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

Feinstein, Elaine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400040892 ISBN 13: 9781400040896

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

This comprehensive biography of the legendary Russian poet — a rich narrative of the dramatic life behind the extraordinary work — draws on a wealth of new material, including memoirs, letters and journals, and interviews with Akhmatova’s surviving friends and family.

Anna Akhmatova began writing in the years before World War I, a time when, according to Akhmatova herself, “to think of a woman as a poet was absurd.” Her genius would rise above categorization, but this superb biography makes clear how heavily she paid for the political and personal passions that informed it. A fierce poise, forged by Anna’s lonely childhood, carried her through her father’s resistance to her writing — which prompted her to change her name from Gorenko to Akhmatova, a name taken from a Tartar ancestor - and her flawed but passionate love affairs. We see Akhmatova’s work banned from 1925 until 1940, and banned again following World War II, when the Union of Soviet Writers labeled her “half nun, half harlot.” We see her steadfast resistance to Stalin during her hopeful but unsuccessful attempt to win her son’s release from prison. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression. And we see how, through everything, Akhmatova continued to write, her poetry giving voice to the Russian people by whom she was, and still is, deeply loved.

Anna of All the Russias takes us into the days and nights of an icon. It is a revelation of both the artist and the woman.

About this title

About the Author:

Elaine Feinstein is a prizewinning poet and novelist and the author of highly praised biographies of Pushkin, Marina Tsvetayeva and Ted Hughes. She lives in London.

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: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400040892
• ISBN 13: 9781400040896
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 352