Flying was the latest thrill in Paris and in Petersburg. Blok, who never missed an aerial show, wrote a poem entitled “Aviator,” dedicated to the memory of a pilot who had died before his eyes. The pilots, who also amused themselves by innocently throwing oranges down at targets, interested everyone. They seemed dashing and sexy; a Petersburg theater ran a farce in which a lady wanting to have an affair with a pilot flies up into the clouds with him. Passionate sounds soon fill the stage and the audience watches the lady’s intimate articles of clothing float down upon them, as if they were at a striptease where the stripper was invisible.
Modigliani, according to Akhmatova, was also fascinated by aviators and thought that they must be extraordinary people. She remembered meeting the famous pilot Louis Bleriot. She was having dinner with Gumilyov in a Paris restaurant; unexpectedly Bleriot came up to them. During the meal Akhmatova had slipped off her tight new shoes. When they got home, she found a note with Bleriot’s address in one of them.
Modigliani did a series of drawings of Akhmatova, some of them nudes. One delicate portrait, in an Egyptian mode (Modigliani was then in his Egyptian phase), is often reproduced today on the jackets of Akhmatova’s books. But in her first book, published in 1912—at her own expense with a printing of only 300 copies—under the unassuming title
The critics were more than kind to
Some readers seem to think now that Russia’s women first found their poetic voice and cultural representative in Akhmatova, and that in that sense she made her debut on an empty stage, so to speak. This is not so. Akhmatova’s creativity was the pinnacle of a long and glorious literary tradition. Akhmatova, and her younger contemporary Marina Tsvetayeva, were poets of genius (they both intensely disliked the word “poetess”), but there were quite a few successful and famous Russian women writers before them.
In fact, the first well-established Russian poetess, Anna Bunina (1774-1829), was a distant relative of Akhmatova’s maternal grandfather. Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya (1792-1862) and Countess Eudoxia Rostopchina (1811-1858) were in their time compared to comets blazing across the Russian literary firmament, writing notable verse and prose. Pushkin himself published a sensational work in 1836,
As the literary and periodical market exploded in Russia, professional women’s participation in it rose significantly as well. Publishing companies and magazines desperately needed translators, copy editors, copyists, and secretaries; educated Russian women gladly accepted the jobs, horrifying the authorities. In 1870 Pyotr Shuvalov, the omnipotent chief of the gendarmes, presented Emperor Alexander II with a special report that sounded the alarm: “Our woman dreams of leading an immoral life, saying that the word morality was invented by the despotism of men…. We must admit that a woman nihilist is much more harmful than a woman of openly indecent behavior.” And the gendarme, who was known as “the head inquisitor of the empire,” demanded, “Can a woman who spends half the day in an office filled with men, where certain ties and demoralization are inevitable, be a loving mother and a good housewife?”38
But the swift integration of women into the world of literature could not be stemmed by the police, or the emperor, or even male writers clearly worried by the growth of competition and losing influence in an area they had traditionally dominated. One leading liberal journalist of the period expressed the views of the majority of his fellow men when he charged, without any real proof, that “You women come to the manuscript marketplace—I am speaking of the manuscript market, not the idea marketplace, calm down—you come with the most horrible, the most treacherous weapon: you knock down prices impossibly. You are dooming other workers to starvation.”39
