In the eyes of the reading public, Akhmatova was inextricably tied to Blok and Gumilyov. And even though both were married and had left “legal” widows, so to speak (and Akhmatova herself was married to Shileiko), the public considered Akhmatova the “real” widow of both poets. Almost every account of the memorial services and interment for Blok mention Akhmatova’s presence, her tragic figure in black mourning and heavy crepe veil.
In 1974 Balmont’s daughter, Nini Bruni, told me with great feeling how Akhmatova grew faint at one of the many services for Blok.174 Another witness recalled the service for Blok in the small cemetery chapel. “The choir sang. But everyone’s eyes were directed not at the altar, or the coffin, but at where I was standing. I began looking around, to see why, and I saw right behind me, the tall, slender figure of Anna Akhmatova. Tears were streaming down her pale cheeks. She wasn’t hiding them. Everyone wept and the choir sang.”175
Akhmatova’s “affair” with Blok, brought into the readers’ consciousness by her poems beginning in 1911, had turned into a popular legend by 1914, one that Blok himself did not dispute. In 1916 one of Blok’s correspondents wrote to him, “blessing” the union of the two poets: “I think Anna Akhmatova is the most marvelous and refined creature. Let her be happy. And you will be happy, too.”176
One entry made in Chukovsky’s diary in 1920 is very interesting; he was walking with Blok and they met Akhmatova. “It was the first time I saw both of them together. Amazing—Blok’s face is inscrutable, but there was constant movement, trembling reactions, very subtle, around his mouth. And it was the same with Akhmatova. They met and they expressed nothing with their eyes or smiles, but
Later, observing that permanent tie between Blok and Akhmatova in the readers’ subconscious, Chukovsky wrote in his diary in 1922, “If you spend an hour in a bookstore, you will see two or three buyers who come in and ask, ‘Do you have Blok?’
‘No.’
‘How about
‘Don’t have
A pause.
‘Then give me Anna Akhmatova.’”178
One would think that the legend of the affair between Akhmatova and Blok would not have survived the publication in 1928 and 1930 of Blok’s diaries and notebooks, which made it abundantly clear that there had been no affair at all. But Akhmatova’s poetry once more proved to be stronger than the “scorned prose” of reality. And even in the 1960s one could hear an exultant but not very well-informed student exclaim, “Ah, you mean the Akhmatova that Blok shot himself over?”
Blok wrote an article months before his death that, harshly and in many ways unjustly, criticized the acmeists, especially Gumilyov; the only kind words he found were for Akhmatova, with “her weary, sickly, female, and self-absorbed” poetry manner. The political differences between them were greatly narrowed after Blok’s anti-Bolshevik speech on Pushkin and were completely erased by his death. Akhmatova later claimed that Blok recalled her on his deathbed and muttered in his delirium, “It’s good that she didn’t leave” (emigrate, that is).
In the first days after Blok’s funeral, Akhmatova’s specially written memorial poem received the widest distribution, unofficial of course, throughout Petrograd. It started with the line “Today is the Smolensk Lady’s birthday …,” an allusion to the fact that the poet had been buried at Smolensk cemetery on the feast day of the icon of Our Lady of Smolensk. The poem ended:
“To this day the best that has been said about my son was said by Anna Akhmatova in those five lines,” wrote Blok’s mother to a friend in September 1921.179 In Moscow, Marina Tsvetayeva, believing as did everyone else that there was an Akhmatova-Gumilyov-Blok triangle, wrote a poem addressed to her in 1921 that referred to the two dead poets as Akhmatova’s brothers:
