After her second marriage fell apart, and following a series of romances with men who were either abusive or who abandoned her (or both), Akhmatova met the man who would be both a stabilizing factor in her turbulent life and a source of continual torment for her and Lev. Art historian Nikolay Punin, who at the time was married, became her lover and, in 1925, Akhmatova actually moved into Punin’s flat, even though his wife Anna Ahrens and their daughter Irina were still living there.
This flat was in the Fountain House, one of the most beautiful mansions of eighteenth-century St Petersburg on the Fontanka river embankment. Before the revolution, the famed baroque palace had belonged to the Sheremetev family, one of the stalwarts of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg aristocracy. This was the geographical and cultural centre of Leningrad, in all its fading glory. Above the arched gateway was the Sheremetev family motto: Deus conservat omnia – ‘God preserves all’. The courtyard faced the central Liteyny Street, and just five blocks away was the headquarters of the NKVD – a 12-storey building nicknamed the ‘Big House’ that was to play such a towering role in the lives of both mother and son.
Like most of the houses of the aristocracy, the Fountain House had been broken up into communal flats, or kommunalki, shared by several families. Akhmatova and the Punins shared the kitchen and two rooms of apartment 44. It was a typical Soviet arrangement: in the years of severe housing and food shortages, divorced couples frequently had to stay in the same flat, leading separate lives. Ahrens was understandably miserable with the arrangement – she and her daughter slept in the room next to Punin and Akhmatova – and she rearranged her work schedule so that she would not have to be home at night.
Punin could be extremely warm, but he had a tyrannical streak, and Akhmatova became more and more isolated from her friends. She would say later that she had wanted to leave Punin but could not bring herself to because she was too weak, physically and spiritually. She had a roof over her head and some measure of security, and during the privations of the 1920s and 1930s Russians got used to all manner of compromise in the name of sheer survival.
In 1929, at the age of 17, Lev moved to Leningrad, which would be his spiritual home for the rest of his life. It was a world away from the town of Bezhetsk and the estate of Slepnevo where he had grown up. In the 1920s and 1930s, the city of Dostoevsky and Pushkin was still the cosmopolitan heart of the Russian/Soviet Empire, though a few more decades of purges would shift that mantle to Moscow. Akhmatova and her friends, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, presided over the tarnished glory of the Russian Silver Age from the faded splendour of the imperial capital.
It was into this world that Lev Gumilev made his way in 1929, hoping to complete his secondary education there and enter Leningrad University. He also moved into the Fountain House. From the outset, Lev and Punin disliked one another. Punin had once denounced Lev’s father Nikolay in the Bolshevik newspaper Iskusstvo Kommuny,5 and indeed this may have influenced Nikolay’s fate. Lev was also resentful of Akhmatova’s relationship with Punin. A supreme attention-seeking egoist, Punin was likewise jealous of Akhmatova’s affection for Lev.
Dysfunctional and miserable, this odd group lived together with no real choice in the matter.6 Apartments were in chronic short supply in the USSR: ‘future generations will never understand what living space meant to us’, wrote Akhmatova’s friend Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoirs of the time:
Innumerable crimes have been committed for its sake and people are so tied to it that to leave it would never occur to them… Husbands and wives who loathe the sight of each other, mothers in law, sons in law, grown sons and daughters, former domestic servants who have managed to hang on to a cubby hole next to the kitchen – all are wedded to their living space and would never part with it.7
Lev established himself in a pigeonhole on a wooden chest, near a partition with another flat. A small window provided some light, and it was heated in winter by a tiled stove. Despite the fact that Akhmatova was actually paying him rent, Punin was resentful of having to feed the 17-year-old Lev. In an argument with Akhmatova, he was heard to complain: ‘What do you expect, Anya, I can’t feed the whole city!’ Lev also moaned that Punin favoured his daughter Irina over him.
Meanwhile, the political situation for artists was worsening. While the early 1920s had been an era of relative tolerance towards artists, as the decade wore on, heavy pressure was applied to all competitors to the orthodox Marxist theory of art and literature. Akhmatova’s friend, the children’s poet Korney Chukovsky, remembered meeting her in the early 1930s, after she had sold a volume of poems to the publisher Sovetskaya Literatura, and they demanded there be ‘1. No mysticism 2. No pessimism 3. No politics’. As Akhmatova joked: ‘all that was left was the fornication’.
Pressure on Akhmatova had slowly been building. In 1925, the Communist Party, in all probability motivated by Stalin, had taken a secret decision to forbid her from publishing any further works. Though it is unclear if she even knew of such a decision, and it appears to have been unevenly enforced. But she cannot have failed to notice that many submissions were refused. Soon after, she lost her pension.8
Emma Gerstein recalled that, soon after she began seeing Lev, her friends warned her to stay away from ‘Akhmatova’s son’. She distinctly remembered calling Lev from the apartment of a friend, who confronted her afterwards: ‘You were talking to Akhmatova’s son, weren’t you?… Keep clear of him, he may have some bad acquaintances… To be honest… from my apartment… I’d prefer it if…’ On her next visit to Leningrad, she was told much the same thing by the relatives she was staying with: ‘Whom do you go to see? Akhmatova? Keep away from her son….’
I was staggered at the spectacle of his existence, which offered him no refuge on this earth. ‘Who is the fairest of them all?’ the fairy queen demands, and the mirror always replies, ‘In this land, beyond all doubt you… but…’ So whenever I asked in like fashion, ‘Who is the unhappiest person in the world?’ I would tell myself ‘You are, but…’ and remember the nobility with which Lyova [as Lev was known] bore the miseries of a life in which he was buried alive.9
Lev’s first run-in with the security services had actually happened in 1933 as a result of his association with poetry: he was translating Persian poetry in the flat of an Arabic scholar, Vasily Eberman, when the latter was arrested.10 Akhmatova recalled being at home and receiving a call from the OGPU. She asked about Lev: ‘He’s with us.’ This time, though, Lev got off relatively easily: he was released after nine days and was not subjected to any harsh treatment. Eberman received a five-year sentence and was never seen again.
Lev’s ambitions to study history at university were hamstrung by more than his tenuous political status. History was actually not offered at Leningrad State University (LGU) for years after the Bolshevik revolution, as it had not been deemed sufficiently progressive. Instead, it had been replaced by a course on the ‘history of world grain prices’.11 In 1934, however, came a break. The (ill-fated) Leningrad Communist Party boss Sergey Kirov spoke of the ‘disgraceful’ state of history teaching in schools, as part of the broad realization among many in the party that the standard Marxist dogmas lacked appeal and needed to be supplemented with genuine patriotism. As part of this change in attitude, Lev’s application to the university was accepted, and he was permitted to take the entrance exams, which he passed. He was almost permanently short of money, wore patches on his clothes and was always hungry. But for all that, Lev was a dashing young man with irrepressible style and a provocative sense of humour. He was quick with jokes and liked to get into arguments, according to Gerstein, who endured this particular trait with some embarrassment.