To give up life for this is no small thing.10
Akhmatova had no hopes for the Revolution - she had only fears. Yet she made it clear that she thought it was a sin for poets to leave Russia after 1917:
I am not with those who abandoned their land To the lacerations of the enemy. I am deaf to their coarse flattery, I won't give them my songs.
But to me the exile is forever pitiful,
Like a prisoner, like someone ill.
Dark is your road, wanderer,
Like wormwood smells the bread of strangers.
But here, in the blinding smoke of the conflagration Destroying what's left of youth, We have not deflected from ourselves One single stroke.
And we know that in the final accounting, Each hour will be justified… But there is no people on earth more tearless, More simple and more full of pride.11
Like all of Russia's greatest poets, Akhmatova felt the moral obligation to be her country's 'voice of memory'.12 But her sense of duty transcended the national; she felt a Christian imperative to remain in Russia and to suffer with the people in their destiny. As did many poets of her generation, she considered the Revolution as a punishment for sin, and believed it was her calling to atone for Russia's transgressions through the prayer of poetry. Akhmatova was a poet of redemption, the 'last great poet of Orthodoxy', according to Chukov-sky, and the theme of sacrifice, of suffering for Russia, appears throughout her work.13
Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song -
This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.14
The fountain House had a special place in Akhmatova's universe. She saw it as a blessed place, the spiritual kernel of St Petersburg, which became the Ideal City of her poetry. In several of her poems she compared St Petersburg ('the holy city of Peter') to Kitezh, the legend-ary city which had preserved its sacred values from the Mongol infidels by vanishing beneath lake Svetloyar to a spiritual realm.15 The Foun-
tain House was another world enclosed by water. Its inner sanctum
represented the European civilization, the vanished universal culture for which Akhmatova nostalgically yearned.* Akhmatova was drawn to the history of the house. She saw herself as its guardian. In her first autumn there she managed to establish that the oak trees in the garden were older than St Petersburg itself. They were longer lasting than any government.16 She researched the history of the Sheremetev clan, and in particular she felt a close attachment to Praskovya, who shared her 'gift of song' and lived, like her, persona non grata, in the Fountain House.
What are you muttering, midnight?
In any case, Parasha is dead,
The young mistress of the palace.17
The cultural history of the palace was a true inspiration to Akhmatova. She sensed the presence of the great Russian poets who had been connected with the house: Tiutchev (a friend of Count Sergei); Viazem-sky, who had visited the house (though Akhmatova was mistaken in her belief that he had died in the room where she lived);+ and Pushkin, above all, the poet she adored, who was a friend of Praskovya's son, Dmitry Sheremetev, the father of the last owner of the house. Rejected by Soviet publishers because they found her verse too esoteric, Akhmatova was drawn even closer to Pushkin from the middle of the1920s. He, too, had been censored, albeit by the Tsar one hundred years earlier, and her identification with him gave a unique edge to her scholarship on Pushkin, the subject of some of her best writing from this period. As a
* During his famous meeting with the poet at the Fountain House in 1945, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin asked Akhmatova whether the Renaissance was a real historical past to her, inhabited by imperfect human beings, or an idealized image of an imaginary world. 'She replied that it was of course the latter; all poetry and art, to her, was - here she used an expression once used by Mandelstam - a form of nostalgia, a longing for a universal culture, as Goethe and Schlegel had conceived it, of what had been transmuted into art and thought…' (I. Berlin, 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956', in Personal Impressions (Oxford, 1982), p. 198). + The room contained a desk with the name Prince Viazemsky written on it, but it belonged to the poet's son, who had died in that room in 1888. The poet died in Baden-Baden ten years earlier (N. I. Popova and O. E. Rubinchauk, Anna Akhmatova i fontanny dom (St Petersburg, iooo), pp. 36-8),
27. Akhmatova and Punin in the courtyard of the Fountain House, 1927
fellow poet, she could draw attention to the way he had defied the authorities by writing about politics and other moral issues in disguised literary forms - much as she was doing in her writing on Pushkin.
Akhmatova and Shileiko were divorced in 1926. He had been a jealous husband, jealous not just of her other lovers but of her talent, too (once in anger he had even burned her poetry). Akhmatova moved out of the Fountain House, but soon returned to live there with her
new lover, Nikolai Punin, and his wife (from whom he was separated) in their apartment in its southern wing. Punin was an art critic, a leading figure in the Futurist movement, but, unlike many of the Futurists, he knew the cultural value of the poets of the past. In one courageous article, in 1922, he had even spoken out against Trotsky, who had written an attack in Pravda against the poetry of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva ('internal and external emigrees') as 'literature irrelevant to October'.18 It was a warning of the terror to come.* 'What', asked Punin, 'if Akhmatova put on a leather jacket and a Red Army star, would she then be relevant to October?' If Akhmatova was to be rejected, 'why allow the works of Bach?'19
Despite his commitment to the Futurist group of left-wing artists, Punin's apartment in the Fountain House retained the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Petersburg. There were always visitors, late night talks around the kitchen table, people sleeping on the floor. Apart from Punin's former wife, her mother and daughter and a houseworker called Annushka, there were always people staying in the tiny four-roomed flat. By Soviet standards this was far more cubic space than the Punins were entitled to, and in 1931 Annushka's son and his new wife, an illiterate peasant girl who had come to Petrograd as a factory worker, were moved in by the Housing Committee, and the flat was reassigned as a communal one.20 Cramped conditions and the crippling poverty of living on Punin's meagre wages (for Akhmatova herself was earning nothing in the 1930s) imposed a strain on their relationship. There were frequent arguments over food and money which would often spill into the corridor so that neighbours overheard.21 Lydia Chukovskaya describes visiting Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1938, just before she broke up with Punin:
I climbed the tricky back staircase that belonged to another century, each step as deep as three. There was still some connection between the staircase and her, but then! When I rang the bell a woman opened the door, wiping soap suds from her hands. Those suds and the shabby entrance hall, with its scraps
* Trotsky's two articles were published just a fortnight after the expulsion from the country of several hundred leading intellectuals (accused of being 'counterrevolutionaries') in September 1921.
of peeling wallpaper, were somehow quite unexpected. The woman walked ahead of me. The kitchen; washing on lines, its wetness slapping one's face. The wet washing was just like the ending of a nasty story, like something out of Dostoevsky, perhaps. Beyond the kitchen, a little corridor, and to the left, a door leading to her room.22