the former servants' wing-of an eighteenth-century palace called the Fountain House, where the poet lived on and off for thirty years. The museum is filled with representations (photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures) of a strikingly beautiful and elegant woman- tall, slender, with dark bangs, always unsmiling-who achieved fame as an avant-garde poet in her early twenties and lived to become one of the heroines of the tragedy of Russian Communism. Though a child of privilege, Akhmatova, born in 1889 (as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko-in 1911 she took the pen name Akhmatova, after a Tatar princess who was her great-grandmother), chose not to join the aristocrats, artists, and writers who left Russia after the revolution, and threw in her lot with those who remained to see the tragedy through. Her fortitude in the face of suffering and loss-her first husband was shot by the Bolsheviks, her only son was imprisoned three times, for a total of thirteen years, her friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam died in a labor camp, as did her third husband-and the major poetry she quietly produced during three decades as a banned (and thus destitute) writer have given her legendary status. Isaiah Berlin, recalling an extraordinary night-long conversation he had with Akhmatova in the autumn of 1945, when she was fifty-six, wrote: 'She did not in public, nor indeed to me in private, utter a single word against the Soviet regime: but her entire life was what Herzen once described virtually all Russian literature as being-one uninterrupted indictment of Russian reality.' Akhmatova's poem 'Requiem,' perhaps the best known of her works in the West, was written during one of her son's incarcerations, at the height of the Stalin terror, and takes us into this reality with chilling directness: You should have been shown, you mocker, Minion of all your friends, Gay little sinner of Tsarskoye Selo, What would happen in your life- How three-hundreth in line, with a parcel, You would stand by the Kresty prison, Your fiery tears Burning through the New Year's ice. Over there the prison poplar bends, And there's no sound-and over there how many Innocent lives are ending now. Akhmatova herself escaped arrest, though not the fear of it by which life in Russia was defined during the Stalin years. In a memoir of Akhmatova, Nadyezda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet, writes: 'Of everything that happened to us, what was most significant and powerful was the fear and what it produced-a loathsome feeling of disgrace and impotence. There is no need to try to remember this; 'this' is with us always.' Mandelstamova goes on to record Akhmatova's stoicism and courage and consistent good conduct during a period when just being decent was to take your life in your hands. Berlin writes of Akhmatova as 'immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness… she moved and looked like a tragic queen.' One is somehow not surprised to learn that this Niobe 'worshiped Dosto-evsky,' and did not care for Chekhov: She asked me what I read: before I could answer she denounced Chekhov for his mud-coloured world, his dreary plays, the absence in his world of heroism and martyrdom, of depth and darkness and sublimity-this was the passionate diatribe, which I later reported to Pasternak, in which she said that in Chekhov 'no swords flashed.'
But when Berlin revisited the Soviet Union in 1956, and spoke with Akhmatova on the telephone (she did not dare see him, for fear of endangering her son, who was briefly out of prison), she told him that she had reread Chekhov, and acknowledged, he writes, that 'at least in 'Ward 6' he had described her situation accurately, hers, and that of many others.' This, too, is not surprising. It only underscores the divide between Chekhov's Dostoevskian examinations of extreme situations-works full of 'depth and darkness and sublimity,' 'heroism and martyrdom'-and those situated on the blessedly 'dreary' other side of the barbed wire. At the museum, a gray- haired woman with a crocheted shawl and a wool cap attached herself to Nelly and me- one of the army of retired women with insufficient pensions who are glad to find ill- or unpaid work in museums-and recited an earnest and na've spiel about the poet's life. The largest part of the museum is given over to Akhmatova's early life: to the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs (among them a drawing by Modigliani, whom Akhmatova met in Paris in 1911) that Akhmatova's contemporaries, ravished by her interesting beauty, tripped over each other to make; and to exhibits of books and manuscripts from the period when she was still able to publish. In addition, there are rooms that supposedly reconstruct the various periods when Akhmatova lived at the Fountain House-first with her second husband, Vladimir Shileilko, an Assyriologist; then with her third husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin (and with his ex-wife and child; such was communal apartment life in those days); then (after her separation from Punin) in a room of her own in the Punin apartment. When her friend Lydia Chukovska visited her in this room in 1938, she found that its 'general appearance… was one of neglect, chaos. By the stove an armchair, missing a leg, ragged, springs protruding. The floor unswept. The beautiful things-the carved chair, the mirror in its smooth bronze frame, the lubok prints on the walls- did not adorn the room; on the contrary, they only emphasized its squalor further.' By the end of the war, when another friend, Natalia Roskina, visited the room, the beautiful things were gone. 'The circumstances in which Akhmatova was then living could not be described as impoverished, for poverty implies having a little of something. She had nothing,' Roskina writes in a memoir of 1966. 'There was a small, old desk in her room and an iron bed covered with a shabby blanket. The bed was obviously hard and it was obvious that the blanket provided no warmth.'
Akhmatova's room in the museum has none of the squalor of Chukovskaya's description or the bleakness of Roskina's. It is of a piece with the elegant young beauty in the drawings and paintings and sculptures and photographs. It is sparsely furnished, but as if by willful design rather than out of pathetic necessity. Only choice and rare pieces of furniture and objects have been admitted: a leather-covered chaise with curved wooden legs on which a small black leather suitcase mysteriously rests; a glass-fronted rosewood cabinet with a few interesting pieces in it (a fan, a strange bottle with a crystal stopper, a porcelain statuette of Akhmatova in her youth); a chair with a white fringed shawl thrown over it; a carved chest with a couple of leather-bound books and three commedia dell'arte rag dolls lying on it. The room looks out on the palace's grassy, tree-filled courtyard. There is no trace in it of the line that stood in front of the Kresty prison or of the corpulent old woman Akhmatova became in the last years of her life. Shrines operate under a kind of reverse Gresham's law: beauty, youth, order, pleasure drive out ugliness, old age, disorder, suffering. In Paris, in 1965, Akhmatova was shown an article in an emigre journal that spoke of her as a martyr, and she protested, 'If they want to write about me over here, let them write about me the way they write about other poets: this line is better than that one, this is an original use of imagery, this image does not work at all. Let them forget about my sufferings.' Chekhov sounded a similar note of asperity in the summer of 1901 in a letter to Olga: 'You write, 'my heart begins to ache when I think of the silent, deep well of melancholy within you.' What nonsense is this, my darling? I am not melancholy and never have been and feel tolerably well and when you're with me I feel absolutely fine.' Akhmatova was fourteen when Chekhov died. Had he lived he undoubtedly would have met her in St. Petersburg literary society, and would not have complained about her looks or her clothes. He might or might not have liked her poetry, but he would have known better than anyone what she meant when she said, 'Let them forget about my sufferings.' Eleven
I
left the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg after the second act of an exceptionally trite and listless Carmen, but not before mingling with the intermission crowd in one of the buffets, where children in velvet party clothes and adults in evening dress crowded around refreshment stands and carried away glasses of champagne and fruit drinks and dishes of ice cream and small plates piled with sandwiches and pastries and chocolates wrapped in cornucopias of colored foil. I felt a stir of memory, a flutter of the romance theater held for me when I was myself a child in a velvet dress. The role of theater in relieving the bleak joylessness of Chekhov's childhood has been noted by his biographers. He and his classmates would go to the Taganrog Theater to see plays or hear operettas, sitting in the cheap seats, and sometimes even wearing dark glasses and their fathers' coats to avoid expulsion. (Unaccompanied schoolboys were not allowed in the theater. A boyhood memory doubtless inspired the moment in 'The Lady with the Dog' when two schoolboys, illicitly smoking on the stair landing of a provincial theater, look down and see Gurov emotionally kissing Anna's face and hands.)
Chekhov began writing plays at an early age. (The untitled manuscript of the half-baked play we call Platonov surfaced in the 1920s and was thought to have been written when he was twenty or twenty-one.) In the English- speaking world, Chekhov is better known as a dramatist than as a story writer. Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while few have even heard of 'The Wife' or 'In the Ravine.' But Chekhov was never comfortable as a playwright. 'Ah, why have I written plays and not stories!' he wrote to Suvorin in 1896. 'Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproduc-tively.' A year earlier, when the first draft of The Seagull had been coolly received by theater people and literary friends, Chekhov had written to Suvorin, 'I am not destined to be a playwright. I have no luck at it. But I'm not sad over it, for I can still go on writing stories. In that sphere I feel at home; but when I write a play, I feel uneasy, as though someone were peering over my shoulder.'
Chekhov wrote 'The Steppe' (1888) in a month and 'The Name-Day Party' (1888) in three weeks; it took him almost a year each to drag the Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard out of himself. Ill health undoubtedly played a role, but there is reason to think that the feeling of being watched as he worked, of no longer being alone in his
