Despite all this, Blok remains to this day one of the most loved—and widely read—Russian poets. The lyrical power, vivid imagery, and haunting rhythm of his verse retain all the impact they had on his first readers. Today Russians may wince at some of Blok’s highly charged romantic sentiments and yet, again and again, they surrender to his magical voice.
Along with the other “thinking young women of Russia,” teenage Anna Gorenko read and reread Blok’s “The Unknown Woman.” “It is marvelous, that intertwining of trite quotidian life and the divine vivid vision,” the seventeen-year-old poetess enthused, just having picked “Akhmatova” as a pseudonym. “Akhmatova” has strangely Tatar overtones for a Russian ear, but Anna decided on it anyway, since her father, a naval engineer, had forbidden her to publish poetry signed Gorenko, because “I don’t want you sullying my name!” The cult of Blok, traditional for the times, reigned in young Anna’s family; for instance, her sister “idolized” Blok and insisted, in the fashionable decadent way, that she had “the other half of Blok’s soul.”35
The complicated relations between Akhmatova and Blok and the legend that surrounded them would hold one of the most important places in Akhmatova’s life; later she would complain that the legend “threatens to distort my poetry and even my biography.” But then, in 1907, Akhmatova had no inkling of it, even though she had a high enough opinion of herself from childhood.
Born, as she liked to remind us, in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s
“Mama was upset,” Akhmatova later recalled. “‘God, how badly I brought you up,’ she said.” In this, as in many other things, Akhmatova was a prophet: her birthplace had become a tourist attraction by the end of the twentieth century. When a high school girlfriend brought Akhmatova a bouquet of lilies of the valley, she rejected it scornfully, declaring she needed at least “hyacinths from Patagonia.”36
In high school Akhmatova attracted attention for her slender, agile figure, her face with its large, bright eyes contrasted with her dark hair, brows, and lashes; her unusual profile (her girlfriends noted her nose with the “special” bump); her pride, stubbornness, and capaciousness; and, in particular, her wide knowledge of modernist poetry.
Nikolai Gumilyov, three years her senior, fell in love with Akhmatova when she was fourteen. Like her relationship with Blok, this was to be the start of the other great Russian cultural legend of the twentieth century, another leitmotif in the Akhmatova mythology. Gumilyov, who subsequently became a famous poet, was destined for a horrible end. But in 1903 the gangling, cross-eyed, lisping seventh-grader did not make much of an impression on the supercilious, sharp girl. Poems dedicated to her did not help (Gumilyov had started writing poetry at the age of five).
Gumilyov, however, was also stubborn and persistent. He studied versification with single-minded diligence, immersed himself in Western poetry (especially the French symbolists), and continued over the next many years to offer his hand and heart to Anna. He had dedicated to her an impressive cycle of love poetry, in which he described her as a mermaid, a sorceress, and a queen, and he affirmed he had attempted suicide several times because of her. She refused him several times, then half agreed, and then refused again. At last she wrote to her best friend, “Pray for me. It can’t be any worse. I want to die,” and then on April 25, 1910, she married Gumilyov. As it often happens, marriage was the beginning of the end of their relationship. Suddenly Gumilyov found Akhmatova’s company tiresome.
The newlyweds headed straight for Paris. As Akhmatova liked to put it later, 1910 was the year of Leo Tolstoy’s death, the crisis of Russian symbolism, and her meeting with the young and unknown artist Amedeo Modigliani. But that year she saw him only once. They became close in 1911, when Akhmatova was in Paris again. Many years later Joseph Brodsky described their relationship with poetic license as
