With typically grandiose self-image, Lev completed the letter by stating that, if published, his authorship of the book could be omitted: ‘The gothic cathedrals were built by nameless masters; I am content to be a nameless master of science.’ It would take a further six years before the first of the books on which he began work during his gulag years saw publication, in 1960, titled Xiongnu; the second was published as Ancient Turks in 1967.
Lev’s impulse to write seems to have been driven partly by the realization, clear from his letters, that his prospects of a normal life had been ruined by his camp experiences, and that he was doomed to live alone with only the solace of his books and writings: ‘My future is dicey, but, apparently, I have to count on a single life, and that does not really distress me, because it is too late for me to marry, I am too lazy for courtship, and I am not at all in the mood to worry about mutual feelings.’41
Varbanets had not written to him for five years. It was one of the undignified truths that the women of convicted men often abandoned them to their fate after arrest, so as not to incriminate themselves and their loved ones. She only wrote to him, finally, in December 1954. They carried on a correspondence which gave Lev hope of reuniting with her – falsely, it turned out, as she was carrying on her affair with her boss the whole time. Lev learned of this only after his return. In the margin of one of her surviving letters to him he had scrawled, apparently after his release: ‘Why did you have to lie so much?’
Spurred by his sufferings in camp, Lev seems to have been increasingly tormented by anger, which he directed not at his immediate oppressors and not at the dictatorial regime, but rather at all those close to him, including Akhmatova. Resentful of both real and imagined slights, he began severing contact with many of his acquaintances from his pre-camp days. Finally, his mother became the target of his wrath. Lev felt that Akhmatova was neglecting him, was not doing enough to get him released, and not writing enough to him. His accumulated resentment over his childhood abandonment, along with her unintentional complicity in his fate, seems to have crystallized into a picture of a mother’s neglect – a picture which Lev nurtured.
As he wrote to Gerstein, ‘I consider that one parcel a month does not fulfill all a mother’s duty to her perishing son and that does not mean that I want two parcels.’42 In another letter, Lev complains to Gerstein: ‘I know what the problem is. Her poetic nature makes her frightfully lazy and egotistic, in spite of her extravagance… for her, my death will be a pretext for some graveside poem: how poor she is, she has lost her son. Nothing more.’43 Gerstein, who was extremely close to both of them throughout this time and afterwards, comes down solidly on Akhmatova’s side: ‘Whom did he feel hurt by? The military prosecutor’s office? The KGB? Or perhaps the central committee of the communist party? No, he blamed his mother for everything.’44
In her defence, Akhmatova does appear to have made a number of gestures intended to help Lev. In 1950, she published a poem entitled ‘In Praise of Peace (and Stalin)’, designed, it appears, to flatter the dictator: ‘Legend speaks of a wise man who saved each of us from a terrible death.’ It was a deliberate, if humiliating, act for her; later in the 1950s, she made an effort to erase all trace of the poem, by pasting new ones over it when she gave her published books to friends as gifts. However calculated, the gesture does not seem to have worked, though it possibly prevented the situation from getting worse. The poem in praise of Stalin ‘would torment Akhmatova as an unhealed wound for the rest of her days’, according to Gerstein.45
The problem was that Akhmatova, who was under 24-hour surveillance and whose correspondence with Lev was opened and read, could not communicate what she was doing in a clear way. She could not say, for instance, that she had written a poem about Stalin simply to flatter his ego. She also could not tell Lev that in 1954 she had written privately to Kliment Voroshilov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet and nominal head of state of the USSR, in an effort to convince him to get the sentence overturned; and she could not explain to him the circumstances under which her appeal had been rejected by the USSR prosecutor general. Akhmatova realized that as long as the central committee decree about Zvezda remained in force, Voroshilov would not take the responsibility for deciding the fate of her son, ‘especially when Lev bore the name of his father, Nikolay Gumilev who had been shot by the Cheka in 1921. Voroshilov must have consulted the party presidium or Khrushchev himself, and decided to offer Akhmatova no favors.’46
She knew that anything of substance had to be written in code, and apparently thought that Lev recognized that he had to read between the lines of her letters, which were written in perfunctory ‘telegraph style’, according to him; but he seems not to have understood this – or else wilfully to have ignored it. Her letters to Lev are littered with vague non sequiturs that seem to be efforts to communicate hidden meanings:
Your non-Confucian letters made me very sad. Believe me, I write to you absolutely everything about me, about my lifestyle and life. You forget that I am 66 years old, that I carry three fatal illnesses inside me, that all my friends and contemporaries have died. My life is dark and lonely – all this does not contribute to the flourishing of an epistolary genre.
This is immediately followed by: ‘Spring has come at last – today I will go on a visit in a new summer dress – it will be my first outing.’47
Lev’s resentment came to a head following the death of Stalin, when he saw those fellow prisoners who managed to take advantage of the political thaw under Khrushchev have their sentences reversed. In a further sign of the thaw, in 1954, Akhmatova was appointed a delegate to the USSR Writer’s Congress, where she was given access to some of the most powerful people in the central committee, and a unique public forum. Lev believed she would use the forum to draw attention to his plight, and he was disappointed:
Lev Nikolaevich and his friends in the camp imagined that Akhmatova would scream there for everyone to hear, ‘Help! My son was convicted falsely!’ Lev Nikolaevich did not want to understand, that Akhmatova’s smallest wrong step would immediately reflect fatally on his own destiny.48
In a letter to Gerstein, Lev seems to be unaware of the overtures made by Akhmatova to Voroshilov:
you write that Mama is not the culprit of my fate. Who else then? Were I not her son, but the son of some ordinary woman I would be, whatever else might happen, a flourishing Soviet professor, a non-party specialist as many have become. Mama herself knows everything about my life and that the sole reason for my difficulties was my kinship with her… You write that she was powerless. I don’t believe that. As a delegate to the congress she could approach a member of the central committee and explain that her son had been unjustly convicted.49
But it was clear to Gerstein that Lev did not know or appreciate the extent of what Akhmatova had done, and clung irrationally to his heartfelt version of being abandoned. Throwing away most of his mother’s letters, Lev began keeping selected ones from her which he felt showed the extent of her neglect and abandonment. These he saved until his death when they were published by his friend Alexander Panchenko. ‘The ten letters from Akhmatova preserved by Gumilev became a selective compilation intended to immortalize the image of a bad mother, which Lyova created and cherished in his tormented soul.’50