This brings us back to the love triangle, Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin, at the nucleus of
Knyazev’s place in this new imaginary triangle will be taken by another poet and officer, Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov. “The Commendatore’s Footsteps” then becomes a secret confession of love for Anna (Akhmatova), and Blok becomes the repentant Don Juan, who—like the hero of Pushkin’s tragedy—finds true love only on the brink of death. (Akhmatova claimed that Blok thought of her in his deathbed delirium.) Thus, Akhmatova, asserting the poet’s right to transform reality, presented in a coded way (but open to the careful reader) a continuation of her imaginary affair with Blok in
Reorganizing her own biography thus, Akhmatova entered into a complex relation with history. In accordance with Russian tradition and her own philosophical system, the poet was not only the bearer of the nation’s historical memory but the catalyst of important contemporary events. Invisible but sturdy threads stretch from the poet to pivotal personalities and dramas of the twentieth century.
In particular, Akhmatova had an acute sense of a personal tie with Stalin even though she never met him. As he had done with the cinema, Stalin took Russian literature under his personal control. He followed the latest books year after year, he met with writers (sometimes in informal settings) and phoned them. Some of these telephone conversations (with Bulgakov and Pasternak, for instance) were much talked about in literary circles.
Akhmatova first appealed to Stalin in 1935, asking for the release of her current husband, Nikolai Punin, and her son Lev. They were freed almost as soon as her letter was given to Stalin; word of that miracle spread far among the Soviet intelligentsia. When her son was again arrested, though, a second letter did not secure his release. But in 1939 Stalin asked at a meeting with writers how Akhmatova was doing and why her poems were not appearing in print. After that, the leaders of the Writers’ Union showed “heightened attention” to Akhmatova, and soon after, a collection of her poems appeared, the first in many years. From that time on, Akhmatova felt—probably with reason—the leader’s attentive gaze. She reasonably connected Stalin with the unexpected remission of her son’s death sentence to a term in the camps and with her own timely evacuation from besieged Leningrad during the war.
Akhmatova assumed that Stalin had spared her because he had formed an image of her as a secluded, ascetic woman, talented but modest, completely devoted to her literary work. (Pasternak had described Akhmatova that way in his letter to Stalin.) According to Akhmatova, Stalin periodically inquired, “Well, how’s our nun doing?” But a fateful event in 1945 shattered that image forever.
Isaiah Berlin, then a young and intellectually curious staffer of the British Embassy in Moscow, came to Leningrad and, knowing Russian well, decided to visit Akhmatova, whose poetry he had long loved. This was late November 1945. Probably Berlin did not fully realize that Stalin perceived all Western diplomats as real or potential spies and therefore kept them under constant surveillance.
Akhmatova was also being watched, and the meeting between Berlin and Akhmatova was immediately reported to Stalin. She always felt that Stalin’s anger was caused by the fact that the thirty-six-year-old Berlin stayed until morning. As Akhmatova told it, when Stalin learned of the nighttime rendezvous, he cursed and shouted, “So our nun receives foreign spies!” The invisible thread that, Akhmatova believed, connected her to Stalin was broken.
She felt that this chain of events led to the infamous Party decree of 1946, directed against her and Zoshchenko. The decree, in turn, led—in her opinion—closer to the Cold War. She wrote about her meeting with Isaiah Berlin in
