Acmeism attempted to stop the inflation of words inherent in “professional symbolism.” No wonder Mandelstam stressed that Akhmatova’s poems, contrary to those of the symbolists, seemed to be forced out between gritted teeth and insisted paradoxically that it was “the tastes and not the ideas of the acmeists that killed symbolism” which was “bloated, vanquished by the dropsy of big themes.” As Akhmatova said—somewhat sarcastically—late in life, “I am an acmeist and therefore am responsible for every word. It was the symbolists who spoke all kinds of unintelligible words and assured the public that there was a great mystery behind them. But there was nothing, but nothing, behind them.”
Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Gumilyov considered themselves acmeists to the end, never renouncing, even under intense pressure in the Soviet times, the literary school they created. This intransigence of the leading acmeists may be better understood in light of Mandelstam’s proud statement, “Acmeism is not only a literary but a social phenomenon in Russian history. With it a moral strength was reborn in Russian poetry.”
The nucleus of the acmeist group consisted of just a half dozen young poets, but their bright talent and promise were so obvious that the symbolists met them with weapons drawn. Akhmatova once complained to me that the acmeists had no money, no millionaire patrons, and the symbolists who had both, took all the important position and tried to block the acmeists from all the magazines. “Everyone criticized acmeists—the right and the left.”
Akhmatova should have been particularly upset by the caution and skepticism toward the acmeist circle of Alexander Blok, a poetic idol of her youth. She had met Blok in the early 1910s and saw him at Ivanov’s Tower. Blok recognized her gift, but his attitude toward Akhmatova’s poetry was ambivalent, especially in the beginning.
According to one memoirist, when Blok was asked to speak his mind after Akhmatova read at the Tower, he said “She writes as if for a man, but poetry must be written for God.”62 Wrote a contemporary, “The ‘Akhmatova-like’ line began to dominate women’s poetry in Russia.”63 This, apparently, annoyed Blok. When he once heard someone being accused of imitating Akhmatova, Blok leaned over to his companion and said in a half-whisper, “Imitate her? Her cup is empty; there is nothing to borrow.”64 The symbolist leader, Valery Bryusov, began referring sarcastically to Akhmatova as the “musical instrument with only one string.”
By that time Blok, of course, had turned into a living legend whose every step was avidly watched, every word discussed, and every poem sifted for clues to his private life. For the quintessential symbolist poet, this was a natural situation, since Russian symbolism brought the traditional romantic identification of artist and person to its outer limits.
As the poet Vladislav Khodasevich observed, “Life events penetrated writing. And the reverse occurred, too—what was written by anyone became a real life event for all.”65 In Blok’s case this equation reached its extreme, as confirmed by Yuri Tynyanov: “When they speak of Blok’s poetry, they almost always unconsciously imagine a
In this tight interweaving of life and literature, the excitement of strong emotions, especially love, played the role of drugs that increased creativity. In turn, the “real” events behind the writing gave it an additional interest and spice. “Therefore,” Khodasevich noted, “everyone was always in love—if not in fact, then they deluded themselves into thinking that they were. The smallest spark of something resembling love was blown up as much as possible.”67
Even his family called Blok the “northern Don Juan.” His affairs often “migrated” into his poems, and so awed Petersburgers followed Blok’s published love poems as though they were an intimate diary made public, forever trying to connect a particular poem to its supposed inspiration. This at times created embarrassing situations for all involved. For instance, the actress Natalya Volokhova, whom Blok courted relentlessly, was offended by some of the poems in the cycle
The rules of this rather cruel literary game were dictated by men. Women could be angry or, on the contrary, feel flattered and immortalized, but on the whole they remained the subjects of male writers literary manipulations.
