they had never been forgotten by their readers; nor, it would seem, had they ever really lost their spiritual authority. In 1945, Isaiah Berlin, on a visit to Russia, was told that
the poetry of Blok, Bryusov, Sologub, Esenin, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, was widely read, learnt by heart and quoted by soldiers and officers and even political commissars. Akhmatova and Pasternak, who had for a long time lived in a kind of internal exile, received an amazingly large number of letters from the front, quoting from both published and unpublished poems, for the most part circulated privately in manuscript copies; there were requests for autographs, for confirmation of the authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author’s attitude to this or that problem.140
Zoshchenko received about 6,000 letters in one year. Many of them came from readers who said they often thought of suicide and looked to him for spiritual help.141 In the end the moral value of such writers could not fail to impress itself on the Party’s bureaucrats, and conditions for these artists gradually improved. Akhmatova was allowed to publish a collection of her early lyrics,
In her patriotic poem ‘Courage’ (published in the Soviet press in February 1942) Akhmatova presented the war as a defence of the ‘Russian word’ - and the poem gave courage to the millions of soldiers who went into battle with its words on their lips:
We know what lies in balance at this moment, And what is happening right now. The hour for courage strikes upon our clocks, And courage will not desert us. We’re not frightened by a hail of lead, We’re not bitter without a roof overhead -And we will preserve you, Russian speech, Mighty Russian word! We will transmit you to our grandchildren Free and pure and rescued from captivity Forever!143
In the first months of the war Akhmatova joined the Civil Defence in Leningrad. ‘I remember her near the old iron railings of the House on the Fontanka’, wrote the poet Olga Berggolts. ‘Her face severe and angry, a gas mask strapped over her shoulder, she took her turn on the fire watch like a regular soldier.’144 As the German armies circled in on Leningrad, Berggolts’s husband, the literary critic Georgy Makogonenko, turned to Akhmatova to raise the spirits of the city by talking to its people in a radio broadcast. For years her poetry had been forbidden by the Soviet authorities. Yet, as the critic explained later, the very name Akhmatova was so synonymous with the spirit of the city that even Zhdanov was
prepared to bow to it in this hour of need. Akhmatova was sick, so it was agreed to record her speech in the Fountain House. Akhmatova’s address was proud and courageous. She appealed to the city’s entire legacy - not just to Lenin but to Peter the Great, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Blok, too. She ended with a stirring tribute to the women of the old capital:
Our descendants will honour every mother who lived at the time of the war, but their gaze will be caught and held fast by the image of the Leningrad woman standing during an air raid on the roof of a house, with a boat-hook and fire- tongs in her hand, protecting the city from fire; the Leningrad girl volunteer giving aid to the wounded among the still smoking ruins of a building… No, a city which has bred women like these cannot be conquered.145
Shostakovich also took part in the radio broadcast. He and Akhmatova had never met, even though they loved each other’s work and felt a spiritual affinity. * Both felt profoundly the suffering of their city, and expressed that suffering in their own ways. Like Akhmatova, Shostakovich had joined the Civil Defence, as a fireman. Only his bad eyesight had prevented him from joining up with the Red Army in the first days of the war. He turned down the chance to leave the besieged city in July, when the musicians of the Conservatory were evacuated to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. In between the fire fighting, he began composing marches for the front-line troops, and in the first two weeks of September, as the bombs began to fall on Leningrad, he worked by candlelight, in a city now deprived of electricity, to finish what would be his Seventh Symphony. As one might expect from his Terror-induced caution and St Petersburg reserve, Shostakovich was rather circumspect in his radio address. He simply told the city that he was about to complete a new symphony. Normal life was going on.146
* Akhmatova rarely missed a Shostakovich premiere. After the first performance of his Eleventh Symphony (‘The Year 1905’) in 1957, she compared its hopeful revolutionary songs, which the critics had dismissed as devoid of interest (this was the time of the Khrushchev thaw), to ‘white birds flying against a terrible black sky’. The next year she dedicated the Soviet edition of her
Later that same day, 16 September 1941, the Germans broke through to the gates of Leningrad. For 900 days they cut the city off from virtually all its food and fuel supplies; perhaps a million people, or one third of the pre-war population, died by disease or starvation, before the siege of Leningrad was at last broken in January 1944. Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent soon after the German invasion; Shostakovich to the Volga city of Kuibyshev (now known by its pre-revolutionary name of Samara), where he completed the final movement of the Seventh Symphony on a battered upright piano in his two-room apartment. At the top of the first page he scribbled in red ink: ‘To the city of Leningrad’. On 5 March 1942. the symphony received its premiere in Kuibyshev. It was performed by the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, which had also been evacuated to the Volga town. Broadcast by radio throughout the land, it transmitted, in the words of the violinist David Oistrakh, who was listening in Moscow, ‘the prophetic affirmation… of our faith in the eventual triumph of humanity and light’.147 The Moscow premiere later that month was broadcast globally, its drama only highlighted by an air raid in the middle of the performance. Soon the symphony was being performed throughout the Allied world, a symbol of the spirit of endurance and survival, not just of Leningrad but of all countries united against the fascist threat, with sixty-two performances in the USA alone during 1942.148
The symphony was resonant with themes of Petersburg: its lyrical beauty and classicism, evoked nostalgically in the moderato movement (originally entitled ‘Memories’); its progressive spirit and modernity, signalled by the harsh Stravinskian wind chords of the opening adagio; and its own history of violence and war (for the
composer’s ‘Socialist Realist’ rejoinder to those who had attacked
For it to achieve its symbolic goal, it was vital for that symphony to be performed in Leningrad - a city which both Hitler and Stalin loathed. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated and the Radio Orchestra was the only remaining ensemble in the city. The first winter of the siege had reduced it to a mere fifteen players, so extra musicians had to be brought out of retirement or borrowed from the army defending Leningrad. The quality of playing was not high, but that hardly mattered when the symphony was finally performed in the bombed-out Great Hall of the Philharmonia on 9 August 1942. - the very day when Hitler had once planned to celebrate the fall of Leningrad with a lavish banquet at the Astoria Hotel. As the people of the city congregated in the hall, or gathered around loudspeakers to listen to the concert in the street, a turning point was reached. Ordinary citizens were brought together by music; they felt united by a sense of their city’s spiritual strength, by a conviction that their city would be saved. The writer Alexander Rozen, who was present at the premiere, describes it as a kind of national catharsis:
Many people cried at the concert. Some people cried because that was the only way they could show their joy; others because they had lived through what the music was expressing with such force; others cried from grief for the people they had lost; or just because they were overcome with the emotion of being still alive.151
The war was a period of
