute rule of Nicholas II, and the magnificence of his empire.

On the February day which inaugurated the Jubilee celebrations, the Imperial family drove in an open carriage towards Kazan Cathedral. To protect the Tsar on his first public appearance since the revolution in 1905, one battalion of horse guards rode in front of his carriage and another behind. Imperial Guards lined the route. Tourists from all over the empire, and foreign dignitaries from the rest of Europe, were staggered by the splendour of the occasion.

Behind these central areas, St. Petersburg remained a city of filth and disease. Many factories were allowed to discharge their waste into the rivers and canals. With a cholera outbreak on average once every three years, the death rate was the highest of any capital city in Europe. Water had to be fetched in buckets and boiled before it was safe, but thirsty workers gave little attention to this and the general domestic water supply was a breeding-ground for typhus as well as cholera. London had eradicated similar problems in the nineteenth century by building a new system of sewers. No attempt was made to improve the situation in St. Petersburg until 1917.

Nicholas thought of himself as divinely appointed and the many peasants who still wrote directly to him for help saw him as a father who felt compassion for their difficulties. Over Nicholas’ vast empire, however, the memory of 1905 remained raw. Reprisals had included executions of suspected radicals and mass violence against ethnic minorities, particularly Jews, incited by the Tsar’s Prime

Minister, Stolypin. The ruling authorities remained suspicious of Poles and Jews, who were always regarded as likely revolutionaries, and indeed 1913 was the year of the Beilis trial, with its medieval trumped-up charge of child murder against a totally innocent Jew. Nevertheless, in 1913 Nicholas was confirmed in his delusion that his people loved him.

Of the skills required to run a country in pre-revolutionary ferment, it has to be said Nicholas had none. He was a shy man and had always been treated like a child by his family. He danced gracefully, rode well and spoke good English but his agonised cry when his father died at forty-nine was entirely appropriate: “What is going to happen to me and all of Russia? I was not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one.” Nor was his Empress a popular

figure. She did not enjoy public occasions, and found the Jubilee celebrations a strain, even withdrawing from a gala performance at

the Maryinsky Theatre. She had acceded to the Russian throne at twenty-two and, although regarded as German by the Russians, she was in fact English. She ordered factory-produced furniture from the London department store Maples for the Winter Palace, where it looked out of place alongside the classic Empire style. She and Nicholas used domestic English endearments for one another such as “lovey” and “wifey.”

The Empress wanted desperately to give Russia a son, but she had four daughters before producing the Tsarevich Alex, who was soon discovered to suffer from haemophilia. This is what brought the strange figure of Rasputin into her life, since he did seem to possess some unexplained powers to stop the child bleeding—even, in one well-attested case, through the power of a telegram, the so-called “Spala miracle.” As an influential presence at court, Rasputin enjoyed gifts, bribes and sexual favours. Though it was said he had shrivelled private parts, he spent days in bathhouses and brothels with prostitutes. Rumours about his behaviour widely increased the unpopularity of the royal family. Nicholas, however, would not remove him from court while the Empress continued to put her faith in him as the only healer for her son.

No visitor would have recognised that “the moon was growing cold over the silver age.” It was a year of extraordinary cultural ferment. Nineteen-thirteen saw the serialisation of the first parts of Andrey Bely’s St. Petersburg, Russia’s most significant modernist novel, and the publication of Maxim Gorky’s celebrated autobiographical trilogy. There were three opera companies, and at the Maryinsky it was virtually impossible to get tickets when Fyodor Chaliapin was singing. On Wednesdays and Sundays there were performances of ballet, where Anna Pavlova and Vaclav Nijinsky could be seen, sometimes in the modernist choreography of Fokine. St. Petersburg enjoyed a great range of theatre, from the Imperially subsidised and traditional Alexandrinsky to the modernist experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Numerous foreign films could be seen in cinemas all over St. Petersburg, while the most popular Russian film actress of the time was Vera Kholodnaya, adored in films that usually took the theme of love unrequited or humiliated.

All the avant-garde movements which were to make themselves felt in the arts took their shape between 1908 and 1913. Futurism drew on street theatre, performance poetry and bizarre costume, and was powerful in the visual arts. Whether poets used classical forms or not, they were instinctively opposed to the values of the society around them. Few of them were committed to political ways of changing that society, but Russian poets before 1913 felt that poetry might make anything happen.

Below street level on Mikhailovskaya Square, at the corner of Italyanskaya Street, lay the legendary cellar of “The Stray Dog,” owned by the actor Boris Pronin. To reach the Stray Dog you had to descend a narrow stone staircase and enter a doorway so low that a man had to take off his top hat. All the windows of the café were blocked up, as if to keep out the everyday world, and the walls and ceilings of low, curving plaster were painted with flowers and birds in brilliant colours by the artist Sergey Sudeikin. A group of bohemian artists gathered there after the theatres closed and often stayed talking until dawn. The clientele took pleasure in chilled Chablis, and anglophiles among them preferred the taste of white bulka to black Russian khleb.* It was a crowded room—very stuffy and not always merry, a society turned in on itself, almost as if unaware of what was happening in the streets above.

In 1913,...

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0297643096
• ISBN 13: 9780297643098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Illustrator: Illus