St Petersburg полностью

The rumor that the deaths of Blok and Gumilyov had left the thirty-two-year-old Akhmatova inconsolable and bereft was so widespread that rumors about her actual suicide began in Petrograd, then in Moscow. Another version also made the rounds—that Akhmatova had literally caught her death of cold at Blok’s funeral. Mayakovsky believed the false story and wandered around, in Tsvetayeva’s words, “Like a gored bull.” Tsvetayeva wrote to Akhmatova from Moscow, “All these days there have been grim rumors about you, growing more persistent and irrefutable with every hour…. In the last three days (without you) Petersburg no longer existed for me.”180

It is very telling that for Tsvetayeva the image of Akhmatova is so tied to Petersburg that without Akhmatova the city disintegrates for her. This close identification of Akhmatova with the city was no doubt strengthened in the public imagination because the Akhmatova-Gumilyov-Blok triangle had become part of the Petersburg background. The trinity of poets glorified the Petersburg mythos, and the mythos, in turn, united the members of the trinity.

It was not important that Blok and Akhmatova were not tied by tragic love. It was not important either that Akhmatova and Gumilyov had actually parted several years before his death. The new Petrograd demanded new martyrs. Blok and Gumilyov became those martyrs. Although hardly saints in life, their death brought them canonization in the eyes of the Russian intelligentsia and contributed to the atonement for the sins of St. Petersburg. And even though Akhmatova did not die, this atonement was now personified by her tragic figure—both as poet and as woman.

The unity of those two aspects of Akhmatova’s public image must be emphasized. In Russia the old romantic idea of the identification of the poet’s life and work was traditionally realized to extreme limits. Petrograd’s embattled cultural elite badly needed a symbolic figure serving as the “keeper of the sacred flame,” and the role suited Akhmatova ideally.

At Blok’s funeral, as became clear from memoirs, Akhmatova was perceived as his widow. And here is a description of the memorial service at the Kazan Cathedral for Gumilyov, held two weeks after Blok’s funeral. Gumilyov’s young widow is weeping, and, the eyewitness continues, “Akhmatova is standing by the wall. Alone. But it seems to me that the widow of Gumilyov is not that pretty, sobbing girl wrapped in widow’s weeds, but she—Akhmatova.”181

Akhmatova’s relations with Gumilyov were probably even more a matter of public record than her imaginary “affair” with Blok. After all, Gumilyov had indeed been her husband, which she did not delay announcing in her first book, Evening, describing him there in rather realistic detail:

He liked three things in life:

Evensong, white peacocks,

And worn maps of America.

He did not like crying children, He did not like tea with jam

Or women’s hysterics.

… And I was his wife.

And if readers believed this description, written in 1910, a half year after their marriage began, then how could they not believe another poem, written a year later and also included in Evening, which was much more emotional and therefore more convincing. It began,

My husband whipped me with a patterned

Strap, folded in half.

Later Gumilyov complained, “Just think about it, those lines made me a sadist. They spread a rumor about me that I would put on tails (which I didn’t even own in those days) and a top hat (which I did) and, with a patterned strap folded in half, would whip not only my wife, Akhmatova, but my young female fans, first stripping them naked.”182

Readers continued to form a picture of Akhmatova’s volatile relationship with Gumilyov through the poems she published, even though some of them were actually addressed to other men in her life. Then the war, the revolution, and finally, Gumilyov’s execution provided Akhmatova with a new, patriotic and civic theme and gave her a new voice. Mandelstam was the first to write about it, noting that Akhmatova’s poetry “had undergone a break toward hieratic importance, religious simplicity and solemnity.”

Akhmatova herself said that tragic events of the postrevolutionary years radically changed her attitude toward blood and death: the word “blood” now reminded her “of the brown seeping blotches of blood on the snow and on the stones and its disgusting odor. Blood is good only when it is alive, the blood coursing in veins, but it is horrible and disgusting in all other situations.”

In Akhmatova’s untitled poem written after Gumilyov’s arrest, this sensation was expressed as follows:

Russian soil

Loves, loves blood.