St Petersburg полностью

It was so cold—and there are so many monuments in Petersburg—and the sleigh flew so fast—everything blurred—and all that was left of Petersburg was the poetry of Pushkin and Akhmatova. Ah, no—there were also the fireplaces. Everywhere I was taken, there were huge marble fireplaces—entire oaken groves were burned!—and polar bears on the floor (polar bears by the fire!—monstrous!), and all the young men parted their hair—and they all had volumes of Pushkin in their hands…. Oh, how they love poetry there! In all my life I never recited as many poems as I did there in two weeks. And they don’t sleep there at all. A call at three A.M. Can we come over? Of course, of course, we’re only starting. And it goes on like that until morning.53

But Tsvetayeva’s sympathies for Petersburg did not ease the fierceness of the struggle for literary supremacy either in 1910 or later, especially because Tsvetayeva found many influential allies in this battle. In her memoirs, she recalled Voloshin, who was already involved in creating Cherubina de Gabriac, asking Tsvetayeva to invent a few other mythical poets as well, like “seventeen-year-old Mr. Petukhov” or “the Kryukov twins, poetic geniuses, brother and sister.” Voloshin enchanted Tsvetayeva with a picture of her total victory over her enemies’ camp: “Besides you, no one will be left in Russian poetry. With your Petukhovs and twins you, Marina, will drive them all out, Akhmatova, and Gumilyov, and Kuzmin.”

Bryusov, the master of Moscow symbolism, tellingly supported Tsvetayeva’s Evening Album in an important review. Speaking of the “terrifying intimacy” of Tsvetayeva’s poems, he noted, “When you read her books, you occasionally feel uncomfortable, as if you had peeked immodestly through a half-shut window into someone’s apartment and observed a scene strangers should not see.”54 Most interestingly, Tsvetayeva’s debut was hailed by Gumilyov—another confirmation of Gumilyov’s high moral scruples as a critic. Gumilyov too stressed the extraordinary frankness of the Evening Album. “Much is new in this book—the bold (sometimes excessive) intimacy; the themes, for instance, children’s crushes; the direct, almost crazed affection for the trifles of life.”55

Voloshin seemed to be summing up a critical consensus when, while listing several names in late 1910 that he felt were notable in contemporary women’s poetry (Tsvetayeva was on that list, but not Akhmatova), he stated, “In some respects this women’s lyric poetry is more interesting than the men’s. It is less burdened with ideas and is deeper and more frank.”

So Akhmatova was probably correct when late in life, recalling this era, she stated, “I filled the vacancy for a woman poet, which was open.” There was such a vacancy. But it’s unlikely that anyone could simply fill it. It had to be taken. It had to be won.

Roman Timenchik observed that there are a variety of “masks” in Akhmatova’s early poetry.56 She seemed to be trying on one mask after another, figuring out which would be the most effective and attractive. Leafing through Evening, one can find Marie Bashkirtseff’s decadent pose and Lokhvitskaya’s duality, shifting back and forth between chastity and sin. Surely Akhmatova, who miraculously survived the tuberculosis that killed two of her sisters, must have felt a bond with both Bashkirtseff and Lokhvitskaya, who had succumbed to that disease in their youth. Undoubtedly, Akhmatova took into account the intellectual striving and technical virtuosity of Zinaida Hippius. Evening contains stylizations of female “naïveté,” comparable to Tsvetayeva’s early attempts. The frenzied religiosity of some of Akhmatova’s works resembles the poetry of Cherubina de Gabriac Many readers of the early Akhmatova pictured her, like Cherubina as a mysterious foreigner. The list of borrowings, echoes, and outright imitations can be lengthened considerably, including the sometimes astonishing similarity of the early Akhmatova’s turns of phrase with the style of popular “women’s fiction.”

Yes, Akhmatova borrowed shamelessly everywhere and this must be stressed to correct the mistaken but firmly rooted notion that she appeared suddenly in Russian literature, like Athena from the head of Zeus. This view of Akhmatova, which ignores her ties with the rich tradition of women’s literature in Russia, was based and survives on the scorn for women’s writing in the Russian literary establishment.