St Petersburg полностью

But really, such situations—arrest, death (in Requiem it always smells of death, people are always on the edge of death)—well, such extreme situations rule out the possibility of an adequate reaction. When a person weeps, it is the weeper’s private concern. When a writer weeps, when he suffers, he actually benefits somehow from suffering. A writer can really suffer, really grieve. But describing that grief, those are not real tears, not real gray hair. It is merely an approximation of a real reaction. And the realization of that alienation creates a truly mad situation. Requiem is a work that is constantly balancing on the edge of madness which is the result not of the catastrophe itself, not the loss of a son, but of that moral schizophrenia, that schism, not of reason but of conscience. The schism between sufferer and writer. That is what makes this work so great.119

During World War I, Akhmatova announced in her frightening poem “The Prayer” her readiness to sacrifice on the altar of Russia her child, her friend, and her mysterious gift of song. Twenty years later her offer was accepted, but only in part, and with truly Faustian conditions: both her friend and her child were taken away (which did not lessen Russia’s suffering, however, as she had requested in “The Prayer”); but it was these tragic events in her own life, so terrible for Akhmatova the woman, that gave a powerful impetus to the inspiration of Akhmatova the poet. Her son sensed this acutely. After returning to Leningrad from his many years in exile after Stalin’s death, he once reproached his mother in the heat of an argument, “It would have been even better for you [as a poet] if I had died in the camps.”120

The Communists’ execution in 1921 of Akhmatova’s first husband Gumilyov and the death of Alexander Blok left the poet with the halo of “poetic widow.” She was on her way to becoming a national symbol, but further developments left her in relative isolation. The tragic turns in her son’s life and then in the life of her third husband somehow returned the moral authority of the seer Cassandra to Akhmatova, making her the priestess of the national destiny. It was then that she fully felt herself the guardian defender and even—to some extent—the creator of the nation’s historical memory.

I was with my people then,

Where, to their misfortune, they were then.

Politically, artistically, and emotionally Leningrad no longer juxtaposed itself to Russia as a whole. Languishing under the weight of the Great Terror, the city suffered like the rest of the country—only more so. In that sense it continued to be the symbol of all Russia, but a hidden, esoteric symbol: officially there was no terror.

The new mythos of the martyr city was being created, as befits a mythos, in deep secrecy, underground. At first only her closest friends knew about the existence of Akhmatova’s Requiem. For many years she did not commit it to paper but secreted it in the memories of several trusted friends. They were to be the bearers of that still hidden mythos until such time as the secret could be revealed. Lydia Chukovskaya, one of those living depositories, recalled meeting with Akhmatova in her bugged apartment:

Suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, she would stop, and looking up at the ceiling and walls, she would pick up paper and pen; later she would say something quite social very loudly, “Would you like some tea?” or “You’ve gotten quite a tan,” and write on the scrap of paper in a quick hand and give it to me. I would read the verse, memorize it, and silently return it to her. “We’re having such an early fall this year,” Akhmatova would say loudly, strike a match, and burn the paper over the ashtray. It was a ritual: hands, match, ashtray—a beautiful and bitter ritual.” 121

In every mythos, there are esoteric and exoteric elements. For many years, Requiem, known only to initiates, formed the esoteric part of the new Petersburg mythos. In 1941 a work appeared that announced to the whole world the exoteric message of that mythos: Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, which came to be called “Leningrad.” It appeared in circumstances that were no less dramatic than those of Requiem, and it followed another important symphonic work by Shostakovich, also directly tied to the Great Terror and its horrible psychological trauma.