Kholodnaya’s films, like Akhmatova’s poems, usually represented unrequited, duped, or humiliated love. Akhmatova spoke with irony of the fact that she had become the favorite author of “lovesick high school girls.” These girls also wept at Kholodnaya’s silent films. It is telling that equally talented actresses of the period with traditionally Russian looks, voluptuous and vivacious, were not as popular as Kholodnaya. The “decadent” type clearly attracted mass audiences.
Artists apparently sensed this too, and so portraits of Akhmatova appeared one after the other around town in fashionable exhibits. Some were academic, even saccharine (Akhmatova justly called one such attempt a “candy box”); others nodded in the direction of decadence. A twenty-six-year-old Jewish artist, Nathan Altman, stirred up the greatest sensation with a portrait of Akhmatova shown in the spring of 1915 at a regular
Born in the Ukraine, Altman had already traveled to Paris, where he befriended other Russian Jewish artists—Marc Chagall from Vitebsk, Osip Zadkine from Smolensk, and Chaim Soutine from Minsk. There in 1911 Altman accidentally met Akhmatova in the street. He wanted to come to the Russian capital, but it wasn’t possible because Jews were banned from living in Petersburg.
The only exceptions made were for wealthy merchants, people with higher education, certified craftsmen, and those who had served in the military. Altman had to go to the small town of Berdichev in the Ukraine, the birthplace of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz,70 to get a diploma for a “sign painter,” which, in fact, certified him as a highly qualified house painter. Only with that certificate could the already famous artist move to the capital.
By 1910, thirty-five thousand Jews lived in the Russian capital, where they made up less than 2 percent of the population. Many of them were educated, affluent, and influential. Among Petersburg’s Jews were prominent bankers, accomplished musicians, and leading journalists. The essayist Vassily Rozanov even asserted that “the Jews were able to ‘make or break’ a person in our literature, and thereby they became its ‘chiefs.’”71
Jews were playing an increasingly important role in Petersburg’s modernist circles. Among Akhmatova’s closest friends, for she always considered herself a militant “anti-anti-Semite,” were Mandelstam and one of the leading female avant-garde painters of the period, Alexandra Exter. Akhmatova readily agreed to pose for Altman, who had moved to a seventh-floor furnished apartment in the “New York” building, a favorite of Petersburg artists.
For a long time Altman worked persistently on the portrait. During rest periods, to amuse herself and demonstrate her famous agility, Akhmatova would climb out the window and make her way along the ledge to visit friends on the same floor. Sometimes Mandelstam would drop in and he and Akhmatova would make up funny stories, laughing like teenagers, rolling on the floor and bringing neighbors running to see what all the noise was about.
Altman had become close to the critic Nikolai Punin, Akhmatova’s future third husband, and the modernist artists around Punin—Lev Bruni, Pyotr Miturich, and Vladimir Lebedev. Punin later wrote, “Altman had the face of an Asian, quick movements, and wide cheekbones. He always brought in the bustle of life, he had a practical mind, but an amusing and cheerful one.”72
When I came to see the seventy-seven-year-old Altman in Leningrad in the fall of 1966, his conversation was ironic but to the point. He was reluctant to speak of Akhmatova, who had died recently—perhaps because lately they had not been particularly close. But more likely, it was because Akhmatova had been ambivalent in her last years toward his painting of her. She found it too “stylized,” preferring instead a portrait by Alexander Tyshler, another Jewish artist she considered a genius; perhaps she was influenced by Mandelstam’s praise of Tyshler.
But in 1915, when Altman’s portrait of her was exhibited in Petersburg, it made a tremendous impression. Punin, an influential and insightful critic, always considered it the best of Altman’s works. Thin and angular, Akhmatova was depicted seated in a piercingly blue dress and a bright yellow shawl. Instantly that image of the fashionable poetess, shown at a fashionable exhibit by an artist coming into fashion, took on the significance of a symbol. First, it was beyond doubt a portrait not only of Akhmatova but also of an idealized image of the modern female poet, a fact well understood by the viewers and Akhmatova. Second, it was a symbol of the times—according to Roman Timenchik, “the embodiment of the general spiritual unease.”
