For the old intelligentsia conditions were particularly harsh. In the Dictatorship of the Proletariat they were put to the bottom of the social pile. Although most were conscripted by the state for labour teams, few had jobs. Even if they received food from the state, it was the beggarly third-class ration, 'just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it', in the words of Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd.8 Gorky took up the defence of the starving Petrograd intelligentsia, pleading with the Bolsheviks, among whom he was highly valued for his left-wing commitment before 1917, for special rations and better flats. He established a writers' refuge, followed later by a House of Artists, and set up his own publishing house, called World Literature, to publish cheap editions of the classics for the masses. World Literature provided work for a vast number of writers, artists and musicians as translators and copy editors. Indeed, many of the greatest names of twentieth-century literature (Zamyatin, Babel, Chukovsky, Khodasev-ich, Mandelstam, Piast', Zoshchenko and Blok and Gumilev) owed their survival of these hungry years to Gorky's patronage.
Akhmatova also turned to Gorky for help, asking him to find her work and get her a ration. She was sharing Shileiko's tiny food allowance, which he received as an assistant in the Department of Antiquities at the Hermitage. They had no fuel to burn, dysentery was rife among the inhabitants of the Fountain House, and, extravagant though it may appear, they had a St Bernard dog to feed which Shileiko had found abandoned and which, in the spirit of the Sheremetev motto, they had decided to keep. Gorky told Akhmatova that she would only get the most beggarly of rations for doing office work of some kind, and then he took her to see his valuable collection of oriental rugs. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, 'Akhmatova looked at Gorky's carpets, said how nice they were, and went away empty-handed. As a result of this, I believe, she took a permanent dislike to carpets. They smelled too much of dust and a kind of prosperity strange in a city that was dying so catastrophically. Perhaps Gorky was afraid to help
Akhmatova; perhaps he disliked her and her poetry. But in 1920 she did at last find work as a librarian in the Petrograd Agronomic Institute, and perhaps Gorky helped.
In August 1921, Akhmatova's former husband Nikolai Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial on charges, which were almost certainly false, of belonging to a monarchist conspiracy. Gumilev was the first great poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks, although many more would soon follow. With his death, there was a feeling in the educated classes that a boundary had been crossed: their civilization had passed away. The moving poems of Akhmatova's collection
The tear-stained autumn, like a widow
In black weeds, clouds every heart…
Recalling her husband's words,
She sobs without ceasing.
And thus it will be, until the most quiet snow
Takes pity on the sorrowful and weary one…
Oblivion of pain and oblivion of bliss -
To give up life for this is no small thing.10
Akhmatova had no hopes for the Revolution - she had only fears. Yet she made it clear that she thought it was a sin for poets to leave Russia after 1917:
I am not with those who abandoned their land To the lacerations of the enemy. I am deaf to their coarse flattery, I won't give them my songs.
But to me the exile is forever pitiful,
Like a prisoner, like someone ill.
Dark is your road, wanderer,
Like wormwood smells the bread of strangers.
But here, in the blinding smoke of the conflagration Destroying what's left of youth, We have not deflected from ourselves One single stroke.
And we know that in the final accounting, Each hour will be justified… But there is no people on earth more tearless, More simple and more full of pride.11
Like all of Russia's greatest poets, Akhmatova felt the moral obligation to be her country's 'voice of memory'.12 But her sense of duty transcended the national; she felt a Christian imperative to remain in Russia and to suffer with the people in their destiny. As did many poets of her generation, she considered the Revolution as a punishment for sin, and believed it was her calling to atone for Russia's transgressions through the prayer of poetry. Akhmatova was a poet of redemption, the 'last great poet of Orthodoxy', according to Chukov-sky, and the theme of sacrifice, of suffering for Russia, appears throughout her work.13
Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song -
This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.14
