The loss of its age-old name must have signified the start of a new era in Petersburg’s development, an era of total consolidation with Russia that was once alien to it. “Petrograd” would become a truly Russian city. But in the name change many saw the tastelessness of contemporary imperialism and also its impotence. Petrograd betrays the Bronze Horseman. The Northern Palmyra cannot be resurrected. And fate is preparing another path for it. It would be not the city of triumphant imperialism but the city of all-destroying revolution. The resurrected Bronze Horseman would appear on his “loud-galloping steed” not at the head of victorious armies of his ill-starred descendant but ahead of the masses, destroying the past.103
Meanwhile, all observers agreed that the face of Petrograd, now in wartime, changed dramatically. The first breath of war, Livshits noted bitterly, blew the blush from the cheeks of The Stray Dog’s regulars. Only now was the Russian capital, as Akhmatova repeated many times later, bidding farewell to the nineteenth century.
People in Petrograd, a contemporary recalled, immediately divided into two groups—those who left for the front and those who remained in the city. “The former, irrespective of whether they left as volunteers or were mobilized, considered themselves heroes. The latter readily agreed with that, trying every which way to expiate their vaguely felt guilt.”104
Among those leaving with the army was Gumilyov, who received news of the war enthusiastically. Although exempted from military service because of his crossed eyes, he managed nevertheless to get permission to shoot from his left shoulder and headed for the front as a volunteer in the squad of the Life Guards of the Uhlan Regiment. By October, Gumilyov had seen battle and in late 1914 he received his first St. George’s Cross.
“His patriotism was as unreserved as his religious faith was cloudless,” wrote the critic André Levinson about his friend’s state of mind in the early days of the war.105 And this “enlightened and exalted” patriotism also found expression in Gumilyov’s poetry.
At the very start of the war, Gumilyov and Akhmatova lunched together with Blok. They spoke of the war, of course, and when Blok left, Gumilyov remarked sadly, “Will they really send him to the front too? It’s like broiling nightingales.”
Blok, German by heritage and pacifist by conviction, clearly did not share Gumilyov’s enthusiasm for the war. Blok did not go to the front and he wrote about the war: “For a minute it seemed that it would clear the air. Actually it turned out to be a worthy crown to the lies, filth, and vileness in which our homeland was bathed.”
Military action began favorably for Russia. In Petrograd they predicted that Russian troops would be in Berlin by Christmas of 1914, but then luck ran out. In the first eleven months of bloody battle, over a million and a half Russian men were wounded, killed, or taken prisoner. Rumors spread in the capital about a catastrophic shortage of weapons and ammunition, about the stupid, craven generals, about theft and bribery in the supply system. They spoke more and more openly about treason, about the German-born empress and her favorite, the all-powerful Rasputin, leading the country to ruin.
Petrograd came to be swollen with refugees from the western provinces. Under the curfew, people were allowed in the streets only until eight in the evening, but Viktor Shklovsky said that crowds of prostitutes roamed the Nevsky Prospect at night with impunity. It was somewhat ironic, since the number of men in the city had diminished steadily. Sometimes it seemed that Petrograd had become a woman’s capital. Life for women became more difficult with food disappearing from the city. More and more wounded were on the streets. There were many benefit performances for the wounded, in which Akhmatova often took part.
The war sharply changed her way of life, and here Gumilyov’s influence was without question. But Akhmatova’s poetry also changed, and her muse responded to the war differently. They said that Gumilyov’s experience of the war was easy and enjoyable. There wasn’t a trace of joy in Akhmatova’s poems about the war. Listening to them, the audience froze in painful presentiment. Her poem “The Prayer,” published in the collection
