Right there in the studio, Gumilyov challenged Voloshin to a duel, considering himself particularly knowledgeable about the custom. Two days were spent finding antique pistols. Voloshin insisted that if they weren’t the exact ones Pushkin used in his legendary duel, they were certainly of that period; and they naturally had their duel in the same place as Pushkin’s. The avalanche of jokes and mockery over the duel, in part because it had been so earnestly planned in the grand tradition, spread all over Petersburg. Every local reporter had a good laugh at the expense of Voloshin and Gumilyov.
The terms were a distance of twenty paces, one shot apiece. Luckily, both Voloshin and Gumilyov missed. The Petersburg newspapers got the story of the outcome and pounced mercilessly on the duelists. Makovsky was probably right in his supposition that the “reporters of the yellow press used this as a pretext to get their revenge on
The final blow came from their own symbolist camp, when Zinaida Hippius wrote a story that ridiculed a duel “of two third-rate poets.” In those days of persistent hounding by both the press and gossip-mongers, Voloshin saw Petersburg as “the main test tube of Russian psychopathy.” However, both he and Gumilyov survived the scandal intact. Not so Dmitrieva. She understood the rules of the game when she told Makovsky, “Once I bury Cherubina, I bury myself, never to be resurrected.”51 And, indeed, Dmitrieva disappeared from the literary scene for a long time.
Twenty-year-old Akhmatova intently watched how the story unfolded and she never forgot those autumnal days of 1909. First of all, she was deeply wounded by the affair between her husband and Dmitrieva. But Akhmatova’s professional ambitions must have been injured even more. Voloshin wrote to a friend in November 1909, “Cherubina de Gabriac’s success is enormous. She is imitated, people who have nothing to do with literature learn her by heart, and the Petersburg poets hate and envy her.”
In the final analysis, both the hoax and duel were in large part about literary competition. Toward the end of her life, Akhmatova spoke of Dmitrieva with undisguised scorn: “She thought that a duel of two poets over her would make her a fashionable Petersburg lady and would guarantee her place in the capital’s literary circles.” But, according to Akhmatova, “Something in Dmitrieva’s calculations went wrong.”
In the late 1950s Akhmatova summed up the whole story in comments so frank that few readers would have imagined Akhmatova had written them had they not been in her own hand: “Obviously, at the time (1909-1910) there was a kind of secret vacancy for a woman’s place in Russian poetry. Cherubina tried to fill it. Either the duel or something in her poetry kept her from taking that place. Fate wanted it to be mine.”52
To this sober evaluation of her own position in Russian poetry at the end of the century’s first decade, Akhmatova adds a revealing comment: “Amazingly, this was half-understood by Marina Tsvetayeva.” Any discussion of Russian poetry of the twentieth century inevitably brings up the paired names of Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva They are juxtaposed and compared, which is understandable, since it is difficult to imagine two poets more different in temperament and technique.
Tsvetayeva, three years younger than Akhmatova, lived a tragic life and hanged herself in 1941 at age forty-nine in a small provincial town. Her complex relations with Akhmatova deserve a study of their own. I will touch here on only one aspect—their struggle for primacy m Russian women’s poetry in the 1910s. The eighteen-year-old Tsvetayeva had published her first work,
Akhmatova’s image is inexorably tied to Petersburg for her readers and contemporaries, as Tsvetayeva’s is with Moscow. Tsvetayeva wrote, “With my entire being I sense the tension—inevitable—with my every line—we are being compared (and in some situations—pitted)—not only Akhmatova and I, but Petersburg poetry and Moscow poetry, Petersburg and Moscow.”
Tsvetayeva could be generous and many times, especially in her poems, she spoke of her reverence for Akhmatova and could even grant literally Petersburg primacy over Moscow, as she did in her colorful letter to Mikhail Kuzmin:
