Natasha's Dance

eastern Siberia - in effect a death sentence in view of his poor health. On his way there he passed the Yenisei river, the towns of Chita and Svobodny, and ended up in a camp near Vladivostok, where he died of a heart attack on 26 December 1938.

    In her memoir about Mandelstam, Akhmatova recalls the final time she saw her friend, stripped of everything, on the eve of his arrest: ‘For me he is not only a great poet but a great human being who, when he found out (probably from Nadya) how bad it was for me in the House on the Fontanka, told me when he was saying goodbye at the Moscow train station in Leningrad: “Annushka” [which he had never used before], always remember that my house - is yours.” ‘126

    Mandelstam’s seditious poem also played a role in the arrest of Lev Gumilev, Akhmatova’s son, in 1935. Since the death of his father, in 1921, Lev had lived with relatives in the town of Bezhetsk, 250 kilometres north of Moscow, but in 1929 he moved into the Punin apartment at the Fountain House and, after several applications (all turned down on account of his ‘social origins’), he was finally enrolled, in 1934, as a history student at Leningrad University. One spring evening at the Fountain House Lev recited the Mandelstam poem, which by that time he, like many people, knew by heart. But among his student friends that night was an informant of the NKVD, who came to arrest him, along with Punin, in October 1935. Akhmatova was driven to a frenzy. She rushed to Moscow and, with the help of Pasternak, who wrote personally to Stalin, secured lev’s release. It

    was not the first time, nor the last, that Lev would be arrested. He had never been involved in anti-Soviet agitation. Indeed, his sole crime was to be the son of Gumilev and Akhmatova; if he was arrested it was only as a hostage to secure his mother’s acquiescence to the Soviet regime. The mere fact of her close relationship with Mandelstam was enough to make the authorities suspicious of her.

    Akhmatova herself was being closely watched by the NKVD during 1935. Its agents followed her and photographed her visitors as they came in and out of the Fountain House, in preparation, as archives have now revealed, for her arrest.127 Akhmatova was conscious of the danger she was in. After Lev’s arrest she had burned a huge pile of her manuscripts in full expectation of another raid on the Punin apartment.128 Like all communal blocks, the Fountain House was full of NKVD informants - not paid-up officials, but ordinary residents who were themselves afraid and wished to demonstrate their loyalty, or who bore a petty grudge against their neighbours or thought that by denouncing them they would get more living space. The cramped conditions of communal housing brought out the worst in those who suffered them. There were communal houses where everyone got along, but in general the reality of living together was a far cry from the communist ideal. Neighbours squabbled over personal property, foodstuffs that went missing from the shared kitchen, noisy lovers or music played at night, and, with everybody in a state of nervous paranoia, it did not take much for fights to turn into denunciations to the NKVD.

    Lev was re-arrested in March 1938. For eight months he was held and tortured in Leningrad’s Kresty jail, then sentenced to ten years’ hard labour on the White Sea Canal in north-west Russia.* This was at the height of the Stalin Terror, when millions of people disappeared. For eight months Akhmatova went every day to join the long queues at the Kresty jail, now just one of Russia’s many women waiting to hand in a letter or a parcel through a little window and, if it was accepted, to go away with joy at the knowledge that their loved one must be still alive. This was the background to her poetic cycle Requiem (written between 1935 and 1940; first published in Munich in 1963).

* The sentence was later changed to five years’ labour in the gulag at Norilsk.

    As Akhmatova explained in the short prose piece ‘Instead of a Preface’

    (1957):

    In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone ‘recognized’ me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

    ’Can you describe this?’

    And I answered, ‘Yes I can.’

    Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.12’

    In Requiem Akhmatova became the people’s voice. The poem represented a decisive moment in her artistic evolution - the moment when the lyric poet of private experience became, in the words of Requiem, the ‘mouth through which a hundred million scream’.130 The poem is intensely personal. Yet it gives voice to an anguish felt by every person who had lost someone.

    This was when the ones who smiled

    Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

    And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

    Swung from its prisons.

    And when, senseless from torment,

    Regiments of convicts marched,

    And the short songs of farewell

    Were sung by locomotive whistles.

    The stars of death stood above us

    And innocent Russia writhed

    Under bloody boots

    And under the tyres of the Black Marias.131

    This was when Akhmatova’s decision to remain in Russia began to make sense. She had shared in her people’s suffering. Her poem had become a monument to it - a dirge for the dead sung in whispered incantations among friends; and in some way it redeemed that suffering.

    No, not under the vault of alien skies,

    And not under the shelter of alien wings -

    I was with my people then,

    There, where my people, unfortunately, were.132

5

    Some time at the end of the 1940s Akhmatova was walking with Nadezhda Mandelstam in Leningrad when she suddenly remarked: ‘To think that the best years of our life were during the war when so many people were being killed, when we were starving and my son was doing forced labour.’133 For anyone who suffered from the Terror as she did, the Second World War must have come as a release. As Gordon says to Dudorov in the epilogue of Doctor Zhivago, ‘When war broke out its real dangers and its menace of death were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’134 People were allowed and had to act in ways that would have been unthinkable before the war. They organized themselves for civilian defence. By necessity, they spoke to one another without thinking of the consequences. From this spontaneous activity a new sense of nationhood emerged. As Pasternak would later write, the war was ‘a period of vitality and in this sense an untrammelled, joyous restoration of the sense of community with everyone’.135 His own wartime verse was full of feeling for this community, as if the struggle had stripped away the state to reveal the core of Russia’s nationhood:

    Through the peripeteia of the past And the years of war and poverty Silently I came to recognize The inimitable features of Russia

    Overcoming my feelings of love I observed in worship Old women, residents Students and locksmiths136

    As the German armies crossed the Soviet border, on 22 June 1941, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Minister, gave a radio address in which he spoke of the impending ‘patriotic war for homeland, honour and freedom’.137 The next day the main Soviet army newspaper, Kras-naia zvezda, referred to it as a ‘holy war’.138 Communism was conspicuously absent from Soviet propaganda in the war. It was fought in the name of Russia, of the ‘family of peoples’ in the Soviet Union, of Pan-Slav brotherhood, or in the name of Stalin, but never in the name of the communist system. To mobilize support, the Stalinist regime even embraced the Russian Church, whose patriotic message was more likely to persuade a rural population that was still recovering from the disastrous effects of collectivization. In 1943, a patriarch was elected for the first time since 1917; a theological academy and several seminaries were re-opened; and after years of persecution the parish churches were allowed to restore something of their spiritual life.139 The regime glorified the military heroes of Russian history - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov - all of whom were summoned as an inspiration for the nation’s self-defence. Films were made about their lives, military orders were created in their names. History became the story of great leaders rather than the charting of the class struggle.

    Russia’s artists enjoyed a new freedom and responsibility in the war years. Poets who had been regarded with disfavour or banned from publication by the Soviet regime suddenly began to receive letters from the soldiers at the front. Throughout the years of the Terror