Later Akhmatova was to recall how that poem “came” to her in a crowded suburban train traveling to Petrograd. She “felt the approach of some lines” and realized that if she didn’t have a cigarette immediately, nothing would be written. But she had no matches. “I went out onto the buffer platform. Some boys in the Red Army were out there, cursing wildly. They didn’t have any matches, either, but fat red sparks flew from the locomotive and settled on the platform railing. I pressed my cigarette against them. On the third (approximately) spark the cigarette lit. The guys, greedily watching my cleverness, were delighted. ‘She’ll always get by,’ one of them said about me.”
In another poem of that period, which also mentions “Hot, fresh blood,” Akhmatova expressed repentance:
Of course, those lines were also interpreted by contemporaries as referring to Blok and Gumilyov. The more erudite among them recalled Akhmatova’s “Prayer” and how it was coming to pass and that Mandelstam in one of his poems called Akhmatova Cassandra, the prophetic daughter of the king of Troy. Thus in the popular imagination Akhmatova was turning from eyewitness of Petersburg’s doom and destruction to prophet of its imminent rebirth, a figure of immense symbolic power. (Mandelstam was more perceptive than most here, too, pointing out the symbolic undercurrent in Akhmatova’s poems as early as 1916.)
When Akhmatova recommenced reading her poetry before audiences after a long absence, she was met “with tense, electrified silence.” The recollections of that event describe not a real person but a potent symbol of popular aspirations.
She was very pale and even her lips seemed bloodless. She looked into the distance, beyond the audience … tall, fragilely thin … hopelessly and tragically beautiful. And how she read! It wasn’t a reading, it was magic…. She finished. She stood in the same spot and still looked out into the distance, as if she had forgotten that she was on stage. No one applauded, no one dared even to breathe.183
The stage was set for a confrontation. On one side, the triumphant, omnipresent, cruel, and manipulative regime determined to destroy and subjugate not only the remains of Petersburg in Petrograd but to recast the new Petrograd “in its own image and likeness” at any cost. On the side of the regime was the full power of the government, the secret police, and the cultural apparatus with its carrots and sticks.
On the other side was just a woman with a handful of confederates, poor, unarmed, and deprived. Her only strength lay in being a great poet in a country where poets traditionally wielded enormous influence and commanded great respect. Therefore she could count on the attention and sympathy of at least part of the audience—the part that was not brainwashed by the ruling ideology, tricked by its slogans, frightened, or destroyed.
The struggle was for the soul of a city—what it would live on, think about, weep over, and delight in, and what it would be called. And since the city also played a special, decisive role in the fate of Russian culture, the struggle would be for the future of Russian culture as well.
If one simply judged from the apparent strengths of the two sides, the battle looked hopeless. And with every year it would seem ever more hopeless. Never in the history of Russia had the poet been up against such a powerful, clever, cynical, and merciless enemy. But on the other hand, never had a poet who was also a woman entered into such a desperate and uncompromising battle with the regime.
Akhmatova was prepared for humiliation and even death, but not for defeat. She believed in the city, in its inhabitants, in herself and her mission, in the power of the Russian word, and in the moral strength of Russian culture. In 1923, a book of her poems published in Berlin,
CHAPTER 4
