* After the outbreak of the First World War the German-sounding name of St Petersburg was changed to the more Slavic Petrograd to appease patriotic sentiment. The city kept that name until 1924, when, after Lenin's death, it was renamed Leningrad.
became the guiding redemptive principle of Ahkmatova's life and art. Although she was only twenty-nine when she moved to the Shereme-tev palace, Akhmatova, like her new home, was from a vanished world. Born in 1889, she had gone to school at Tsarskoe Selo, where, like Pushkin, she imbibed the spirit of French poetry. In 1911 she went to Paris, where she became friends with the painter Amedeo Modigliani, whose drawing of her, one of many, hung in her apartment at the Fountain House until 1952. Her early poetry was influenced by the Symbolists. But in 1913 she joined Gumilev and Mandelstam in a new literary group, the Acmeists, who rejected the mysticism of the Symbolists and returned to the classical poetic principles of clarity, concision and the precise expression of emotional experience. She won immense acclaim for her love poetry in
I taught women to speak…
But Lord, how to make them cease!2
On the eve of the First World War, Akhmatova was at the height of her success. Tall and astonishingly beautiful, she was surrounded by friends, lovers and admirers. Freedom, merriment and a bohemian spirit filled these years. She and Mandelstam would make each other laugh 'so much that we fell down on the divan, which sang with all its springs'.3 And then, at once, with the outbreak of the war, 'we aged a hundred years', as she put it in her poem 'In Memoriam, 19 July, 1914' (1916):
We aged a hundred years, and this Happened in a single hour: The short summer had already died, The body of the ploughed plains smoked.
Suddenly the quiet road burst into colour, A lament flew up, ringing, silver… Covering my face, I implored God Before the first battle to strike me dead.
Like a burden henceforth unnecessary, The shadows of passion and songs vanished
from my memory. The Most High ordered it - emptied -To become a grim book of calamity.4
After all the horrors of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Akhmatova's intimate and lyrical style of poetry seemed to come from a different world. It appeared old-fashioned, from another century.
The February Revolution had swept away, not just the monarchy, but an entire civilization. The liberals and moderate socialists like Alexander Kerensky, who formed the Provisional Government to steer the country through to the end of the First World War and the election of a Constituent Assembly, had assumed that the Revolution could be confined to the political sphere. But almost overnight all the institutions of authority collapsed - the Church, the legal system, the power of the gentry on the land, the authority of the officers in the army and the navy, deference for senior figures - so that the only real power in the country passed into the hands of the local revolutionary committees (that is, the Soviets) of the workers, peasants and soldiers. It was in their name that Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 and instituted their Dictatorship of the Proletariat. They consolidated their dictatorship by leaving the war and buying peace with Germany. The cost of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, was one-third of the Russian Empire's agricultural land and more than half its industrial base, as Poland, the Baltic territories and most of the Ukraine were given nominal independence under German protection. Soviet Russia, as a European power, was reduced to a status comparable to that of seventeenth-century Muscovy. From the remnants of the Imperial army, the Bolsheviks established the Red Army to fight against
the Whites (a motley collection of monarchists, democrats and socialists opposed to the Soviet regime) and the interventionary forces of Britain, France, Japan, the USA and a dozen other western powers which supported them in the civil war of 1918-21.
