Still Lunacharsky and Gorky hired Gumilyov to work at Vsemirnaya Literatura; he also started to give lectures to Petrograd workers and sailors. Even for audiences like those Gumilyov declaimed his monarchist poems. He laughed. “The Bolsheviks despise conformists. I prefer to be respected.”
Years later Akhmatova was asked why Gumilyov took part in various cultural enterprises under the aegis of the Bolsheviks: he translated, lectured, and led a seminar of young poets. She explained that he had been a born organizer—just think of the creation of acmeism. But at the time it would have been ridiculous to consider that he could go to the tsarist minister of education and announce, “I want to organize a studio to teach people how to write poetry.” Under the Bolsheviks that became possible. Moreover, Gumilyov had to survive. Before the revolution he lived on his annuity, but under the Bolsheviks only by working in Lunacharsky’s commissariat could he stave off starvation.
This was how Akhmatova justified Gumilyov’s compromise with the regime. Still she herself did not go to work for the Bolsheviks despite her hunger. She admitted that once, when things got really bad, she went to Gorky to ask for some work. Gorky suggested she apply to the Communist International, the notorious Comintern, headed by the chief of the Petrograd Communists, Grigory Zinoviev. She would be given Communist proclamations to translate into Italian. Akhmatova refused the job. “Just think: I would do translations that would be sent to Italy, for which people would be arrested.” Akhmatova’s principles cost her dearly. A friend writing to his wife reported, “Akhmatova has turned into a horrible skeleton, dressed in rags.”154
On Gumilyov’s return to Bolshevik Petrograd, Akhmatova was quite laconic: “He loved his mother and was a good son.” Their marriage had fallen apart even before the revolution. Gumilyov later confessed to a woman friend that soon after his marriage to Akhmatova, he began to cheat on her. “But she demanded absolute fidelity.” According to the wayward husband, Akhmatova carried on a “love war” with him in the style of Knut Hamsun, that is, she was constantly having jealous rages with stormy scenes and stormy reconciliations. But Gumilyov hated “working out” their relationship.
In the sixties, Akhmatova stated that Gumilyov was a “complex man, refined but not soft. He could not be called responsive.” In response to her demand, “Nikolai, we have to talk,” he would typically answer, “Leave me alone, mother dear.”
Even the birth of their son, Lev, in 1912 did not save the foundering marriage. “We argued over him, too,” Gumilyov later complained. Akhmatova rarely saw the child, who was brought up by Gumilyov’s relatives, and once when asked what he was doing, the child replied, “I’m trying to figure out the odds of my mother thinking about me.”155
While holding Akhmatova’s work in high esteem, Gumilyov could not forgive her for her poem of the war years, “The Prayer,” calling it monstrous. He would quote,
and comment indignantly, “She’s asking God to kill Lev and me! After all, the friend here is meant to be me…. But thank God, that monstrous prayer, like most prayers, was not heard. Lev is—knock on wood—a sturdy lad!”156 Gumilyov never learned that Akhmatova’s prayer, embodied in a poem, was a prophecy of the true—and most tragic—course of events. When in June 1941 Akhmatova met Tsvetayeva for the first time, the latter asked her, “How could you write ‘take away my child and my friend’… ? Don’t you know that everything in poetry comes true?”
Right after Gumilyov’s return to Petrograd Akhmatova told him, “Give me a divorce.” She recalled that he turned white and without any argument replied, “Gladly.” Learning that Akhmatova was marrying Vladimir Shileiko, Gumilyov refused to believe it, so outlandish was this young Assyriologist’s reputation in Petrograd. Gumilyov immediately proposed to one of his women friends, the lovely Anna Engelhardt.
In the sixties, Akhmatova would only shrug when asked for the real reasons for the divorce. “In 1918, everyone was getting divorced.” She added, “I’m all for divorce.” She always believed that her request for a divorce had hurt Gumilyov badly and even hinted that her former husband encouraged hostility toward her in his many young poetry students.
