This myth, despite Akhmatova’s sarcastic reaction to it, was typical of prerevolutionary Petersburg. The capital was all mixed up. Grigory Rasputin, a mystical Siberian peasant turned monk, had become the most influential person in the empire. (Akhmatova once saw Rasputin in a train and would later reminisce how his hypnotic eyes pierced her.)
Nikolai Klyuev, a peasant poet close to Rasputin, adored Akhmatova’s work. She later maintained that Klyuev was intended to take Rasputin’s place near the emperor and his wife. So no one would have been surprised if Akhmatova suddenly were to have become the “court poet.” Rumors appeared and vanished daily in the capital’s atmosphere of mysticism, sex, and poetry. Inevitably they touched the uncrowned empress of the Petersburg bohemians, who was reigning at The Stray Dog.
Akhmatova was ambivalent toward this bohemian world and her role in it. In late 1912 she wrote a poem called “In The Stray Dog,” subtitled, “Dedicated to Friends.” It begins,
And it ends with lines that could refer to Akhmatova or to her friend Sudeikina.
But having published the poem, Akhmatova continued to appear regularly at The Stray Dog, the living symbol of which she had become. A kind of umbilical cord existed now between the place and the person. Without the majestic Akhmatova, without her stylized beauty, The Stray Dog was unimaginable. But Akhmatova apparently felt most comfortable in that cellar filled with smoke and the heavy scent of wine. As a poet later recalled, “We (Mandelstam and I and many others) began to imagine that the whole world was in fact concentrated at The Stray Dog, that there was no other life, no other interests than the Doggy ones.”100
That cellar world, a part of and an attraction for elite Petersburg, shuddered along with the rest of the capital in the summer of 1914, for World War I had begun. “Everyone expected it and no one believed in it,” Viktor Shklovsky later maintained. “We sometimes allowed that it might happen, but we were convinced that it would last three months at most.”101
Events escalated swiftly and ominously. In response to the general mobilization ordered by Nicholas II, Germany declared war. The next day the tsar published a manifesto, greeted with great enthusiasm, on Russia’s responding in kind. Thousands of people came out on Palace Square waving the flag, icons, and portraits of the tsar. When Nicholas and his wife appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace, the crowd sank to its knees and sang the anthem, “God Save the Tsar.”
The city was caught up in patriotic frenzy. German stores were attacked and the gigantic cast-iron horses on top of the German embassy were thrown down to the street. This wave of long-unknown patriotism and chauvinism is the only explanation for how the renaming of Saint Petersburg to Petrograd slipped through without serious debate in August 1914.
The reason for this fateful change was to discard the city’s “Germanic” name in favor of a “Slavic” version. But in the frenzy of the war, two things were forgotten. The name originally given to the capital by Peter the Great was not German but Dutch. Second, turning the capital’s name into Petrograd made it the city of Peter the man, Peter the emperor, whereas at the time of its founding the city had been named for Saint Peter, its patron. This was particularly ironic because Nicholas II, who personally ordered the name change, was highly ambivalent, to say the least, about his ancestor, the “miracle-working builder.” He had said of Peter the Great, “This is the ancestor I like least of all for his enthusiasm for Western culture and violation of all purely Russian customs.”
Obviously, it was not the time for pedantic discussions of the correctness of the capital’s new name. Even Blok only noted laconically in his notebook, “Petersburg has been renamed
It was just five years later that Petersburg’s bard Nikolai Antsiferov, with the advantage of hindsight, would analyze this fatal turn:
