22).166 The hooked curve and line was a double cipher. It stood for the horse-stick on which the shaman rode to the spirit world in seances. Buriat shamans hit their sticks (called ‘horses’) while they danced: the tops were shaped like horses’ heads, the bottom ends like hoofs. Among Finno-Ugric tribes the shaman’s drum itself was called a ‘horse’ and was equipped with reins, while the drumstick was referred to as a ‘whip’.167
In eastern Europe the hobby horse has a preternatural pedigree which belies its benign status in the Western nursery. The Hungarian
Where will you gallop, charger proud, Where next your plunging hoofbeats settle?168
For the Symbolist circles in which Kandinsky moved, the horse was a symbol of the Asiatic steppe upon which Russia’s European civilization had been built. It featured constantly in Symbolist paintings (perhaps most famously in Petrov-Vodkin’s
7
overleaf:
1
Akhmatova arrived at the Fountain House, the former palace of the Sheremetevs, when she went to live there with her second husband, Vladimir Shileiko, in 1918. The house remained as it had always been, a sanctuary from the destruction of the war and revolution that had transformed Petersburg in the four years since it had been renamed Petrograd;* but, like the city (which had lost its status as the capital), the beauty of the palace was a retrospective one. Its last owner, Count Sergei, the grandson of Praskovya and Nikolai Petrovich, had preserved the house as a family museum. He himself had written several books on the history of the Sheremetev clan. During the February Revolution of 1917, when crowds came to the house and demanded arms to help them in their struggle against the Tsar’s last loyalist troops, the count had opened the collection cabinets of Field Marshal Boris Petrovich, the founder of the palace, and handed out to them some picks and axes from the sixteenth century.1 To save his home from the violence of the mob, he turned it over to the state, signing an agreement with the newly installed Soviet government to preserve the house as a museum, before fleeing with his family abroad. The old Sheremetev servants were kept on, and Shileiko, a brilliant young scholar of Middle Eastern archaeology who had been a tutor to the last count’s grandsons and a close friend of the family, was allowed to keep his apartment in the northern wing. Akhmatova had known Shileiko since before the war, when he was a minor poet in her bohemian circle at the ‘Stray Dog’ club with Mandelstam and her previous husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev. The Fountain House was more than just the scene of her romance with Shileiko - it drew her to him in a spiritual way. The Sheremetev motto,
* After the outbreak of the First World War the German-sounding name of St Petersburg was changed to the more Slavic Petrograd to appease patriotic sentiment. The city kept that name until 1924, when, after Lenin’s death, it was renamed Leningrad.
became the guiding redemptive principle of Ahkmatova’s life and art. Although she was only twenty-nine when she moved to the Shereme-tev palace, Akhmatova, like her new home, was from a vanished world. Born in 1889, she had gone to school at Tsarskoe Selo, where, like Pushkin, she imbibed the spirit of French poetry. In 1911 she went to Paris, where she became friends with the painter Amedeo Modigliani, whose drawing of her, one of many, hung in her apartment at the Fountain House until 1952. Her early poetry was influenced by the Symbolists. But in 1913 she joined Gumilev and Mandelstam in a new literary group, the Acmeists, who rejected the mysticism of the Symbolists and returned to the classical poetic principles of clarity, concision and the precise expression of emotional experience. She won immense acclaim for her love poetry in
I taught women to speak…
But Lord, how to make them cease!2
On the eve of the First World War, Akhmatova was at the height of her success. Tall and astonishingly beautiful, she was surrounded by friends, lovers and admirers. Freedom, merriment and a bohemian spirit filled these years. She and Mandelstam would make each other laugh ‘so much that we fell down on the divan, which sang with all its springs’.3 And then, at once, with the outbreak of the war, ‘we aged a hundred years’, as she put it in her poem ‘In Memoriam, 19 July, 1914’ (1916):
We aged a hundred years, and this Happened in a single hour: The short summer had already died, The body of the ploughed plains smoked.
Suddenly the quiet road burst into colour, A lament flew up, ringing, silver… Covering my face, I implored God Before the first battle to strike me dead.
Like a burden henceforth unnecessary, The shadows of passion and songs vanished
from my memory. The Most High ordered it - emptied -To become a grim book of calamity.4
After all the horrors of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Akhmatova’s intimate and lyrical style of poetry seemed to come from a different world. It appeared old-fashioned, from another century.
The February Revolution had swept away, not just the monarchy, but an entire civilization. The liberals and moderate socialists like Alexander Kerensky, who formed the Provisional Government to steer the country through to the end of the First World War and the election of a Constituent Assembly, had assumed that the Revolution could be confined to the political sphere. But almost overnight all the institutions of authority collapsed - the Church, the legal system, the power of the gentry on the land, the authority of the officers in the army and the navy, deference for senior figures - so that the only real power in the country passed into the hands of the local revolutionary committees (that is, the Soviets) of the workers, peasants and soldiers. It was in their name that Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 and instituted their Dictatorship of the Proletariat. They consolidated their dictatorship by leaving the war and buying peace with Germany. The cost of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, was one-third of the Russian Empire’s agricultural land and more than half its industrial base, as Poland, the Baltic territories and most of the Ukraine were given nominal independence under German protection. Soviet Russia, as a European power, was reduced to a status comparable to that of seventeenth-century Muscovy. From the remnants of the Imperial army, the Bolsheviks established the Red Army to fight against
the Whites (a motley collection of monarchists, democrats and socialists opposed to the Soviet regime) and the interventionary forces of Britain, France, Japan, the USA and a dozen other western powers which supported them in the civil war of 1918-21.
Popularly seen as a war against all privilege, the practical ideology of the Russian Revolution owed less to Marx - whose works were hardly known by the semi-literate masses - than to the egalitarian customs and Utopian yearnings of the peasantry. Long before it was written down by Marx, the Russian people had lived by the idea that surplus wealth was immoral, all property was theft, and that manual labour was the only true source of value. In the Russian peasant mind there was Christian virtue in being poor - a fact the Bolsheviks exploited brilliantly when they called their newspaper
By giving institutional form to this crusade, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements among the poor who
