The Magical Chorus

Akhmatova did not serve the Soviets, nor did she leave for the West, remaining in what was called “internal emigration.” After 1922, her books of poetry were no longer published and she lived in proud isolation. But in 1935, when her husband, Punin, and her son, Lev Gumilev, were arrested, Akhmatova wrote to Stalin: “Iosif Vissarionovich, I do not know of what they are accused, but I give you my word of honor that they are not fascists, or spies, or members of counterrevolutionary societies. I have lived in the USSR since the start of the Revolution, I have never wanted to leave the country to which I am tied by mind and heart. Despite the fact that my poetry is not published and reviews by critics cause me many bitter minutes, I have not given in to despair; I continued to work in very difficult moral and material conditions…In Leningrad I live in great isolation and am frequently ill for long periods. The arrest of the only two people close to me is a blow that I will not be able to survive. I ask you, Iosif Vissarionovich, to return my husband and son to me, certain that no one will ever regret it.”¹¹

Stalin wrote his resolution on the letter: “Free both Punin and Gumilev from arrest and report on the implementation.” From that moment, Akhmatova felt that she was in dialogue with the ruler. She had good reason. There is a story that in 1939 Stalin saw his young daughter, Svetlana, copying Akhmatova’s poetry from somebody’s notebook into her own, and asked her: “Why don’t you just use the book?” Learning from her that there were no easily available books of Akhmatova, Stalin, as the poet later wrote, “was bitterly stunned.”¹²

Akhmatova also maintained that in early 1939, “Stalin asked about me at a banquet for writers.”¹³ The fact remains that on November 11, 1939, the Presidium of the Union of Writers met urgently for a closed session where they voted on the resolution proposed by Union Secretary Fadeyev, Stalin’s tried and true henchman, on aid for Akhmatova—“bearing in mind Akhmatova’s great contributions to Russian poetry.”¹⁴

Who was behind the abrupt change in the official organization’s formerly hostile and scornful attitude toward Akhmatova can be guessed from Fadeyev’s letter to then Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Andrei Vyshinsky: Fadeyev asked him to find Akhmatova a room in Leningrad, since she “was and remains the most major poet of the prerevolutionary period.”¹⁵ This definition, strikingly similar to Stalin’s famous evaluation of Mayakovsky (who “was and remains the best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era”), must have been a quote from Stalin’s verbal order, since Vyshinsky, an infamously ruthless Stalinist butcher, supported Fadeyev’s request with extraordinary readiness.

Akhmatova was also given “a one-time grant of 3,000 rubles” and a monthly pension. (Fadeyev’s argument was charming: “After all, she doesn’t have that long to live.” As it happens, Akhmatova lived another twenty-seven years, outliving Fadeyev, who shot himself in 1956, by eleven years.)

The publishing house Sovetskii Pisatel (according to Akhmatova, on orders from Stalin “to publish my poetry”¹⁶) speedily printed her collection Iz shesti knig [From Six Books], in fact, her selected works. There is a story that Sholokhov had asked Stalin to do this.¹⁷ Most interestingly, the book came up in May 1940, just at the peak of the feverish intrigues in preparation for the first series of Stalin Prizes; it was instantly nominated for the prize by the most influential writers of the time— Sholokhov, Fadeyev, and Alexei Tolstoy. They were supported by Nemirovich-Danchenko, chairman of the Committee on Stalin Prizes.

However, Akhmatova did not get the Stalin Prize (neither did Pasternak, who had been nominated for his translation of Hamlet): someone reversed. Was it Stalin himself? We have only Zhdanov’s resolution: “How could this ‘depravity with prayer in the praise of god’ of Akhmatova’s ever appear? Who promoted it?”¹⁸

A special decree of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Party banned the Akhmatova collection as being “ideologically harmful” and required it to be removed from sale—an empty gesture, since the entire printing had sold out long before. All this was a tremendous blow for Akhmatova then, but later it helped cement her anti- Stalinist image (while, for example, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are often blamed nowadays for their numerous Stalin Prizes).

In 1941, along with other leading cultural figures of Leningrad like Shostakovich and Zoshchenko, Akhmatova was evacuated on Stalin’s orders. She landed in Tashkent in Central Asia, where on February 23, 1942, she wrote her famous patriotic poem “Courage.” It was published two weeks later in Pravda, the central Party newspaper.

We are not afraid of dying beneath bullets,

We will not be bitter left without shelter—

We will preserve you, Russian speech,

The mighty Russian word.

One of the somewhat mysterious episodes in Akhmatova’s biography took place that same year. A military base located near Tashkent was the training site for a Polish anti-Hitler army under the command of General Wladislaw Anders. Stalin had these forces under his personal control and often summoned Anders to the Kremlin.

Anders was playing a complicated game with Stalin. His goal was to bring his men, Polish soldiers and officers who were interned in the Soviet Union, to Iran, where he would join up with the British (which he managed to do eventually). In order to lull Stalin’s suspicions, Anders had to keep sending him signals of his loyalty. With that in mind, he invited the famous writer and Stalin favorite, the Red Count Alexei Tolstoy, author of the historical novel Peter the First, to visit his headquarters. The visit was organized by Count Jozef Czapski, a cavalry officer who handled cultural issues for Anders and also, as Brodsky told me (having learned it from Akhmatova), counterintelligence.¹⁹

In response, Tolstoy invited the count to lunch. There, forty-six-year-old Czapski, an artist and writer in peacetime, met Akhmatova, who was fifty-three. In his memoirs, Czapski described her as a woman with vestiges of former beauty and big gray eyes. Her confidante, Lydia Chukovskaya, asserts that the poet began meeting the Polish officer secretly, trying to escape his Soviet surveillance. Akhmatova later wrote a poem about their meetings, which begins clearly enough: “That night we drove each other mad.”

Did Akhmatova really think that she and Czapski managed to hide from the vigilant eyes of Stalin’s spies? Brodsky expressed his doubts: “How could you even consider that, especially in those times? In Tashkent, I believe, a whole multitude followed their every step.”²⁰

You couldn’t call Akhmatova naive; she was a tough nut. We know that she wrote down her anti-Stalinist poems (including Requiem, about the Great Terror) for her closest friends, let them read the lines, and then burned the paper on the spot. She feared—and properly so—that her rooms were bugged. (Remember careless Sholokhov in the National Hotel.) Why was Akhmatova not punished for her forbidden liaison with a Polish officer? Another girlfriend of Czapski’s in Tashkent was arrested by the Soviet authorities, as he wrote in his memoirs.²¹

Akhmatova might have begun to think that she was indeed under “higher protection,” as Czapski put it. That certainty played her false in late November 1945, when she was back in Leningrad and spent a night talking with Isaiah Berlin, a thirty-six-year-old British diplomat of Russian descent. This was her second contact with a foreigner in the Soviet Union, and this time Stalin was furious, as Akhmatova learned soon enough.

Akhmatova was condemned in a special Resolution of the Central Committee of the Party on August 21, 1946, which proclaimed that her poetry “brings harm to bringing up our youth and therefore cannot be tolerated in Soviet