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st. petersburg journal
if poet's room could speak,
it would tell of grief
june 28, 1995
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - In the diffuse, almost endless light
of summer, it is hard to regard this city as a place of suffering.
Few people could gaze at the noble mansions and monuments and easily
summon thoughts of despair.
In many ways St. Petersburg has, since its creation, always
been the spiritual center of the country, the center of science,
sophistication, culture and art. But for the last century and a
half, culture has often been at war with Russia. Pushkin died
here in a foolish duel and Dostoyevsky was once taken from the
city in chains. Osip Mandelstam, one of Pushkin's heirs, was
destroyed by Stalin.
Somehow, though, the poet Anna Akhmatova survived. She lived
through the revolution and the Nazi siege, through hunger and
disgrace and the murder of her closest friends. She lived through
the terror of Stalin, mostly alone in a small room that is now
a sad, perpetually empty museum. She lived to tell about it all
by carefully committing her poems to memory and then burning the
paper they were written on. ("It was like a ritual," her friend
the poet Lydiya Chukovskaya wrote. "Hands, matches, an ashtray.
A ritual beautiful and bitter.")
Always grand in her restraint, lucid in the agony she was
able to convey, Akhmatova was the bard of St. Petersburg. She
managed to be everything the city has always been: elegant, expressive
and laden with grief. She was, in her disciple Joseph Brodsky's
unforgettable phrase, "the keening muse."
But the muse is not in demand these days. Even at the height
of the tourist season there are not many visitors to the memorial
rooms devoted to her in the Fountain House, a former palace that
became a communal residence where she lived during Soviet times.
More people visit Dostoyevsky's house in a month than have been
to see Akhmatova's rooms this year, even though, in Russia, she
is considered one of this century's finest poets.
"She is still loved," said the museum's director, Nina Popova.
"But people just don't feel the need to come here. I don't
understand it. Maybe the memories are still too strong. Maybe
it's too painful for people to be reminded of something so close."
This is a country that cherishes literature like no other.
But maybe life in Russia today is moving too fast to waste time
on a woman who died 30 years ago and could well have lived in
another world. Born in 1889 and raised near here in Tsarskoye
Celo (Czar's Village), where Pushkin also once lived, she chose
not to emigrate after the revolution. "I am not one of those
who left the land to the mercy of its enemies," she wrote.
"Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them
to praise."
Her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was shot as a subversive
in 1921. She was barred from publishing her poetry; she was with
Mandelstam when he was arrested. Like most of her friends, he
died in the camps.
All this is communicated in the few rooms in which she lived
between the years 1922 and 1952. There are silhouettes of her
friends, and carefully reworked drafts of some of her shorter
poems. There are many drawings of her, for she was tall, lithe,
dark and beautiful in an eternally exotic way.
She gained her early fame writing love poems, but history
took her in a sharply different direction. She was at her most
creative when Russia plunged into the darkest ravine (perhaps
proving her friend Mandelstam's comment that great poetry is often
a response to total disaster).
When the terror was at its worst, she lived in a single room
with a tiny bed, a desk and four books (Pushkin, Shakespeare,
Dante and the Bible.) Linden trees -- beautiful and often mentioned
in her poetry -- block most of the light even on the sunny days
that are now upon the city. There was little heat and less food.
"The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars," she
wrote in "The Return." "Thank God there's no one left for me to
lose so I can cry."
There is surprisingly little of value or importance in her
rooms. Some porcelain; a copy of the one Modigliani line drawing
of her that survives (he drew 16); posters that tell the troubled
story of modern Russian literature. "Akhmatova or Mayakovsky?
Two Russias" was the bill for a lecture on Dec. 16, 1920,
at the House of Artists here, when debates between opposing figures
like a traditionalist and a futurist were still possible. There
are a few short notes for "Requiem," her great epic
of suffering.
"Requiem" is Akhmatova's story but it is also Russia's.
It takes place during the worst years of the purges, between 1935
and 1940, when she stood outside Leningrad's enormous stone prison
day after day for 17 months, desperate for some word of her son's
fate. Even then she was famous, and a woman, seeing the poet for
the first time, timidly approached her. The exchange appears at
the beginning of her long story of those terrible years:
"One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing
behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course,
never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the
torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered
there):
" 'Can you describe this?'
"And I said: 'I can.'
"Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what
had once been her face."
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