“Women’s fiction” was held in particular contempt and still is. Verbitskaya attracted a mass audience as long as worn copies of her books were still in circulation, while she was attacked relentlessly by conservatives and revolutionaries alike. The Soviet authorities stopped publishing Verbitskaya after the revolution, just as they stopped publishing Bashkirtseff, Lokhvitskaya and Hippius. During the Soviet years, the “women’s novel” disappeared completely. Until recently, even the mere mention of it could be found only in academic books, where it was routinely disparaged—in passing, without critical analysis.
Still, it is obvious that if Akhmatova’s first book had offered readers only a parade of familiar “masks,” it would not have garnered the attention it did. Boris Eikhenbaum documented the reaction of the poetry connoisseurs of the time: “We were surprised, amazed, delighted, we argued, and finally, felt pride.”57
As even the first critics had immediately noted, “Akhmatova can speak in a way that makes long-familiar words sound new and sharp.” They wondered about the “teasing disharmony” of her poems. They also agreed right away that her “broken rhythms express a morbid crisis of the soul” of a Petersburg lady.
Bryusov was probably one of the first to point out an important feature of
Akhmatova brought into Russian lyric poetry the enormous complexity and psychological wealth of the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Akhmatova would not exist if it were not for Tolstoy and his
Akhmatova’s first readers were intrigued by the narrative line of her poems, which was so different from the poetic generalizations of the symbolists, and, even more so by the fact that this narrative was the point of view of a contemporary woman living in Petersburg. It was like reading
This is reminiscent of Chekhov, who expressed human drama in plain and sometimes incongruous words and acts. The dialogue of Chekhov’s characters usually reveals only the tip of the iceberg. Akhmatova also uses this method. Her words appear like rocky islands in an ocean of silence.
This is why Akhmatova’s first admirers all had a sense of the unusual weight and significance of each of those words. It seemed to them the narrator was losing her breath. Akhmatova spoke of love sparingly, as if with difficulty, and without pathos or hysteria Thus sophisticated Petersburgers could read an Akhmatova love poem aloud without embarrassment. It was their own voice, their worldview, presented with unprecedented clarity, precision, and psychological insight.
Of one such poem, Vladimir Mayakovsky observed, “This poem expresses refined and fragile feelings, but it is not fragile itself. Akhmatova’s poems are monolithic and will resist the pressure of any voice without cracking.” Another prescient contemporary was Tsvetayeva: “Akhmatova writes about herself-about eternity. Akhmatova, without writing a single abstractly generalized line, gives our descendants the most profound picture of our age—by describing a feather in a hat.”
When I first heard Akhmatova read her poetry in the 1960s her presence and performance had an astonishing effect on me but I was perceiving Akhmatova as a living classic. It turns out Akhmatova had enchanted her audiences when she was young, too. Even then she was considered an “exemplary reciter of poetry.” She read with restraint without pathos, but “every intonation was planned, tested, and calculated.”59 They said she prepared for every appearance, practicing before a large mirror. She knew one had to fight for the audience’s attention, and she was prepared to put in the necessary time and effort. Akhmatova was a total professional from an early age That is a particularly Petersburgian trait.
