Natasha's Dance

said, whereas the real Tsar had been great and wise in ‘preserving the country from foreign influence’. Ivan had been ‘very cruel’, and Eisenstein could ‘depict him as a cruel man, but’, Stalin explained,

    you have to show why he had to be cruel. One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the five key feudal clans. Had he destroyed these five clans, there would have been no Time of Troubles. And when Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more decisive.162

    Part Two of Ivan was banned by Stalin, but Eisenstein was permitted to resume production on Part Three on the understanding that he incorporate approved material from the previous film in it. On Stalin’s instructions, he even promised to shorten Ivan’s beard. At a screening of Part Two at the State Institute of Cinema, Eisenstein gave a speech in which he criticized himself for the ‘formalistic deviations’ of his film. But he told his friends that he would not change his film. ‘What re-shooting?’ he said to one director. ‘Don’t you realize that I’d die at the first shot?’163 Eisenstein, who had never lacked bravura, was evidently preparing an artistic rebellion, culminating in the confession scene of the film’s third and final part, a terrifying commentary on Stalin’s madness and his sins:

    Tsar Ivan bangs his forehead against the flagstones in a rapid sequence of genuflections. His eyes swim with blood. The blood blinds him. The blood enters his ears and deafens him. He sees nothing.164

    When they shot the scene the actor Mikhail Kuznetsov asked Eisenstein what was going on. ‘Look, 1,200 boyars have been killed. The Tsar is “Terrible”! So why on earth is he repenting?’ Eisenstein replied: ‘Stalin has killed more people and he does not repent. Let him see this and then he will repent.’165

    Eisenstein took inspiration from Pushkin, whose own great drama Boris Godunov had served as a warning against tyranny in the wake of the suppression of the Decembrist revolt by Tsar Nicholas I. But there is a deeper sense in which his brave defiance as an artist was rooted in the whole of the Russian humanist tradition of the nineteenth century. As he explained to a fellow director, who had pointed out the connection to Boris Godunov:

    ’Lord, can you really see it? I’m so happy, so happy! Of course it is Boris Godunov: “Five years I have governed in peace, but my soul is troubled…” I could not make a film like that without the Russian tradition - without that great tradition of conscience. Violence can be explained, it can be legalized, but it can’t be justified. If you are a human being, it has to be atoned. One man may destroy another - but as a human being I must find this painful, because man is the highest value… This, in my opinion, is the inspiring tradition of our people, our nation, and our literature.166

    Eisenstein did not have enough strength to complete his film. The heart attack had crippled him. He died in 1948.

6

    The Leningrad to which Akhmatova returned in 1944 was a shadow of its former self. For her it was a ‘vast cemetery, the graveyard of her friends’, Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘it was like the aftermath of a forest fire - the few charred trees made the desolation still more desolate’.167 Before the war she had been in love with a married man, Vladimir Garshin, a medical professor from a famous nineteenth-century literary family. He had helped her through her son’s arrest and her first heart attack in 1940. On Akhmatova’s return to Leningrad she was expecting to be with him again. But when he met her at the station there was something wrong. During the siege Garshin had become the chief coroner of Leningrad, and the daily horror which he experienced in the starving city, where cannibalism became rife, stripped away his sanity. In October 1942 his wife had collapsed from hunger on the street and died. He had recognized her body in the morgue.168 When Garshin met Akhmatova at the station, it was only to tell her that their love affair was over. Akhmatova returned to the Fountain House. The palace had been half-destroyed by a German bomb. Her old apartment had large cracks in the walls, the windows were all smashed, and there was no running water or electricity. In November 1945, her son Lev came to live with her, having been released from the labour camp to fight in the war, and he resumed his studies at the university.

    During that same month Akhmatova received an English visitor. In

    1945 Isaiah Berlin had just arrived as First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow. Born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Russian-Jewish timber merchant, Berlin had moved in 1916 with his family to Petersburg, where he had witnessed the February Revolution. In 1919 his family returned to Latvia, then emigrated to England. By the time of his appointment to the Moscow embassy Berlin was already established as a leading scholar for his 1939 book on Marx. During a visit to Leningrad, Berlin was browsing in the Writers’ Bookshop on the Nevsky Prospekt when he ‘fell into casual conversation with someone who was turning over the leaves of a book of poems’.169 That someone turned out to be the well-known literary critic Vladimir Orlov, who told Berlin that Akhmatova was still alive and residing in the Fountain House, a stone’s throw away. Orlov made a telephone call and at three o’clock that afternoon he and Berlin climbed the stairs to Akhmatova’s apartment.

    It was very barely furnished - virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away - looted or sold - during the siege; there was a small table, three or four chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa and, above the unlit stove, a drawing by Modigliani. A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness.170

    After conversing for a while, Berlin suddenly heard someone shouting his name outside. It was Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, whom Berlin had known as an undergraduate at Oxford and who had come to Russia as a journalist. Churchill needed an interpreter and, hearing that Berlin was in the city, had tracked him down to the Fountain House. But since he did not know the exact location of Akhmatova’s apartment he ‘adopted a method which had served him well during his days in Christ Church’. Berlin rushed downstairs and left with Churchill, whose presence might be dangerous for Akhmatova. But he returned that evening and spent the night in conversation with Akhmatova - who, perhaps, fell in love with him. They spoke about Russian literature, about her loneliness and isolation, and about her friends from the vanished world of Petersburg before the Revolution,

    some of whom he had since met as emigres abroad. In her eyes, Berlin was a messenger between the two Russias which had been split apart in 1917. Through him she was able to return to the European Russia of St Petersburg - a city from which she felt she had lived apart as an ‘internal exile’ in Leningrad. In the cycle Cinque, among the most beautiful poems she ever wrote, Akhmatova evokes in sacred terms the feeling of connection she felt with her English visitor.

    Sounds die away in the ether,

    And darkness overtakes the dusk.

    In a world become mute for all time,

    There are only two voices: yours and mine.

    And to the almost bell-like sound

    Of the wind from invisible Lake Ladoga,

    That late-night dialogue turned into

    The delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows.171

    ’So our nun now receives visits from foreign spies,’ Stalin remarked, or so it is alleged, when he was told of Berlin’s visit to the Fountain House. The notion that Berlin was a spy was absurd, but at that time, when the Cold War was starting and Stalin’s paranoia had reached extreme proportions, anyone who worked for a Western embassy was automatically considered one. The NKVD stepped up its surveillance of the Fountain House, with two new agents at the main entrance to check specifically on visitors to Akhmatova and listening devices planted clumsily in holes drilled into the walls and ceiling of her apartment. The holes left little heaps of plaster on the floor, one of which Akhmatova kept intact as a warning to her guests.172 Then, in August 1946, Akhmatova was attacked in a decree by the Central Committee which censored two journals for publishing her work. A week later Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief of ideology, announced her expulsion from the Writers’ Union, delivering a vicious speech in which he described Akhmatova as a ‘left-over from the old aristocratic culture’ and (in a phrase that had been used by Soviet critics in the past) as a ‘half-nun, half- harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer’.173

    Akhmatova was deprived of her ration card and forced to live off

    food donated by her friends. Lev was barred from taking his degree at the university. In 1949, Lev was re-arrested, tortured into making a confession and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp near Omsk. Akhmatova became dangerously ill. With rumours circulating of her own arrest, she burned all her manuscripts at the Fountain House. Among them was the prose draft of a play about a woman writer who is tried and sentenced to prison by a writers’ tribunal. It was an allegory on her own tormented position. Because the tribunal consciously betrays the freedom of thought for which, as fellow writers, they are meant to stand, its literary bureaucrats are far