During the reign of Soviet ideology, which stressed selfless collectivism, public spirit and ululating, broad-chested heroes, Akhmatova’s poetry – with its private loves, despair and tender-hearted longing – was subversive. This was her paradox: the unrelenting publicity she gave to her private life. And it bothered Lev, the subject of ‘Requiem’, who liked to point out that while it was his death that was being written about, the poem was basically about her. The tragedies of Akhmatova’s life were public property; and Lev felt she treated the torments of those around her, including his own, above all as something that she was suffering.
Akhmatova was one of Russia’s most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century, the conscience of the nation throughout the suffering of the Stalinist era. And Lev had to share her with the entire country. Akhmatova was both an immense source of personal pride and the bane of his existence. Lev was fond of saying of his two seven-year stints in labour camps that ‘the first was for papa, the second for mama’. The first spell was punishment for being the son of a martyr – his father, Nikolay Gumilev, was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921; during the second, he was – he strongly believed – being held hostage to ensure his mother’s good behaviour. ‘If I wasn’t her son, but the son of a simple woman, I would be, other things being equal, a flourishing professor’, Lev wrote from prison in 1955 to Emma Gerstein.
But mother and son were each a heavy weight for the other to bear: Akhmatova knew that any transgressions by her would rebound on Lev, and so his very existence was a ball and chain on her artistic freedom. She could not help but see her son as an enormous responsibility and a yoke on her poetic gift – a gift which, for his sake, she refused to use for decades. This sense of their shared fates would emerge most expressively in ‘Requiem’ with the line ‘ty syn i uzhas moi’ – literally ‘you are my son and my horror’.
Lev’s attachment to Akhmatova seemed to border on the neurotic. He would throw fits and tantrums (even in his mid-forties) if she ignored him, sometimes rebuking her or complaining about her in his letters (‘Mama is not writing to me. I imagine I am once again the victim of psychological games’). He was also intensely jealous of her other husbands and lovers after the death of his father. After their first meeting, Gerstein said of Lev that he ‘took no interest in girls. He adored his mother.’2 It may have been coincidence, but Lev only married in 1967, the year after his mother died.
As the son of Akhmatova and Gumilev, Lev grew up with a sense of entitlement, but also under the pressure to live up to their expectations. As a child he was surrounded by all the names that would become synonymous with modern Russian poetry: Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetayeva, all of whom were close friends of his mother and father. Akhmatova herself discouraged Lev from being a poet, saying he lacked the talent. Though this was basically the truth, it used to plunge her son into bouts of depression and rejection.
Lev’s father, Nikolay Gumilev, was one of the most talented poets of Russia’s Silver Age. A tremendously charismatic artist, he was shot by the Bolsheviks when Lev was just nine years old. Like many boys who lose their fathers so young, Lev never had the chance to move on from his hero-worship, even though Nikolay had essentially abandoned the boy after he and Akhmatova divorced in 1918.
Akhmatova, too, was notable more for the empty spaces she left in Lev’s life than for her presence. She was in a state of emotional collapse for most of his childhood, and lacked the strength to raise a child – a task which she left to her mother-in-law. Akhmatova’s treatment of Lev is controversial, and the two did not speak for the final five years of her life – partly because Lev’s personality changed for the worse after 14 years in labour camps, and partly, it seems, because (as he would later say in several interviews) she let her concern for her public persona get in the way of her commitment to him.
Akhmatova was a tremendously private person, and extremely introverted. Her biographer Amanda Haight has written that she was ‘incapable of the simple acts of love which make it possible to live with another person’.3 This could be seen in her poetry, which was overwhelmingly about one subject: herself. She wrote of her emotions, her feelings, her wants and her needs. Her friend, the poet Korney Chukovsky, described her poetry as: ‘I love, but I am not loved; I am loved, but I do not love – this is her main specialty.’
Her obsession with the unrequited and dysfunctional was borne out in her failed marriage to Lev’s father. Soon after Lev was born, his parents’ marriage began to break down. The lifestyle of the avant-garde circles of St Petersburg had taken their toll; sexual experimentation was all the rage, and things were not well with the couple. Gumilev told his wife he would not continue to be faithful to her, but said she could have the freedom to take lovers as she pleased. Indeed, the following year he fathered a son by another woman. Even before their divorce, Akhmatova left Lev with her mother-in-law, Anna Sergeevna Gumileva, on their estate at Slepnevo.4
In 1921, Nikolay was arrested after an acquaintance accused him of plotting to overthrow the Bolshevik government. It was a common enough occurrence in those days: whatever the merits of an allegation, one simply deflected blame by naming, under interrogation, one’s ‘co-conspirators’ in whatever deed the accusation concerned. Gumilev, however, did not crack. After days of interrogation, and before his friends could intervene to have him released, he was sentenced to death and shot on 25 August. The last time Lev saw his father had been that May. He reminisced much later: ‘My grandmother kept weeping, and the atmosphere at home was desolate… She and my mother were convinced of my father’s innocence, which… added a bitter twist to their sorrow.’
In death, Nikolay became a martyr, the many flaws in his indulgent character forgotten by his contemporaries. He became a ghost to haunt the Bolsheviks and a generation of Russia’s finest poets grew up worshipping him. Lev spent the rest of his life trying to live up to the impossible ideal of this dead colossus. His own youthful memories of his father’s infrequent visits took on gigantic proportions in his psyche. It seems his decision to devote his life to history was largely because of an offhand comment that his father had made on their last meeting: ‘history is important’, he had said, while presenting Lev with a history book as a gift.
The nine-year-old Lev was ostracized at school after his father’s execution. In a practice characteristic of early Soviet experiments with breeding young communists, Lev’s school was ‘self-governed’ by pupils. When his fellow nine-year-olds learned that young Lev’s father had been shot as a traitor, they voted not to give him textbooks that year. Adding to the pain, his mother, who was in a state of total emotional collapse, did not visit until that December. Nikolay’s death was devastating for Akhmatova, even though they had separated long ago. She would say later that, of all the men who were her ‘husbands’, she had been spiritually closest to him. After his death, she began what Haight calls her 40-year period of ‘homelessness’, during which time she was utterly dependent on others for survival, living with husbands, lovers, their relatives or her friends. That visit to Lev in 1921 would be the last he saw of her until 1925 – and that next visit was to last just one day.