They were tears of shock. For many Leningraders Akhmatova must have seemed like a ghost from the past. In 1925, when an unofficial Party directive was issued about her (“Do not arrest, but do not publish”), her new poems ceased to appear. Akhmatova could have been considered deceased long ago, and in fact many thought she was. A favorite theme of the official critics, when her work was submitted for publication, was its blatant incompatibility with the new progressive “socialist way of life.” In her late years, Akhmatova often ironically quoted one such article. “The new people remain, and will remain, cold and unmoved by the whining of a woman who either was born too late or did not die in time.”
Hardest of all for Akhmatova was that this official hostility coincided with a certain cooling toward her poetry among the Leningrad poetry connoisseurs, who preferred to listen to Oberiu avant-garde poets like Zabolotsky or Vaginov. Akhmatova was losing contact with her audience and that may have been one of the reasons for the decline in her productivity. There were years when she wrote only one or two poems or none at all. For a lyric poet such muteness is worse than death, and Akhmatova suffered greatly.
The Great Terror brought to Akhmatova, as it did to millions of her fellow citizens, fear, sorrow, and inexpressible suffering, but it also gave her a new poetic voice and a renewed sense of sharing the nation’s fate. Between 1935 and 1940 Akhmatova wrote the main body of the verse cycle
The tsars had created Petersburg as an artificial capital, summoned to exert control over the Russian Empire, and many Russian creative geniuses keenly felt that the city’s influence was that of the devil. Yet over two centuries, Petersburg grew deep roots in the native soil. And now the Communists’ abrupt return of the capital to Moscow was regarded by the locals as violence against history and tradition. Stalin’s vendetta against “oppositionist” Leningrad merely strengthened that impression.
The Petersburg elite of the nineteenth century, in opposition to the regime, felt alienated from their own capital. At the turn of the century, only isolated individuals began to feel a certain sympathy for Petersburg. But by the time Petrograd had lost its political significance under the Soviet regime, wide circles of the intelligentsia had come to love and revere their city.
The city’s imperial traditions made it the ideal focus for remembrance; this was understood well by its enemies, too. When in the early 1920s Nikolai Antsiferov’s book,
The book draws the city’s “face,” the face and soul of Petersburg. But it draws it exclusively from the point of view of the representative of the former ruling class. It presents (rather vividly) the image of the central part of the city—its palaces, gardens, churches, and monuments—but does not present at all, does not even mention, the large area where there were factories, poverty, and slavery, as if there existed only the center, full of interest, life, movement, and uniqueness, while the rest was just deserted, dead, mute, and unneeded. This creates an incorrect, anti-proletarian perspective.116
The Great Terror in Leningrad destroyed the juxtaposition of the “imperial” and “proletarian” parts of the city. Right after Kirov’s murder in 1934, Lyubov Shaporina, describing the start of the deportation of the Leningrad elite, wrote in her diary, “Who is being exiled? For what reasons? What do all those people have in common? They are the intelligentsia. And the majority are native Petersburgers.” The subsequent terror of the late 1930s spread a much wider net. It was not that just a part of Leningrad was destroyed; the whole city was a victim now. These tragic events paved the way for a decisive change in the Petersburg mythos, while the city became a martyr city. The work that cemented that radical change of the city’s image was Akhmatova’s
