It was all particularly hurtful for Lev, because he was feeling increasingly rejected by his mother. Though she wrote beautiful and famous poems about his ordeal, she failed to write to him. In virtually every letter he wrote to Emma Gerstein at this time, he complained of his mother’s neglect:
The men with me are two workers, and I have seen three females in a year: a doe hare, which fell into a wire trap, a doe deer, which came to a tent by accident, and a squirrel killed with a stick. There are no books and there is nothing good at all. Mum, apparently, is in good health… But she does not write to me, does not send cables. It is sad.15
Gerstein, one of Akhmatova’s closest confidantes during those years, thought Lev was wrong to imagine that his mother had abandoned him. She believed there was an explanation for Akhmatova’s behaviour that lay in her complex and somewhat mysterious poetic persona: ‘Akhmatova’s silence was a kind of charm: she believed there were superstitious omens in every word she wrote.’ Indeed, she kept her silence through the most dangerous periods of Lev’s internment and his time at the front during the war. When Berlin was finally captured and the danger to her son had passed, she began to write to him. ‘I have received three very laconic postcards from Mama and I became even angrier. Well, when we meet we shall make our peace.’16
Lev continued to find solace in history and musing about philosophy. The Second World War gave him more inspiration to apply his theory of human behaviour to the subject of nations and civilizations.
Having completed his five-year sentence in 1943, he stayed on in Norilsk as a paid volunteer for a year, until the winter of 1944. The war was almost over and victory for the USSR was assured. Lev wanted to see some action. By his own account, he went to the local recruiting office, took out a razor and threatened to slit his wrists if he was not allowed to join the army. He arrived at the front in February 1945, which gave him enough time to see three months of easy victories before the capitulation of Germany in May. ‘After Norilsk, the front line felt like a resort’, he said of army life. Winter clothes were plentiful, as was food and vodka.
He was in one of the Red Army units that marched into Berlin in April 1945. The event left a lasting impression on him. And like all his experiences, it was one that he treated in scholarly gloss: when his flat was searched on his arrest in 1949, his notebooks were confiscated, including one with an article he had written (apparently for an army newspaper) but evidently thought better of publishing. The paper was later found in his file by his biographer, Vitaly Shentalinsky. It was probably a wise decision not to submit the article.
Musing further on the idea of ‘passion’ and complementarity which had inspired him in prison, he had evidently become more convinced that he had hit on something significant when he observed the victory of his own relatively backward country over the hugely superior technology of the Germans. He described what he saw in the German towns that his unit passed through. There were ‘ornate books’, ‘asphalted roads’ and ‘luxurious apartments and automobiles’: ‘In the midst of this “culture” – we, dirty and unshaven, stood and wondered, why are we stronger? How are we better than this immaculately groomed and shiny country?’
The Russians had arrived in Germany like barbarians at the gates of Rome. Primitive Russia’s victory over one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world was yet another example of ‘passionarity’, Gumilev believed, in the natural disposition of man towards feats of sacrifice. He put it in the same terms he had used while laid up in the infirmary in 1939, when he had dreamt of Alexander’s march across the Eurasian continent:
Culture is not summed up in the quantity of automobiles, houses, and warm toilets. Not even in the quantity of books written and published, no matter how ornate their style. The former and the latter are the results of culture, not the same as culture itself. Culture is equivalent to the kind of relations people have with each other. Culture is there, where out of human relations arise strong and noble feelings – friendship, trust, mutual suffering, patriotism, love for one’s own and respect for the other… Indeed it was this, true culture, which Germany did not possess in enough quantity.17
Lev’s experiences of a war which pitted one nation against another – a true ethnic genocide on industrial proportions, which took place in a Europe bedecked with the trappings of the Enlightenment – must have inspired some of his profoundly pessimistic scholarship. The fact that in the name of progress and ‘scientific history’, millions of people would go to their deaths and that the most rationalistic of philosophies could give birth to the most irrational human behaviour, taught Gumilev that, whatever our intentions, human beings are still ruled by natural impulses.
Humanity was a virtue that could be both learned and taken away. The years spent in a disease-ridden swamp felling trees and mining north of the Arctic Circle apparently left their stamp on him, and he would never again be the ‘boy-king’ of Gerstein’s romantic memories, who bore his burden with nobility. Instead, he returned irascible, easily panicked, and bore terrible grudges. As Gerstein put it:
For many years we would continue to see someone who bore the name of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev. But though we called him Lyova, it was not the Lyova we had known before his arrest in 1938. How Akhmatova suffered from his fateful change in personality! Not long before her death, she once fell into deep thought, re-examining every stage in her son’s life from the day he was born. At last she firmly declared: ‘No! He wasn’t always like that. They made my boy like that.’18
Leningrad, Akhmatova said when she returned in 1944 from Tashkent, was ‘a spectre masquerading as a city’. The horrible famine during the 900-day blockade had destroyed the population; all the animals (and some people) had long since been eaten. The graceful canals were clogged with corpses and the city stank of death. It was to this that Lev finally returned in 1945. According to Maryana Kozyreva, the sister-in-law of Nikolay Kozyrev, a physicist whom Lev had met in Norilsk and who stayed friendly with him for the rest of his life, Gumilev ‘was skinny, looked like spaghetti, almost boneless. When he sat down to table, his hands and legs twisted somehow; he bended. For those who knew him only in his last years, it was difficult to imagine.’19
Akhmatova had been rehabilitated during the war – temporarily, as it would later turn out. A genuine patriot, she refused to emigrate and stayed in her native Leningrad until it was surrounded by German forces. The stuff of her poems – private emotions, love, family – had been the antithesis of monochromatic Marxism, of trumpeted patriotism and loudly delivered manifestos; but suddenly this was the glue that bound the Russian people together.
In cold, pragmatic terms, Stalin was probably able to see plainly that the Marxist ideology could not mobilize the Soviet people to defend their land, and appeals to vague social forces could not exhort them to throw themselves on German bayonets. He tugged on the heartstrings of Russians’ love for their land and for each other. He started to use the term ‘brothers and sisters’ in addition to ‘comrades and citizens’ in public speeches. This was a sea-change in the relationship between the regime and its citizens: the blaring, ululating public culture of ideology was replaced with appeals to the cherished and private realm of the family and – its natural extension – the nation.