Naturally, the young Akhmatova was interested in and influenced by the comparatively new female “decadent” tradition. At its beginning stands the extraordinary figure of Marie Bashkirtseff. The Russian but thoroughly Francophile Bashkirtseff, who died in Paris of tuberculosis a few days before her twenty-fourth birthday in 1884, was a successful artist who exhibited in the Salon and corresponded with Guy de Maupassant. She dreamed of great love and universal recognition. Feeling that she would not have long to live, Bashkirtseff devoured knowledge with incredible intensity, quickly turning from a precocious wunderkind into an independent-minded and assertive young woman. Her real fame came posthumously from the diary that she kept in French from the age of thirteen, published by the poet André Theuriet in 1887, three years after her death.
The emotionally and stylistically exalted diary, described by Bashkirtseff as “the life of a woman, recorded day after day, without any pretense, as if no one in the world would ever read it and at the same time with a passionate desire that it be read,” touched on many popular fin-de-siècle themes. Bashkirtseff’s self-image was wildly romanticized; when her diary was published in Russia, neither Leo Tolstoy nor Chekhov liked it. But it was those very qualities that endeared her to the first Russian modernists. Valery Bryusov noted in his diary that Bashkirtseff “is me, with all my thoughts, convictions, and dreams.” And Velimir Khlebnikov, one of the leading Russian futurists, considered her outpourings “the exact diary of my spirit.”
Independent and ambitious young women all over Russia became engrossed in Bashkirtseff’s diary. Its admirers included the young Marina Tsvetayeva, who dedicated her first book,
I believe Akhmatova used those lines to establish a connection with the work or at least the image of Bashkirtseff, whose admirer and champion Theuriet was. And it is significant that the “nod” in Bashkirtseff’s direction appeared for the first time in Akhmatova’s collection published in 1940, when the authorities ended a fifteen-year ban on her poetry. This was her first volume of selected works, in a sense. Gumilyov had been dead for almost twenty years by then. One can speculate that Akhmatova restored the epigraph, originally intended for the book in 1912, which she had removed at the time either because of Gumilyov’s opposition or from fear of being mocked by him and his friends for her “bad taste.” The lesson given to Tsvetayeva was learned well by the proud and ambitious Akhmatova.
Another seminal proto-decadent figure in poetry was the famed beauty Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869-1905), who also died young of tuberculosis. Lokhvitskaya was cheered and celebrated at her public readings and at age twenty-seven received the most coveted Russian literary award of the day, the Pushkin Prize, for her first collection. She was called the “Russian Sappho,” as was Akhmatova later, because she wrote primarily of love—passionate, ecstatic, exotic. At first she was accused of “immodesty,” “unchasteness,” even “immorality,” though Tolstoy himself defended her: “It’s the young drunken wine spouting. It will quiet down and cool, and pure waters will flow.”42
The first Russian Nobel laureate in literature, Ivan Bunin, recalled how Lokhvitskaya’s public image hardly corresponded with her real life. Neither her passionate admirers nor her severe critics ever suspected that Lokhvitskaya was “the mother of several children, a homebody, and indolent in an Eastern way: she even receives guests lying in a robe on her sofa.”43 Lokhvitskaya was close to the “older” symbolists in the melodiousness of her verse, its message of emotional and erotic emancipation, and her growing interest in medieval matters, including satanic cults. Women in Lokhvitskaya’s poetry resembled the ideal of the pre-Raphaelites, but in one of her popular poems of 1895 there appears a stanza strikingly similar to the themes and images of the vintage Akhmatova:
