St. Petersburg : A Cultural History

Chapter 3

In 1908, there were published and distributed in Petersburg around seven and a half million books, describing the adventures of Nat Pinkerton, Nick Carter, and other legendary detectives. They were thin (several dozen pages) and cheap (10-12 kopeks) editions in colored cardboard covers, with titles like Pinkerton’s Trip to the Other World, The Mysterious Ice Skater, The Steel Sting, and The Murderous Model. For a city 30 percent of whose population was illiterate, such sales figures, even for light fiction, could only be considered astonishing. Just twenty or thirty years earlier the most popular and inexpensive book would have found only a few tens of thousands of readers in the city. For example, Crime and Punishment, published in Dostoyevsky’s lifetime, sold some four hundred copies a year.

Obviously, the primary reason for this incredible expansion of the Petersburg book market was the city’s rapid growth. By 1900, almost a million and a half inhabitants swelled the city, and the number continued to increase rapidly (in 1917 there would be almost two and a half million; that is, the population grew by almost 70 percent in just seventeen years).^{148} In the gigantic metropolis beautiful buildings, broad squares, granite embankments, and wide avenues filled with fashionable people lay next to ugly, poorly lit neighborhoods densely populated with workers’ families.

Those were two different worlds. The modernist poet Mikhail Kuzmin described in his diary how a friend looked out the window one evening “at the dark factories with such grim fear, as if he were a guard looking down from the city tower at the Huns at the city gates.” Petersburg was the leading industrial center of Russia, its technological laboratory, and its main port. Here steel was produced, steam engines, cannons, and diesel engines manufactured, oil tankers, destroyers, and submarines built. Here with ever increasing speed, powerful social forces unfolded, changing first the cultural and political face of Russia, then of the world.

It was in Petersburg that the first Russian revolution erupted in 1905. Since the turn of the century, a quiet but palpable dissatisfaction had ripened here among the urban masses directed against the young tsar, Nicholas II. The ruling elite felt that to hold off the social explosion, Russia needed a “small, victorious war.” Japan was targeted for the demonstration—no match, it would seem, for the mighty Russian Army. But the war, which began in 1904, did not go the way Nicholas and his generals had planned. The Russians lost one bloody battle after another. The loss of the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Strait, between Japan and Korea, was a horrible shock for Petersburg. Wandering organ grinders lamented the tragedy in the city’s courtyards, eliciting tears and contributions more generous than usual from residents.

At first the liberal intelligentsia merely “gave the finger inside its pocket,” in the words of Alexander Benois, the traditional behavior of the Russian opposition. But, as Benois recalled, “following the tragedy playing in the Far East, following the shame that the nation was forced to feel, the usual ‘mutterings’ turned to something else. The revolution was no longer on the far horizon. Russian society felt the instability and unreliability of everything and sensed the need for radical change.”^{149} Zinaida Hippius wrote about the same thing: “Something was breaking in Russia, something was being left behind, and something that had been born or resurrected strove forward…. Where to? No one knew…. There was tragedy in the air. Oh, not everyone sensed it. But very many did, and in many things.”^{150}

In August 1905 Russia signed a humiliating peace treaty with Japan in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Theodore Roosevelt acted as mediator. The populace was caught up in a storm of outrage, with Petersburg at its center. They had not forgotten Bloody Sunday, the nightmarish day of January 9, 1905, when guards, cavalry units, and police attacked a peaceful demonstration by Petersburg workers. That day almost 150,000 people had marched from various parts of the city toward the Winter Palace. Their leader, Father Georgy Gapon, planned to hand Nicholas II a petition that began: “We, workers, have come to you, Sovereign, to seek truth and protection. We are impoverished, we are oppressed and burdened with unbearable work…. We are seeking our last salvation from you, do not refuse to help your people.” The demonstrators were carrying icons, church banners, and portraits of Nicholas II; many were singing the anthem, “God Save the Tsar.”

Neither Father Gapon nor the workers knew that the tsar was not in the Winter Palace that day; fearing terrorists, he was away at his country residence. His German wife kept saying, “Petersburg is a rotten town, not one atom Russian.” And his supercilious generals firmly—and stupidly—decided to teach the Petersburg plebeians a lesson once and for all. When the crowd approached the Winter Palace, the order came: “Fire!” The troops attacked the unarmed demonstrators in other parts of the city, too. No one believed the government statement that around one hundred people died; rumor put the number in the thousands.

Petersburg had not seen such a massacre since the fateful December 14, 1825, when Nicholas I, the grandfather of Nicholas II, scattered the Decembrists on Senate Square with artillery fire. That irretrievably tragic day marked the appearance of the abyss between Russian tsar and intellectuals. Bloody Sunday of 1905 had even more unpredictable consequences. The words of Father Gapon echoed throughout the land: “We no longer have a tsar. A river of blood separates the tsar from the people.” Anna Akhmatova, who was sixteen in 1905, used to repeat, “January 9 and Tsushima were a shock for life, and since it was the first, it was particularly terrible.”^{151}

In the fall of 1905, the first Russian revolution seized the country. Strikes virtually paralyzed Petersburg. Factories closed, the stock exchange was inactive, schools and pharmacies shut down. There was no electricity and the eerily deserted Nevsky Prospect was illuminated by searchlights from the Admiralty. A unique alternative form of political power arose spontaneously—the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, with the radical Leon Trotsky as its cochairman. Unprepared to use brute force further, Nicholas II on October 17,1905, issued a Constitutional Manifesto, which promised the Russian people freedom of speech and assembly. Too little, too late. A sarcastic ditty rang through the streets of Petersburg: “The tsar got scared and made a manifesto; the dead got freedom, the living got arrest-o!”

The cynics were right—the Duma, a legislative assembly created by the tsar’s manifesto, never acquired real power. The rights granted were curtailed one after another. The first political parties created in Russia led a precarious existence. But the revolutionary ferment quieted down. Life in Petersburg returned to normal. Chasing away gloomy thoughts about politics, the residents of the capital tried to distract themselves and have some fun again.

Petersburg’s prospering commercial life had brought into full bloom a large class of assertive, self-indulgent bourgeois whose appearance was a relatively recent phenomenon in Russia. Their aspirations and activities added something new to the older court traditions of wealth and cultural style.

Once more the elegant city was shimmering and dizzying. Once more luxurious carriages bearing arrogant and mysterious welldressed ladies whom Osip Mandelstam would later call “fragile Europeans” raced down Nevsky Prospect. The most impressive were the private carriages pulled by expensive thoroughbreds with a satiny sheen to their coats.

The horses, with battery-operated lanterns hanging from the shafts, were no longer frightened by the recently installed trolleys, nor by the first “taximotors,” but they still snorted at the exhaust fumes. Footmen in costumes matching the crests on the doors of the carriages rode on the running boards. The lackeys of the palace carriages stood out in their bright red liveries with capes trimmed in gold braid and black eagles. The red caps of the gallant hussars repeated the striking color. The guards galloped in dashing gray coats with sword hilts peeking out of the slit left pocket. Each regiment had its own uniform. The colorful assortment of epaulets, orders, buttons, and trouser stripes gladdened the eye. Nor were the military the only ones with special uniforms—civil servants, engineers, even students all had their own.

In Petersburg, as always, the cult of Nevsky Prospect thrived. In an almost ritual parade, high-placed bureaucrats and lowly clerks, naval and army officers, important gentlemen, nouveaux riches, and bohemians sauntered along the street. Some moved with the precise tread appropriate to capital denizens, while others gawked around, turning to follow pretty ladies, in attempts to flirt. Many stared at the enticing shop windows that carried expensive goods from all over the world.

Oysters from Paris, lobsters from Ostend, flowers from Nice! The aristocracy particularly liked the English Shop on Nevsky, where, as Vladimir Nabokov later recalled, one could buy all sorts of comforting things: fruitcakes, smelling salts, Pears soap, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls, and football jerseys in the color of Cambridge and Oxford.

Nevsky Prospect was also called the street of banks. Of the fifty buildings making up the section from the Admiralty to the Fontanka, there were banks in twenty-eight, including the Russian-British, the Russian-French, and the Russian-Dutch branches. In the passageway from Nevsky Prospect to Mikhailovsky Square were the jewelers: diamonds on black velvet, blinding brooches, expensive rings and necklaces. Signs, announcements, and stylish posters, many done in the fashionable Mir iskusstva manner, advertised Russian and foreign brand names: the jewelry by craftsman Faberge and the maker of cardboard holders for Russian papirosy cigarettes, Viktorson Senior; Singer sewing machines, chocolates by Georges Borman, Konradi’s cocoa, Siou perfumes and colognes, Zhukov’s soap.

The capital’s fashionable idlers stopped by the poster column: where should they go tonight? Petersburg had three operas, a famous ballet company, a lively operetta, and opulent theaters for every taste—from the very respectable, imperially subsidized Alexandrinsky, which tended to stage serious plays, to the frivolous Nevsky Farce, known for its topical parodies of famous contemporaries. The “decadent” Meyerhold was being parodied there. He had recently been asked to direct at the Alexandrinsky Theater, where his premiere of a Knut Hamsun drama had been a terrible flop. How could they have let a thirty-four-year-old upstart, with outlandishly modernist attitudes, take charge at the imperial theater? Now, they said, he was planning to “modernize” Wagner at the Maryinsky Opera. We’ll see, we’ll see….

The year 1908 brought forth Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse on the Petersburg stages. The posters proudly announced the appearance of a flashy conductor, Arthur Nikisch, who was a brilliant interpreter of Tchaikovsky, though connoisseurs really preferred the more serious conducting style of Gustav Mahler, who had recently been a hit in the capital.

Pablo Casals was playing Bach and tickets were available. How about going to that? Especially since if you weren’t a subscriber it was almost impossible to get tickets to the Maryinsky, where people lined up the night before. Students and young ladies warmed themselves by bonfires so that they could rush the box office at ten the next morning—and hope for the best. The great draw there was the incredibly popular basso Fyodor Chaliapin in the exotic opera Judith by the composer Alexander Serov, who had died almost forty years earlier. The young Tchaikovsky had adored this opera and it clearly influenced opera composition by such composers as Mussorgsky and Borodin.

Chaliapin was appearing in the role of the villainous Babylonian Holofernes. One habitue observed acidly that when the giant Chaliapin, moving with the grace of a panther, approached the footlights, reached out with his bare arms, and sang in his thunderingly resonant basso, “This city has many wives! Its streets are paved with gold! Beat them and trample them with horses—you’ll be the city’s new king!” chills ran down the spines of the beautiful ladies in full dress and the important gentlemen sitting in the light blue velvet chairs at the imperial theater. The memory of revolutionary 1905 was still fresh.

When the performance ended, Chaliapin, still in heavy makeup and his ornate “Assyrian” costume, would go up to the huge scenery workshop located over the hall at the Maryinsky Theater. The artist Alexander Golovin would work until morning on the singer’s portrait in the role of Holofernes. Almost sixty years later, barely keeping up with the tireless Leningrad choreographer Leonid Yakobson, I ran up those endless, narrow stairs, which Chaliapin with his large entourage had ascended so majestically. “So this is where they all went,” I thought, entering the spacious room, empty but so alive for me with its splendid ghosts. There stood the legendary Chaliapin, his guests, and Golovin, the most fashionable stage designer of Petersburg, the silver-haired darling of its high society.

It was Golovin, who had the ear of even high-placed bureaucrats, who got Meyerhold into the imperial theaters. Now, questioning the great singer casually about his recent triumph in Paris—Chaliapin had stunned the French with his Boris Godunov in the production brought to France by Diaghilev, with scenery by Golovin—the artist swiftly sketched Holofernes with charcoal on a large canvas, while his scenery for the next premiere dried in a corner beside them. In 1967, in the same place, I saw the scenery, painted in the lacquerbox style of Palekh folk artists, drying for Yakobson’s forthcoming adventurous ballet, Wonderland. Golovin’s portrait of Chaliapin as Holofernes had been hanging for many years by then in a place of honor at the Tretyakov Gallery, the country’s most famous museum of Russian art.

Wednesdays and Sundays were ballet days at the Maryinsky. In 1908 Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky starred in the productions of the twenty-eight-year-old Michel Fokine. In one night could be seen two of Fokine’s most innovative works, his one-act Egyptian Nights and Chopiniana, a plotless wonder that later became famous in the West under the title Les Sylphides. The court balletomanes sniffed: even ballet, that holy of holies, was being taken over by the nasty modernists! They had to put up with it, for Nijinsky and Pavlova were just wonderful, air and champagne! Of course, Fokine could create a real dance, if he tried. Have you seen his “Dying Swan?” A lovely piece and Pavlova is incomparable in it. They say she is off on her first European tour. Petersburg won’t be the same without her….

But not everyone, after all, was crazy about the ballet alone. Petersburg’s snobs attended the refined concerts of the avant-garde circle, called “Evenings of Contemporary Music.” This association could be considered the musical branch of Mir iskusstva; connoisseurs met in small hallways to sample the latest musical morsel from Paris, Berlin, or some Scandinavian capital.

In December 1908, the forty-fifth concert of the Evenings of Contemporary Music, in the hall of the Reformation School, presented the debut of a seventeen-year-old student of the Petersburg Conservatory, Sergei Prokofiev. “Touchy, clumsy, and ugly” in Nathan Milstein’s words,^{152} Prokofiev at the piano looked even younger than he was. The reviewer of the reputable newspaper Rech was rather sympathetic: “The author, a young student who interpreted his own music, is undoubtedly talented, but his harmonies are often strange and even bizarre and thus go beyond the bounds of the beautiful.”^{153}

At that same concert the Petersburg audience, among whom was the twenty-six-year-old Igor Stravinsky, heard for the first time the music of Petersburger Nikolai Myaskovsky, another conservatory student. The know-it-alls compared Myaskovsky’s three settings of the “decadent” poems of Zinaida Hippius with the vocal works of Stravinsky, who was becoming quite famous, heard at Evenings of Contemporary Music last year. Well, Myaskovsky’s works were probably more refined and mature than the sweet but naive attempts of Stravinsky, who was much too influenced by his teacher, Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov….

Rimsky-Korsakov, that master of Russian music, had died recently, in June 1908, from heart paralysis. Walter Nouvel, Stravinsky’s friend and mentor in the Evenings of Contemporary Music, who was called the arbiter of the arts by the modernists, liked to say, “I feel that the sooner Rimsky-Korsakov dies the better for Russian music. His enormous figure oppresses the young and keeps them from taking new paths.”^{154} Just in May Prokofiev had seen Rimsky-Korsakov in the hallway of the conservatory and noted somewhat wistfully in his diary, “I looked at him and thought—there he is, a man who has achieved true success and fame!”^{155} And in August Stravinsky was writing to Rimsky-Korsakov’s widow, “If you only knew how I share your terrible grief, how I feel the loss of the endlessly dear and beloved Nikolai Andreyevich!”^{156}

Stravinsky asked the widow of his teacher to help him have performed his “Funeral Song” for wind instruments, op. 5, which he wrote with incredible speed. It was dedicated to the memory of Rimsky-Korsakov. The widow pulled strings and Stravinsky’s tribute would be played in Petersburg in early 1909 in a special memorial concert….

Bookstores lined the sunny side of Nevsky Prospect. Their windows were a true exhibit of Petersburg art, with multicolored book jackets by artists of Mir iskusstva like Alexander Benois, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Sergei Chekhonin. The books were poetry collections of the leading Russian symbolists—Fyodor Sologub, Valery Bryusov, Andrei Bely—and also the debuts of Mikhail Kuzmin, Igor Severyanin, and Vladislav Khodasevich. Earth in Snow, the third book by Alexander Blok, was getting a lot of attention: the twenty-eight-year-old poet was probably the most intriguing figure of the symbolists by now.

You could attend a lecture by that Blok fellow at the ReligiousPhilosophical Society. Its meetings took place in the hall of the Geographical Society, attracting large crowds. There you could see the monks’ cloaks and the high chic of wealthy socialites; many fashionable philosophers, writers, and artists never failed to come. The burning issues of Neo-Christianity were discussed; the Petersburg elite saw renewed Orthodoxy as one of the important elements of the coming new society. “These gatherings were remarkable as the first meeting of representatives of Russian culture and literature, who were infected by religious angst, with the members of the traditional Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy,” the philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, an active and passionate participant, recalled in his autobiography. “We spoke about the relationship of Christianity and culture. The central theme was that of flesh and sex.”^{157} The huge statue of Buddha towering over the hall was covered during those Christian debates “to avoid temptation.”

The auditorium overflowed for Blok’s appearance on November 13, 1908. He spoke in a monotone but hypnotically, like a true poet, saying that in Russia “the people and the intelligentsia constitute not only two different concepts but truly two realities; one hundred fifty million on one side and several hundred thousand on the other; and neither side understands the other at the most fundamental level.”

The audience began to whisper, Why be so pessimistic about the current situation? Aren’t literacy and culture growing among the masses? But Blok continued quietly: “Why do we feel more and more frequently two emotions: the oblivion of rapture and the oblivion of depression, despair, indifference? Soon there will be no room for other emotions. Is that not because the darkness reigns all about us?” The power of the poet’s persuasion was so strong that the people in the hall shivered, anticipating the gathering gloom.

But the audience’s liberal sensibility was particularly affronted by Blok’s dire prophecy, pronounced almost matter-of-factly: “In turning to the people, we are throwing ourselves under the feet of a troika of wild horses, to our certain death.” This grim prediction elicited a chorus of outrage but also the delight of many who were sick of the liberal orthodoxy. Even though the announced debate had been banned by the police, the audience surrounded Blok after his lecture. An enraged liberal professor denounced Blok as a reactionary. A poet friend of Blok’s remarked sarcastically, “He who fears the future is neither with the people nor the intelligentsia.”

Blok listened to his opponents with a barely perceptible smile, his face resembling a stone mask. His notebook soon recorded, “It is most important for me that in my theme they hear a real and terrible memento mori.”^{158} And not long before that Blok had written, “I must admit that the thought of suicide is often lulling and vivid. Quiet. To vanish, disappear ‘having done all that I could.’”^{159} In 1908 the Petersburg police registered close to fifteen hundred suicide attempts.

Blok was focusing on a new phenomenon—the urban masses, baptized “The Coming Boor” by the father of Russian symbolism, Dmitri Merezhkovsky. These new unkempt who hungered for “bread and circuses” were frightening and incomprehensible to the elite. “Who are they, these strange people, unknown to us, who have so unexpectedly revealed themselves? Why hadn’t we even suspected their existence until now?” demanded the horrified influential Petersburg literary critic Kornei Chukovsky. He scoffed, “I’m afraid to sit among these people. What if they suddenly neigh or have hooves instead of hands?” “These people” were beyond redemption as far as Chukovsky was concerned: “No, they’re not even savages. They are not worthy of nose rings and feathers. Savages are visionaries, dreamers, they have shamans, fetishes, and curses, while this is just some black hole of nonexistence.”^{160}

The main amusement for this new mass audience was motion pictures. Petersburg was covered with a network of cinemas playing foreign films. It was only in 1908 that the first Russian feature film was made, about the legendary rebel and robber Stepan Razin; in 1964 Dmitri Shostakovich would compose his monumental poem for bass, chorus, and orchestra on this theme so beloved in Russia. But by 1909 there were twenty-three Russian motion pictures; their number grew tremendously and reached five hundred by 1917. Filmmaking and movie theaters had become a profitable part of Petersburg’s nascent entertainment industry.

“Look into the cinema auditoriums. You will be amazed by the makeup of the audience. Everyone is here—students and gendarmes, writers and prostitutes, officers and all kinds of intellectuals in glasses and beards, workers, clerks, merchants, society ladies, modistes, in a word, everyone,”^{161} mused a journalist. But this was exactly what frightened Chukovsky and his kind. They presented an apocalyptic vision of a coming “culture market,” where the goods would have to compete and the survivors would be “only those that are the most adapted to the tastes and whims of the consumer” (as Chukovsky formulated that “horrifying” prospect in 1908).

For him, as for many Russian intellectuals, the thought of culture as a product was still humiliating and shameful. That ideological puritanism was curious since Chukovsky himself won fame and fortune, appearing regularly in the popular periodical press. And at the turn of the century the more commonsensical Russian journalists freely admitted that “a newspaper is as much a capitalist enterprise as coal mining or manufacturing alcohol.”^{162}

The newspaper boom started in Petersburg in the late nineteenth century. As censorship weakened and printing costs declined, along with the price per issue, the number of readers of periodicals increased. The real explosion occurred in 1908, when the Jewish entrepreneur Mikhail Gorodetsky founded the daily Gazeta-Kopeika (Kopek Gazette). This tabloid really did cost one kopek but managed in its four to five pages (half of which were advertising) to squeeze in some foreign news, national politics, and accounts of life in the capital, naturally with a bent for sensationalism. Each issue had a lot of photographs; the regularly featured novels in installments were accompanied by original illustrations. The publisher’s motto was “Everything that interests the world,” and his politics were quite liberal.

In the beginning the Gazeta-Kopeika printed 11,000 copies, but by 1909 its circulation had grown to 150,000 and by 1910 the street vendors and the hundreds of stores and kiosks were selling 250,000 copies a day of the tabloid. Gorodetsky turned his flourishing business into a powerful newspaper and magazine conglomerate, publishing among others Zhurnal-Kopeika, the humor pamphlet “Kopeika,” the weekly World Panorama, and the illustrated magazine Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia), for which the avowed foe of mass culture, Chukovsky, wrote a column.

All these publications, which were aimed at the widest possible audience, allotted considerable coverage to national culture, particularly literature. For instance, Leo Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday, in August 1908, was celebrated by both the liberal and the right-wing press. Typically a journalist proposed, “It would be good, in honor of Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday, to give up sexual relations on that great day, and donate the money saved thereby (!) to the development of cooperatives.”^{163} On a more serious note, in 1917 Gazeta-Kopeika offered its readers as a premium the complete collected works of Leo Tolstoy in fifty-six volumes.

Comparatively little has been written about the connections between Russian mass culture and its highbrow literature, even though it was in Russia that popular newspapers and magazines regularly published the works of leading writers. Anton Chekhov began his career with humorous stories in such lowbrow publications as the Petersburg magazine Oskolki (Fragments) and the tabloid Peterburgskaya gazeta. In one newspaper he published a crime novel, The Shooting Party, in nine months of installments.

For many years, Chekhov was a prolific contributor to the monarchist, ultrachauvinist Petersburg newspaper Novoye vremya, which Nicholas II read thoroughly every day (they say he had a special copy on vellum made just for him). Chekhov gave them some of his best stories. The publisher of Novoye vremya, the spiritual heir of the Petersburg journalist and publisher Faddei Bulgarin, the owner of the infamous Severnaya pchela, was Alexei Suvorin, who was just as clever and unprincipled as Bulgarin. Suvorin was one of the first to recognize Chekhov’s talent and paid him well. According to Chekhov, when he started working for Novoye vremya, “I felt I was in California.”

Suvorin’s group published several newspapers and magazines, the annual reference book All Petersburg, calendars, and the so-called Cheap Library, which flooded the country with some three hundred titles of Russian and foreign classics. He put out a special series for reading in trains. They and his other publications were sold in Suvorin’s own book stores and hundreds of kiosks in railroad stations. Suvorin was often accused of greed and shameless commercialism, to which he replied with total sincerity, “I worked for Russian education and Russian youth…. I can go to any judgment and die peacefully.”^{164}

A contemporary spoke of Suvorin as a gifted editor who avidly sought new authors: “Like a fisherman, he cast a line with a lure and felt true pleasure when a large fish ended up on his hook.”^{165} One contributor to Novoye vremya described it as “an obliging chapel where you could pray any way you wanted, as long as it sounded vivid and talented.”^{166} That at any rate was fair with regard to the newspaper’s theater section, which was considered one of the best in the capital. As for the arts, Novoye vremya hated the decadents and so it readily published articles by the temperamental foe of modernism, Vladimir Stasov, who occupied the ideological pole opposite Suvorin. Once Stasov explained his work in the “reactionary” newspaper this way: “When I need multitudes of the Russian public, who know only Novoye vremya, to read about this or that, I boldly go to Suvorin.”^{167}

Another colorful figure in the world of the press was Solomon Propper, an Austrian citizen who, according to popular legend, appeared in Petersburg with no money and bought the rights for thirteen rubles at auction to publish Birzhevye novosti (Stock Exchange News). It was said that Propper never did learn to speak Russian tolerably, but he certainly mastered the rules of the newspaper game. In a relatively short time he increased the paper’s circulation to ninety thousand. According to one of his workers, “Propper used blackmail: firms that refused to advertise in his newspaper were soon denounced as not creditworthy. He did it cleverly, between the lines. The banks called him a revolver.”^{168}

Soon Propper was buying up estates and houses, received the rank of councillor of commerce, and even became a member of the city duma of Petersburg. But most important, he expanded his publishing business, sending out often as free supplements numerous magazines, including Accessible Fashions, Family Health, Knowledge and Art, and Ogonyok (Little Flame). Ogonyok, founded in 1908, was particularly popular. By 1910 its circulation had reached 150,000, and by 1914 it peaked at 700,000, surpassing all other existing Russian periodicals of the time.

All of Propper’s publications covered culture extensively. There was a popular joke in Petersburg: “What’s the most theatrical newspaper?” “Stock Exchange News.” “And the most stock-oriented newspaper?” “Theater Review.” The latter was published by the financier I. O. Abelson, patron of the young violinist Nathan Milstein.^{169} Propper took into account that the Russian public devoured news about new books, plays, art, music, and movies, and reports from auctions. To woo and keep readers, the Petersburg mass media tried to inform them about every interesting event in those fields. That’s how the Russian modernists came to their attention.

A pioneer here was the illustrated weekly Niva (Cornfield), founded in 1869 in Petersburg by Adolf Marx, from Prussia. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Niva’s circulation had reached 275,000. Its success came in great part thanks to the magazine’s steady publication of contemporary Russian prose and generous presentations of lithographs of paintings by realist Russian artists. According to a contemporary, Marx “understood a bit of art, and even less of literature.”^{170} But his enterprising instinct led him to select authors like Leo Tolstoy, whose novel Resurrection premiered in the pages of Niva, and Chekhov.

In 1899 Marx bought the rights to Chekhov’s works from the author for 75,000 rubles, an incredible sum in those days. Marx did not read Chekhov; nevertheless, his intuition correctly told him he would not lose the advance. He paid leading writers a thousand rubles for what was called a printer’s sheet (approximately six thousand words) and was justly called “the creator of literary fees.” The system of patriarchal and “friendly” relations between publisher and author, by which the fee often was determined by publisher’s whim and not by actual demand in the cultural marketplace, was vanishing.

Marx’s personal tastes were definitely conservative. But Merezhkovsky, the father of Russian symbolism, was published in Niva as early as 1891 and soon became a regular contributor. Other leading symbolists followed and in 1906 the magazine presented twenty-six-year-old Alexander Blok. His poetry then appeared simultaneously in other influential Petersburg publications. For instance, the serious political newspaper Slovo (The Word) published the young poet’s verses four times in February and March 1906. And the popular liberal newspaper Rus’ ran Blok’s works five times in April 1907 alone.

The symbolists, who had started out a mere fourteen or fifteen years earlier as an esoteric group, despised and mocked, suddenly became fashionable. Just recently Blok’s literary debut in a small religious-decadent journal, The New Path, led reviewers to smirk that this “new path led to an old hospital for the mentally ill.” Now it was becoming clear that the symbolists had been accepted by the reading public. Weary of the naturalism and positivism of the last few decades, readers were impressed by the symbolists’ demonstrative aestheticism and mysticism. They also liked the erotic motifs, which were fairly strong in the poems and prose of the symbolists, and so unusual in classical Russian literature.

Eroticism was becoming all the rage in 1908. In Petersburg two editions of Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel Sanin caused a sensation that led to polemics in the press and the public. The novel’s eponymous hero was summed up by a contemporary critic as someone who “eats a lot, drinks even more, says many mostly unnecessarily gross things, brawls hard, and artistically seduces beautiful women.”^{171} The prudish critic did not mention that Sanin’s themes included rape, suicide, and incest.

Artsybashev was officially charged with publishing a pornographic and blasphemous work. This naturally increased interest in the book: most of the reviews of 1908 were of Sanin; a critic wrote, “There is a new ism, Saninism.” Students debated the topic, “Is Sanin right?” Saninist clubs spread throughout the city. All this reflected real market demand.

In early 1908 Chukovsky, incensed by the “wholesale lurid relishing of sexual bestiality,” sounded the alarm. “Thousands of unthinkable, impossible books about sodomy, lesbian love, masochism have flooded the book stores.”^{172} The “serious” press wrung its hands: the book market, which offered over eighteen thousand Russian-language titles in 1908, was dominated by pornography and crime novels, “and the literature of a progressive tendency is going through a hard year.” The prudish newspaper of the Russian revolutionaries, Pravda, saw an enemy of its political ideals in erotic literature: “In Sanin, Artsybashev spits on any social work and, in effect, proclaims, ‘Vodka and broads!’ instead of ‘Proletarians of the world, unite!’”^{173}

On the contrary, some of the Russian symbolists greeted Artsybashev’s novel with sympathetic interest. For the exquisitely refined poet and essayist Innokenti Annensky Sanin was something “caricatured and metaphysical in a purely Gogolian way. Whether you like it or not is your business, but without a doubt, the caricature turned out to be powerful.” Blok, noting in passing that Artsybashev “has no language of his own,” admitted that in the amoral Sanin he sensed at last “a real man, with an iron will, a restrained smile, ready for anything, young, strong, and free.”

That is more a self-portrait of Blok than a portrait of Sanin. Freedom meant much to the Russian symbolists; freedom from the old, oppressive morality and from the traditional literary conventions. Learning first from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Verhaeren, the symbolists changed the course of Russian poetry with their bold images, metaphors, and unusual rhyme schemes. After many years of the reign of realistic prose, a new mass interest in poetry had been awakened in Russia. In those conditions Blok and his symbolist friends were not only esteemed; they had become brand names that could guarantee readership for a new newspaper or magazine.

The popularity of Blok and his cohorts—especially compared with their Western decadent brethren—was promoted by their active participation in the topical debates then raging in Petersburg. Writing of the early years of Russian symbolism, the critic D. S. Mirsky noted, “Aestheticism substituted beauty for duty, and individualism emancipated the individual from all social obligations.”^{174} However, the symbolists did not hold to these positions for long, and there were several reasons for that.

In Russia, literature rarely disengaged itself from society. Also, many symbolists, for all their proclaimed aesthetic interest in the contemporary West, had deep Slavophile roots. While announcing their cosmopolitanism, they still considered themselves Russian patriots. These patriotic feelings came to the fore in crises like revolution or war. The Russian symbolists had started out as solitary, misunderstood prophets, but in their hearts they really wanted to speak to and for the masses. Their dream came to pass, and the Russian public adopted the symbolists.

The political climate in Russia helped. Any literary gesture, however innocent, could be perceived as a political act. It’s quite possible that the esoteric lecture Blok gave at the Religious-Philosophical Society in 1908 would not have generated a lot of interest were it not for the mindless interference of the police, who had banned the discussion. That clumsy act attracted the popular press and turned that and later appearances by Blok into events with national significance, as so often happened in early-twentieth-century Russia, where literary and religious activities were concerned.

In her final years Akhmatova often said that symbolism had been perhaps “the last great movement” in Russian literature.^{175} Absorbing much of the Russian classical and Western modernist traditions, Russian symbolism became an influential and complex phenomenon. Erudite, talented, often brilliant individualists whose tangled personal relationships sometimes influenced their aesthetic standing, the symbolists were forever breaking and re-forming ranks. Any attempt to delineate concisely their ever-changing positions would be futile. But it is possible to divide them conditionally into the “elder” Russian symbolists (Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Hippius, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Fyodor Sologub) and the “younger” ones (Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov). And even here it should be noted that, for example, Ivanov was in fact older than Bryusov but debuted as a poet significantly later.

Another important distinction would be geographic. Bryusov, Balmont, and Bely were Muscovites; the Merezhkovskys, Sologub, Blok, and Ivanov lived in Petersburg. In their arguments the symbolists often defined the enemy camps as “Moscow” and “Petersburg,” but the borders were very flexible, with unexpected allies and defectors. The “Muscovites” on the whole were more “decadent” and, disdaining abstract theorizing, strove for pure aestheticism. The “Petersburgers,” on the other hand, readily debated religious and civic themes.

For all the acrimony of the debates between the Muscovites and the Petersburgers, the public perceived the symbolists more or less as a single group. At first the most famous among them was the Muscovite Balmont. But the audience soon focused on Blok. “Blok’s poetry affected us the way the moon does lunatics,”^{176} Chukovsky recalled. His poetry’s lyrical expressiveness and musicality, its hypnotic, singsong quality, exalted mystical imagery, and undoubted erotic appeal attracted readers, especially women.

The appeal of Blok’s poetry was compounded by his magnetism. Tens of thousands of postcards with his photograph were sold all over Russia, adorned with the refined “face of the young Apollo” (as the photo was described) in a glorious aureole of blond curls, sensual lips, an exalted look in his pale gray eyes. Blok was photographed in a black shirt with a smooth white collar, his hands folded together—the ideal image of the symbolist poet.

According to Chukovsky, Blok was “unbearably, unbelievably” handsome. “I had never before nor after ever seen a person exude magnetism so clearly, palpably, and visibly. It was hard to imagine that there was a young woman in the world who might not fall in love with him.”^{177} A female contemporary concurred: “In those days there wasn’t a single ‘thinking’ young woman in Russia who wasn’t in love with Blok.”^{178}

We learn of a typical fan’s love for Blok from this reminiscence:

Sonechka Mikhailova was a “Turgenev girl” with a long soft braid and small black eyes, who blushed easily. Once she walked behind Blok for a long time as he returned from some meeting with a friend. Blok was agitated, arguing furiously, and smoking—Sonechka picked up the butts, collected a small box of them, and probably still has them to this day. Dying of love for Blok, she would go to his house. But not daring to enter, she would stand by the door and kiss the wooden handle of the entry, weeping.^{179}

Blok was showered with letters asking for a rendezvous (“It would be the greatest day of my life!”) or demanding advice; one young writer famous in Petersburg circles told Blok that her marriage was fictitious and she wanted to have his child, who most certainly would be a genius. (She offered the same proposal to two other writers at the same time, though.) Many young poets sent their works to Blok; the fortunate ones who got a response—even negative—were undoubtedly proud for the rest of their lives. But his inaccessibility became legendary, and many who wanted to show Blok their work did not dare to do so.

One of Blok’s meek admirers was Marc Chagall, a nineteen-year-old artist from the backwater town of Vitebsk and new in Petersburg. Soon after his arrival Chagall went to the premiere of Blok’s play The Fair Show Booth directed by Meyerhold. In a long room with a small stage, a show unlike anything the Russian theater had ever known went on for forty minutes. Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine, the traditional characters of commedia dell’arte, appeared in Blok’s play, but here they were ultramodern and typically symbolist, even decadent. The eccentric and challenging poetry interplayed with the transparent music (composed by the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, who was also an accomplished musician). For Meyerhold this was a wonderful opportunity to realize his ideas of symbolist theater. Later he would write, “The first push toward setting the path of my art was given … by the fortunate invention of the plan for Alexander Blok’s marvelous The Fair Show Booth.”^{180}

Meyerhold himself—tall, lanky, with a hooked nose and abrupt gestures—played Pierrot. In a harsh, almost creaking voice, he shouted at the stunned audience, “Help! I’m bleeding cranberry juice!” At the end of the play Pierrot summed up the action: “I’m very sad. And you think it’s funny?” He then took a flute from the pocket of his traditional white costume with big lace collar and played a simple melody, typically Kuzminian.

As the lights gradually went on, the bewildered audience sat in silence. But then a storm broke out, which another poet described, not without envy: “I had never seen before or since such implacable opposition and such delight in the fans in a theater. The vicious whistling of the foes and the thunder of friendly applause mixed with shouts and cries. This was fame.”^{181}

This highly eccentric spectacle made an indelible impression on the young Chagall. Like many of his peers, he wrote lyric poetry à la Blok, which he didn’t dare show to Blok himself. But Chagall retained the atmosphere, symbols, and images of The Fair Show Booth throughout his life.

Blok societies were appearing all over the country and the cult of the poet was spreading. At parties high school students would read to one another, trying to imitate the author’s monotonous-hypnotic manner, Blok’s most “decadent” verse:

Or his poem “The Unknown Woman,” about the mysterious beauty, floating past the poet like a vision, in a cheap suburban restaurant filled with “rabbit-eyed drunkards”—the poem was reprinted in the popular anthology Reader-Declaimer and read all over Russia:

Prostitutes on Nevsky Prospect quickly bought hats with black ostrich feathers and demonstrated they were au courant to potential clients. “I’m the Unknown Woman, would you like to get to know me?” Or even more temptingly, “We are a pair of Unknown Women. You can have the ‘electric dream wide awake,’ you won’t regret it.” The reading public gave Blok the title “poet of Nevsky Prospect.” This was, in the words of a contemporary critic, “the decadence of decadence.”

Despite all this, Blok remains to this day one of the most loved—and widely read—Russian poets. The lyrical power, vivid imagery, and haunting rhythm of his verse retain all the impact they had on his first readers. Today Russians may wince at some of Blok’s highly charged romantic sentiments and yet, again and again, they surrender to his magical voice.

Along with the other “thinking young women of Russia,” teenage Anna Gorenko read and reread Blok’s “The Unknown Woman.” “It is marvelous, that intertwining of trite quotidian life and the divine vivid vision,” the seventeen-year-old poetess enthused, just having picked “Akhmatova” as a pseudonym. “Akhmatova” has strangely Tatar overtones for a Russian ear, but Anna decided on it anyway, since her father, a naval engineer, had forbidden her to publish poetry signed Gorenko, because “I don’t want you sullying my name!” The cult of Blok, traditional for the times, reigned in young Anna’s family; for instance, her sister “idolized” Blok and insisted, in the fashionable decadent way, that she had “the other half of Blok’s soul.”^{182}

The complicated relations between Akhmatova and Blok and the legend that surrounded them would hold one of the most important places in Akhmatova’s life; later she would complain that the legend “threatens to distort my poetry and even my biography.” But then, in 1907, Akhmatova had no inkling of it, even though she had a high enough opinion of herself from childhood.

Born, as she liked to remind us, in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, and the Eiffel Tower, Akhmatova wrote her first poem at age eleven. But her father called her a “decadent poetess” even earlier. She began her autobiography at eleven, and at fifteen she stopped in front of the dacha where she was born and blurted out to her mother, “There will be a memorial plaque here someday.”

“Mama was upset,” Akhmatova later recalled. “‘God, how badly I brought you up,’ she said.” In this, as in many other things, Akhmatova was a prophet: her birthplace had become a tourist attraction by the end of the twentieth century. When a high school girlfriend brought Akhmatova a bouquet of lilies of the valley, she rejected it scornfully, declaring she needed at least “hyacinths from Patagonia.”^{183}

In high school Akhmatova attracted attention for her slender, agile figure, her face with its large, bright eyes contrasted with her dark hair, brows, and lashes; her unusual profile (her girlfriends noted her nose with the “special” bump); her pride, stubbornness, and capaciousness; and, in particular, her wide knowledge of modernist poetry.

Nikolai Gumilyov, three years her senior, fell in love with Akhmatova when she was fourteen. Like her relationship with Blok, this was to be the start of the other great Russian cultural legend of the twentieth century, another leitmotif in the Akhmatova mythology. Gumilyov, who subsequently became a famous poet, was destined for a horrible end. But in 1903 the gangling, cross-eyed, lisping seventh-grader did not make much of an impression on the supercilious, sharp girl. Poems dedicated to her did not help (Gumilyov had started writing poetry at the age of five).

Gumilyov, however, was also stubborn and persistent. He studied versification with single-minded diligence, immersed himself in Western poetry (especially the French symbolists), and continued over the next many years to offer his hand and heart to Anna. He had dedicated to her an impressive cycle of love poetry, in which he described her as a mermaid, a sorceress, and a queen, and he affirmed he had attempted suicide several times because of her. She refused him several times, then half agreed, and then refused again. At last she wrote to her best friend, “Pray for me. It can’t be any worse. I want to die,” and then on April 25, 1910, she married Gumilyov. As it often happens, marriage was the beginning of the end of their relationship. Suddenly Gumilyov found Akhmatova’s company tiresome.

The newlyweds headed straight for Paris. As Akhmatova liked to put it later, 1910 was the year of Leo Tolstoy’s death, the crisis of Russian symbolism, and her meeting with the young and unknown artist Amedeo Modigliani. But that year she saw him only once. They became close in 1911, when Akhmatova was in Paris again. Many years later Joseph Brodsky described their relationship with poetic license as “Romeo and Juliet performed by members of the royal house.” This characterization, Brodsky told me, “vastly amused” the elderly Akhmatova.^{184} In 1911 Akhmatova and Modigliani wandered in the Paris rain, went to the Louvre to look at the Egyptian mummies (thin and mysterious, Akhmatova was later called the “mummy who brings everyone bad luck”), and watched strange-looking biplanes circle the Eiffel Tower, Akhmatova’s peer.

Flying was the latest thrill in Paris and in Petersburg. Blok, who never missed an aerial show, wrote a poem entitled “Aviator,” dedicated to the memory of a pilot who had died before his eyes. The pilots, who also amused themselves by innocently throwing oranges down at targets, interested everyone. They seemed dashing and sexy; a Petersburg theater ran a farce in which a lady wanting to have an affair with a pilot flies up into the clouds with him. Passionate sounds soon fill the stage and the audience watches the lady’s intimate articles of clothing float down upon them, as if they were at a striptease where the stripper was invisible.

Modigliani, according to Akhmatova, was also fascinated by aviators and thought that they must be extraordinary people. She remembered meeting the famous pilot Louis Bleriot. She was having dinner with Gumilyov in a Paris restaurant; unexpectedly Bleriot came up to them. During the meal Akhmatova had slipped off her tight new shoes. When they got home, she found a note with Bleriot’s address in one of them.

Modigliani did a series of drawings of Akhmatova, some of them nudes. One delicate portrait, in an Egyptian mode (Modigliani was then in his Egyptian phase), is often reproduced today on the jackets of Akhmatova’s books. But in her first book, published in 1912—at her own expense with a printing of only 300 copies—under the unassuming title Evening, Akhmatova did not use Modigliani’s portrait. Instead, Evening had a typically Mir iskusstva frontispiece by Evgeny Lanceray. (Akhmatova said Modigliani laughed openly at the art of Mir iskusstva.)

The critics were more than kind to Evening, and its small printing sold out immediately. Even the critical Gumilyov (according to Akhmatova “a man direct to the point of cruelty, judging poetry with extreme severity”) approved of the book. Earlier he advised his wife to go into dancing instead: “You’re so lithe.” Akhmatova herself rather coquettishly referred to her first book as “the poor poems of a shallow girl.” If she is to be believed, she was so upset that Evening was coming out that she fled to Italy and “sitting in a trolley, looked at my companions and thought. ‘How fortunate they are—they don’t have a book coming out.’”

Some readers seem to think now that Russia’s women first found their poetic voice and cultural representative in Akhmatova, and that in that sense she made her debut on an empty stage, so to speak. This is not so. Akhmatova’s creativity was the pinnacle of a long and glorious literary tradition. Akhmatova, and her younger contemporary Marina Tsvetayeva, were poets of genius (they both intensely disliked the word “poetess”), but there were quite a few successful and famous Russian women writers before them.

In fact, the first well-established Russian poetess, Anna Bunina (1774-1829), was a distant relative of Akhmatova’s maternal grandfather. Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya (1792-1862) and Countess Eudoxia Rostopchina (1811-1858) were in their time compared to comets blazing across the Russian literary firmament, writing notable verse and prose. Pushkin himself published a sensational work in 1836, From the Notes of a Maiden Cavalryman, by Nadezhda Durova—the memoirs of the author’s incredible exploits, dressed as a Cossack, in the battles against Napoleon.

As the literary and periodical market exploded in Russia, professional women’s participation in it rose significantly as well. Publishing companies and magazines desperately needed translators, copy editors, copyists, and secretaries; educated Russian women gladly accepted the jobs, horrifying the authorities. In 1870 Pyotr Shuvalov, the omnipotent chief of the gendarmes, presented Emperor Alexander II with a special report that sounded the alarm: “Our woman dreams of leading an immoral life, saying that the word morality was invented by the despotism of men…. We must admit that a woman nihilist is much more harmful than a woman of openly indecent behavior.” And the gendarme, who was known as “the head inquisitor of the empire,” demanded, “Can a woman who spends half the day in an office filled with men, where certain ties and demoralization are inevitable, be a loving mother and a good housewife?”^{185}

But the swift integration of women into the world of literature could not be stemmed by the police, or the emperor, or even male writers clearly worried by the growth of competition and losing influence in an area they had traditionally dominated. One leading liberal journalist of the period expressed the views of the majority of his fellow men when he charged, without any real proof, that “You women come to the manuscript marketplace—I am speaking of the manuscript market, not the idea marketplace, calm down—you come with the most horrible, the most treacherous weapon: you knock down prices impossibly. You are dooming other workers to starvation.”^{186}

The education level of Russian women was rising, and their economic independence was becoming stronger accordingly; this naturally led to an increase in the number of women as a significant segment of the reading public. And that trend was confirmed by various reader surveys: there were many women subscribers to public and private libraries and they were increasingly buying newspapers, journals, and books.

In Petersburg many magazines appeared that targeted a specifically female audience. Among them were Zhenskii vestnik (Woman’s Herald) and Damskii listok (Ladies’ Sheet). The weekly Zhenshchina (Woman), in content and form similar to the popular Ogonyok (with the subtitle Mother—Citizen—Wife—Housewife), had departments like Women in the Arts, Women’s Creativity, Famous Actresses, For Mothers About Children, Woman-Citizen, The Elegant Woman, Women of the World, Women in New Roles, Famous Contemporary Women, Women and Humor. The publishers may still have made sarcastic remarks about “reading ladies,” but they had to take the sizable group of potential customers into account.

One of the first and most striking examples of that audience’s economic power came in 1909, when The Keys of Happiness, a novel by the then little-known writer Anastasia Verbitskaya, sold thirty thousand copies in four months, creating the terms “women’s genre” and “women’s novel” in Russia. Verbitskaya, who had gone all the way from copy editor of a newspaper to author of the number-one best-seller, now wrote novels filled with vivid adventures of passionate and talented women of the artistic milieu.

Exalted in tone, Verbitskaya’s colorful potboilers, openly propagandizing leftist and feminist views, elicited extremely hostile reviews from the same critics who had patronizingly patted her on the back before the phenomenal success of The Keys of Happiness. In the newspaper Rech (Speech), the ubiquitous Chukovsky, admitting that “our young people are crowding after Mrs. Verbitskaya,” still proclaimed that this was literature “for urban savages.”^{187}

Such scorn did not diminish Verbitskaya’s popularity—on the contrary. Her novels continued to sell in huge quantities and spawned numerous imitations. Verbitskaya, a socialist by conviction and a civic activist by temperament, became chairwoman of the Society for the Betterment of Women’s Condition and energetically helped other women writers. In the 1910s their position grew considerably stronger and women’s names ceased to be a rarity among best-selling authors. Eudoxia Nagrodskaya’s erotic novel, Wrath of Dionysus, with its typically “women’s genre” artist heroine and advocacy of free love, went through ten printings in just a few years. Lydia Charskaya and Klavdia Lukashevich (the latter became the newborn Dmitri Shostakovich’s godmother in September 1906 and inculcated a love of reading in little Dmitri) were among the most popular names in contemporary fiction. In the 1940s, when Boris Pasternak was working on his novel, Doctor Zhivago, he said that he was “writing almost like Charskaya,” because he wanted to be accessible and dreamed that his prose would be gulped down, “even by a seamstress, even by a dishwasher.”^{188}

Russian women poets had reached a mass audience even earlier. After the Boer War of 1899-1902, organ grinders in every Petersburg courtyard played the touching song “Transvaal, Transvaal, my dear country, you are in flames!” The words of this moving, sentimental ballad, which became a folk song, were written by Glafira Galina, a thirty-year-old poet. Even now I can’t listen to it without the threat of tears. Another of her poems, “The forest is being cut down—the young, tender-green forest,” an allegorical description of the tsarist repressions of students, elicited “delight and tears,” Mikhail Kuzmin said, when it was read in public and prompted the authorities to exile Galina from Petersburg. So when her collection of poems, Predawn Songs, came out in 1906, it sold five thousand copies, a healthy sale for poetry.

Naturally, the young Akhmatova was interested in and influenced by the comparatively new female “decadent” tradition. At its beginning stands the extraordinary figure of Marie Bashkirtseff. The Russian but thoroughly Francophile Bashkirtseff, who died in Paris of tuberculosis a few days before her twenty-fourth birthday in 1884, was a successful artist who exhibited in the Salon and corresponded with Guy de Maupassant. She dreamed of great love and universal recognition. Feeling that she would not have long to live, Bashkirtseff devoured knowledge with incredible intensity, quickly turning from a precocious wunderkind into an independent-minded and assertive young woman. Her real fame came posthumously from the diary that she kept in French from the age of thirteen, published by the poet André Theuriet in 1887, three years after her death.

The emotionally and stylistically exalted diary, described by Bashkirtseff as “the life of a woman, recorded day after day, without any pretense, as if no one in the world would ever read it and at the same time with a passionate desire that it be read,” touched on many popular fin-de-siècle themes. Bashkirtseff’s self-image was wildly romanticized; when her diary was published in Russia, neither Leo Tolstoy nor Chekhov liked it. But it was those very qualities that endeared her to the first Russian modernists. Valery Bryusov noted in his diary that Bashkirtseff “is me, with all my thoughts, convictions, and dreams.” And Velimir Khlebnikov, one of the leading Russian futurists, considered her outpourings “the exact diary of my spirit.”

Independent and ambitious young women all over Russia became engrossed in Bashkirtseff’s diary. Its admirers included the young Marina Tsvetayeva, who dedicated her first book, Evening Album, published in 1910, to “the brilliant memory of Maria Bashkirtseff.” This prompted the snob Gumilyov to rebuke Tsvetayeva in his review. This sarcastic attitude toward Bashkirtseff on the part of Akhmatova’s husband gives a clue to a telling detail. When Akhmatova’s first book, Evening, is reprinted now, it has the following epigraph from Theuriet:

I believe Akhmatova used those lines to establish a connection with the work or at least the image of Bashkirtseff, whose admirer and champion Theuriet was. And it is significant that the “nod” in Bashkirtseff’s direction appeared for the first time in Akhmatova’s collection published in 1940, when the authorities ended a fifteen-year ban on her poetry. This was her first volume of selected works, in a sense. Gumilyov had been dead for almost twenty years by then. One can speculate that Akhmatova restored the epigraph, originally intended for the book in 1912, which she had removed at the time either because of Gumilyov’s opposition or from fear of being mocked by him and his friends for her “bad taste.” The lesson given to Tsvetayeva was learned well by the proud and ambitious Akhmatova.

Another seminal proto-decadent figure in poetry was the famed beauty Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869-1905), who also died young of tuberculosis. Lokhvitskaya was cheered and celebrated at her public readings and at age twenty-seven received the most coveted Russian literary award of the day, the Pushkin Prize, for her first collection. She was called the “Russian Sappho,” as was Akhmatova later, because she wrote primarily of love—passionate, ecstatic, exotic. At first she was accused of “immodesty,” “unchasteness,” even “immorality,” though Tolstoy himself defended her: “It’s the young drunken wine spouting. It will quiet down and cool, and pure waters will flow.”^{189}

The first Russian Nobel laureate in literature, Ivan Bunin, recalled how Lokhvitskaya’s public image hardly corresponded with her real life. Neither her passionate admirers nor her severe critics ever suspected that Lokhvitskaya was “the mother of several children, a homebody, and indolent in an Eastern way: she even receives guests lying in a robe on her sofa.”^{190} Lokhvitskaya was close to the “older” symbolists in the melodiousness of her verse, its message of emotional and erotic emancipation, and her growing interest in medieval matters, including satanic cults. Women in Lokhvitskaya’s poetry resembled the ideal of the pre-Raphaelites, but in one of her popular poems of 1895 there appears a stanza strikingly similar to the themes and images of the vintage Akhmatova:

The most famous and influential of the modernist poetesses was Zinaida Hippius, the “decadent Madonna.” All Petersburg was talking about the tall beauty with green eyes who dressed extravagantly and presented herself in an outlandish way. Bunin’s description may help us understand why Hippius’s mere appearance caused a sensation: “a heavenly vision walked in slowly, an angel of astonishing thinness in snow-white garments and golden loose hair, along whose bare arms something akin to sleeves or wings fell to the very floor.”^{191}

Along with her husband, Merezhkovsky, Hippius imperiously “ran” Petersburg’s symbolist movement for many years by receiving a steady flow of visitors after midnight in her apartment, recumbent on a chaise longue, smoking long, scented cigarettes and unceremoniously peering at her guests through her famous lorgnette. Her opinions and declarations were epigrammatic and beyond appeal. The denizens of literary Petersburg respected, hated, and, most important, feared Hippius.

For beginning modernists a visit to the Merezhkovsky salon was mandatory, almost a ritual. But Akhmatova avoided that ritual. The reason was the reception the Merezhkovskys had given to young Gumilyov in 1906. Hippius described his visit devastatingly in a letter to Bryusov:

Twenty years old. Deathly pallor. His sententious ideas are as old as the hat of a widow visiting the cemetery. He sniffs the ether (about time!) and says that he alone can change the world. “There were attempts before me … Buddha, Christ…. But unsuccessful.”^{192}

After a reception like that, it’s no surprise that when Akhmatova wanted to show her poems to Hippius in 1910, she was dissuaded: “Don’t go, she’s very nasty to young poets.” Later Hippius made a point of calling Akhmatova and inviting her to her salon, but even then there was no meeting of the minds. And in the last years of her life, Akhmatova was still hostile toward Hippius, saying that she was “a clever, educated woman, but nasty and mean.” Merezhkovsky also displeased Akhmatova. “Typical boulevard writer. How can you read him?”^{193}

There was also the scandalous affair of the poetess Cherubina de Gabriac in 1909, which made a big impression on Akhmatova. The sensational hoax caused one of the last famous duels in the history of Russian culture. What mattered most for Akhmatova was the fact that one of the duelists was Gumilyov.

The stage on which this spectacle, so symbolic of the era, was played out was the editorial office of the new modernist journal Apollo. The magazine continued the work and line of Mir iskusstva and was organized by Gumilyov and the influential art critic Sergei Makovsky. Financing came from Mikhail Ushkov, the son of the immeasurably wealthy tea magnate.

In Petersburg Makovsky was considered an arbiter of taste. No one else in the capital had such long, starched collars or such glossy patent leather shoes. Gossip had it that the flawless part in his hair had been permanently etched by a special lotion from Paris. His waxed mustache stood out challengingly. Makovsky, a mediocre poet, considered himself the highest authority in literature as well and edited Blok’s poems because they were “grammatically incorrect.”

In 1965, Akhmatova characterized Makovsky flatly and quite unjustly as a “world-class philistine and a total idiot.”^{194} It turns out that he asked her an embarrassing question when she and Gumilyov returned from their Parisian honeymoon: “Are you satisfied with your sex life now?” After that, Akhmatova told me, she avoided being left alone with Makovsky.

In early September 1909 an elegant envelope sealed with black wax and imprinted with a coat of arms and the motto Vae victis arrived at the Apollo office on the embankment of the Moika River. Opening it, Makovsky found Russian poems and an accompanying letter written in refined French on paper with a black border signed by Cherubina de Gabriac, apparently a wealthy noblewoman. The return address was a post office box.

Makovsky was impressed by the poetry but even more so by the letter, and immediately replied, also in French, with a request that more work be sent. The next day the mysterious Cherubina called Makovsky. That was the start of their affair by phone, which the entire staff of Apollo followed avidly. Makovsky was certain that his new love was at least a countess and worried, “If I had forty thousand a year, I’d court her.” Cherubina de Gabriac, keeping her distance, continued to intrigue Makovsky, calling him almost every day. “What an astonishing woman! I always knew how to trifle with a woman’s heart, but the sword is knocked from my hands now,” Makovsky mused.

A selection of twelve poems by Cherubina appeared in Apollo. Literary Petersburg was abuzz; a young poet wrote to a friend, “Their characteristic trait is frenzied Catholicism; the mix of sin and repentance (the hymn to Ignatius Loyola, prayers to the Virgin, etc.). At any rate, no one has ever written like this in Russian before.”^{195} Only a few people knew that Cherubina de Gabriac did not exist, that her fiery poems filled with “mystical eros,” as Vyacheslav Ivanov put it, were a hoax.

Every literary hoax has elements of parody. In order to succeed, the hoax must reflect existing trends of the literary scene. Cherubina was invented by the young, erudite poet Maximilian Voloshin and his lover, Elizaveta Dmitrieva. The latter was a twenty-two-year-old teacher of history at a women’s high school in Petersburg, earning eleven and a half rubles monthly, who wrote interesting verse. But the “modest, inelegant and lame” (as Voloshin described her) Dmitrieva had no hope of making the necessary impression on the aesthete Makovsky.

The hoax was intended to mock Petersburg’s symbolist establishment, which dreamed of a new poetic female star in the image described by Marina Tsvetayeva: “Not Russian, obviously. Beautiful, obviously. Catholic, obviously. Rich, oh, incalculably rich, obviously (female Byron, without the limp), externally happy, obviously, so that she could be unhappy in her own pure and selfless way.” Voloshin and Dmitrieva’s Cherubina was “constructed” to those specifications, and that is why their hoax succeeded so brilliantly.

This attack on the prejudices of the symbolists was a risky one. After the game got too complex, and the besotted Makovsky was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, someone revealed Cherubina’s true identity to him. Dmitrieva came to the editor of Apollo to apologize. Many years later Makovsky described the visit:

The door opened slowly, too slowly it seemed to me, and a woman entered, with a strong limp, rather short and plump, with dark hair and a large head and a truly horrible mouth, from which fanglike teeth protruded. She was simply ugly. Or did it seem that way to me in comparison with the image of beauty that I had envisaged all those months?^{196}

A woman poet was not allowed to be ugly, poor, and truly miserable, as opposed to miserable in verse, and so Dmitrieva’s poetic career was soon over. Apollo did run another large selection of her poetry, which it served up with great elan, with artwork by Yevgeny Lanceray. But it was the beginning of the end. The star of Cherubina de Gabriac vanished from the poetic horizon, while Voloshin, still the center of attention, continued to manipulate Cherubina’s name, maintaining as late as 1917 that “to a certain extent she set the tone for modern women’s poetry.” Tellingly, in 1913 two other hoax images of poetesses appeared, as if to confirm the public’s longing for a female voice in poetry: “Nellie,” whose coy poems were written by Valery Bryusov, and the completely parodic “Angelica Safyanova.”

The drama of Cherubina-Dmitrieva was not limited to literature. The sensational incident that followed upon it, never to be forgotten by either Akhmatova or Tsvetayeva, crossed the line between literary games and utter cruelty. Before her meeting with Voloshin, Dmitrieva had had an affair with Gumilyov. Such a relationship was entirely in keeping with the erotically and melodramatically charged atmosphere of the period. Dmitrieva later insisted that Gumilyov had begged her to marry him: “He twisted my fingers and then wept and kissed the hem of my dress.”

But Dmitrieva, in turn, became infatuated with Voloshin, so Gumilyov’s love, according to Dmitrieva, turned to hate. “He stopped me at the Apollo offices and said, ‘I’m asking you for the last time—will you marry me?’ I said, ‘No!’ He grew pale. ‘Then you’ll hear from me.’”^{197} Soon both Voloshin and Dmitrieva learned that Gumilyov was denouncing her publicly, without mincing words.

On November 19,1909, the poets of Apollo met in the studio of the artist Golovin (the creator of Chaliapin’s portrait in his role as Holofernes), under the roof of the Maryinsky Theater. Present were Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Innokenti Annensky, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Alexei Tolstoy. So were Makovsky, Gumilyov, and Voloshin. Golovin was supposed to paint a group portrait. They could hear Chaliapin downstairs on stage, singing an aria from Faust. When he finished, the stocky, broad-shouldered Voloshin, who weighed at least two hundred pounds, jumped up and slapped tall, pale Gumilyov in the face. After a stunned silence, the only comment came from Annensky, who never lost his Olympian calm: “Dostoyevsky is right—a slap really does have a wet sound.”

Right there in the studio, Gumilyov challenged Voloshin to a duel, considering himself particularly knowledgeable about the custom. Two days were spent finding antique pistols. Voloshin insisted that if they weren’t the exact ones Pushkin used in his legendary duel, they were certainly of that period; and they naturally had their duel in the same place as Pushkin’s. The avalanche of jokes and mockery over the duel, in part because it had been so earnestly planned in the grand tradition, spread all over Petersburg. Every local reporter had a good laugh at the expense of Voloshin and Gumilyov.

The terms were a distance of twenty paces, one shot apiece. Luckily, both Voloshin and Gumilyov missed. The Petersburg newspapers got the story of the outcome and pounced mercilessly on the duelists. Makovsky was probably right in his supposition that the “reporters of the yellow press used this as a pretext to get their revenge on Apollo for its bold literary claims.”

The final blow came from their own symbolist camp, when Zinaida Hippius wrote a story that ridiculed a duel “of two third-rate poets.” In those days of persistent hounding by both the press and gossip-mongers, Voloshin saw Petersburg as “the main test tube of Russian psychopathy.” However, both he and Gumilyov survived the scandal intact. Not so Dmitrieva. She understood the rules of the game when she told Makovsky, “Once I bury Cherubina, I bury myself, never to be resurrected.”^{198} And, indeed, Dmitrieva disappeared from the literary scene for a long time.

Twenty-year-old Akhmatova intently watched how the story unfolded and she never forgot those autumnal days of 1909. First of all, she was deeply wounded by the affair between her husband and Dmitrieva. But Akhmatova’s professional ambitions must have been injured even more. Voloshin wrote to a friend in November 1909, “Cherubina de Gabriac’s success is enormous. She is imitated, people who have nothing to do with literature learn her by heart, and the Petersburg poets hate and envy her.”

In the final analysis, both the hoax and duel were in large part about literary competition. Toward the end of her life, Akhmatova spoke of Dmitrieva with undisguised scorn: “She thought that a duel of two poets over her would make her a fashionable Petersburg lady and would guarantee her place in the capital’s literary circles.” But, according to Akhmatova, “Something in Dmitrieva’s calculations went wrong.”

In the late 1950s Akhmatova summed up the whole story in comments so frank that few readers would have imagined Akhmatova had written them had they not been in her own hand: “Obviously, at the time (1909-1910) there was a kind of secret vacancy for a woman’s place in Russian poetry. Cherubina tried to fill it. Either the duel or something in her poetry kept her from taking that place. Fate wanted it to be mine.”^{199}

To this sober evaluation of her own position in Russian poetry at the end of the century’s first decade, Akhmatova adds a revealing comment: “Amazingly, this was half-understood by Marina Tsvetayeva.” Any discussion of Russian poetry of the twentieth century inevitably brings up the paired names of Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva They are juxtaposed and compared, which is understandable, since it is difficult to imagine two poets more different in temperament and technique.

Tsvetayeva, three years younger than Akhmatova, lived a tragic life and hanged herself in 1941 at age forty-nine in a small provincial town. Her complex relations with Akhmatova deserve a study of their own. I will touch here on only one aspect—their struggle for primacy m Russian women’s poetry in the 1910s. The eighteen-year-old Tsvetayeva had published her first work, Evening Album, in the fall of 1910, that is, a year after the Cherubina de Gabriac affair and a year and a half before Akhmatova’s first book came out. Tsvetayeva was published in Moscow, Akhmatova in Petersburg, and as is always the case in Russia, the difference was not simply geographical.

Akhmatova’s image is inexorably tied to Petersburg for her readers and contemporaries, as Tsvetayeva’s is with Moscow. Tsvetayeva wrote, “With my entire being I sense the tension—inevitable—with my every line—we are being compared (and in some situations—pitted)—not only Akhmatova and I, but Petersburg poetry and Moscow poetry, Petersburg and Moscow.”

Tsvetayeva could be generous and many times, especially in her poems, she spoke of her reverence for Akhmatova and could even grant literally Petersburg primacy over Moscow, as she did in her colorful letter to Mikhail Kuzmin:

It was so cold—and there are so many monuments in Petersburg—and the sleigh flew so fast—everything blurred—and all that was left of Petersburg was the poetry of Pushkin and Akhmatova. Ah, no—there were also the fireplaces. Everywhere I was taken, there were huge marble fireplaces—entire oaken groves were burned!—and polar bears on the floor (polar bears by the fire!—monstrous!), and all the young men parted their hair—and they all had volumes of Pushkin in their hands…. Oh, how they love poetry there! In all my life I never recited as many poems as I did there in two weeks. And they don’t sleep there at all. A call at three A.M. Can we come over? Of course, of course, we’re only starting. And it goes on like that until morning.^{200}

But Tsvetayeva’s sympathies for Petersburg did not ease the fierceness of the struggle for literary supremacy either in 1910 or later, especially because Tsvetayeva found many influential allies in this battle. In her memoirs, she recalled Voloshin, who was already involved in creating Cherubina de Gabriac, asking Tsvetayeva to invent a few other mythical poets as well, like “seventeen-year-old Mr. Petukhov” or “the Kryukov twins, poetic geniuses, brother and sister.” Voloshin enchanted Tsvetayeva with a picture of her total victory over her enemies’ camp: “Besides you, no one will be left in Russian poetry. With your Petukhovs and twins you, Marina, will drive them all out, Akhmatova, and Gumilyov, and Kuzmin.”

Bryusov, the master of Moscow symbolism, tellingly supported Tsvetayeva’s Evening Album in an important review. Speaking of the “terrifying intimacy” of Tsvetayeva’s poems, he noted, “When you read her books, you occasionally feel uncomfortable, as if you had peeked immodestly through a half-shut window into someone’s apartment and observed a scene strangers should not see.”^{201} Most interestingly, Tsvetayeva’s debut was hailed by Gumilyov—another confirmation of Gumilyov’s high moral scruples as a critic. Gumilyov too stressed the extraordinary frankness of the Evening Album. “Much is new in this book—the bold (sometimes excessive) intimacy; the themes, for instance, children’s crushes; the direct, almost crazed affection for the trifles of life.”^{202}

Voloshin seemed to be summing up a critical consensus when, while listing several names in late 1910 that he felt were notable in contemporary women’s poetry (Tsvetayeva was on that list, but not Akhmatova), he stated, “In some respects this women’s lyric poetry is more interesting than the men’s. It is less burdened with ideas and is deeper and more frank.”

So Akhmatova was probably correct when late in life, recalling this era, she stated, “I filled the vacancy for a woman poet, which was open.” There was such a vacancy. But it’s unlikely that anyone could simply fill it. It had to be taken. It had to be won.

Roman Timenchik observed that there are a variety of “masks” in Akhmatova’s early poetry.^{203} She seemed to be trying on one mask after another, figuring out which would be the most effective and attractive. Leafing through Evening, one can find Marie Bashkirtseff’s decadent pose and Lokhvitskaya’s duality, shifting back and forth between chastity and sin. Surely Akhmatova, who miraculously survived the tuberculosis that killed two of her sisters, must have felt a bond with both Bashkirtseff and Lokhvitskaya, who had succumbed to that disease in their youth. Undoubtedly, Akhmatova took into account the intellectual striving and technical virtuosity of Zinaida Hippius. Evening contains stylizations of female “naïveté,” comparable to Tsvetayeva’s early attempts. The frenzied religiosity of some of Akhmatova’s works resembles the poetry of Cherubina de Gabriac Many readers of the early Akhmatova pictured her, like Cherubina as a mysterious foreigner. The list of borrowings, echoes, and outright imitations can be lengthened considerably, including the sometimes astonishing similarity of the early Akhmatova’s turns of phrase with the style of popular “women’s fiction.”

Yes, Akhmatova borrowed shamelessly everywhere and this must be stressed to correct the mistaken but firmly rooted notion that she appeared suddenly in Russian literature, like Athena from the head of Zeus. This view of Akhmatova, which ignores her ties with the rich tradition of women’s literature in Russia, was based and survives on the scorn for women’s writing in the Russian literary establishment.

“Women’s fiction” was held in particular contempt and still is. Verbitskaya attracted a mass audience as long as worn copies of her books were still in circulation, while she was attacked relentlessly by conservatives and revolutionaries alike. The Soviet authorities stopped publishing Verbitskaya after the revolution, just as they stopped publishing Bashkirtseff, Lokhvitskaya and Hippius. During the Soviet years, the “women’s novel” disappeared completely. Until recently, even the mere mention of it could be found only in academic books, where it was routinely disparaged—in passing, without critical analysis.

Still, it is obvious that if Akhmatova’s first book had offered readers only a parade of familiar “masks,” it would not have garnered the attention it did. Boris Eikhenbaum documented the reaction of the poetry connoisseurs of the time: “We were surprised, amazed, delighted, we argued, and finally, felt pride.”^{204}

As even the first critics had immediately noted, “Akhmatova can speak in a way that makes long-familiar words sound new and sharp.” They wondered about the “teasing disharmony” of her poems. They also agreed right away that her “broken rhythms express a morbid crisis of the soul” of a Petersburg lady.

Bryusov was probably one of the first to point out an important feature of Evening: “In a number of poems you can see an entire novel.” Chukovsky observed: “Take a story of Maupassant, compress it extremely, and you will get an Akhmatova poem.” But Osip Mandelstam later pointed out another and what he considered more important tradition for her:

Akhmatova brought into Russian lyric poetry the enormous complexity and psychological wealth of the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Akhmatova would not exist if it were not for Tolstoy and his Anna Karenina, Turgenev with A Nest of Gentlefolk, all of Dostoyevsky and some Leskov. Akhmatova’s genesis lies in Russian prose, not poetry.^{205}

Akhmatova’s first readers were intrigued by the narrative line of her poems, which was so different from the poetic generalizations of the symbolists, and, even more so by the fact that this narrative was the point of view of a contemporary woman living in Petersburg. It was like reading Anna Karenina retold by its heroine. Her public was also amazed by the appearance in Akhmatova’s poems of ordinary “nonpoetic” words. Her poetry is full of seemingly inconsequential items like dark veils, fluffy muffs, and gloves. In the poetry of the decadents these objects could appear as symbols, but for Akhmatova they were things in their own right. Yet she uses them to astonishing effect. The tragedy of unrequited love is expressed with a few simple props:

This is reminiscent of Chekhov, who expressed human drama in plain and sometimes incongruous words and acts. The dialogue of Chekhov’s characters usually reveals only the tip of the iceberg. Akhmatova also uses this method. Her words appear like rocky islands in an ocean of silence.

This is why Akhmatova’s first admirers all had a sense of the unusual weight and significance of each of those words. It seemed to them the narrator was losing her breath. Akhmatova spoke of love sparingly, as if with difficulty, and without pathos or hysteria Thus sophisticated Petersburgers could read an Akhmatova love poem aloud without embarrassment. It was their own voice, their worldview, presented with unprecedented clarity, precision, and psychological insight.

Of one such poem, Vladimir Mayakovsky observed, “This poem expresses refined and fragile feelings, but it is not fragile itself. Akhmatova’s poems are monolithic and will resist the pressure of any voice without cracking.” Another prescient contemporary was Tsvetayeva: “Akhmatova writes about herself-about eternity. Akhmatova, without writing a single abstractly generalized line, gives our descendants the most profound picture of our age—by describing a feather in a hat.”

When I first heard Akhmatova read her poetry in the 1960s her presence and performance had an astonishing effect on me but I was perceiving Akhmatova as a living classic. It turns out Akhmatova had enchanted her audiences when she was young, too. Even then she was considered an “exemplary reciter of poetry.” She read with restraint without pathos, but “every intonation was planned, tested, and calculated.”^{206} They said she prepared for every appearance, practicing before a large mirror. She knew one had to fight for the audience’s attention, and she was prepared to put in the necessary time and effort. Akhmatova was a total professional from an early age That is a particularly Petersburgian trait.

Akhmatova started her readings in the intimate circles of symbolist Petersburg particularly at “the Tower,” one of the most important centers of intellectual life in the city—the salon of the leading symbolist poet, Vyacheslav Ivanov. It was called the Tower because Ivanov’s large apartment was situated in a building with a semicircular, towerlike section. The regulars at the Tower met on Wednesdays around midnight and parted at dawn. Their gentle, golden-curled host, moving rhythmically as if dancing, greeted the guests. His legendary erudition as well as the pince-nez and black gloves, which he seldom removed because of eczema, made Ivanov resemble one of Hoffmann’s fantastic characters.

An evening at the Tower usually began with one of the guests reading a paper on a topic such as “Religion and Mysticism,” “Individualism and the New Art,” or “Solitude.” This was followed by an involved discussion. Candles were lit in the chandeliers, red wine flowed, and by morning poetry was read.

The Tower was imbued with an intensely intellectual atmosphere. As a woman poet who participated in the meetings recalled,

We quoted the Greeks by heart, took delight in the French Symbolists, considered Scandinavian literature our own, knew philosophy and theology, poetry and history of the whole world. In that sense we were citizens of the universe, bearers of the great cultural museum of humanity. It was Rome at the time of the fall. We did not live, but rather contemplated the most refined that there was in life. We were not afraid of any words. We were cynical and unchaste in spirit, wan and inert in life. In a certain sense we were, of course, the revolution before the revolution—so profoundly, ruthlessly, and fatally did we destroy the old tradition and build bold bridges into the future But our depth and daring were intertwined with a lingering sense of decay, the spirit of dying, ghostliness, ephemerality. We were the last act of a tragedy.^{207}

The atmosphere at the Tower was heady, thanks in great part to the host’s charms. Akhmatova, who later said, “This was the only real salon I ever saw,” admitted that Ivanov “knew how to manipulate people.” When they were alone, Ivanov expressed delight in Akhmatova’s poetry, comparing her poems with the works of Sappho. Then he forced her to read for his guests, only to subject the same poems to harsh criticism unexpectedly. Akhmatova’s pride was hurt. In addition, Ivanov and company tried to break up her relationship with Gumilyov, suggesting, “He does not understand your poetry.”

Ivanov was hostile to Gumilyov, and he once publicly attacked his poetry. This humiliating incident was just one in a series of conflicts that led to the open break by Gumilyov and Akhmatova with both the symbolist leaders and the movement itself. Gumilyov, according to Akhmatova, “decided that he had to organize young pots and choose his own course.” He and his friend, the poet Sergei Gorodetsky, published a manifesto in the January 1913 issue of Makovsky’s Apollo, proclaiming that a new literary school, acmeism (from the Greek acme, the highest degree), had come to replace obsolescent symbolism. As Akhmatova later explained, “Without a doubt, symbolism was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. We were right in our rebellion against symbolism, because we felt like people of the twentieth century.”^{208}

Akhmatova always insisted that in acmeism, practice preceded theory and that in particular, Gumilyov’s manifesto came out of his observations of her poetry and the poetry of their friend Osip Mandelstam. Akhmatova met Mandelstam, a scrawny, thin-skinned redhead with jerky movements, at Ivanov’s Tower, where Osip was very articulate, as opposed to the taciturn Akhmatova. That evening there was a heated discussion of the recent premiere of Prométhée, le poème du feu—a grandiose composition by Alexander Scriabin, a favorite of the capital’s modernists whom Mandelstam adored.

Mandelstam may have formulated best the acmeists’ objections to “professional symbolism”—“Not a single clear word, only hints and unfinished thoughts.” He joked that the Russian symbolists “had sealed off all words, all images, intending them exclusively for liturgical use. It became quite inconvenient—you couldn’t get around them, or get up, or sit down…. A man wasn’t master of his own house anymore.”

Acmeism attempted to stop the inflation of words inherent in “professional symbolism.” No wonder Mandelstam stressed that Akhmatova’s poems, contrary to those of the symbolists, seemed to be forced out between gritted teeth and insisted paradoxically that it was “the tastes and not the ideas of the acmeists that killed symbolism” which was “bloated, vanquished by the dropsy of big themes.” As Akhmatova said—somewhat sarcastically—late in life, “I am an acmeist and therefore am responsible for every word. It was the symbolists who spoke all kinds of unintelligible words and assured the public that there was a great mystery behind them. But there was nothing, but nothing, behind them.”

Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Gumilyov considered themselves acmeists to the end, never renouncing, even under intense pressure in the Soviet times, the literary school they created. This intransigence of the leading acmeists may be better understood in light of Mandelstam’s proud statement, “Acmeism is not only a literary but a social phenomenon in Russian history. With it a moral strength was reborn in Russian poetry.”

The nucleus of the acmeist group consisted of just a half dozen young poets, but their bright talent and promise were so obvious that the symbolists met them with weapons drawn. Akhmatova once complained to me that the acmeists had no money, no millionaire patrons, and the symbolists who had both, took all the important position and tried to block the acmeists from all the magazines. “Everyone criticized acmeists—the right and the left.”

Akhmatova should have been particularly upset by the caution and skepticism toward the acmeist circle of Alexander Blok, a poetic idol of her youth. She had met Blok in the early 1910s and saw him at Ivanov’s Tower. Blok recognized her gift, but his attitude toward Akhmatova’s poetry was ambivalent, especially in the beginning.

According to one memoirist, when Blok was asked to speak his mind after Akhmatova read at the Tower, he said “She writes as if for a man, but poetry must be written for God.”^{209} Wrote a contemporary, “The ‘Akhmatova-like’ line began to dominate women’s poetry in Russia.”^{210} This, apparently, annoyed Blok. When he once heard someone being accused of imitating Akhmatova, Blok leaned over to his companion and said in a half-whisper, “Imitate her? Her cup is empty; there is nothing to borrow.”^{211} The symbolist leader, Valery Bryusov, began referring sarcastically to Akhmatova as the “musical instrument with only one string.”

By that time Blok, of course, had turned into a living legend whose every step was avidly watched, every word discussed, and every poem sifted for clues to his private life. For the quintessential symbolist poet, this was a natural situation, since Russian symbolism brought the traditional romantic identification of artist and person to its outer limits.

As the poet Vladislav Khodasevich observed, “Life events penetrated writing. And the reverse occurred, too—what was written by anyone became a real life event for all.”^{212} In Blok’s case this equation reached its extreme, as confirmed by Yuri Tynyanov: “When they speak of Blok’s poetry, they almost always unconsciously imagine a human face behind it—and everyone falls in love with the face and not with the art.”^{213}

In this tight interweaving of life and literature, the excitement of strong emotions, especially love, played the role of drugs that increased creativity. In turn, the “real” events behind the writing gave it an additional interest and spice. “Therefore,” Khodasevich noted, “everyone was always in love—if not in fact, then they deluded themselves into thinking that they were. The smallest spark of something resembling love was blown up as much as possible.”^{214}

Even his family called Blok the “northern Don Juan.” His affairs often “migrated” into his poems, and so awed Petersburgers followed Blok’s published love poems as though they were an intimate diary made public, forever trying to connect a particular poem to its supposed inspiration. This at times created embarrassing situations for all involved. For instance, the actress Natalya Volokhova, whom Blok courted relentlessly, was offended by some of the poems in the cycle Snow Mask, which was dedicated to her. “Particular phrasings,” quite unambivalently stating that their affair had been consummated did not, according to Volokhova, “correspond to the reality.” The embarrassed Blok had to explain that “poetry licenses a certain exaggeration.”

The rules of this rather cruel literary game were dictated by men. Women could be angry or, on the contrary, feel flattered and immortalized, but on the whole they remained the subjects of male writers literary manipulations.

Akhmatova became a revolutionary in this particular area too. Other female poets had published love poetry, of course, but Akhmatova was the first “to construct” a literary love affair; that is, for the first time, by force of her public readings and publications in magazines, a woman created a public perception of an affair in which, for a change, attention was focused on a man she selected for the purpose.

This literary “affair” of Akhmatova’s caught on almost immediately with her readers because the subject of the literary charade was none other than Blok, a nationally famous person. Akhmatova had turned the tables on Blok, using his own devices.

Her first poem that was centered on Blok, the ballad “Gray-Eyed King,” appeared in 1911 in Apollo. It became phenomenally popular and was even set to music and sung in cabarets by the fashionable chansonnier of the period, Alexander Vertinsky. (The public knew that Blok had gray-blue eyes from the popular portrait done in 1907 by Konstantin Somov, a leading member of Mir iskusstva.) In subsequent years the number of Akhmatova’s love poems in that vein increased. They starred “my famous contemporary,” bearing “a short, resounding name,” a restrained, gray-eyed poet, The readers in the capital had no doubt that the poems were addressed to Blok. This implicit understanding gave these poems a sensational edge and, to their readers, the pleasure of insider’s knowledge.

Blok reacted to this bold attempt to change the rules of the game with cautious interest. He must have decided not to meet Akhmatova halfway in real life. His mother, who shared the poet’s most intimate secrets, commented forthrightly on his decision in a letter to a friend. “I keep waiting for my son to meet and fall in love with a woman who is anxious and profound, and therefore also tender…. And there is such a young poetess, Anna Akhmatova, who is reaching out to him and would be prepared to love him. But he is turning away from her, even though she is beautiful and talented. But she is sad. And he doesn’t like that.” Quoting the opening lines of Akhmatova’s ballad,

Blok’s mother concludes compassionately, “You can judge for yourself what that miserable young maiden must feel.”^{215}

But on a purely literary plane, Blok apparently decided to participate in Akhmatova’s charade, since he wrote a madrigal and dedicated it to her. And when Akhmatova in turn replied to the madrigal with a new poem, Blok suggested—perhaps hoping to outmaneuver her—that they have both works printed in a small theatrical magazine published for the Petersburg elite by his friend the director Meyerhold. Even though the magazine’s circulation was only three hundred, the impact of the publication was enormous, assuring readers in the know that there definitely was an affair between Blok and Akhmatova.

In Akhmatova’s second book, The Rosary, published in March 1914 the Blok theme dominated. This collection established Akhmatova’s reputation for readers of that era and made her a truly popular poet. In the following years The Rosary appeared in at least nine other editions.

A contemporary chronicled Akhmatova’s ascension: At literary evenings the young people went crazy when Akhmatova appeared on the stage. She did it skillfully, aware of her feminine charm. Another witness of Akhmatova’s frequent literary appearances in Petersburg recalled, “Her success was extraordinary. Students and young women surrounded their beloved poetess It was hard to reach her in the intermissions—the young people crowded around her in an impenetrable wall.”^{216}

Once Akhmatova was invited to appear at the first Russian university for women, the so-called St. Petersburg Higher Bestuzhev Courses. The leading Russian feminists were in attendance. In the green room Akhmatova saw Blok and learned that she was supposed to appear after him. Frightened by the prospect of appearing on stage after the most famous poet in Russia, she asked him to switch places with her. She was rebuffed with a polite but firm, “We’re not tenors.” Nevertheless, Akhmatova was a great success, prompting an esteemed feminist to comment, “Now she got equal rights for herself at least.”

By this time postcard pictures of Akhmatova, like the ones of Blok were available throughout Russia. And her popularity with artists as a model had even surpassed Blok’s.

It’s interesting to recall that exactly in those years a woman named Vera Kholodnaya became the most famous Russian movie star. Her sad beauty, cool demeanor, and expressive eyes made Kholodnaya “the queen of the Russian screen.” I don’t believe anyone has yet pointed out the resemblance of Kholodnaya’s heroines in character and image with the “Akhmatova type.”

Kholodnaya’s films, like Akhmatova’s poems, usually represented unrequited, duped, or humiliated love. Akhmatova spoke with irony of the fact that she had become the favorite author of “lovesick high school girls.” These girls also wept at Kholodnaya’s silent films. It is telling that equally talented actresses of the period with traditionally Russian looks, voluptuous and vivacious, were not as popular as Kholodnaya. The “decadent” type clearly attracted mass audiences.

Artists apparently sensed this too, and so portraits of Akhmatova appeared one after the other around town in fashionable exhibits. Some were academic, even saccharine (Akhmatova justly called one such attempt a “candy box”); others nodded in the direction of decadence. A twenty-six-year-old Jewish artist, Nathan Altman, stirred up the greatest sensation with a portrait of Akhmatova shown in the spring of 1915 at a regular Mir iskusstva exhibit.

Born in the Ukraine, Altman had already traveled to Paris, where he befriended other Russian Jewish artists—Marc Chagall from Vitebsk, Osip Zadkine from Smolensk, and Chaim Soutine from Minsk. There in 1911 Altman accidentally met Akhmatova in the street. He wanted to come to the Russian capital, but it wasn’t possible because Jews were banned from living in Petersburg.

The only exceptions made were for wealthy merchants, people with higher education, certified craftsmen, and those who had served in the military. Altman had to go to the small town of Berdichev in the Ukraine, the birthplace of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz,^{217} to get a diploma for a “sign painter,” which, in fact, certified him as a highly qualified house painter. Only with that certificate could the already famous artist move to the capital.

By 1910, thirty-five thousand Jews lived in the Russian capital, where they made up less than 2 percent of the population. Many of them were educated, affluent, and influential. Among Petersburg’s Jews were prominent bankers, accomplished musicians, and leading journalists. The essayist Vassily Rozanov even asserted that “the Jews were able to ‘make or break’ a person in our literature, and thereby they became its ‘chiefs.’”^{218}

Jews were playing an increasingly important role in Petersburg’s modernist circles. Among Akhmatova’s closest friends, for she always considered herself a militant “anti-anti-Semite,” were Mandelstam and one of the leading female avant-garde painters of the period, Alexandra Exter. Akhmatova readily agreed to pose for Altman, who had moved to a seventh-floor furnished apartment in the “New York” building, a favorite of Petersburg artists.

For a long time Altman worked persistently on the portrait. During rest periods, to amuse herself and demonstrate her famous agility, Akhmatova would climb out the window and make her way along the ledge to visit friends on the same floor. Sometimes Mandelstam would drop in and he and Akhmatova would make up funny stories, laughing like teenagers, rolling on the floor and bringing neighbors running to see what all the noise was about.

Altman had become close to the critic Nikolai Punin, Akhmatova’s future third husband, and the modernist artists around Punin—Lev Bruni, Pyotr Miturich, and Vladimir Lebedev. Punin later wrote, “Altman had the face of an Asian, quick movements, and wide cheekbones. He always brought in the bustle of life, he had a practical mind, but an amusing and cheerful one.”^{219}

When I came to see the seventy-seven-year-old Altman in Leningrad in the fall of 1966, his conversation was ironic but to the point. He was reluctant to speak of Akhmatova, who had died recently—perhaps because lately they had not been particularly close. But more likely, it was because Akhmatova had been ambivalent in her last years toward his painting of her. She found it too “stylized,” preferring instead a portrait by Alexander Tyshler, another Jewish artist she considered a genius; perhaps she was influenced by Mandelstam’s praise of Tyshler.

But in 1915, when Altman’s portrait of her was exhibited in Petersburg, it made a tremendous impression. Punin, an influential and insightful critic, always considered it the best of Altman’s works. Thin and angular, Akhmatova was depicted seated in a piercingly blue dress and a bright yellow shawl. Instantly that image of the fashionable poetess, shown at a fashionable exhibit by an artist coming into fashion, took on the significance of a symbol. First, it was beyond doubt a portrait not only of Akhmatova but also of an idealized image of the modern female poet, a fact well understood by the viewers and Akhmatova. Second, it was a symbol of the times—according to Roman Timenchik, “the embodiment of the general spiritual unease.”

Altman’s painting became a kind of an aesthetic manifesto for the “Punin group.” As Punin later wrote, “This portrait rejected the traditions of impressionism and introduced the problem of constructivist forms. We were particularly interested in forms then.”^{220} Contemporaries found cubist influences in Altman’s portrait, but in a conversation with me in 1966 Altman denied that vehemently: “They decided that I was a Cubist, and a bad one at that. First they christen a brunet a redhead, and then they say that he’s a false redhead. But I never was a Cubist.” I remember well how his small gray brush of a mustache curled mockingly as he spoke. Georges Braque, whose photo had been cut out of a French Communist newspaper and was attached to Altman’s easel, looked somewhat uncomfortable listening along with me.

Punin avoided the word “cubism” in his review of Altman’s portrait in Apollo in 1916. “It’s significant that in this work Altman did not seem to have the desire to show beauty (at least the beauty of Akhmatova’s eyes), character, give expression—all that is typical of the impressionist. His sole aim was to reveal form—the form of the body (in particular, the kneecap, collarbone, foot, phalanxes, and so on), the bench, stool, flowers, and shawl.”^{221}

Describing the portrait later, the poet Benedikt Livshits also mentioned “the imperial folds of blue silk” and directly tied Altman’s painting to the acmeist experiments in literature: “Acmeism is feeling around for heavyweight correlates to itself in painting.”^{222} Obviously, acmeists were flirting with cubism, selecting and noting works close to them, usually the ones that used cubist techniques. Besides Altman’s cubist-like portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, this wing of Petersburg art was distinguished by the sharp, angular portraits by his friends Lev Bruni and Boris Grigoryev and, in a later period, Yuri Annenkov, as well as by some of the cubistically constructed still lifes by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.

A true union of Russian cubism and acmeism did not take place, however, because in Russia cubism tied itself to literary futurism. At the same exhibit of Mir iskusstva in 1915 where Altman’s Akhmatova portrait appeared, there was a portrait by Miturich of the modernist composer and later intimate friend of Akhmatova, Arthur Lourié. Punin wrote that Miturich’s brush strokes were “unique and error-free. Their loveliness lies in their distinctively feminine yet dry manner. I would not call Miturich a lyric poet, but there is a tender poetry nevertheless in his works.”^{223} One might have thought Punin was writing about Akhmatova’s poems.

There was a clear correlation between the ideas of the Punin group and the aesthetics of the acmeists. Just as the acmeists “overcame” symbolism, the young artists of Petersburg were “overcoming” impressionism. They were still tied by personal relations to the older members of Mir iskusstva and exhibited together with them, but they were attracted by more radical ideas. But the decisive move toward the more avant-garde happened a bit later, and for the time being, in Punin’s words, the young rebels were all “entwined in their specifically Petersburg, Mir iskusstva ‘graphic’ attitudes toward their material.”^{224}

Altman told me that when he arrived in Petersburg from Paris, he encountered Akhmatova once again at the artistic cabaret The Stray Dog.^{225} Now a legendary establishment, which opened on New Year’s Eve 1912 and survived until spring 1915, it was a favorite hangout for the artistic elite of Petersburg in that period.

The role of The Stray Dog for Russian culture is comparable to that of the Left Bank cafés in Paris. But The Stray Dog was more elitist and refined than La Coupole, Les Deux Magots, or Closerie des Lilas. After all, they functioned as ordinary cafés, distinguished by their colorful clientele. To get into The Stray Dog, located deep in the cellar of a house on the corner of Italyanskaya Street and Mikhailovskaya Square that had once belonged to the Jesuits, guests had to sign a thick volume bound in pigskin before entering. This ritual in itself turned The Stray Dog, which had no waiters, into a private club. Serious lectures and futurist poems were read there, clever plays were performed, and avant-garde exhibitions mounted.

For example, when the actor Boris Pronin, the manager of The Stray Dog (also known as the “Hund-direktor”) announced “Caucasus Week,” the cellar featured talks describing trips to the Caucasus, an exhibit of Persian miniatures, and evenings of Oriental music and dance. In the same manner, the establishment had a “Marinetti Week,” with the participation of the famous visiting Italian futurist, and a “Paul Fort Week” for the Parisian poet who in 1912 was elected “Prince of Poets” by his contemporaries.

As the tall, elegant poet Benedikt Livshits, whose admirers claimed that the nine muses always danced around him, recalled, “The basic premise of The Stray Dog existence was the division of humanity into two unequal categories—representatives of the arts and ‘pharmacists,’ with the latter label covering all other people, no matter what they did and what their professions were.” Writers and artists were admitted free of charge, while the “pharmacists” had to pay a hefty admission, up to 25 rubles per head. They were glad to pay—where else could they see the prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina on a giant mirror performing numbers choreographed by Michel Fokine, or watch the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the pose of a wounded gladiator, lying in his famous striped shirt on a huge Turkish drum and triumphantly striking it at the appearance of each bizarrely arrayed comrade in futurism?

The futurists and their shocking behavior got a lot of press in Petersburg. Thus a prospering “pharmacist”—lawyer, stockbroker, or dentist—could show how up-to-date he was by recounting his “personal” meeting at The Stray Dog with those “horrible modernists”—but of course he might then add, “Maxim Gorky himself said, ‘There’s something to them!’”

The futurist Vasilisk Gnedov was notorious for his Poem of the End, which consisted of a single, sharp circular movement of the arm. There were no words in the Poem of the End and thus this experimental “poetry of silence” could be regarded as a precursor forty years earlier of the aesthetically analogous “music of silence” by the American composer John Cage.

But the tone at The Stray Dog was set nevertheless not by the futurists but by the acmeists and their friends. They usually gathered after midnight and left around dawn. In that little cellar they lived “for the audience,” playing the role of the bohemians of the imperial capital. Livshits left a seemingly sarcastic but actually affectionate description of that “intimate parade,” at which the poets transformed themselves into stage actors, and the audience took a voyeuristic ride.

Wrapped in black silk, with a large oval cameo at her waist, Akhmatova floated in, stopping at the entrance so as to write her latest poem in the “pigskin book” at the request of Pronin, who was rushing to greet her, with the unsophisticated “pharmacists,” their curiosity piqued, wildly guessing who’s who in the poem.

Attired in a long frock coat, not leaving a single beautiful woman without his attention, Gumilyov retreated, moving backward among the tables, either to observe court etiquette or to avoid “dagger” looks at his back.

Under the vaults of The Stray Dog, painted with flowers and birds by the artist Sergei Sudeikin, what Diaghilev called “intimate art” was made nightly. “Pianists, poets, and artists who were present were simply invited on stage. Voices would call, ‘We want so-and-so,’ and almost no one refused.”^{226} Musical improvisation took on great importance here. Cultural Russia of that era lived under the strong impression of Alexander Scriabin’s grandiloquent musical statements. His ecstatic works were consonant with the poetry of the symbolists. In the casual ambiance of The Stray Dog several people worked on music they considered alternative to Scriabin’s overheated visions.

One of them, Arthur Lourié, was a composer of enormous potential that was partially realized later, when he fled Soviet Russia for France and then to the United States. But only one other man from that informal association that I would call the musical circle of The Stray Dog was a professional composer. Ilya Sats was renowned for his music for the plays at the Stanislavsky Art Theater.

Sats was apparently the first to experiment with the “prepared” piano, again anticipating similar experiments by John Cage, which were conducted thirty years later. Sats placed sheets of metal and other objects on piano strings to change the sound. The traditional “sound palette” was not enough for him, and Sats sought new timbers and techniques of producing sound as well as new untempered sounds, similar to what would later be called la musique concrète. Insisting that he spoke for “an entire group of seekers,” Sats wrote, “Music is the wind, and rustling, and speech, and banging, and crunching, and squalling. That is the symphony of sounds which makes my soul cringe and weep and which I long for. Why is there no register called ‘Wind,’ which intones in microtones?”^{227}

Lourié was in solidarity with Sats and proposed a theory that he grandly called the “theater of reality.” Its essence was that everything in the world was proclaimed art, including the sound made by every object. Lourié also experimented with quarter-tone music and proposed a new type of piano with two settings of strings and a double (three-color) keyboard. But for lack of such a new instrument, Lourié had to settle for playing at The Stray Dog, where he “extended his hands, nails chewed down to the half moon, with a suffering look toward the Bechstein, smiling like Sarasate might, having been offered a three-string balalaika.”^{228}

Arthur—he took the name in honor of his favorite philosopher, Schopenhauer, adding a second name, Vincent, in honor of van Gogh—Lourié, who had converted to Roman Catholicism as a teenager at the Petersburg Maltese Chapel, once gave an influential lecture at The Stray Dog, calling for “overcoming impressionism” and achieving synthesis by using the primitive. The esteemed Petersburg music critic Vyacheslav Karatygin, also a regular at The Stray Dog, explained, “The more certainly and energetically the process of ‘specification’ and ‘purification’ of particular art forms proceeds, the more acutely do we sometimes feel a strange longing for the possibility of their ‘synthesis.’ Such synthesis is realizable only with the help of an artificial primitivization of the main elements of those being synthesized.”^{229}

This program resembled the ideas of the French composer Eric Satie, propounded at about the same time, which were later realized in the works of Les Six and in what Satie called la musique d’ameublement. Satie himself wrote laconic piano pieces in the 1910s and also little waltz songs that were popular in Parisian cafés.

Independently of Satie, and in some ways preceding him, Stray Dog regular Mikhail Kuzmin, called “the greatest of minor poets” in Petersburg, made similar experiments. Akhmatova asked Kuzmin to write the introduction to her first book. Kuzmin was a great poseur, and there were many contradictory legends about him in Petersburg, summed up by a female contemporary this way:

Kuzmin is the king of aesthetes, the arbiter of fashion and taste. He is the Russian Beau Brummell. He has three hundred sixty-five vests. In the morning high school students, lawyers, and young Guardsmen come to his “petit lever.” He is an Old Believer. His grandmother is Jewish. He studied with the Jesuits. He was an apprentice in a corn-chandler’s shop. In Paris he danced the cancan with the models of Toulouse-Lautrec. He wore an ascetic’s chains and spent two years as a penitent in an Italian monastery. Kuzmin has supernatural “Byzantine eyes.” Kuzmin is a monster.^{230}

Kuzmin was the first to introduce an openly homosexual theme into Russian poetry and prose. His novella Wings, which appeared in 1906, was attacked as pornographic. But characteristically for the Petersburg of that period, the leading modernists immediately came to Kuzmin’s defense. Blok published an article that announced, “Kuzmin’s name, surrounded now by such coarse, barbarically trivial talk, is for us a charming name.”

Kuzmin had spent several years at the Petersburg Conservatory in Rimsky-Korsakov’s composition class, but did not graduate; he explained his transformation into a poet this way: “It’s easier and simpler. Poetry falls ready-made from the sky, like manna into the mouths of the Israelites in the desert. I never rewrite a single line.”^{231}

But Kuzmin didn’t drop music. He was the much discussed composer for Meyerhold’s memorable production of Blok’s pioneering drama, The Fair Show Booth. Kuzmin’s songs became popular among the Petersburg elite. He sang them, accompanying himself on the piano, first in various salons, including Ivanov’s Tower, and then at The Stray Dog. Kuzmin liked to say of his work that “it’s only little music, but it has its poison.” One visitor to The Stray Dog confirmed the charming impression Kuzmin’s songs created:

Cloyingly sweet, wanton, and breathtaking languor overtakes the audience. In a joke you hear sadness, in laughter, tears—

The banal modulations blend with the velvety tremolo voice and it’s not clear how and why, but the simple, childish words take on a mysterious significance.^{232}

The director Nikolai Evreinov made music in a similar style at The Stray Dog. Arnold Schoenberg, visiting Petersburg, heard Evreinov’s “Second Polka” and asked sarcastically, “Und warum es notwendig ist, diese Sekunden?” Schoenberg had reason to consider himself a connoisseur of cabaret music. For several years he had conducted the orchestra at the famous Überbrettl, Ernst von Wolzogen’s Berlin cabaret.

Karatygin, one of the guiding spirits of the Evenings of Contemporary Music, performed at The Stray Dog as accompanist and also as author of musical jokes “with a strong dose of musical pepper in the form of sharp rhythms and brazen harmonies, strung onto curious and silly words.”^{233} Ilya Sats went even further in that direction, composing parody operas with names like “Revenge of Love, or The Ring of Guadelupe” and “Oriental Delights, or The Battle of the Russians and the Kabarda.” Karatygin wrote about Sats’s music, “I never saw such a musical mirror. By itself, it’s nothing, zero. But light candles all around it and suddenly this music will shine and sparkle like fire. Isn’t that enough?”^{234}

Sats, rumpling his thick black hair and nervously chewing at his walrus mustache, wrote his biggest opus at The Stray Dog, the ballet The Goat-legged, first performed in Petersburg in 1912. Balanchine’s future mentor, the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, was present at the premiere and as he confessed to me in a conversation in 1967, he “didn’t understand a thing in Sats’s music—all dissonance.” I asked him about Boris Romanov’s choreography. “Very daring, borderline pornography. It was a much more revealing spectacle than The Afternoon of a Faun with Vaslav Nijinsky,” Lopukhov replied thoughtfully. “But Romanov was a very talented man. He experimented with free dance àla Isadora Duncan. And he found a beautiful dancer who wasn’t even a professional. She was very, very sexy.”^{235}

Lopukhov meant Olga Glebova-Sudeikina, whose performance in The Goat-legged created a sensation in Petersburg. The wife of the artist Sudeikin, who had decorated The Stray Dog’s interior, and closest friend of Akhmatova, Olga was one of the “fragile Europeans” (Mandelstam’s expression) who scintillated in the capital. Arthur Lourié tried to describe her. “Glorious golden braids, like Melissande or Debussy’s La Fille aux cheveux de laine, enormous gray-green eyes, sparkling like opals, porcelain shoulders and a ‘Diana’s bust,’ nearly revealed by her deeply décolleté dress, charming smile, lilting laughter, flying, light movements—who is she? a butterfly? Colombine?’^{236}

Discussing the Petersburg era with me in 1976, Vera Stravinsky, who married Sudeikin after taking him away from Olga, was rather pejorative about her. “She was no actress, she couldn’t sing or dance, and basically was a rather empty-headed thing whose only interest was suitors.”^{237} Lourié, however, wrote that Olga Sudeikina “was one of the most talented characters I had ever met.”

Lourié maintained that she was exceptionally musical, could read poetry unforgettably, particularly Blok, and successfully translated Baudelaire into Russian. Lourié also recalled that Sudeikina “knew the style of every epoch and her taste was impeccable. I remember how she liked to go to the Alexander Market, where she knew all the shopkeepers. She would bring back all sorts of incredible things dug out from the flotsam—old porcelain, snuff boxes, miniatures, knickknacks.”^{238}

For Lourié and the other bohemians of the capital, Olga Sudeikina was the personification of the sophisticated Petersburg style of the 1910s, its soul and its muse. She “expressed the refined era of Petersburg of the beginning of the twentieth century just as Madame Récamier expressed the early Empire.”^{239} Nadezhda Mandelstam said wryly,

Akhmatova considered Olga the embodiment of all female qualities and was constantly giving me recipes for household work and for charming men according to Olga…. Dust rags must be gauze—you dust and rinse it out… cups must be thin and the tea strong. Among the beauty secrets the most important was that dark hair should be smooth and blond hair must be fluffed and curled. Kchessinska’s secret for getting along with men was never to take your eyes off “them,” hang on every word, “they” love it…. Those were the Petersburg recipes at the start of the century.^{240}

Sudeikina and Akhmatova quoted Mathilda Kchessinska, the notorious star of the imperial ballet, for good reason. In prerevolutionary Petersburg, Kchessinska, the mistress first of Nicholas II when he was heir to the throne, then of two grand dukes, was the symbol and proof of the success to which an artist, a woman from the demimonde, could aspire.

The tabloids described Kchessinska’s outfits, her diamond necklaces and pearls, the luxurious banquets in her honor at expensive restaurants, and her townhouse in the modern style. The director of the imperial theaters, Vladimir Telyakovsky, who hated her whims and intrigues, wrote in his diary that she was a “morally impudent, cynical, and brazen dancer, living simultaneously with two grand dukes and not only not hiding it but on the contrary, weaving this art as well into her stinking, cynical wreath of human offal and vice.”^{241}

But many people were in awe of Kchessinka’s brilliance as a dancer. “Le tout Petersburg” came to her performances. A reporter for Peterburgskaya gazeta breathlessly described the audience at the Maryinsky Theater when Kchessinska was dancing on stage: “Innumerable ball gowns in every color and shade, diamonds sparkling on shoulders, endless frock coats and tails, small talk in English and French, the heady scent of fashionable perfume, in a word, the familiar scene of a social rout.”^{242}

The influential ballet critic Akim Volynsky should not have been interested in Kchessinska’s social successes, but he too did not distinguish between her stage performance and her image.

Her demonic artistry sometimes gives off an icy chill. But at other times Kchessinska’s rich technique seems like a miracle of a real, high art. At moments like that the audience bursts into wild applause and crazy cries of delight. And the black-eyed she-devil of ballet endlessly repeats, to the bravos of the entire hall, her incredible pas, her blindingly glorious diagonal dance across the stage.^{243}

Praising Kchessinska’s genius, “capricious and mighty, with a shade of sinful personal pride,” the critic saw in her a symbolic and tragic figure. But for Telyakovsky, the director of the imperial theaters, Kchessinska’s appearances on the stage were the triumph of “vulgarity, triteness, and banality.”

The director was disgusted by the open, challenging, and indecorous sexuality of the ballerina, “her too short costume, fat, turned-out legs and open arms, expressing total self-satisfaction, an invitation to an embrace.” The irony of the situation lay in the fact that the audience, loving the unheard-of energy of the spectacle, readily attributed the sexual explosion on stage to their presence. The cynical Telyakovsky knew better, when he wrote in his diary after another “trite and coarse” performance, “Kchessinska was in good form. The royal box was filled with young grand dukes, and Kchessinska made a real effort.”^{244}

Thus the connection between the huge stage of the Imperial Maryinsky Theater and the little halls of the Petersburg cabarets was made. Everywhere the intimate was becoming the purview of everyone, brought out for display and gossip. Private life no longer existed. The sexual relations (real or imagined) of the royal family or of two famous poets was the subject of public discussion and ballyhooed in the same way.

Kchessinska on the stage was almost within reach. One could undress her mentally and evaluate her physical charms (or flaws) with the same aplomb with which Akhmatova’s tragic loves were gossiped about on the basis of her latest poems. Few were shocked that the niece of Alexander Benois, the twenty-eight-year-old artist Zinaida Serebryakova, entered the Mir iskusstva exhibits with nude self-portraits—under innocent titles like “Bather” or “In the Baths”—of incredible beauty, in which there was “a certain sensuality,”^{245} as even her loving uncle admitted.

For Serebryakova and her friends this was a manifesto of moral and aesthetic emancipation. For the public it was yet another opportunity to feel drawn by a celebrity’s sex appeal and to indulge their voyeuristic fantasies. In this charged atmosphere Kchessinska, Serebryakova, Akhmatova, and Sudeikina were all equal before the Petersburg public, which was ever hungry for sexy scandal and gossip.

A contemporary described Sats’s The Goat-legged as “half-goats, half-humans lasciviously frolicking on stage.”^{246} But Sudeikina did not limit her appearances to the Theater of Miniatures on Liteiny Prospect, where Sats’s ballet was appearing. In her memoirs, Akhmatova recalled that Sudeikina performed a Russian dance for Grand Duke Kirill at his father’s palace. Akhmatova repeated the grand duke’s reaction: “La danse russe rêvée par Debussy.”

Grand Duke Kirill was often seen at performances of Kchessinska, who was the mistress of his younger brother, Andrei. An interesting connection appears—grand dukes, Kchessinska, Sudeikina, Akhmatova. To my knowledge, no one has noted that connection before, and yet it could partly explain the persistent and rather widespread rumor that Akhmatova had had an affair with Nicholas II or, at any rate, with someone from the royal family.

This myth, despite Akhmatova’s sarcastic reaction to it, was typical of prerevolutionary Petersburg. The capital was all mixed up. Grigory Rasputin, a mystical Siberian peasant turned monk, had become the most influential person in the empire. (Akhmatova once saw Rasputin in a train and would later reminisce how his hypnotic eyes pierced her.)

Nikolai Klyuev, a peasant poet close to Rasputin, adored Akhmatova’s work. She later maintained that Klyuev was intended to take Rasputin’s place near the emperor and his wife. So no one would have been surprised if Akhmatova suddenly were to have become the “court poet.” Rumors appeared and vanished daily in the capital’s atmosphere of mysticism, sex, and poetry. Inevitably they touched the uncrowned empress of the Petersburg bohemians, who was reigning at The Stray Dog.

Akhmatova was ambivalent toward this bohemian world and her role in it. In late 1912 she wrote a poem called “In The Stray Dog,” subtitled, “Dedicated to Friends.” It begins,

And it ends with lines that could refer to Akhmatova or to her friend Sudeikina.

But having published the poem, Akhmatova continued to appear regularly at The Stray Dog, the living symbol of which she had become. A kind of umbilical cord existed now between the place and the person. Without the majestic Akhmatova, without her stylized beauty, The Stray Dog was unimaginable. But Akhmatova apparently felt most comfortable in that cellar filled with smoke and the heavy scent of wine. As a poet later recalled, “We (Mandelstam and I and many others) began to imagine that the whole world was in fact concentrated at The Stray Dog, that there was no other life, no other interests than the Doggy ones.”^{247}

That cellar world, a part of and an attraction for elite Petersburg, shuddered along with the rest of the capital in the summer of 1914, for World War I had begun. “Everyone expected it and no one believed in it,” Viktor Shklovsky later maintained. “We sometimes allowed that it might happen, but we were convinced that it would last three months at most.”^{248}

Events escalated swiftly and ominously. In response to the general mobilization ordered by Nicholas II, Germany declared war. The next day the tsar published a manifesto, greeted with great enthusiasm, on Russia’s responding in kind. Thousands of people came out on Palace Square waving the flag, icons, and portraits of the tsar. When Nicholas and his wife appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace, the crowd sank to its knees and sang the anthem, “God Save the Tsar.”

The city was caught up in patriotic frenzy. German stores were attacked and the gigantic cast-iron horses on top of the German embassy were thrown down to the street. This wave of long-unknown patriotism and chauvinism is the only explanation for how the renaming of Saint Petersburg to Petrograd slipped through without serious debate in August 1914.

The reason for this fateful change was to discard the city’s “Germanic” name in favor of a “Slavic” version. But in the frenzy of the war, two things were forgotten. The name originally given to the capital by Peter the Great was not German but Dutch. Second, turning the capital’s name into Petrograd made it the city of Peter the man, Peter the emperor, whereas at the time of its founding the city had been named for Saint Peter, its patron. This was particularly ironic because Nicholas II, who personally ordered the name change, was highly ambivalent, to say the least, about his ancestor, the “miracle-working builder.” He had said of Peter the Great, “This is the ancestor I like least of all for his enthusiasm for Western culture and violation of all purely Russian customs.”

Obviously, it was not the time for pedantic discussions of the correctness of the capital’s new name. Even Blok only noted laconically in his notebook, “Petersburg has been renamed Petrograd,” and moved on to more important matters, the bad news from the front. “We lost many troops. Very many.”^{249}

It was just five years later that Petersburg’s bard Nikolai Antsiferov, with the advantage of hindsight, would analyze this fatal turn:

The loss of its age-old name must have signified the start of a new era in Petersburg’s development, an era of total consolidation with Russia that was once alien to it. “Petrograd” would become a truly Russian city. But in the name change many saw the tastelessness of contemporary imperialism and also its impotence. Petrograd betrays the Bronze Horseman. The Northern Palmyra cannot be resurrected. And fate is preparing another path for it. It would be not the city of triumphant imperialism but the city of all-destroying revolution. The resurrected Bronze Horseman would appear on his “loud-galloping steed” not at the head of victorious armies of his ill-starred descendant but ahead of the masses, destroying the past.^{250}

Meanwhile, all observers agreed that the face of Petrograd, now in wartime, changed dramatically. The first breath of war, Livshits noted bitterly, blew the blush from the cheeks of The Stray Dog’s regulars. Only now was the Russian capital, as Akhmatova repeated many times later, bidding farewell to the nineteenth century.

People in Petrograd, a contemporary recalled, immediately divided into two groups—those who left for the front and those who remained in the city. “The former, irrespective of whether they left as volunteers or were mobilized, considered themselves heroes. The latter readily agreed with that, trying every which way to expiate their vaguely felt guilt.”^{251}

Among those leaving with the army was Gumilyov, who received news of the war enthusiastically. Although exempted from military service because of his crossed eyes, he managed nevertheless to get permission to shoot from his left shoulder and headed for the front as a volunteer in the squad of the Life Guards of the Uhlan Regiment. By October, Gumilyov had seen battle and in late 1914 he received his first St. George’s Cross.

“His patriotism was as unreserved as his religious faith was cloudless,” wrote the critic André Levinson about his friend’s state of mind in the early days of the war.^{252} And this “enlightened and exalted” patriotism also found expression in Gumilyov’s poetry.

At the very start of the war, Gumilyov and Akhmatova lunched together with Blok. They spoke of the war, of course, and when Blok left, Gumilyov remarked sadly, “Will they really send him to the front too? It’s like broiling nightingales.”

Blok, German by heritage and pacifist by conviction, clearly did not share Gumilyov’s enthusiasm for the war. Blok did not go to the front and he wrote about the war: “For a minute it seemed that it would clear the air. Actually it turned out to be a worthy crown to the lies, filth, and vileness in which our homeland was bathed.”

Military action began favorably for Russia. In Petrograd they predicted that Russian troops would be in Berlin by Christmas of 1914, but then luck ran out. In the first eleven months of bloody battle, over a million and a half Russian men were wounded, killed, or taken prisoner. Rumors spread in the capital about a catastrophic shortage of weapons and ammunition, about the stupid, craven generals, about theft and bribery in the supply system. They spoke more and more openly about treason, about the German-born empress and her favorite, the all-powerful Rasputin, leading the country to ruin.

Petrograd came to be swollen with refugees from the western provinces. Under the curfew, people were allowed in the streets only until eight in the evening, but Viktor Shklovsky said that crowds of prostitutes roamed the Nevsky Prospect at night with impunity. It was somewhat ironic, since the number of men in the city had diminished steadily. Sometimes it seemed that Petrograd had become a woman’s capital. Life for women became more difficult with food disappearing from the city. More and more wounded were on the streets. There were many benefit performances for the wounded, in which Akhmatova often took part.

The war sharply changed her way of life, and here Gumilyov’s influence was without question. But Akhmatova’s poetry also changed, and her muse responded to the war differently. They said that Gumilyov’s experience of the war was easy and enjoyable. There wasn’t a trace of joy in Akhmatova’s poems about the war. Listening to them, the audience froze in painful presentiment. Her poem “The Prayer,” published in the collection War in Russian Poetry, was particularly popular.

The self-oblivion of Akhmatova’s “Prayer,” which in 1915 may have seemed natural and timely, now first shocks, then horrifies. These are terrifying verses, almost blasphemous in their unprecedented, self-denying patriotism. They are particularly horrifying now because we know that none of the people who praised the poem during the war nor the author herself could even guess at how great the sacrifice Akhmatova offered would turn out to be.

Meanwhile, the war continued to chew up millions of human lives. A black cloud hung over Petrograd. To describe the prevailing conditions, Merezhkovsky coined the expression “brutifying,” which was picked up by other Russian intellectuals. Blok, returning from a walk to the Bronze Horseman, wrote, “On Falconet’s statue is a horde of boys, hooligans, holding onto the tail, sitting on the serpent, smoking under the horse’s belly. Total decay. Petrograd is finis.”

The gigantic state machine sputtered: it was falling apart. Nicholas II no longer held the reins of power. In a common view of the last Russian monarch, succinctly stated by one of his officials in his memoirs, “His wife ruled the state, and Rasputin ruled her. Rasputin inspired, the empress ordered, the tsar obeyed.”^{253}

Like any epigram, it was an oversimplification. Rasputin’s murder by court conspirators in December 1916 did not stop the coming catastrophe. But the role of the personality (or rather its absence) in the fall of the Russian Empire is clear, if we mean Nicholas II himself. For in Russia, as an historian justly put it, “the ruler is not a symbol of the regime but is the regime.”^{254}

One often hears that the quiet, amiable, and educated tsar, a model family man and a loving, gentle father, would have been the ideal constitutional monarch in a country like England. But for the single-handed ruling of enormous Russia at a crucial time, Nicholas lacked the talent, the wisdom, and above all, the determination. Instead, the emperor displayed stubbornness and an absurdly unyielding conviction that the people and the army adored their Tsar Father, that only the intellectuals, encamped in their “rotten Petersburg,” stirred up trouble.

This manner of ruling the country was unsurprisingly among the causes for Nicholas’s dethroning. In July 1918, he and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks in the Urals, where the royal family had been kept under guard by the local Soviet.

But in early 1917 Nicholas II had not even imagined such a horrible possibility, even though his empire and its capital in particular were coming to a boil. Zinaida Hippius recalled,

The war startled the Petersburg intelligentsia and heightened political interests…. Figures from the most varied spheres—scientists, lawyers, doctors, writers, poets—they all turned out to be involved in politics. For us, who had not yet lost human common sense, one thing was clear. War for Russia, in its present political condition, would not end without revolution.

By January 1917 even diehard monarchists like Gumilyov had lost faith in the efficacy of continuing the war. Gumilyov at that time, according to a friend, openly fumed about the “stupid orders” of the generals. This disillusionment with the system overtook the entire hierarchical ladder of the empire from Ensign Gumilyov to the highest officials. Telyakovsky, the director of the imperial theaters, kept amazingly frank diaries. “January 26, 1917. You have to be completely blind and stupid not to sense that the country cannot be ruled this way any more.” “January 29. Life is bad in Russia and has been for a long time, but now it’s becoming unbearable, because this is not merely bad ruling, this is a mockery of the subjects.”^{255} And so on, page after page.

Anarchy took over Petrograd, but it was just then that the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater put on perhaps the most famous production of prerevolutionary Russia—Mikhail Lermontov’s drama Masquerade, directed by Meyerhold and designed by Golovin. Everything about this production is legendary. Its endless rehearsals, ongoing for five years under Meyerhold, had turned into a theatrical ritual of sorts. Golovin had made four thousand drawings of costumes, makeup, furniture, and other props, setting a record for the Russian theater. Masquerade cost three hundred thousand gold rubles, an amazing sum even for the seemingly bottomless royal treasury.

Lermontov, who had been killed in a duel in 1841 at the age of twenty-six, never dreamed that his youthful drama, which he had never seen on the stage, would be presented with such sumptuousness. Masquerade was a typical romantic melodrama from the life of Petersburg high society, in which the hero, the jealous Arbenin, poisons his wife.

The impudent and independent Lermontov, an amateur artist, liked to depict Petersburg engulfed in a raging tide. “In those pictures,” recalled Count Sollogub, “Lermontov gave free rein to his imagination, which craved sorrow.” But even the fatalistic and pessimistic Lermontov could not have predicted that the production of Masquerade, which even the participating actors nicknamed “Sunset of the Empire,” would be the last act of the old Russia, drowning in the waves of the revolutionary flood. Lermontov would have found such a coincidence the height of romantic irony.

Lermontov’s unfinished novel, Princess Ligovskaya (1836), set in Petersburg, depicts the city’s topography exceptionally accurately. In that sense as in many others, Lermontov was an innovator, presaging the detailed descriptions of the capital in Dostoyevsky’s prose. As Leonid Dolgopolov noted, that topographical accuracy was due most probably to Lermontov and Dostoyevsky’s shared military education.^{256}

But Lermontov would not have recognized the long, straight prospects of Petersburg in those days of February 1917, filled as they were with unhappy crowds of people. The protest demonstrations were spreading. One of them even interrupted a rehearsal of Masquerade, when the actors rushed to the windows and watched fearfully as an avalanche of workers moved silently along Nevsky Prospect. Banners imprinted with demands for bread swayed over the demonstrators’ heads. Yuri Yuriev, a popular actor playing Arbenin, recalled that “in that concentrated, silent mass was something threatening.”^{257}

Events around Masquerade developed in a grotesque and symbolic way. Despite the existence of a revolutionary situation in the city, the minister of the imperial court insisted that the premiere take place. Yet again in Russian history, ritual and appearance for the sake of appearance was of paramount importance.

Meyerhold, fully sensing the tragic irony of the situation, was nevertheless excited. This was not the first time his artistic intuition had led him to mount a production whose political naïveté bordered on the outrageous. In 1913 during the pomp and ceremony commemorating three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty, he staged Richard Strauss’s opera Electra, with a scene of a royal beheading.

Meyerhold’s challenge in Masquerade was to create a unique “director’s score,” according to which literally every word the actor spoke had an exact equivalent in his gestures or movements. At all those innumerable rehearsals Meyerhold sought to find an exact scheme for moving each of the hundreds of extras across the huge Alexandrinsky stage. A critic called the delicate orchestration of the actors in the play “an opera without music.” Thus the basics were carefully laid down of Meyerhold’s as yet unformed avant-garde theatrical teaching, “biomechanics,” which would eventually become famous.

The premiere of Masquerade was set for February 25. The city was empty and eerie that night, but cars were parked in solid black rows in front of the Alexandrinsky Theater. Despite the high cost of tickets, the play sold out, and all the celebrities of the city were present. To his great astonishment, Yuriev saw grand dukes in the royal box.

Golovin had created a set that was a continuation of the audience. Intense black and red predominated. On stage, to Glinka’s languid “Valse-Fantaisie,” the imperial capital’s high society made merry, intrigued, and ultimately rushed to its doom, all the while watched by the truly doomed high society of the capital. What romantic author could have come up with a more symbolic or melodramatic scene?

The action of Masquerade shifted from the gambling house to a masquerade where myriad masks swirled before the audience, then to a ball. The outstanding actors, especially Yuriev, the lavish sets, splendid costumes, and beautiful music blended into an overpowering tapestry. Even the most jaded regulars oohed at the mounting theatrical effects. Still, one critic did write, though after the revolution, that he had been shocked watching the play, “So close, in the same city, next to those starving for bread—this artistically perverted, brazenly corrupting, meaninglessly frenzied luxury for the sake of prurience. What was it—the Rome of the Caesars? What were we going to do afterward, go to Lucullus to eat nightingales’ tongues, and let the hungry bastards howl, seeking bread and freedom?”^{258}

The play ended with an eerie scene of a Russian Orthodox memorial service. The church choir Meyerhold had brought in seemed to be ringing the death knell for the regime, the country, and its capital. The curtain fell not only on Lermontov’s Masquerade but on the extravagant, entrancing, and tragic masquerade of an era.

The applause seemed to have no end. Baskets of flowers and laurel wreaths piled up on the stage. When Yuriev came out for a bow, the audience stood. Then came a solemn announcement that a gift from Nicholas II had been bestowed upon Yuriev—a gold cigarette case ornamented with a diamond-studded eagle. Few could guess that this imperial gift would be the last in the history of the Russian stage. Ironically, theater connoisseurs exchanged glances.

Everyone knew that Yuriev was homosexual—he didn’t hide his sexuality. Thus the gift from the prudish tsar was puzzling. The public still remembered the scandal of 1911, when Nijinsky was suddenly fired from the imperial theaters, the excuse being that his costume was too daring. But rumor had it that the dancer’s love affair with Diaghilev had displeased the royal family.

Akhmatova, who saw Meyerhold’s production of Masquerade, hadn’t liked the show. “Too much furniture on stage…. And I never thought highly of Yuriev.” What she remembered the most was the difficulty of getting home from the play. “There were shots on Nevsky Prospect and horsemen with bared swords attacked passersby. Machine guns were set up on roof tops and in attics.”

Akhmatova did not have a car or private coach, and coachmen refused to take her from the theater to the Vyborg side, where she was living at the time. They explained in embarrassment that it was impossible to go that far, they might get killed. “Young lady, I have two children,” one driver explained. Another agreed reluctantly. “He probably had no children,” Akhmatova recalled with melancholy. And so her coach rolled past rebellious troops in the streets of Petrograd.

A few days later Nicholas II saw he was no longer capable of controlling events and reluctantly abdicated. The unthinkable had occurred: the monarchy in Russia had fallen. In Petrograd, power passed formally to the provisional government, which immediately declared an amnesty for political prisoners, and in fact into the hands of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, who controlled the army, railroads, post, and telegraph. Everyone agreed that the people’s revolution had been a gigantic improvisation. According to Viktor Shklovsky, it “happened instead of being organized.”^{259} Shklovsky pictured this revolution as “a thing that was light, blinding, unreliable, and joyous.”

Petrograd was shaken by innumerable rallies with fiery orators making speeches for hours to spellbound audiences. Still, the war with the Germans continued, even though the army and the nation were exhausted. Freedom from the tsarist regime had not brought bread, either, and the capital roiled with the anger of the hungry. Revolutionary developments zigzagged and soon it came to pass that Vladimir Lenin became one of the most famous politicians in Petrograd. Recently returned from exile, he was the leader of a small faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party called Bolsheviks.

Lenin and his party colleague, Leon Trotsky, were both known as hypnotic orators, each in his own style. Trotsky’s temperament carried the audience away, while Lenin persuaded with seeming simplicity and logic. The provisional government could not explain to the soldiers why it was necessary to continue the war, to the workers why factories were shutting down, nor to the peasants why the land was not being redistributed to them. Speaking from the balcony of Kchessinska’s town house (the dancer had fled during the revolution and the Bolsheviks turned her palace into their headquarters), Lenin told the crowds that the war must be ended and promised the people instant well-being as soon as the power of the bourgeoisie was destroyed. A politician of genius with a brilliant understanding of mass psychology, Lenin talked in language of immediate goals, persuading the tired and hungry masses that an instant solution was possible for all the complex problems at hand.

The Petrograd intelligentsia was in disarray. Their ears belonged to the moderate liberal party of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), which had set the tone for a while in the provisional government. However, seeing that the moderate elements were quickly losing ground, the more opportunistic members of the Petrograd elite tried to establish contacts with the Bolsheviks as well. One of the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd was the columnist and playwright Anatoly Lunacharsky, considered an expert on culture among the party comrades. That is why Yuriev, the leading actor of the Alexandrinsky (formerly Imperial) Theater, unexpectedly invited Lunacharsky to his apartment in the fall of 1917 to discuss the fate of the capital’s culture.

Arriving at Yuriev’s, Lunacharsky found over forty famous actors in the cozy quarters with its velvet armchairs. To his surprise he recognized among them the imposing figure of one of the Cadets party leaders, Vladimir Nabokov, the father of the future writer. The diplomatic Yuriev explained that he understood, as did everyone else, that a political storm was gathering over the capital and it was not clear which party would be in power tomorrow. Therefore he was asking Lunacharsky and Nabokov, each of whom had a chance to become the next minister of culture, to state his views on the theater’s future.

In response the wily Lunacharsky gave an eloquent ninety-minute speech, assuring the actors that in the case of a Bolshevik victory not a single “bourgeois” theater would be closed. Nabokov, in a manner typical of the Russian liberals, avoided a discussion with the Bolshevik parvenu and announced with an ironic smile that his party could not propose any Utopian programs.

Nabokov must have imagined that he sounded quite respectable and realistic. But actually, he was losing ground to the Bolsheviks without firing a shot. In that decisive moment of Russian history a multitude of similar episodes were being played out in every sphere of life in Petrograd, with the same results. The Bolsheviks, unchallenged, were gaining everywhere.

Months passed in political maneuvering, in attempted coups from right and left, while the soldiers and workers of the capital continued rumbling, rallying, and making ever more radical demands. Finally, the Petrograd garrison voted to recognize the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was dominated at the time by the Bolsheviks, as the only legal power in the capital. On the morning of October 25, 1917, posters were plastered all over the city proclaiming the overthrow of the provisional government and the transfer of all power to the Soviets.

That evening two ballets were presented at the Maryinsky Theater—The Nutcracker and Michel Fokine’s Eros, set to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings.” The audience excitedly exchanged the latest news, passing around the evening newspapers, which slowly floated along the rows like swans. Everyone expected the Bolsheviks to attack the Winter Palace, where the provisional government, virtually paralyzed by fear, was still sitting.

When the performance began, the audience jumped at the sound of shots. The cruiser Aurora, on the Neva River opposite the Winter Palace, fired a blank shot, which echoed deafeningly throughout the capital. The Bolsheviks burst into the Winter Palace and arrested the ministers of the provisional government. The head of the new government, called the Soviet of People’s Commissars, was the short, barrel-chested Lenin, a forty-seven-year-old professional revolutionary with a maximalist program, confident in his messianic role.

But even Lenin, seizing power, could not have thought in those autumn days that he had led one of the most far-reaching upheavals of the twentieth century. It not only radically changed the historical course of one of the biggest countries on earth but also started a chain of major social changes and mortal conflicts throughout the world that was to last for most of the century. The effect of that fateful day was still being felt decades later in places far from the marvelous city on the Neva, among all kinds of peoples, some of whom didn’t even know the city existed.

At the start of his rule, Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades in arms seriously doubted they would be able to hold onto the power that had fallen into their hands so unexpectedly. One young artist peeked into the empty Winter Palace the day after the coup and ran into the new minister of culture—People’s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky; the prediction of the actor Yuriev had turned out to be correct. Lunacharsky commented philosophically that the Bolsheviks apparently would not be able to stay here more than two weeks, “after which they would be hanged from those balconies.”^{260}

A joke widely circulated in the capital held that the provisional government held its sessions standing instead of sitting. The Bolsheviks, having founded in Petrograd the most radical communist regime in the world, also felt very uncertain. They were surrounded by a sea of hostility.

A few days after the coup the Petrograd theaters ceased working in protest against the “illegal government of Lenin and Lunacharsky.” When Lunacharsky announced that he wanted to meet with intellectuals prepared to cooperate, only a few persons showed up, easily fitting onto one couch. Of course, among them were such extraordinarily talented individuals as Blok, Mayakovsky, Altman, and Meyerhold. (Meyerhold soon went even further and joined the Communist Party.)

This small but fairly representative group of intellectuals that was willing to collaborate with the Soviet authorities was soon joined by the leader of the Mir iskusstva group, Alexander Benois. In a secret report to Lenin, Lunacharsky wrote that Benois had “hailed the October revolution long before October.”^{261} This is what he meant. In April 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks kept attacking the provisional government’s policy of “war to the victorious end,” Benois reassuringly reasoned in an article,

Calm down, friends, don’t burn the ships of your idealism only because the dreadnought of Lenin and his leftist friends have entered the same port as you. You’ll manage to coexist with them. Well, you’ll have to make some concessions, some changes; well, it’ll be less comfortable for you and, in any case, less familiar. But, first of all, life as a whole will not become worse, only better. And then is it so hard to part with a few things, if you are promised at the same time such great, maybe even absolute joy as the resurgence of purely human relations among people in general, if this kingdom of vileness, blood, and lies that is the war will end, if we will be able to think once more of the general well-being of the universe?

This eloquent but starry-eyed statement, which now seems so naive as to be almost touching, was actually a rather bold act in those days, because it went against common sense and public opinion, at least in the capital’s intellectual circles. Not surprisingly, the Soviet authorities first accepted Benois with open arms. He and Blok took on thousands of big and small responsibilities—in particular, they participated in the discussion of the fairly major changes in Russian orthography undertaken by the Bolsheviks.

This was one of the innumerable reforms of the new regime. According to another, the first day after January 31, 1918, would be not the first, but the fourteenth of February, “In order to establish calculation of time in Russia that is the same as in all the civilized nations.” Thus the country shifted from the Julian calendar, which had been used since 1699, to the Western (Gregorian) one.

This innovation was applauded even by monarchists. Count Dmitri Tolstoy, the director of the Hermitage Museum, wrote to his wife, “On the Bolsheviks’ orders we have skipped fourteen days of life—this is the sole reasonable thing the Bolshevik rule will leave to Russia.” The conservatives resisted orthographic changes and, for one, Igor Stravinsky (as did many other Russian émigrés) continued to write in the old orthography to the end of his days.

Life in Bolshevik Petrograd plunged into chaos as frenzied crowds looted everything from warehouses to wine cellars. In response the government started to destroy the wine supplies. Akhmatova recalled with a shudder how she was driving through Petrograd with Mandelstam and saw huge brown chunks of frozen cognac, which smelled powerfully.

Shots rang out constantly in the city. Despite Lenin’s announced desire to sue for peace, the Germans pressed their advance and on February 20, 1918, they approached Petrograd. Blok wrote in his diary in his usual mystical style, “Only—flight and rush. Fly and tear yourself away, otherwise, there is destruction on every path.” And further, “The Germans are still coming…. If you’ve done so many horrible things in your life, you must at least die honorably.”^{262}

On February 21 at the meeting of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, Lenin promulgated an appeal. “The German generals want to establish their Order’ in Petrograd…. The socialist republic of Soviets is in the greatest danger.” The Bolsheviks appealed to the “laboring populace”: “All corrupt elements, hooligans, marauders, and cowards must be expelled ruthlessly from the ranks of the army, and if they attempt to resist—they must be wiped from the face of the earth…. In Petrograd, as in all other centers of revolution, order must be maintained with an iron hand.”^{263}

Rumors spread in Petrograd that the government headed by Lenin was prepared to flee to Moscow. The Bolsheviks announced officially that the rumors were lies; yet on the very day of this categorical denial, Lenin had approved the resolution to move the seat of government and reestablish Moscow as the country’s capital.

At first this evacuation was euphemistically called an “unloading” of Petrograd. The intended flight from Petrograd of almost the entire Bolshevik leadership and the government apparatus was kept secret for fear of terrorist acts. Just recently, on January 1, 1918, Lenin’s car had been attacked while he was returning from an army rally at the Mikhailovsky Manege.

When I emigrated to New York in 1976, I met the last living participant of that legendary assassination attempt, Nikolai Martyanov. The polite and gentle Martyanov told me that he considered Lenin a very lucky man. Among the terrorists were some of the best shots in the Russian Army, but Lenin escaped unscathed. “Amazing luck!”^{264}

So in 1918, Martyanov, never giving up, began preparing a new attempt on Lenin’s life, but somebody denounced Martyanov and his friends. They would have been executed by the Bolsheviks, but Lenin’s orders came. “Stop the case. Free them. Send them to the front.” As one of Lenin’s comrades commented, “In this case, he showed great nobility.”^{265}

On March 10, 1918, Lenin and his entourage left Petrograd for Moscow on special train No. 4001. The journey was comparatively long, almost twenty-four hours, and in that time Lenin managed to write an article in which he proclaimed, “The history of mankind in our days is making one of the greatest and most difficult turns with—and it can be said without the slightest exaggeration—immense significance for world liberation.” For Petrograd, at any rate, those days were truly historical.

On March 16, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets rubber-stamped Lenin’s resolution, “In the conditions of the crisis the Russian revolution is undergoing at the given moment, the situation of Petrograd as the capital has changed sharply. In view of this, the Congress resolves that until these conditions change, the capital of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic will temporarily be moved from Petrograd to Moscow.”^{266}

That this declaration was intended only as a smoke screen is clear, in particular, from Lunacharsky’s secret report to the Soviet of People’s Commissars, written in early March 1918 but published only in 1971. “The government firmly and absolutely correctly decided to leave Petersburg and move the capital of Soviet Russia to Moscow even if we were to achieve a more or less stable peace.” And further, continuing to call the capital Petersburg, as so many of its inhabitants did, Lunacharsky accurately and ruthlessly predicted the results of this fateful step. “Things will be hard for Petersburg. It will have to go through the agonizing process of reducing its economic and political significance. Of course, the government will try to ease this painful process, but still Petersburg cannot be saved from a terrible food crisis or further growth of unemployment.”^{267}

At that moment the majority of Petrograd’s intellectuals did not view this dramatic change in the city’s status pessimistically. The Bolshevik Krasnaya gazeta (Red Gazette) described their mood sarcastically in a lead article entitled “The Birdies Sang Too Soon.” “In connection with the evacuation the bourgeoisie is overjoyed. They think that as hated Bolsheviks will leave Petrograd, the former government will somehow return to power, and bourgeois paradise will arrive at last.”^{268} Blok in his notebook for March 11 noted, “‘Flight’ to Moscow, panic, rumors.”

On March 16, the Bolsheviks signed a separate peace with the Germans and Petrograd was spared German occupation. The elite of the former capital experienced an ambivalent reaction. Krasnaya gazeta went on mocking,

There is a rumor in the city that Petersburg will be declared a free city. On the streets, in the trolleys and in cafés, you can hear a lot about the future “free” Petersburg. The so-called “clean public” is building its faith on that rumor so dear to their hearts of the evacuation of the capital and the government’s move to Moscow. They say, “There’s a reason they left, there’s a secret paragraph in the peace treaty about making Petrograd an open city.” The bourgeoisie is building the most fantastic hopes on ridiculous rumors, and everywhere that fat cats meet they talk about these hopes. And that’s understandable. What else is left to the totally defeated bourgeoisie, but dreaming about what could have been?^{269}

Who would find it surprising that in March 1918 the populace of Petrograd believed the most fantastic rumors more than the decrees and editorials in official newspapers? People refused to look truth in the eye, still not understanding that the circle of Russian history had closed. Pushkin once described Peter the Great’s move of the capital of the Russian Empire from Moscow to Petersburg:

It was only in 1919 that Antsiferov admitted, “In the cosmic winds Russian imperialism found its tragic end. Petersburg stopped crowning Great Russia with its granite diadem. It became Red Piter. And Moscow, the porphyry-bearing widow, became the capital once again, the capital of the new Russia. And what of Petersburg?” And Antsiferov answered his rhetorical question, citing the prophetic lines from Andrei Bely’s epic novel, Petersburg, written before World War I, “If Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only seems that it exists.”^{270}

The loss of status as capital was a horrible blow for Petrograd. Many of the site’s inherent weaknesses, compensated for two hundred years by the massive influx of money and labor, suddenly pushed to the fore. All at once it was remembered that the former capital was quite removed from the rest of Russia, so food as well as raw materials for its industry had to be delivered from afar; that it was located too close to the border, open to foreign invasions; and that the climate was bad, and that the city was regularly flooded.

Clearly Lenin weighed these considerations before deciding to return the Russian capital from Petrograd to Moscow. As he described it, he felt like a military leader “taking the tatters of a defeated army or one shattered by panicky flight deep into the interior.” But as was the case with Peter the Great’s determination to establish his capital at St. Petersburg, there was an emotional, almost irrational aspect to Lenin’s decision.

Lenin was the first to admit he didn’t know Russia well. No fewer than fifteen years of his short life (he died in 1924, at age fifty-three) were spent abroad. For Lenin, Russia was embodied in Petersburg, with its all-powerful, tsarist institutions that constantly persecuted him, its police and prisons, in one of which Lenin spent fourteen months after his arrest in 1895.

Lenin felt great hostility to monarchical and bureaucratic Petersburg. But he also despised and hated the Petersburg intelligentsia, whom he considered spineless, drooling liberals and, most important, counterrevolutionary. Lenin’s anti-intellectual position was confirmed in the recollections of many people, including those who admired him.

A typical, psychologically telling example is related by Lunacharsky. The writer Maxim Gorky, who had often defended the Petrograd intelligentsia before Lenin, came to him to complain about the arrest of people who had hidden many Bolsheviks, Lenin included, from the tsarist police before the revolution.

Lenin responded to Gorky’s complaint with a laugh and said that all those idealist liberals ought to be arrested exactly because they are such “fine, kind people,” who always aid the persecuted. First they hid Bolseheviks from the tsar, and now they protected counterrevolutionaries from the Bolsheviks. “And we,” Lenin concluded sternly, “need to catch and destroy active counterrevolutionaries. The rest is clear.”^{271}

The move to Moscow was among other things an act of revenge, perhaps unconscious, on Lenin’s part against the Petrograd intelligentsia, whom the Bolshevik leader called “embittered … understanding nothing, forgetting nothing, having learned nothing, at best—in the very rare best case—confused, despairing, whining, repeating old superstitions, frightened and frightening itself.”^{272}

Like Peter the Great breaking with Moscow to start Russian history afresh, Lenin left behind the former tsarist capital to assert his right to a radical experiment. In demoting Petrograd, Lenin demonstrated the seriousness of the new regime’s rejection of the old Russia, its institutions, and its intelligentsia. After leaving Petrograd, Lenin wrote to Gorky, who remained in the city: “The intellectual powers of the workers and peasants are growing in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its helpers, the little intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brain of the nation. In fact they are not the brain, but the droppings.”^{273}

With the government’s move to Moscow, Lunacharsky’s dire predictions about Petrograd’s fate immediately came to pass. Unemployment and economic dislocation increased not daily but hourly, and the population began to decline dramatically. In postrevolutionary Russia the population fell throughout the country, but overall decline and population losses were the greatest in Petrograd.

In 1915 Petrograd had 2,347,000 people. But on June 2, 1918, just two and a half months after the city lost capital status, there were only 1,468,000 people living there. This sharp downturn continued. The census of August 1920 reported only 799,000 people in Petrograd, that is, not quite 35 percent of the prerevolutionary level.^{274}

The cold, hungry city was dying, and many recalled the curse of Tsarina Eudoxia, the wife Peter the Great exiled to a convent: “Sankt-Peterburg will stand empty!”

Pipes froze. People burned furniture, books, and the wood of their houses for firewood. The avant-garde artist Yuri Annenkov, who later emigrated to France, recalled,

It was an era of endless hungry lines, queues in front of empty “produce distributors,” an epic era of rotten, frozen offal, moldy bread crusts, and inedible substitutes. The French, who had lived through a four-year Nazi occupation, liked to talk of those years as years of hunger and severe shortages. I was in Paris then, too—an insignificant shortage of some products, a lowering of quality in others, artificial but still aromatic coffee, a slight reduction in electric energy and gas. No one died of hunger on icy sidewalks, no one tore apart fallen horses, no one ate dogs, or cats, or rats.^{275}

Petrograders went through all that, but something kept them from total despair. Shklovsky maintained, “This city did not become provincial, it was not taken because it heated itself with its own fire, burned everyone who attacked it. Potatoes and carrots were bought like flowers; poems and tomorrow were sacred.”

The factories stopped smoking, and the sky above Petrograd became cloudless and wrenchingly blue. Artists egocentrically found new beauty in the radically changed urban landscape.

You no longer saw luxurious carriages. The crowd of sated, strolling people vanished. The streets were deserted, and the city that could be seen only knee-high at last stood up at full height. Before that, when you drew it, you sometimes had to wait several minutes for a crowd of people to pass and let you see the pure line of a building’s foundation, of the bottom of a column or statue, or the horizon over the river. Now everything was free.^{276}

But even this incredible transformation did not seem adequate to many artists, especially in the avant-garde. They wanted to feel like the true masters of the former capital, if only for an hour, and play even more boldly with its still majestic and beautiful squares, prospects, palaces, and monuments.

Petrograd was called the Petrograd Labor Commune in those days. The editorial of the first issue in late 1918 of the semiofficial newspaper Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the Commune), whose editor in chief was Akhmatova’s future husband, Punin, was a poem by the futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Orders on the Army of Art.”

In another poem, which was soon placed in a Communist newspaper, Mayakovsky confidently proclaimed, “A new architect is coming. It is we, the illuminators of tomorrow’s cities.” The radical poet’s declarations were not simply utopian manifestoes; rather, they summed up the fantastic artistic experiments already attempted by the avant-gardists on a citywide scale.

The first grand theatrical demonstration, imitating the legendary festivities of the French Revolution, rolled down the streets of Petrograd on May 1, 1918. Red banners, huge multicolored proclamations, garlands of greenery and flags covered the most important buildings, squares, bridges, and embankments. Giant posters showed soldiers and peasants, painted in bold orange and cinnabar. People’s Commissar Lunacharsky rushed around the city in a car from one mass rally to another.

“It’s easy to celebrate,” he intoned, “when everything is going swimmingly and fortune pats us on the head. But the fact that we, hungry Petrograders, besieged, with enemies within, bearing such a burden of unemployment and suffering on our shoulders, still are celebrating proudly and solemnly—this is our real achievement.”^{277}

At the Winter Palace, renamed by the politically astute Lunacharsky the Palace of the Arts, Mozart’s Requiem was performed for an audience of seven thousand. Many were listening to classical music for the first time, and as Lunacharsky recalled, a small boy in the front row thought that he was in church, sank to his knees, and stayed that way for the entire concert.

Aeroplanes soared overhead. The fleet on the Neva was festooned with thousands of flags. Fireworks blazed in the sky that night and the artillery sounded salutes from the Peter and Paul Fortress. And the memorable celebration ended with a parade of thousands of Petrograd’s firemen in gleaming brass helmets carrying blazing torches—a scene worthy of a new Rembrandt.

By the time a lavish celebration for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution was decided a few months later, there were already some attempts to push aside Petrograd’s avant-garde artists. So for this occasion Lunacharsky handed out commissions to a group of some 170 artists, sculptors, and architects, among whom were many traditionalists. But the avant-garde painter Nathan Altman, for instance, still got permission to redesign Palace Square (renamed Uritsky Square, in memory of the recently assassinated prominent Bolshevik), and that symbol of the former monarchy, the Winter Palace, standing on it.

In 1966, Altman told me that he had passionately wanted to turn the square into a huge open-air auditorium, where the revolutionary crowd could at last feel at home. For that he had to “destroy the imperial grandeur of the square.”^{278} On the palace and other buildings around the square, Altman hung enormous propaganda posters, depicting the “new hegemonic forces”—gigantic workers and peasants. In the center of the square, near the Alexander Column, he placed a rostrum made up of bright red and orange surfaces, which in the evening light created the feeling of a wild cubist flame. This avant-garde rostrum seemed to be blowing up the the Alexander Column, which Altman associated with the old order.

In comparable fashion the avant-garde artists transformed the Hermitage, the Admiralty, the Academy of Sciences, and many other historic buildings of old Petersburg. When I asked Altman in 1966 where he got the material—the panels alone required tens of thousands of meters of canvas—the artist, smiling enigmatically, replied, “They didn’t skimp back then.”

This bold, lavish experiment in ruined Petrograd opened a new page in the history of urban design. But the hungry masses were angered by the “Futurist showings off” of the leftist artists. A contemporary wrote, “Alien and uncomprehending columns of demonstrators walked past the red and black sails thrown onto the Police Bridge by the artist Lebedev, past green canvases and orange curves which covered the boulevard and the column on Palace Square at Altman’s whim, past fantastically deformed figures with hammers and rifles on Petrograd buildings.”^{279}

Even the workers, who supported the Bolsheviks, vaguely felt that Petrograd was being subjected to some sort of ideological violence. For locals the modernist experiments with the city’s squares and palaces in November 1918 did not differ in the least from another mockery carried out that same November of the historical values of the former capital.

Several thousand participants had come to Petrograd for the Congress of Committees of Peasants, and many of them were housed at the Palace of the Arts. When they left after the debates, it was discovered that all the bathtubs of the palace—the official residence of the imperial family before the revolution—and an enormous number of Sevres, Saxon, and Oriental vases of museum quality had been filled with excrement.

Outraged by the contempt of the country’s new masters for its cultural heritage, Maxim Gorky conveyed the shock of the Petrograd intelligentsia: “This was done not out of need—the toilets in the palace were fine and the plumbing worked. No, this hooliganism was an expression of the desire to break, destroy, mock, and spoil beauty.”^{280}

So Petrograd literature rushed to defend the city’s cultural heritage as if it had suddenly sensed the fatal threat to its roots. Music and art had done it first, of course. Predicting the coming cataclysms, Tchaikovsky’s symphonies bewailed the great city in the nineteenth century. Benois and his companions in Mir iskusstva, with the same prophetically nostalgic feeling, described and captured the essence of the capital at the turn of the century. But contemporary literature, even the most modern, merely continued to damn Petersburg routinely. In that sense it remained hopelessly under the spell of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, the undisputed idols of the Russian symbolists.

I should stress once more that many leading symbolists grew up influenced heavily by Slavophile ideas. So while radically rethinking some of Gogol and Dostoyevsky’s heritage, the literary symbolists remained much more under the influence of their Slavophile ideology than the Russian artists of the turn of the century.

Even Benois and Diaghilev’s comrades at Mir iskusstva— Merezhkovsky and his wife, Hippius—did not go beyond what Gogol had begun and Dostoyevsky had developed in their attitude toward Petersburg. Hippius wrote skillful poetry and Merezhkovsky full-blown entertaining historical novels that were very popular (among them the eloquently named Antichrist, subtitled “Peter and Alexei,” dealing specifically with Peter the Great), and whose contents, despite all pseudo-philosophical trappings, could be easily reduced to the forthright conclusion by Dostoyevsky that Petersburg was an alien phenomenon in Russia and therefore doomed to destruction. “SanktPeterburg will stand empty!” In the amusing middle-brow interpretation this old curse had turned into an ideological cliché.

A much more ambitious and significant attack on the imperial capital was the novel Petersburg, written by the symbolist Andrei Bely, who was born in Moscow in 1880 and died there in 1934. This monumental work, finished in its first version in 1913, is unquestionably the peak of Russian symbolist prose. Nabokov held Bely’s Petersburg on a par with Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an opinion shared by many specialists.

Bely’s attitude toward Petersburg is profoundly negative, and in that sense he is a faithful adherent to the Gogol-Nekrasov-Dostoyevsky tradition. “Europe’s culture was imagined by the Russians; the West has civilization; there is no Western culture in our sense of the word; such culture in embryonic form exists only in Russia.” Such Slavophile passages are not unusual in the Muscovite Bely’s writing. Therefore Bely’s admission, made in a letter to his friend the Petersburger Blok, should not surprise us: “In Petersburg I am a tourist, an observer, not an inhabitant.”^{281}

The fact that the most famous modernist text about Petersburg belongs to a Muscovite is paradoxical only at first glance, for the essence of Bely’s Petersburg, no matter how one turns it or interprets it, consists of artistically humiliating and philosophically destroying the “illegal” capital. No wonder Bunin irritatedly rejected Bely’s novel. “What a vile idea the book has—‘Petersburg will stand empty.’ What did Petersburg ever do to him?”^{282} And Akhmatova in her later years often said, “The novel Petersburg for us Petersburgers is so unlike the real Petersburg.”

One of the impulses for writing the novel came to Bely with the unveiling in Petersburg on May 23, 1909, of the equine statue of Emperor Alexander III on Znamenskaya Square. Created by the sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy (1866-1938), who was born in Italy of an American mother and was the scion of one of the noblest Russian families, the monument caused a storm of controversy. It presented the heavy, gloomy emperor sitting on a stolid draft horse.

Many saw a political caricature in that statue, but Trubetskoy, who was famous for never reading books or newspapers and didn’t know a word of Russian, replied to the question, “What is the idea of your monument?” with, “I don’t care about politics. I simply depicted one animal on another.”

To general amazement, the widow of Alexander III, Maria Fyodorovna, supported the project, since she believed the statue greatly resembled her late husband, and her son, Nicholas II, was forced to agree. As soon as the monument was erected, jokes began circulating around Petersburg. One ditty went as follows:

The ill-starred statue annoyed Nicholas so much that he wanted to move it to the Siberian city of Irkutsk but gave up the idea when he was told the latest bon mot going around town—the sovereign wanted to exile his father to Siberia. Ironically, the Soviets fulfilled the last Russian emperor’s wish. In 1937 Trubetskoy’s work was removed from its pedestal and exiled not to Siberia but to the backyard of the Russian (formerly, Alexander III) Museum.

Whenever I went through the museum, I always stopped at one of its big windows to look out at the monstrously heavy silhouette of the rider and horse, which was such a contrast to Falconet’s Bronze Horseman. This contrast was felt even more acutely in 1909. In this respect Trubetskoy’s monument was for many viewers, including Bely, just another proof of the dead end into which Peter the Great had led Russia. (In 1994 this equestrian statue at last found a home—erected not on its former site, but in front of one of the palaces of St. Petersburg.)

Of course, Bely brought Falconet’s statue into his novel, as well as numerous themes from Pushkin’s poem that was dedicated to it, but he removed Pushkin’s dualism, which vacillated in its evaluation of the role of Petersburg’s founder. For Bely the Bronze Horseman is a figure out of the apocalypse, still galloping through Petersburg in 1905, a horrible symbol of the vain attempts at Westernizing by the Russian Empire.

The detective plot of Bely’s novel—the hunt for an important Petersburg official by revolutionary terrorists—is merely an excuse for fantastic situations, intense descriptions, and mystical theories (at that time Bely was a fanatical adherent of Rudolf Steiner and his anthroposophic teaching). The reader is virtually engulfed by a literary storm of enormous power. Bely uses irony, absurdity, pathos, and parody; in particular, he parodies Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. He is a virtuoso at using the entire arsenal of techniques first tried by his precursors Gogol and Dostoyevsky. He also creates brilliant new effects, incomparably mixing the horrible, the funny, and the tragic with the aid of masterful linguistic tricks. Yevgeny Zamyatin rightly observed that Bely’s Petersburg has the same complicated relation to the Russian language that Ulysses has to English.

For Bely, heavily influenced by anthroposophy, Petersburg is on the border between the earthly and the cosmic on the one hand and between the West and Asia on the other. This is the novel’s main intellectual innovation. Before Bely the imperial capital had always been viewed in the framework of West versus Russia. But Bely seems to soar into space and from there to see Petersburg caught between two realities—Western and Asiatic. This is a tragic situation for him. “The West stinks of decay, and the East does not stink only because it has decayed long ago.”

Europe, Bely predicted, would inevitably die, swallowed up by Asia, and Petersburg, that loathsome example of the triumph of civilization over culture, would vanish. Russian writers before Bely, enjoying their fantasies about the destruction of their capital, expected three of the four elements to beset the city—Petersburg would perish in a flood, by burning, or by dissolving like a mirage. Bely introduces the fourth element, earth. In his novel Petersburg falls into a hole.

When inspired, Bely, opening wide his piercing blue eyes, read excerpts from his novel at Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Tower, jumping up and practically taking off, so that his hair stood on end like a crown. The spellbound listeners, nodding in time to the hypnotically rhythmic prose, were prepared to consider the author a prophet.

But Blok—who had a love-hate relationship with Bely that was typical of the symbolists, further complicated by Bely’s infatuation with Blok’s wife—wrote after hearing the novel, “revulsion for the terrible things he sees; evil work; the approach of despair (if the world really is like that).”^{283}

And Blok also noted in that “muddled novel with a stamp of genius” an amazing parallel with his own autobiographical verse epic. Retribution, which preoccupied Blok in those years and in which the image of Petersburg loomed large. Actually, for all their obvious differences in style, the similarity of the attitudes toward the imperial capital of the Muscovite Bely and the Petersburger Blok is astonishing.

The Slavophile symbolist doctrine, which rejected a Germanic Petersburg, was obviously stronger than direct experience even for such an independent personality as Blok. Blok’s Retribution and his drafts of it are filled with Slavophile anti-Petersburg rhetoric. For instance, Peter the Great appears in Blok’s work, as he does in Bely’s novel, as an emanation of the devil.

Similar symbolist clichés, the result of a mix of Slavophile and modernist-urbanist phraseology, fill Blok’s correspondence, which bristles with italics: “again that horrible anger at Petersburg boils within me, for I know that it is a lousy, rotten nucleus, where our boldness wanes and weakens … we live daily in horror, stink, and despair, in factory smoke, in the rouge of lascivious smiles, in the roar of disgusting automobiles … Petersburg is a gigantic whorehouse, I feel it. You can’t rest, learn everything there, a brief rest only where the masts creak, boats sway on the outskirts, on the islands, at the gulf, in twilight.”^{284}

Blok’s paradoxical love for Petersburg’s outskirts, like his hatred of the “pompous” center, was ideological in nature and originated in his Slavophile beliefs. But in this particular instance there were also some true and strong emotions involved, the happy result of which was a multitude of strange, moody poems in which Blok, not calling Petersburg by name, nevertheless lets us feel the longing, sadness, and charm of its outskirts.

The shades of “small” Petersburgers flicker in those poems—tramps, prostitutes, card sharks, drunken sailors. Blok’s Petersburg is hostile to all those people. In the traditions of Gogol, Nekrasov, and Dostoyevsky, he depicts the metropolis as a monster. But we also feel an intensely personal note, comparable to Blok’s observation of the city in his diaries, like this almost Dickensian one: “What dreariness—almost tears. Night—on the broad embankment of the Neva, near the university, barely visible among the rocks was a child, a boy. His mother (a peasant) picked him up and he wrapped his little arms around her neck—afraid. Horrible, miserable city, where a child gets lost. It chokes me with tears.”^{285}

It is only natural, therefore, that Blok, who at first greeted the Bolshevik coup enthusiastically, managed to create an astonishing picture of postrevolutionary Petrograd, its hackles raised, in his famous narrative epic The Twelve, written in January 1918. The twelve of the title are a Red Army patrol walking through the dark, ruined city, and at the same time they become in Blok’s imagination the twelve apostles, led by Jesus Christ.

Petrograd in The Twelve appears in a series of impressionistic sketches—snow, ice, shoot-outs, and robberies on the streets, huge political posters flapping in a sharp wind. Despite the mystical image of Christ, the narrative presented some intentionally brutal and horrifying pictures. Therefore Blok’s work pleased both the Bolsheviks and their foes. Still, controversy flared. Religious leaders were shocked that Blok had Christ leading the Red Army through Petrograd. In a letter to a friend, one writer was indignant: “But I and many millions of people are now observing something completely different from what Christ taught. Then why should he be leading that gang? When you see Blok, ask him about that.”^{286}

Blok’s and Akhmatova’s political positions diverged sharply then. At the start of the Bolshevik revolution Akhmatova published in liberal newspapers, which were soon shut down by the authorities. She also read her poetry at rallies with a marked anti-Bolshevik character.

At one of them organized to support political prisoners, victims of the Bolshevik terror, Akhmatova read her old poem “The Prayer,” which took on an even more ominous tone in the new circumstances. She appeared with her closest friends; Olga Sudeikina danced and Arthur Lourié played the piano at the same concert. Blok, who did not attend, was told the audience shouted “Traitor!” at the mention of his name.

Tellingly, Akhmatova refused to participate in another literary evening when she learned that someone would be reading The Twelve. In his notebook a deeply wounded Blok called her decision “astonishing news.”^{287}

Much later, Akhmatova, recalling Petersburg after the Bolshevik revolution, remarked mournfully, “The city did not simply change, it determinedly turned into its opposite.” Apparently, from similar observations of Petrograd in agony, Akhmatova and Blok drew different conclusions.

Such obvious disagreements between Akhmatova and Blok in interpreting the Petersburg mythos were dictated by several reasons. Age made a difference, as well as being from different social strata and feuding literary movements. The acmeists, Akhmatova included, were freer of the clichés employed by the Slavophile “professorial” culture. Therefore their attitude toward Petersburg was less prejudiced and more sympathetic.

In that sense the acmeists had much in common with Benois and his Mir iskusstva. They were also similar in their use of a flexible, confident line and well-drawn, lacelike detail. In the early poems of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, two leading acmeists, there is a definite resemblance to the drawings of the Mir iskusstva group. In their work, Petersburg at last ceases to threaten and takes on the intimate traits of a place that has been lived in. But there were also differences with Mir iskusstva, which became more apparent in time.

The acmeists considered their forefather to be the poet Innokenti Annensky (1855-1909), the author of the posthumously published “Petersburg,” a most concentrated presentation of the symbolists’ imagery of the city on the Neva.

Akhmatova had a special respect for Annensky that went beyond appreciation of his poetry. She recalled with great feeling Annensky’s words when he learned of the wedding of his relative to Akhmatova’s older sister: “I would have chosen the younger one.” Akhmatova insisted, “I mark my ‘beginning’ from Annensky’s poetry. His work, to my mind, is tragic, sincere, and whole-hearted.”

For Annensky Petersburg was always tied to the “awareness of a damned mistake.” For the acmeists, the existence of Petersburg was not an issue; the city was a given for them and belonging to it a source of pride. That’s why they didn’t borrow Annensky’s Petersburg mythology but took to heart his dramatic precision in descriptions and his expressive landscape details, like the ones that open “Petersburg”:

Viktor Zhirmunsky later announced that “Akhmatova’s Petersburg landscape was her poetic discovery.”^{288} In fact, Akhmatova had borrowed extensively from Annensky in this respect, and also something from Blok and the other symbolists. But the landscape they saw as unpeopled, hostile, and historically illegitimate takes on roots in Akhmatova’s work, is legitimized by her, and, most important, becomes “homey” and familiar. Akhmatova’s “autobiographical” heroine moves around freely in the historical and temporal space of Petersburg.

For Akhmatova Petersburg is an enchanted place, as it is for Annensky. But in differing from him, she finds it even better. She does not feel herself a stranger—

Peter’s smile may be cold, but it is addressed to Akhmatova personally. In one poem of 1914 Akhmatova ties her entire existence to Petersburg. She calls it her “blessed cradle,” “solemn bridal bed,” and “prie-dieu of my prayers”—an amazing combination but typical of Akhmatova. This is the city in which her Muse lives, the city “loved with bitter love.”

Not one of the Mir iskusstva participants would have ever spoken or even thought in such a way. At that period their attitude toward Petersburg was very loving but with a faint smile of condescension, as for an object that was quite lovely and dear but without question part of the distant past. Those artists delighted in Petersburg as antiquarians might.

The acmeists quickly overcame that approach. Akhmatova later insisted that Mandelstam “disdained” the Mir iskusstva love of Petersburg, but she herself had patiently studied the architecture of old Petersburg, and the reappraisal by Benois and Co. of that architecture had a significant influence on both her and Mandelstam.

Mandelstam recalled,

When I was seven or eight, I regarded as something sacred and festive Petersburg’s architectural ensemble, the granite and stone blocks, the tender heart of the city, with its unexpected squares, lacy gardens, and islands of monuments, the Caryatids of the Hermitage, the mysterious Millionnaya Street, where there were never any passersby and where among the marble buildings one tiny grocery store was hidden, and especially the arch of the General Staff Headquarters, the Senate Square, and “Dutch” Petersburg.

The acmeists’ attitude—which was intimate and at the same time solemn and historically rooted—portended the horror with which Akhmatova responded to the sudden changes in the face of the city on the Neva after the Bolsheviks came to power:

But Akhmatova’s indignation quickly turned to pity in the escalating deterioration of her beloved city.

All the old Petersburg signs were still in place, but behind them, there was nothing but dusk, gloom, and gaping emptiness. Typhus, hunger, executions, dark apartments, damp logs, people swollen beyond recognition. You could pick a bouquet of wild flowers at the Gostiny Dvor. The famous Petersburg wooden pavements were rotting. It still smelled of chocolate from the cellar windows of Kraft’s. The cemeteries were torn up.

After the Bolshevik revolution Akhmatova did not leave for the West, as did numerous intellectual notables, many of them former ideological “foes” of Petersburg. Her refusal to emigrate was perceived as a conscious sacrifice, as were Mandelstam’s and Gumilyov’s. One of the many complex reasons for that fateful decision was Akhmatova’s proclaimed desire to save at least some remains of Petersburg’s grandeur, the “palaces, fire, and water” of the former capital.

The acmeists’ identification of Petersburg’s fate with the fate of Russia took on such a declarative character at the time that in Mandelstam’s poetry, for instance, “the symbol of faithfulness to Russia in her misfortune became St. Isaac’s Cathedral,”^{289} according to Sergei Averintsev, even though the poet disliked that church from a purely architectural point of view.

Thus, the acmeists helped to usher in a new period in the history of the Petersburg mythos, in which the city began to be viewed as martyr. Anything that could be integrated into this mythos was once again—after a hiatus of one hundred years—regarded positively, even if a particular building or statue was not liked. After the Mir iskusstva group’s rather sentimental look at the city, this was a significant new attitude, prompted by a totally different political and social reality.

To suffer together with Petersburg became a ritual. Partly because of this sacrificial rite, for the first time in the history of Russian culture Petersburg’s inevitable downfall was interpreted as the first stage of its inexorable resurrection in some new form.

Thus Mandelstam, describing Petersburg’s decay, simultaneously predicts the city’s postapocalyptic existence:

Grass on Petersburg streets—the first runners of a virgin forest, which will cover the place of modern cities. This bright, tender green, amazing in its freshness, belongs to the new animate nature. Truly Petersburg is the most avant-garde city in the world. The race of modernity is not measured by the existence of subway or skyscraper, but by merry grass breaking through the urban stones.

Akhmatova expressed her feelings for the dying Petersburg with even more mystical force:

Akhmatova’s irrational, almost ecstatic sensation that “The miraculous comes so close” to the collapsing dirty buildings of Petersburg is deciphered by Mandelstam: “Nothing is impossible. Like a dying man’s room open to everything, the door of the old world is now wide open to the crowd. Suddenly everything became common property. Go and take. Everything is accessible: all the labyrinths, all the secret places, all the hidden passages.”

In Mandelstam’s poetry of that period, horror and despair at witnessing Petersburg’s convulsions prevail. There is no one to complain to, and the poet must raise his voice to the heavens:

But in Mandelstam’s essay “Word and Culture,” we can find autobiographical lines that cast a different light on current events. “At last we found inner freedom, real inner merriment. We drink water from clay pitchers as if it were wine, and the sun likes a monastery refectory more than a restaurant. Apples, bread, potatoes—they sate not only physical but spiritual hunger.”

The artist Vladimir Milashevsky, a rather cynical observer, gave an ironic commentary to this sort of almost religious frenzy and obsession with cathartic ideas that were so prevalent in postrevolutionary Petrograd: “Meager nourishment and sluggish functions of the physical body affected the psyche. It gave rise to meager, strange, and distorted ideas. In monasteries the monks made a point of eating little, in order to believe more strongly, to have religious visions. ‘I believe! I believe! I believe rapturously!’”^{290}

By the 1920s Petrograd really did resemble a vision of some religious ascetic. We can judge that from a remarkable cycle of lithographs, “Petersburg in 1921,” by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957). That series was Dobuzhinsky’s farewell to the city he loved more than anything else on earth. Later, as an émigré in the West, the artist would recall, “The city was dying before my very eyes with a death of incredible beauty, and I tried to capture as best I could its terrible, deserted, and wounded look.”^{291}

A member of Mir iskusstva, all of whose participants were enraptured by Petersburg, Dobuzhinsky stood out even among them for his uncanny comprehension of the city’s mood. He did not idealize old Petersburg. His attention from the first was captured by the newest parts of the city: “Those sleepy canals, endless fences, brick fireproof walls without windows, piles of black logs, empty lots, dark wells of courtyards—it all astonished me with its sharply drawn, even eerie features. Everything seemed extraordinarily original, imbued with bitter poetry and mystery.”^{292}

Dobuzhinsky’s contemporaries had noticed early on that alongside the Petersburg of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky in literature appeared “Dobuzhinsky’s Petersburg” in the visual arts. “When they looked at a foggy sunset in London, people said, like Oscar Wilde, that it was ‘a Turner sunset,’ and when they looked at the blind stone backs of Petersburg buildings, they saw ‘Dobuzhinsky walls.’ It was as if we were given different eyes for some objects, different glasses.”^{293}

Akhmatova once wrote that she observed her beloved city “with the curiosity of a foreigner.” Dobuzhinsky’s friend Milashevsky found something comparable in the artist’s Petersburg works. “Dobuzhinsky has the feeling of a man seeing Petersburg for the first time. You have to be born elsewhere to see it in all its strangeness. Dobuzhinsky was not born in Petersburg like Somov, Benois, or Blok; he saw it for the first time as a young man and then as an adult artist. But Petersburg became the hometown of his soul.”^{294}

Dobuzhinsky readily admitted how enormously Dostoyevsky had influenced his artistic vision of Petersburg. It is through the prism of Dostoyevsky that Dobuzhinsky first saw the imperial capital, and so he started to capture its “nonimperial” aspects—the outskirts, dimly lit, empty, and sad. In Dobuzhinsky’s work, Petersburg’s walls, roofs, and chimneys formed fantastic landscapes filled with anxiety and anticipation.

Dobuzhinsky expressed his admiration for Dostoyevsky by illustrating his White Nights, which the writer had subtitled A Sentimental Novel. The seventeen stark, transparent drawings Dobuzhinsky did for White Nights in the early 1920s are his masterpiece. The exquisite drawings, with their sensitive contrasts of black and white, creating an atmosphere of quiet despair, can easily be called the best illustrations of Dostoyevsky. At the same time, they create probably the most inspired visual paean to Petersburg in all of Russian art. In that sense, Dobuzhinsky’s series still has no rivals in Russian culture.

His album of lithographs, “Petersburg in 1921,” is another incomparable document capturing the tragedy of the former capital. The artist fixes the city’s farewell with Western civilization, which Akhmatova expressed in poetry in those same years:

It is hard to imagine the shock Dobuzhinsky, usually slow to action and regally calm, so in love with Petersburg, must have experienced to give in to the hardships and humiliations of postrevolutionary life, pack his bags, and emigrate to the West while it was still possible, leaving behind forever the city and his friends, among them Akhmatova, and dying eventually, a heartbroken old man, in New York City.

In late 1920 and early 1921 decrees were issued in Petrograd eliminating fares on public transportation and admission to the steam baths and making apartments, water, and electricity free for residents. The problem was that the trolleys rarely ran then, the water froze, and washing at home, much less at the baths, was rare. Money didn’t mean anything anyway, because there was nothing to buy. Food was distributed in ration parcels at work.

People who were not employed in factories or Soviet offices received a bread ration of half a pound a day, which was called “hunger rations.” In order to survive, intellectuals started “ration hunting,” finding parcels wherever they could.

The artist Yuri Annenkov, who drew the very successful cubist illustrations for the first edition of Blok’s The Twelve, became the champion ration hunter. As a professor in the reorganized Academy of Arts, he received “scholar’s rations,” and as a founder of the cultural and educational studio for militiamen, he got their parcel, too. Annenkov found a job there for Dobuzhinsky, who lectured the militia on the Petersburg architectural monuments they were supposed to guard. Lecturing sailors guaranteed Annenkov the “special” rations parcel of the Baltic fleet. (The archives contain the topics of lectures sanctioned by the Bolsheviks for sailors in the winter of 1920: “The Origins of Man,” “Italian Painting,” “Mores and Life in Austria.”^{295}) But the most generous rations—for a breast-feeding mother—were given to Annenkov at the Maternity Center, now called the Rosa Luxemburg Drops of Milk, for lecturing the midwives on the history of sculpture.

Blok, who did not have to work for a living before the revolution, was hard up under the Bolsheviks, since he lacked the know-how to “ration hunt.” The Communists treated him sympathetically at first. Annenkov recalled how he, Blok, Bely, Olga Sudeikina, and a few other friends had stayed late at someone’s house in October 1919 and, because there was a curfew in Petrograd then, they decided to spend the night there.

They put Olga in the bed while Blok napped at a table. Toward dawn there was a commanding knock at the door: armed sailors led by the military commandant of Petrograd came to search the apartment in response to a report about “suspicious” guests from the vigilant neighbors of their “building committee of the poor.” (The Bolsheviks created such committees in every Petrograd house.)

“Any strangers here?”

“Yes, as you can see: the poet Alexander Blok is sleeping at the table,” replied the host. “He lives far away and would not have gotten back in time for the curfew.”

“Detail!” The self-important Bolshevik was impressed. “Which Blok, the real one?”

“One hundred percent!”

After a peek at the sleeping poet, the commandant whispered, “To hell with you!” to the host and tiptoed out, leading away the sailors with their clanging weapons. Annenkov thought then that as a young man the Communist must have read Blok’s The Unknown Woman, as so many of his contemporaries had….

When Blok, Bely, and Annenkov left in the morning, a symbolic meeting of the new regime and the Petrograd intelligentsia took place on deserted Nevsky Prospect. They came across a bored militiaman with a rifle over his shoulder, legs apart, writing his name in the snow with his urine. Upon seeing that, Bely shouted, “I don’t know how to write on snow! I need ink, just a little bottle of ink! And a scrap of paper!”

“Move along, citizens, move along,” the militiaman muttered, buttoning his fly.^{296}

Blok used to tell his friends who were making do with lecturing, “I envy you all: you know how to talk, so you lecture someone somewhere. I don’t know how. I can only read from a text.” But it was impossible to live on a writer’s fees in those days. One writer calculated that to survive in Petrograd in 1920, Shakespeare would have had to write three plays a month, and Turgenev’s fees for his novel Fathers and Sons could have kept him fed for three weeks.^{297} So to survive, Blok took a job, as did many other Petrograd intellectuals, in the People’s Commissariat of Education, that is, the Soviet Ministry of Culture, headed by Lunacharsky.

The poet worked in its theatrical department, sitting on all kinds of committees and on the editorial board of Vsemirnaya Literatura (World Literature) Publishing House. Here Blok and other intellectuals compiled an enormous list of masterpieces of all times and peoples that had to be retranslated into Russian and published for the proletarian audience. The first series alone was to include fifteen hundred titles of an academic nature with detailed commentary and another five thousand of a more popular kind.

It was Maxim Gorky’s utopian idea, and in the impossible conditions of postrevolutionary Russia, it would have taken a hundred years to complete, but in the meantime, writers could get fed. One of them, André Levinson, later recalled bitterly in exile that their work was the “hopeless and paradoxical task of implanting the West’s spiritual culture on the ruins of Russian life…. We lived in a naive illusion in those years, thinking that Byron and Flaubert reaching the masses even in the guise of the Bolshevik ‘bluff’ would enrich and astonish more than one soul.”^{298}

At meetings of the editorial board of Vsemirnaya Literatura Blok often met with Nikolai Gumilyov, who had returned to Petrograd in 1918 from Paris, where he had been serving in the office of the military attaché of the provisional government overthrown by the Bolsheviks. To the friends who tried to dissuade him from what they considered to be a foolish decision, Gumilyov said, “I fought the Germans for three years and I hunted lion in Africa. But I’ve never seen a Bolshevik. Why shouldn’t I go to Petrograd? I doubt it’s more dangerous than the jungles.”^{299}

Gumilyov behaved provocatively in Bolshevik Petrograd, announcing at every corner that he was a monarchist and crossing himself at every church he passed, which was considered almost a sign of madness in the conditions of official atheism and “red terror.” Just as Gumilyov arrived in Petrograd a Russian writer was complaining to another by letter, “There are patrols in the evenings now—they search people for weapons. The decree says that if they find a gun and take it away and the person resists, he is to be shot on the spot. So where’s the proclaimed abolition of capital punishment? In the past even regicides were first given a trial and only then hanged, but now they do it ‘on the spot.’ They’ve turned everybody into an executioner!”^{300}

Still Lunacharsky and Gorky hired Gumilyov to work at Vsemirnaya Literatura; he also started to give lectures to Petrograd workers and sailors. Even for audiences like those Gumilyov declaimed his monarchist poems. He laughed. “The Bolsheviks despise conformists. I prefer to be respected.”

Years later Akhmatova was asked why Gumilyov took part in various cultural enterprises under the aegis of the Bolsheviks: he translated, lectured, and led a seminar of young poets. She explained that he had been a born organizer—just think of the creation of acmeism. But at the time it would have been ridiculous to consider that he could go to the tsarist minister of education and announce, “I want to organize a studio to teach people how to write poetry.” Under the Bolsheviks that became possible. Moreover, Gumilyov had to survive. Before the revolution he lived on his annuity, but under the Bolsheviks only by working in Lunacharsky’s commissariat could he stave off starvation.

This was how Akhmatova justified Gumilyov’s compromise with the regime. Still she herself did not go to work for the Bolsheviks despite her hunger. She admitted that once, when things got really bad, she went to Gorky to ask for some work. Gorky suggested she apply to the Communist International, the notorious Comintern, headed by the chief of the Petrograd Communists, Grigory Zinoviev. She would be given Communist proclamations to translate into Italian. Akhmatova refused the job. “Just think: I would do translations that would be sent to Italy, for which people would be arrested.” Akhmatova’s principles cost her dearly. A friend writing to his wife reported, “Akhmatova has turned into a horrible skeleton, dressed in rags.”^{301}

On Gumilyov’s return to Bolshevik Petrograd, Akhmatova was quite laconic: “He loved his mother and was a good son.” Their marriage had fallen apart even before the revolution. Gumilyov later confessed to a woman friend that soon after his marriage to Akhmatova, he began to cheat on her. “But she demanded absolute fidelity.” According to the wayward husband, Akhmatova carried on a “love war” with him in the style of Knut Hamsun, that is, she was constantly having jealous rages with stormy scenes and stormy reconciliations. But Gumilyov hated “working out” their relationship.

In the sixties, Akhmatova stated that Gumilyov was a “complex man, refined but not soft. He could not be called responsive.” In response to her demand, “Nikolai, we have to talk,” he would typically answer, “Leave me alone, mother dear.”

Even the birth of their son, Lev, in 1912 did not save the foundering marriage. “We argued over him, too,” Gumilyov later complained. Akhmatova rarely saw the child, who was brought up by Gumilyov’s relatives, and once when asked what he was doing, the child replied, “I’m trying to figure out the odds of my mother thinking about me.”^{302}

While holding Akhmatova’s work in high esteem, Gumilyov could not forgive her for her poem of the war years, “The Prayer,” calling it monstrous. He would quote,

and comment indignantly, “She’s asking God to kill Lev and me! After all, the friend here is meant to be me…. But thank God, that monstrous prayer, like most prayers, was not heard. Lev is—knock on wood—a sturdy lad!”^{303} Gumilyov never learned that Akhmatova’s prayer, embodied in a poem, was a prophecy of the true—and most tragic—course of events. When in June 1941 Akhmatova met Tsvetayeva for the first time, the latter asked her, “How could you write ‘take away my child and my friend’… ? Don’t you know that everything in poetry comes true?”

Right after Gumilyov’s return to Petrograd Akhmatova told him, “Give me a divorce.” She recalled that he turned white and without any argument replied, “Gladly.” Learning that Akhmatova was marrying Vladimir Shileiko, Gumilyov refused to believe it, so outlandish was this young Assyriologist’s reputation in Petrograd. Gumilyov immediately proposed to one of his women friends, the lovely Anna Engelhardt.

In the sixties, Akhmatova would only shrug when asked for the real reasons for the divorce. “In 1918, everyone was getting divorced.” She added, “I’m all for divorce.” She always believed that her request for a divorce had hurt Gumilyov badly and even hinted that her former husband encouraged hostility toward her in his many young poetry students.

This was one of the many paradoxes of the revolutionary era—that cold, hungry Petrograd was positively seething with budding poets. Their unquestioned idol was Blok at first. But after The Twelve many recoiled from him and then Gumilyov was the pretender to the role of leader. Politically, poetically, and psychologically, Gumilyov was Blok’s opposite. Akhmatova commented, “Blok did not like Gumilyov, and who knows why. There was personal hostility, but what was in Blok’s heart only Blok knew.” Blok described Gumilyov’s poems as cold and “foreign.” Akhmatova recalled, offended, how she was changing from shoes to boots in a coatroom and Blok came up behind her and started to mumble, “You know, I don’t like your husband’s poetry.”

Blok also found strange Gumilyov’s idea that writing poetry could be learned, that there were rules and laws of versification. Gumilyov, who admired Blok’s poetry enormously, nevertheless attacked The Twelve, maintaining that Blok had served the “cause of the Antichrist” in that work. “He crucified Christ a second time and executed our sovereign yet again.”

It is remarkable, however, that in politics Blok and Gumilyov were gradually moving closer to the same position. The latter apparently had come to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had a fairly tight grip on power. And even though Gumilyov did not accept the Communist platform, he started to be impressed by some aspects of their policies. For instance, he announced that if the Bolsheviks moved to conquer India, his sword would be with them. He also maintained that “the Bolsheviks respect the bold, even as they execute them.”^{304} Romanticizing the Communists, Gumilyov elevated them to the rank of worthy opponents, or even potential allies.

Blok, on the contrary, was gradually becoming disillusioned by the romantic image he had created for the revolution. In an appearance before Petrograd actors, he complained, “The destruction has not ended, but it’s on the wane. Construction has not yet begun. The old music is gone but the new music has not yet come. It’s boring.” Blok’s diary is filled with grim notes such as “I’m so tired,” “I feel I’m in a heavy sleep.”

In February 1919, Blok was arrested by the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), the Bolshevik secret police. He was suspected of participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy from the left. The next day, after two interrogations, he was released, with Lunacharsky’s intercession. In 1920 Blok wrote in his diary, “under the yoke of violence human conscience grows silent; then man shuts himself up in the old; the more brazen the violence, the more firmly man shrinks into himself. That happened in Europe under the yoke of war and in Russia now.”^{305}

Blok had stopped writing poetry completely and answered questions about his silence this way: “All sounds have disappeared. Can’t you hear that there are no sounds?” He complained to the artist Annenkov, “I’m suffocating, suffocating, suffocating! We’re suffocating, we will all suffocate. The world revolution is turning into world angina pectoris!”^{306}

Tellingly, the bass singer Fyodor Chaliapin, who lived in Petrograd in those years, would later describe that era in almost the same terms. Chaliapin acknowledged “that at the very basis of the Bolshevik movement there was a striving for a real restructuring of life on a more just footing, as it was perceived by Lenin and some of his comrades.”^{307} But Chaliapin, like Blok, was feeling oppressed by the growing bureaucratization of daily and artistic life, until the great singer felt that the “robot would choke me if I didn’t get out of its inanimate embrace.”^{308} Soon thereafter Chaliapin left Petrograd for the West.

Blok’s eagerly awaited speech in February 1921 at an evening dedicated to Pushkin turned into a cry for help. Akhmatova was there and so was Gumilyov, who arrived in tails, a lady on his arm shivering from the cold in her deep-cut black dress. Blok stood on the stage in a black jacket over a white high-necked sweater, hands in his pockets. Quoting Pushkin’s famous line, “There is no happiness in the world, but there is peace and freedom,” Blok turned to a nervous Soviet bureaucrat sitting on the stage (one of those “who write nothing, but only sign,” in Andrei Bely’s sarcastic definition) and said, “They’re taking away our peace and freedom, too. Not external peace, but creative peace. Not childish freedom, not the freedom to be a false liberal, but our creative freedom, our secret freedom. And the poet is dying because there is nothing for him to breathe; life has lost its meaning.”^{309}

After such a declaration, imbued with pathos and tragedy, made from a stage, the poet-prophet, as Blok was perceived (and perceived himself to be) could only die. And by the summer of 1921 Blok’s health had deteriorated so much that Lunacharsky and Gorky asked Lenin to allow the poet to go for treatment in neighboring Finland. Four months earlier in response to a secret inquiry from Lenin, Lunacharsky had characterized Blok and his works this way: “In everything that he writes there is a unique approach to the revolution: a mixture of sympathy and horror of the typical intellectual. Anyway, he is much more talented than smart.”^{310}

Apparently, Lenin was intrigued by Blok. In the inventory of the Bolshevik leader’s personal library at the Kremlin are at least a dozen books by or about Blok. Nevertheless, the Politburo of the Communist Party, in a meeting chaired by Lenin, refused permission for Blok to go abroad, fearing he would openly speak out in the West against the Soviet regime. That was also the opinion of the Cheka representative, which was often the deciding one in such questions. This circumstance irritated Lunacharsky, and he referred to the Cheka in a letter to Lenin as the “final court.”

It was clear now that Blok was dying, and Lunacharsky and Gorky bombarded Lenin with appeals for immediate help. Lenin gave in, but it was too late. In an earlier conversation with Annenkov, Blok called death “abroad, where everyone goes without preliminary permission from the authorities.” He went to that abroad on August 7, 1921. A brief notice ran on the front page of the Communist newspaper Pravda: “Last night the poet Alexander Blok passed away.” That was all, without a word of commentary.

Blok died of endocarditis complicated by nervous exhaustion and severe malnutrition. But his contemporaries saw his death symbolically, as the poet had wanted; it was clear to them that Blok had suffocated from a lack of personal and creative freedom, from “spiritual asthma,” as Bely called it.

In that sense Blok’s death summed up an entire era. Akhmatova had predicted in the spring of 1917, “The same thing will happen that had happened in France during the Great Revolution, it might even be worse.” But Blok had the most radiant hopes for the revolution, which were shared by some highly talented people.

Arthur Lourié, the composer of a modernist cantata set to Blok’s poetry that was performed while the poet was still alive, recalled,

Blok had an enormous influence on me; with him, and taught by him, I listened to the music of the revolution. Like my friends, the young avant-garde—artists and poets—I believed in the revolution and joined it immediately. Thanks to the support we got from the revolution, all of us, young innovative artists and eccentrics, were taken seriously. For the first time fantasy-spinning youngsters were told they could realize their dreams and that neither politics nor any other power would interfere with pure art. We were given complete freedom to do whatever we wanted in our realm; this was a first in history. Nowhere in the world had anything similar ever taken place.

Blok’s death destroyed this faith in the “idealism” of the Soviet authorities and in the possibility of uncompromised coexistence with the Bolsheviks. Blok and his allies were not too troubled by the loss of material wealth that the revolution caused; the real tragedy for them was the loss of spiritual independence, the ability to express themselves freely. That is why, when Arthur Lourié wrote in an article dedicated to the poet’s memory, “The Russian Revolution ended with the death of Alexander Blok,” he expressed the general feeling of Petrograd’s leftist intelligentsia.

Blok, in one of his last letters, found terrible, very Russian words for his self-predicted and anticipated death: “She did devour me, lousy, snuffling dear Mother Russia, like a sow devouring her piglet.”^{311} The last lines of his farewell letter to his mother were, “Thank you for the bread and eggs. The bread is real, Russian, almost without additives, I haven’t eaten any like that in a long time.”^{312} Blok had not reached his forty-first birthday….

The poet was buried on August 10; Kuzmin wrote in his diary, “Priests, wreaths, people. Everyone was there. It would be easier to list who wasn’t.”^{313} Someone said that if a bomb had gone off then, not a single important member of the literary and artistic community would be left in Petrograd. They sang music by Tchaikovsky, that quintessential Petersburg composer. Annenkov, helping to lower the coffin into the grave, remembered Akhmatova weeping nearby. He did not know that on that day Akhmatova had learned about the arrest of her ex-husband, Gumilyov.

The circumstances of Gumilyov’s arrest were wrapped in legend for almost seventy years. At the time, the Bolsheviks announced that Gumilyov had been part of the Petrograd Military Organization (PBO), a large underground association preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet regime. Akhmatova always insisted that there had been no such conspiracy and that Gumilyov did not take part in the anti-Soviet struggle. Once the materials of the “Gumilyov case” began to be published in the Russian press in the 1990s, the matter could be judged more objectively.

In the summer of 1921 the Petrograd Cheka made mass arrests, and only in the PBO case, according to Soviet sources, over two hundred people were detained. Grigory Zinoviev, Petrograd’s party boss, thought it was time to put some fear into the intelligentsia. They did not like Zinoviev, who had introduced a dictatorial rule that was harsh even by Bolshevik standards. They called Zinoviev “baba au rhum,” because he had taken the reins of power in Petrograd as skinny as a rail and had grown very fat over the lean revolutionary years. Also head of the Comintern, Zinoviev operated rather independent of Moscow.

It is clear now that there was no large anti-Soviet Petrograd Military Organization. That preposterous idea was fabricated by Yakov Agranov, a young Chekist and lover of belles lettres who later reminisced, “In 1921 seventy percent of the Petrograd intelligentsia had one foot in the enemy camp. We had to burn that foot!”^{314}

Thus, the goal of the Zinoviev-Agranov campaign was preventive. The people arrested in the PBO case, including many leading representatives of Petrograd’s scientific and artistic communities, had been scared and confused during the interrogations and were forced to denounce themselves and others.

Judging by the transcripts of the interrogations, Gumilyov was an easy mark for the Cheka investigator. He naively believed that first of all, there was a “gentleman’s agreement” of sorts between him and the Soviet authorities, according to which he honestly cooperated with the Bolsheviks in the area of culture and they gave him the right to a certain freedom of thought and conscience.

Second, Gumilyov was sure that his enormous popularity in Petrograd would be a reliable shield against any provocations from the secret police. “They won’t dare touch me,” he often said. As the much more sober Vladislav Khodasevich observed, “He was extremely young at heart and maybe in mind. He always seemed a child to me.”^{315}

In the published records of the interrogation, Gumilyov seems to admit that he had talked with friends “on political topics, bitterly condemning the suppression of personal initiative in Soviet Russia”^{316} and also that if there were a hypothetical anti-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, he “in all probability” would be able “to gather and lead a band of passers-by, using the general mood of opposition.”^{317} All that, even for those harsh times, was very minor stuff.

Gorky rushed to Moscow to ask Lenin for a pardon for Gumilyov. According to some very similar and probably reliable versions of the course of events, Lenin promised to talk with Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the All-Russian Cheka about releasing Gumilyov. If Gorky is to be believed, Lenin guaranteed that none of those arrested in the PBO case would be executed.

Gorky returned to Petrograd to learn that sixty of the prisoners, including Gumilyov, had already been shot, on the recommendation of the investigator, without any trial, even a Bolshevik one. With tears in his eyes, Gorky kept saying, “That Zinoviev held up Lenin’s orders.”^{318}

An authoritative eyewitness account by the Russo-French revolutionary Victor Serge (Kibalchich), who was living in Petrograd then, says that the so-called independent decision of the Petrograd Cheka to shoot Gumilyov was actually approved in Moscow. “One comrade traveled to Moscow to ask Dzerzhinsky a question: ‘Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia’s two or three poets of the first order?’ Dzerzhinsky answered, ‘Are we entitled to make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?’”^{319}

There is reason to believe that Lenin’s order of pardoning Gumilyov was part of a charade designed to keep Gorky at bay and that Zinoviev’s holdup of the order had been agreed upon beforehand by Lenin.

The Bolsheviks achieved their goal. When news of the executions in the PBO case came, not only Petrograd but all of Russia shuddered in horror. Zinoviev strengthened his reputation for ruthlessness. The career of Yakov Agranov, the mastermind of the case, took off. After moving to Moscow, he became the director of the “literary subdepartment” of the secret police, a personal friend of Stalin, and a member of his secretariat. Agranov returned to the city once more in December 1934 to “investigate” Kirov’s murder—in the preparation of which he himself had probably taken an active part.

I later learned more about Agranov in the early 1970s from Lilya Brik, the mistress of the late Mayakovsky. Agranov was Mayakovsky’s personal patron and political control. When Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, Agranov was the first to read the poet’s suicide note. He wanted to make sure there were no anti-Soviet statements in it. But faithful service to Stalin did not save Agranov: in 1938 he and his wife were shot on his boss’s orders. Zinoviev had been shot in 1936. One Soviet source maintains that when he was led from his cell to his place of execution, he laughed hysterically.^{320}

Gumilyov, according to the stories circulating in Petrograd in those days, died in the manner appropriate to his image of the fearless Russian officer: smiling, with a cigarette held in his lips. His death, at the age of thirty-five, became legendary instantly. It was because of Gumilyov that the PBO case was not forgotten in the long chain of mass executions by the Bolsheviks. Along with Blok’s untimely demise, Gumilyov’s execution marked a sharp break in the relations of the intellectuals with the Soviet regime. In Russia the poet had always been a symbolic figure. The attitude of the authorities toward poets signaled the regime’s position on issues of culture, tradition, and human rights.

The policy of Lenin’s government toward Blok and Gumilyov, for all the extraordinariness of the situation, was nevertheless characteristic. All the methods for dealing with the cultural elite later to be witnessed in the Soviet Union were already in place. The intellectuals were pushed firmly onto the path of serving the regime. They were given opportunities to educate the masses, but under the strict control of the Communist Party. Loyalty was generously rewarded, while deviation from the “correct” line was punished with greater and greater ruthlessness.

As long as the Bolsheviks did not feel totally in control, they pretended to acknowledge the cultural elite’s right to ideological neutrality. But that relative tolerance quickly vanished, and then they demanded absolute fidelity from the intellectuals.

Gumilyov, by honestly responding to the Cheka investigator’s questions, was re-creating—probably consciously although perhaps not—a famous moment of Russian cultural history. Pushkin, recalled from exile by Nicholas I in 1826 after the rebellion of the Decembrists had been quashed, told the emperor frankly that he would have joined the revolutionaries had he been in Petersburg on the day of the uprising.

As we know, Nicholas I pardoned Pushkin and favored him. The emperor appreciated the poet’s honesty because he was comfortably certain of his own authority. A charitable gesture toward the famous poet would simply underscore the fact.

Gumilyov’s mistake, which cost him his life, was in thinking the Bolsheviks were somehow descendants of the imperial Russian government, even though he himself was a monarchist and anti-Communist. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, believed their rule to be scarcely legitimate; thus a show of charity would be taken for weakness. They could play cat and mouse with the poet, but any overt disobedience on his part had to be punished. Using Blok and Gumilyov as examples, the Bolsheviks showed that they regarded artists as their serfs.

It is telling that this first archetypal scenario of the relationship between the Soviet regime and intellectuals was played out in Petrograd. The city had been the stage of confrontation and cooperation between the authorities and the cultural elite for over two hundred years. In that time the autocracy weakened gradually and the intellectuals had grown in power and independence. The Bolsheviks set the destruction of that independence as their goal.

By punishing Gumilyov and Blok, the quintessential Petersburg poets, the Bolsheviks were consciously destroying the equilibrium in the capital between the state authority and the cultural elite that had been created during prerevolutionary times. In effect, they abrogated the old rules and replaced them with new ones. At the same time the city’s reputation as the cultural capital of Russia was also under attack.

Petrograd was dealt an irreparable blow politically and economically when Lenin moved the government to Moscow. Now the Petrograd culture had to be cut down a peg. In that sense Moscow’s wishes coincided with Zinoviev’s desire to teach the disloyal Petrograd intelligentsia a lesson.

All this had a profound effect on the Petersburg mythos but in direct contradiction to the Bolsheviks’ intent. Petrograd parted rather easily with political hegemony, but it refused to relinquish its cultural preeminence. Sprinkled with fresh blood, the Petersburg mythos took on a new life. From the very start, Akhmatova played an exceptional role in that complex and painful process.

In the eyes of the reading public, Akhmatova was inextricably tied to Blok and Gumilyov. And even though both were married and had left “legal” widows, so to speak (and Akhmatova herself was married to Shileiko), the public considered Akhmatova the “real” widow of both poets. Almost every account of the memorial services and interment for Blok mention Akhmatova’s presence, her tragic figure in black mourning and heavy crepe veil.

In 1974 Balmont’s daughter, Nini Bruni, told me with great feeling how Akhmatova grew faint at one of the many services for Blok.^{321} Another witness recalled the service for Blok in the small cemetery chapel. “The choir sang. But everyone’s eyes were directed not at the altar, or the coffin, but at where I was standing. I began looking around, to see why, and I saw right behind me, the tall, slender figure of Anna Akhmatova. Tears were streaming down her pale cheeks. She wasn’t hiding them. Everyone wept and the choir sang.”^{322}

Akhmatova’s “affair” with Blok, brought into the readers’ consciousness by her poems beginning in 1911, had turned into a popular legend by 1914, one that Blok himself did not dispute. In 1916 one of Blok’s correspondents wrote to him, “blessing” the union of the two poets: “I think Anna Akhmatova is the most marvelous and refined creature. Let her be happy. And you will be happy, too.”^{323}

One entry made in Chukovsky’s diary in 1920 is very interesting; he was walking with Blok and they met Akhmatova. “It was the first time I saw both of them together. Amazing—Blok’s face is inscrutable, but there was constant movement, trembling reactions, very subtle, around his mouth. And it was the same with Akhmatova. They met and they expressed nothing with their eyes or smiles, but there much was said.”^{324} Even the perceptive cynic and skeptic Chukovsky tended to read something romantic, almost fateful, into a casual meeting of Akhmatova and Blok.

Later, observing that permanent tie between Blok and Akhmatova in the readers’ subconscious, Chukovsky wrote in his diary in 1922, “If you spend an hour in a bookstore, you will see two or three buyers who come in and ask, ‘Do you have Blok?’

‘No.’

‘How about The Twelve?’

‘Don’t have The Twelve.’

A pause.

‘Then give me Anna Akhmatova.’”^{325}

One would think that the legend of the affair between Akhmatova and Blok would not have survived the publication in 1928 and 1930 of Blok’s diaries and notebooks, which made it abundantly clear that there had been no affair at all. But Akhmatova’s poetry once more proved to be stronger than the “scorned prose” of reality. And even in the 1960s one could hear an exultant but not very well-informed student exclaim, “Ah, you mean the Akhmatova that Blok shot himself over?”

Blok wrote an article months before his death that, harshly and in many ways unjustly, criticized the acmeists, especially Gumilyov; the only kind words he found were for Akhmatova, with “her weary, sickly, female, and self-absorbed” poetry manner. The political differences between them were greatly narrowed after Blok’s anti-Bolshevik speech on Pushkin and were completely erased by his death. Akhmatova later claimed that Blok recalled her on his deathbed and muttered in his delirium, “It’s good that she didn’t leave” (emigrate, that is).

In the first days after Blok’s funeral, Akhmatova’s specially written memorial poem received the widest distribution, unofficial of course, throughout Petrograd. It started with the line “Today is the Smolensk Lady’s birthday …,” an allusion to the fact that the poet had been buried at Smolensk cemetery on the feast day of the icon of Our Lady of Smolensk. The poem ended:

“To this day the best that has been said about my son was said by Anna Akhmatova in those five lines,” wrote Blok’s mother to a friend in September 1921.^{326} In Moscow, Marina Tsvetayeva, believing as did everyone else that there was an Akhmatova-Gumilyov-Blok triangle, wrote a poem addressed to her in 1921 that referred to the two dead poets as Akhmatova’s brothers:

The rumor that the deaths of Blok and Gumilyov had left the thirty-two-year-old Akhmatova inconsolable and bereft was so widespread that rumors about her actual suicide began in Petrograd, then in Moscow. Another version also made the rounds—that Akhmatova had literally caught her death of cold at Blok’s funeral. Mayakovsky believed the false story and wandered around, in Tsvetayeva’s words, “Like a gored bull.” Tsvetayeva wrote to Akhmatova from Moscow, “All these days there have been grim rumors about you, growing more persistent and irrefutable with every hour…. In the last three days (without you) Petersburg no longer existed for me.”^{327}

It is very telling that for Tsvetayeva the image of Akhmatova is so tied to Petersburg that without Akhmatova the city disintegrates for her. This close identification of Akhmatova with the city was no doubt strengthened in the public imagination because the Akhmatova-Gumilyov-Blok triangle had become part of the Petersburg background. The trinity of poets glorified the Petersburg mythos, and the mythos, in turn, united the members of the trinity.

It was not important that Blok and Akhmatova were not tied by tragic love. It was not important either that Akhmatova and Gumilyov had actually parted several years before his death. The new Petrograd demanded new martyrs. Blok and Gumilyov became those martyrs. Although hardly saints in life, their death brought them canonization in the eyes of the Russian intelligentsia and contributed to the atonement for the sins of St. Petersburg. And even though Akhmatova did not die, this atonement was now personified by her tragic figure—both as poet and as woman.

The unity of those two aspects of Akhmatova’s public image must be emphasized. In Russia the old romantic idea of the identification of the poet’s life and work was traditionally realized to extreme limits. Petrograd’s embattled cultural elite badly needed a symbolic figure serving as the “keeper of the sacred flame,” and the role suited Akhmatova ideally.

At Blok’s funeral, as became clear from memoirs, Akhmatova was perceived as his widow. And here is a description of the memorial service at the Kazan Cathedral for Gumilyov, held two weeks after Blok’s funeral. Gumilyov’s young widow is weeping, and, the eyewitness continues, “Akhmatova is standing by the wall. Alone. But it seems to me that the widow of Gumilyov is not that pretty, sobbing girl wrapped in widow’s weeds, but she—Akhmatova.”^{328}

Akhmatova’s relations with Gumilyov were probably even more a matter of public record than her imaginary “affair” with Blok. After all, Gumilyov had indeed been her husband, which she did not delay announcing in her first book, Evening, describing him there in rather realistic detail:

And if readers believed this description, written in 1910, a half year after their marriage began, then how could they not believe another poem, written a year later and also included in Evening, which was much more emotional and therefore more convincing. It began,

Later Gumilyov complained, “Just think about it, those lines made me a sadist. They spread a rumor about me that I would put on tails (which I didn’t even own in those days) and a top hat (which I did) and, with a patterned strap folded in half, would whip not only my wife, Akhmatova, but my young female fans, first stripping them naked.”^{329}

Readers continued to form a picture of Akhmatova’s volatile relationship with Gumilyov through the poems she published, even though some of them were actually addressed to other men in her life. Then the war, the revolution, and finally, Gumilyov’s execution provided Akhmatova with a new, patriotic and civic theme and gave her a new voice. Mandelstam was the first to write about it, noting that Akhmatova’s poetry “had undergone a break toward hieratic importance, religious simplicity and solemnity.”

Akhmatova herself said that tragic events of the postrevolutionary years radically changed her attitude toward blood and death: the word “blood” now reminded her “of the brown seeping blotches of blood on the snow and on the stones and its disgusting odor. Blood is good only when it is alive, the blood coursing in veins, but it is horrible and disgusting in all other situations.”

In Akhmatova’s untitled poem written after Gumilyov’s arrest, this sensation was expressed as follows:

Later Akhmatova was to recall how that poem “came” to her in a crowded suburban train traveling to Petrograd. She “felt the approach of some lines” and realized that if she didn’t have a cigarette immediately, nothing would be written. But she had no matches. “I went out onto the buffer platform. Some boys in the Red Army were out there, cursing wildly. They didn’t have any matches, either, but fat red sparks flew from the locomotive and settled on the platform railing. I pressed my cigarette against them. On the third (approximately) spark the cigarette lit. The guys, greedily watching my cleverness, were delighted. ‘She’ll always get by,’ one of them said about me.”

In another poem of that period, which also mentions “Hot, fresh blood,” Akhmatova expressed repentance:

Of course, those lines were also interpreted by contemporaries as referring to Blok and Gumilyov. The more erudite among them recalled Akhmatova’s “Prayer” and how it was coming to pass and that Mandelstam in one of his poems called Akhmatova Cassandra, the prophetic daughter of the king of Troy. Thus in the popular imagination Akhmatova was turning from eyewitness of Petersburg’s doom and destruction to prophet of its imminent rebirth, a figure of immense symbolic power. (Mandelstam was more perceptive than most here, too, pointing out the symbolic undercurrent in Akhmatova’s poems as early as 1916.)

When Akhmatova recommenced reading her poetry before audiences after a long absence, she was met “with tense, electrified silence.” The recollections of that event describe not a real person but a potent symbol of popular aspirations.

She was very pale and even her lips seemed bloodless. She looked into the distance, beyond the audience … tall, fragilely thin … hopelessly and tragically beautiful. And how she read! It wasn’t a reading, it was magic…. She finished. She stood in the same spot and still looked out into the distance, as if she had forgotten that she was on stage. No one applauded, no one dared even to breathe.^{330}

The stage was set for a confrontation. On one side, the triumphant, omnipresent, cruel, and manipulative regime determined to destroy and subjugate not only the remains of Petersburg in Petrograd but to recast the new Petrograd “in its own image and likeness” at any cost. On the side of the regime was the full power of the government, the secret police, and the cultural apparatus with its carrots and sticks.

On the other side was just a woman with a handful of confederates, poor, unarmed, and deprived. Her only strength lay in being a great poet in a country where poets traditionally wielded enormous influence and commanded great respect. Therefore she could count on the attention and sympathy of at least part of the audience—the part that was not brainwashed by the ruling ideology, tricked by its slogans, frightened, or destroyed.

The struggle was for the soul of a city—what it would live on, think about, weep over, and delight in, and what it would be called. And since the city also played a special, decisive role in the fate of Russian culture, the struggle would be for the future of Russian culture as well.

If one simply judged from the apparent strengths of the two sides, the battle looked hopeless. And with every year it would seem ever more hopeless. Never in the history of Russia had the poet been up against such a powerful, clever, cynical, and merciless enemy. But on the other hand, never had a poet who was also a woman entered into such a desperate and uncompromising battle with the regime.

Akhmatova was prepared for humiliation and even death, but not for defeat. She believed in the city, in its inhabitants, in herself and her mission, in the power of the Russian word, and in the moral strength of Russian culture. In 1923, a book of her poems published in Berlin, Anno Domini MCMXXI, appeared in Petrograd. When readers opened the book, they virtually froze: the very first poem spoke of the fate of the city, their fate, their future. It was Akhmatova’s manifesto, her call to arms. The poem was called “To My Fellow Citizens.” It did not promise a speedy victory. On the contrary, it spoke of life “in a bloody circle.” But the poem ended as might have been expected, prophetically: