Akhmatova had a special respect for Annensky that went beyond appreciation of his poetry. She recalled with great feeling Annensky’s words when he learned of the wedding of his relative to Akhmatova’s older sister: “I would have chosen the younger one.” Akhmatova insisted, “I mark my ‘beginning’ from Annensky’s poetry. His work, to my mind, is tragic, sincere, and whole-hearted.”
For Annensky Petersburg was always tied to the “awareness of a damned mistake.” For the acmeists, the existence of Petersburg was not an issue; the city was a given for them and belonging to it a source of pride. That’s why they didn’t borrow Annensky’s Petersburg mythology but took to heart his dramatic precision in descriptions and his expressive landscape details, like the ones that open “Petersburg”:
Viktor Zhirmunsky later announced that “Akhmatova’s Petersburg landscape was her poetic discovery.”141 In fact, Akhmatova had borrowed extensively from Annensky in this respect, and also something from Blok and the other symbolists. But the landscape they saw as unpeopled, hostile, and historically illegitimate takes on roots in Akhmatova’s work, is legitimized by her, and, most important, becomes “homey” and familiar. Akhmatova’s “autobiographical” heroine moves around freely in the historical and temporal space of Petersburg.
For Akhmatova Petersburg is an enchanted place, as it is for Annensky. But in differing from him, she finds it even better. She does not feel herself a stranger—
Peter’s smile may be cold, but it is addressed to Akhmatova personally. In one poem of 1914 Akhmatova ties her entire existence to Petersburg. She calls it her “blessed cradle,” “solemn bridal bed,” and “prie-dieu of my prayers”—an amazing combination but typical of Akhmatova. This is the city in which her Muse lives, the city “loved with bitter love.”
Not one of the
The acmeists quickly overcame that approach. Akhmatova later insisted that Mandelstam “disdained” the
Mandelstam recalled,
When I was seven or eight, I regarded as something sacred and festive Petersburg’s architectural ensemble, the granite and stone blocks, the tender heart of the city, with its unexpected squares, lacy gardens, and islands of monuments, the Caryatids of the Hermitage, the mysterious Millionnaya Street, where there were never any passersby and where among the marble buildings one tiny grocery store was hidden, and especially the arch of the General Staff Headquarters, the Senate Square, and “Dutch” Petersburg.
The acmeists’ attitude—which was intimate and at the same time solemn and historically rooted—portended the horror with which Akhmatova responded to the sudden changes in the face of the city on the Neva after the Bolsheviks came to power:
But Akhmatova’s indignation quickly turned to pity in the escalating deterioration of her beloved city.
All the old Petersburg signs were still in place, but behind them, there was nothing but dusk, gloom, and gaping emptiness. Typhus, hunger, executions, dark apartments, damp logs, people swollen beyond recognition. You could pick a bouquet of wild flowers at the Gostiny Dvor. The famous Petersburg wooden pavements were rotting. It still smelled of chocolate from the cellar windows of Kraft’s. The cemeteries were torn up.
After the Bolshevik revolution Akhmatova did not leave for the West, as did numerous intellectual notables, many of them former ideological “foes” of Petersburg. Her refusal to emigrate was perceived as a conscious sacrifice, as were Mandelstam’s and Gumilyov’s. One of the many complex reasons for that fateful decision was Akhmatova’s proclaimed desire to save at least some remains of Petersburg’s grandeur, the “palaces, fire, and water” of the former capital.
