derived satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether such destruction brought about any improvement in their own lot. They licensed the Red Guards and other self-appointed groups of armed workers to raid the houses of ‘the rich’ and confiscate their property. They rounded up the leisured classes and forced them to do jobs such as clearing snow or rubbish from the streets. Akhmatova was ordered to clean the streets around the Fountain House.5 House Committees (usually made up of former porters and domestic servants) were instructed to move the urban poor into the apartments of the old privileged elites. Palaces like the Fountain House were sub-divided and made into apartment blocks. Soon after their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks unleashed a campaign of mass terror, encouraging the workers and the peasants to denounce their neighbours to Revolutionary Tribunals and the local Cheka, or political police. Almost anything could be construed as ‘counterrevolutionary’ - hiding property, being late for work, drunkenness or hooligan behaviour - and the prisons were soon filled. Most of those
arrested by the Cheka in the early years of the Bolshevik regime had been denounced by their neighbours - often as a result of some vendetta. In this climate of mass terror no private space was left untouched. People lived under constant scrutiny, watched all the time by the House Committees, and always fearful of arrest. This was not a time for lyric poetry.
Akhmatova was dismissed as a figure from the past. Left-wing critics said her private poetry was incompatible with the new collectivist order. Other poets of her generation, such as Pasternak, were able to adapt to the new conditions of the Revolution. Or, like Mayakovsky, they were made for it. But Akhmatova was rooted in a classical tradition that had been thrown out in 1917, and she found it hard to come to terms - as did Mandelstam - with her new Soviet environment. She wrote very little in the early Soviet years. Her energy was consumed by the struggle to survive the harsh conditions of the civil war in Petrograd, where chronic shortages of food and fuel reduced the population by more than half, as people died or fled the hungry city for the countryside. Trees and wooden houses were chopped down for firewood; horses lay dead in the middle of the road; the waters of the Moika and Fontanka were filled with rubbish; vermin and diseases spread; and the daily life of the Tsars’ capital appeared to return to the prehistoric age, as desperate people scavenged for a piece of bread to eat or a stick of wood to burn.6
And confined to this savage capital,
We have forgotten forever
The lakes, the steppes, the towns,
And the dawns of our great native land.
Day and night in the bloody circle
A brutal languor overcomes us…
No one wants to help us
Because we stayed home,
Because, loving our city
And not winged freedom,
We preserved for ourselves
Its palaces, its fire and water.
A different time is drawing near,
The wind of death already chills the heart,
But the holy city of Peter
Will be our unintended monument.7
For the old intelligentsia conditions were particularly harsh. In the Dictatorship of the Proletariat they were put to the bottom of the social pile. Although most were conscripted by the state for labour teams, few had jobs. Even if they received food from the state, it was the beggarly third-class ration, ‘just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it’, in the words of Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd.8 Gorky took up the defence of the starving Petrograd intelligentsia, pleading with the Bolsheviks, among whom he was highly valued for his left-wing commitment before 1917, for special rations and better flats. He established a writers’ refuge, followed later by a House of Artists, and set up his own publishing house, called World Literature, to publish cheap editions of the classics for the masses. World Literature provided work for a vast number of writers, artists and musicians as translators and copy editors. Indeed, many of the greatest names of twentieth-century literature (Zamyatin, Babel, Chukovsky, Khodasev-ich, Mandelstam, Piast’, Zoshchenko and Blok and Gumilev) owed their survival of these hungry years to Gorky’s patronage.
Akhmatova also turned to Gorky for help, asking him to find her work and get her a ration. She was sharing Shileiko’s tiny food allowance, which he received as an assistant in the Department of Antiquities at the Hermitage. They had no fuel to burn, dysentery was rife among the inhabitants of the Fountain House, and, extravagant though it may appear, they had a St Bernard dog to feed which Shileiko had found abandoned and which, in the spirit of the Sheremetev motto, they had decided to keep. Gorky told Akhmatova that she would only get the most beggarly of rations for doing office work of some kind, and then he took her to see his valuable collection of oriental rugs. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, ‘Akhmatova looked at Gorky’s carpets, said how nice they were, and went away empty-handed. As a result of this, I believe, she took a permanent dislike to carpets. They smelled too much of dust and a kind of prosperity strange in a city that was dying so catastrophically. Perhaps Gorky was afraid to help
Akhmatova; perhaps he disliked her and her poetry. But in 1920 she did at last find work as a librarian in the Petrograd Agronomic Institute, and perhaps Gorky helped.
In August 1921, Akhmatova’s former husband Nikolai Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial on charges, which were almost certainly false, of belonging to a monarchist conspiracy. Gumilev was the first great poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks, although many more would soon follow. With his death, there was a feeling in the educated classes that a boundary had been crossed: their civilization had passed away. The moving poems of Akhmatova’s collection
The tear-stained autumn, like a widow
In black weeds, clouds every heart…
Recalling her husband’s words,
She sobs without ceasing.
And thus it will be, until the most quiet snow
Takes pity on the sorrowful and weary one…
Oblivion of pain and oblivion of bliss -
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
