NATASHA

Petersburg that history left behind in 1913. Through this creative act of memory the poetry redeems and saves that history. In the opening dedication Akhmatova writes,

… and because I don't have enough paper, I am writing on your first draft.²¹²*

* Akhmatova informed several friends that the first dedication was to Mandelstam. When Nadezhda Mandelstam initially heard her read the poem and asked her to whom the dedication was addressed, Akhmatova replied 'with some irritation': 'Whose first draft do you think I can write on?' (Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 435).

The poem is full of literary references, over which countless scholars have puzzled, but its essence, as suggested by the dedication, is foretold by Mandelstam in a prayer-like poem which Akhmatova quotes as an epigraph to the third chapter of her own poem.

We shall meet again in Petersburg

as though we had interred the sun in it

and shall pronounce for the first time

that blessed, senseless word.

In the black velvet of the Soviet night,

in the velvet of the universal void

the familiar eyes of blessed women sing

and still the deathless flowers bloom.²¹³

Akhmatova's Poem is a requiem for those who died in Leningrad. That remembrance is a sacred act, in some sense an answer to Mandelstam's prayer. But the poem is a resurrection song as well - a literal incarnation of the spiritual values that allowed the people of that city to endure the Soviet night and meet again in Petersburg.

Akhmatova died peacefully in a convalescent home in Moscow on 5 March 1966. Her body was taken to the morgue of the former Sheremetev Alms House, founded in the memory of Praskovya, where she was protected by the same motto that overlooked the gates of the Fountain House: 'Deus conservat omnia'. Thousands of people turned out for her funeral in Leningrad. The baroque church of St Nicholas spilled its dense throng out on to the streets, where a mournful silence was religiously maintained throughout the requiem. The people of a city had come to pay their last respects to a citizen whose poetry had spoken for them at a time when no one else could speak. Akhmatova had been with her people then: 'There, where my people, unfortunately, were.' Now they were with her. As the cortege passed through Petersburg on its way to the Komarovo cemetery, it paused before the Fountain House, so that she could say a last farewell.

8

overleaf:

Igor and VeraStravinsky arriving at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow,

21 September 1962

1

Homesickness! that long Exposed weariness! It's all the same to me now Where I am altogether lonely

Or what stones I wander over Home with a shopping bag to A house that is no more mine Than a hospital or a barracks.

It's all the same to me, a captive Lion - what faces I move through Bristling, or what human crowd will Cast me out as it must -

Into myself, into my separate internal World, a Kamchatka bear without ice. Where I fail to fit in (and I'm not trying) or Where I'm humiliated it's all the same.

And I won't be seduced by the thought of My native language, its milky call. How can it matter in what tongue I Am misunderstood by whomever I meet

(Or by what readers, swallowing Newsprint, squeezing for gossip?) They all belong to the twentieth Century, and I am before time,

Stunned, like a log left

Behind from an avenue of trees.

People are all the same to me, everything

Is the same, and it may be that the most

Indifferent of all are those

Signs and tokens which once were

Native but the dates have been

Rubbed out: the soul was born somewhere,

But my country has taken so little care Of me that even the sharpest spy could Go over my whole spirit and would Detect no birthmark there!

Houses are alien, churches are empty Everything is the same: But if by the side of the path a Bush arises, especially

a rowanberry…'

The rowanberry tree stirred up painful memories for the exiled poet Marina Tsvetaeva. It was a reminder of her long-lost childhood in Russia and the one native 'birthmark' that she could neither disguise nor bury underneath these lines of feigned indifference to her native land. From her first attempts at verse, Tsvetaeva adopted the rowanberry tree as a symbol of her solitude:

The red mound of a rowanberry kindled, Its leaves fell, and I was born.²

From such associations the homesick exile constitutes a homeland in his mind. Nostalgia is a longing for particularities, not some devotion to an abstract fatherland. For Nabokov, 'Russia' was contained in his dreams of childhood summers on the family estate: mushroom-hunting in the woods, catching butterflies, the sound of creaking snow. For Stravinsky it was the sounds of Petersburg which he also recalled from his boyhood: the hoofs and cart wheels on the cobblestones, the cries of the street vendors, the bells of the St Nicholas Church, and the buzz of the Marinsky Theatre where his musical persona was first formed. Tsvetaeva's 'Russia', meanwhile, was conjured up by the mental image

of her father's Moscow house at Three Ponds Lane. The house was stripped apart for firewood in the cold winter of 1918. But after nearly twenty years of exile, when she returned to it in 1939, she found her favourite rowanberry growing as before. The tree was all that remained of her 'Russia', and she begged Akhmatova not to tell a soul of its existence, unless 'they find out and cut it down'.³

Of the many factors that lay behind Tsvetaeva's return to Stalin's Russia, the most important was her desire to feel the Russian soil beneath her feet. She needed to be near that rowanberry tree. Her return was the outcome of a long and painful struggle within herself. Like most emigres, she was torn between two different notions of her native land. The first was the Russia that 'remains inside yourself: the written language, the literature, the cultural tradition of which all Russian poets felt themselves a part.⁴ This interior Russia was a country that was not confined to any territory. 'One can live outside of Russia and have it in one's heart,' Tsvetaeva explained to the writer Roman Gul. It was a country that one could 'live in anywhere'.⁵ As Khodasev-ich put it when he left for Berlin in 1922, this was a 'Russia' that could be encapsulated in the works of Pushkin and 'packed up in a bag'.

All I possess are eight slim volumes, And they contain my native land.⁶

The other Russia was the land itself - the place that still contained memories of home. For all her declarations of indifference, Tsvetaeva could not resist its pull. Like an absent lover, she ached for its physical presence. She missed the open landscape, the sound of Russian speech, and this visceral web of associations was the inspiration of her creativity.

Three million Russians fled their native land between 1917 and 1929. They made up a shadow nation stretching from Manchuria to California, with major centres of Russian cultural life in Berlin, Paris and New York. Here were