Эта женщина больна,
Эта женщина одна.
Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме,
Помолитесь обо мне.
1938.
Isaiah Berlin, a British philosopher and translator of Russian literature, originally from Riga, then temporary secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow, visited Leningrad in the fall of 1945 Anna Akhmatova and talked with her long into the night poetry, history, about life in a besieged city. In the course of that night conversation, there was a commotion from the street that he ignored for a while, but the shouting became louder and louder. The word "Isaiah" was clearly heard.
"I went to the window, looked out, and saw a man whom I recognized as Randolph Churchill. He was standing in the middle of the great yard shouting my name. He looked like a drunken graduate. For a few seconds I was pinned to the floor. Then I composed myself, muttered an apology, and rushed down the stairs; my only thought was to prevent him from entering the apartment."
In the courtyard, Randolph, Winston Churchill's son, explained with a cheerful greeting that he had come to Leningrad as a journalist for the North American Press Association, that upon arriving at the Astoria Hotel his first impulse was to put the jar of caviar he had bought into the refrigerator, but since he did not speak Russian and his translator was missing, someone mentioned that Berlin was in town.
Randolph guessed where he might stop and tried to call him by barking from the park of the former Sheremetyevo Castle.
Isaiah Berlin called Akhmatova by phone, apologized for the incident, and she invited him to continue the conversation the next evening...
Around three o'clock in the morning, Anna's son Lev Gumilyov joined them, and he offered Berlin a plate of boiled potatoes. It was all they had.
Ana read parts. Requiem, and when Berlin asked her if she could transcribe them, she replied: "There is no need. My collection of poems is due out next February; the proofs are already finished; I will send you a copy to Oxford."
"The party, as we know, decided otherwise," writes Berlin.
Some publicists write that Stalin allegedly muttered to himself in those days: "So our nun is now receiving visits from foreign spies."
"WHO ORGANIZED THE Uprising?? "
A few months later, on February 22, 1946, the American diplomat George F. Kennan, when asked by Washington what the Russians wanted, sent from Moscow the famous "long telegram" of 8.000 words, extremely voluminous by the standards of the time.
He described the Soviet government as ideologically motivated and permanently suspicious of the West: "Soviet power is impervious to the logic of reason, but very sensitive to the logic of force..."
From this vision arose the strategy of containment, which in the next four decades will shape the global confrontation of the two blocs - the Western and the Soviet - in ideology, politics, economy and security and culture.
In a speech in Fulton on March 5, 1946, the British statesman Winston Churchill warned that "from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended..."
And in early April 1946, in the Columned Hall of the House of Soviets (Колонный зал Дома Союзов), the poetess of the Silver Age performed at a literary evening of Moscow and Leningrad poets.
Vitaly Yakovlevich Vilenkin, theater historian in the book In the hundred and first mirror dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, describes the atmosphere like this:
"What a celebration it was, what an unforgettable, bright celebration of Russian poetry! How many military and student youth gathered there that evening, what famous faces they saw, how all the entrances to the hall were full, how the choir benches and boxes were bursting with the influx of this crowd of young men and women with bright eyes and rosy cheeks. With what unity this hall breathed, its choir encouraged Pasternak to words that he kept forgetting in his excitement, begging Akhmatov for more, more, more songs from the war years, songs about Leningrad, songs about love".
The audience gave a standing ovation. Poet Ilya Ehrenburg records in his memoirs: "At the beginning of April, a great evening of Leningrad poets was held in the Hall of Pillars. Among other things, Anna Akhmatova read her poems. She was greeted with enthusiasm. Two days later, Anna Andreyevna visited me and when I mentioned the evening, she shook her head: 'I don't like this... And most importantly, we don't like this...'"
And according to the Petrograd newspaper "Argumenti i fakti", Joseph Stalin asked:
“Who organized the wake-up?”
"THE HARLOT AND THE NUN... "
photo: wikimediaON THE TARGET OF THE TOP OF THE STATE: Andrej Zhdanov...
In August 1946, the Soviet ideologue Andrey Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR (b) with a focus on ideology, launched a campaign against "bourgeois formalism" in culture. As his first targets, he chose the writer and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, whom he called "a scoundrel without principles and conscience" and Anna Akhmatova, whom he called "either a nun or a harlot, or rather a harlot and a nun, where boudoir is mixed with prayer":
"Akhmatova's poetry is completely removed from the people. It is the poetry of ten thousand doomed members of the upper class of the old Russian nobility, who had no choice but to sigh for the 'good old days'."
And according to Ždanov, "remains of noble culture have fallen into the irreversible past: courtyards from the time of Catherine the Great, with their centuries-old linden alleys, fountains, statues and stone arches, greenhouses, love pavilions and torn coats of arms on the gates, Tsarsko Selo; the railway station in Pavlovsk..."
Zhdanov then thundered that the publication of Anna Akhmatova's work in the Leningrad magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad" is "surprising and unnatural, as if someone is now republishing the works of those whom our progressive public and literary elites have always considered representatives of reactionary obscurantism and apostasy (darkness and renegadeness) in politics and art."
With those words, he "wrote off" the entire Russian Silver Age: Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, Zinaida Gippius...
He referred to the statement of Maxim Gorky who, in one of the previous aesthetic-ideological conflicts, said that the decade 1907-1917. deserves to be called "the most shameful and incompetent decade in the history of the Russian intelligentsia, when, after the Revolution of 1905, a significant part of the intelligentsia turned away from the revolution, slipped into the swamp of reactionary mysticism and pornography."
In the decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1946, which harshly criticized the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad", Anna Akhmatova was called "a typical representative of empty, idealess poetry, foreign to our people, which fails to keep pace with its own people but spreads pessimism, bourgeois-aristocratic aestheticism and decadence..."
WHY TANKS OVER THE SICK OLD WOMAN'S CHEST?
Anna's close friend, actress Faina Ranevskaya, notes in her memoirs that Anna Akhmatova honestly could not understand why this punishment befell her:
"Tell me why my great country, which expelled Hitler and all his military equipment, had to drive all its tanks over the chest of a sick old woman?"
Such offensives in the ideological-aesthetic sphere occurred in several waves: the confrontation with formalism in 1926-28, the dogmatization of socialist realism in 1934, the great purge in 1938... But why did the Soviet leadership start this campaign in the summer of 1946, in the year of the post-war revival of hope?
One of the answers indicates that the cause is the Cold War, which was just beginning. At the first meeting of the Cominform, Georgy Malenkov, a high-ranking official who supported Zhdanism at the time, declared that it was an "energetic fight" against "the disease of enslavement to everything that is foreign, which has infected some unstable layers of intellectuals" who, in his words, are "easy prey for espionage."
Italian historian and publicist Giuseppe Boffa, who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Italy, in the book History of the Soviet Union, which was a bestseller in Italy in 1976, explains that the Cold War was not the only driver of that campaign, but that the Soviet leadership feared the new force of intellectual life that was born during the war: "Being blocked in the political direction, the vague post-war aspirations for renewal could express themselves in cultural activity, especially after the new understanding that was created between the intelligentsia and the people during the war. This does not mean that in the circles of the Soviet There was a new force now that one could think more deeply about the dramatic human and political events that had just passed".
The campaign soon spread to literature, film, theater, music, cultural manifestations that were the most accessible to the general public in the USSR in 1946, to philosophy and social sciences. In each episode, the starting point was seemingly secondary phenomena. Big names such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev or Sergei Eisenstein also came under fire.
Sergei Eisenstein, for example, was attacked for "showing ignorance" in the field of history in the second part of his famous film about Ivan the Terrible. He presented the emperor as a kind of Hamlet, although, according to the ideologues of the time, he was a "man of strong will and character", and the "oprichniki", his infamous armed guard, were presented as a "gang of perverts", instead of being portrayed as "progressive forces", as described by "Pravda" on September 11, 1946.
Boffa says that Stalin was personally interested in elevating the historical figure of Ivan IV.
photo: ap photo…and Stalin
The following summer, the attack moved to the "philosophical front" (this military terminology, writes Boffa, close to Stalin's customs, was never abandoned during the campaign).
A little later, it turned out that the accusations addressed to philosophers also apply to economists: the entire field of social sciences was therefore covered, all the more so because it is more directly related to ideology.
The bearer of that harsh campaign was Zhdanov, until his death in the summer of 1948, but, Boffa states, the real creator of that campaign described by the label "Zhdanovism" was Stalin. Zhdanov only added wisdom, simplicity and linguistic bullying. His speeches were never a personal work: in the most exemplary cases, they were confirmed by official party "establishments".
VEGETARIAN YEARS
The consequences were severe and far-reaching. Anna Akhmatova was expelled from the Writers' Union, her supply card was cancelled, and her books were removed from libraries.
Anna's son Lev Gumilyov was soon arrested again, this time in Moscow's Lefortovo prison. In one of his articles, Lev Nikolayevich says about it: "No real charges were brought against me and there were none in the beginning. I was beaten sparingly, but I remember the beating. They wrote me another ten-year sentence and sent me to a camp in Karaganda."
Her ex-husband Punjin was arrested again in 1949 and died in the camp in 1953.
During the investigation, Anna Akhmatova again wrote letters to Stalin and Voroshilov. The first recipient did not respond, while the second sent a letter to the prosecutor's office, which replied that it "rejects the request".
On the occasion of Stalin's 70th birthday, on December 21, 1949, a poem by Anna Akhmatova was published in the magazine "Ogonyok" In praise of peace which also includes songs in which the Leader sees with eagle eyes from the heights of the Kremlin how the land has been transformed by the abundant rays... and the voice of the grateful people is heard: "We have come to say: where Stalin is, there is freedom, peace and the greatness of the country!"
Respect for the leader in the Patriotic War and the hard-earned peace aside - in the circumstances she found herself in in 1949, it was probably not easy for her to write that. They say that the file on Akhmatova's case contained 900 pages of documents, recorded conversations and, most often, forced statements against her in various hearings.
In her "vegetarian years", as she called them, when she was practically forbidden to publish, Anna Akhmatova wrote significant essays on Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. She translated the works of Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi and other authors.
Among other things, she translated a South Slavic folk tragic ballad Hasanaginica which is:
The white breast fell on the earth
И расталась с своей душою
Of sorrow for his poor.
In her translation of the ballad The Death of Omer and Merima a stanza was added to the original, in which a pine grows from the graves of the unfortunate lovers, who ended tragically, wrapped around an oak as tall as a silken thread of an immortelle.
A pine tree surrounded a tall oak tree,
Kak immortal silk thread...
(Bor in Russian is sosenka – a feminine noun)
Both ballads have been translated into Russian before, since Pushkin's translation of the first 26 verses. Hasanaginice from 1835. It is safe to assume why she decided to translate those tragic ballads again.
In 1951, when the dust settled, she was returned to the Union of Writers at the suggestion of its president Alexander Fadeev. Her poetry, prose and studies on Pushkin have been translated into many languages. In May 1955, the Literary Fund granted homeless Akhmatova (she was evicted from Punin's apartment after his arrest) a two-room dacha in the literary village of Komarovo near Leningrad.
Lav Gumilyov was released in 1956. After his release from prison, he was expelled from the Institute of Oriental Studies with the characteristic that he was arrogant and aloof and did not engage in public work, so he got a job in the library of a psychiatric hospital in St. After serving the required time, he received a normal character recommendation and submitted his dissertation to the university. Out of 16 votes in the academic council, 15 were "for" and one "against". He gained a reputation as a historian.
REQUIEM IN "TAMIZDATU"
In 1957, Ana Akhmatova returned to singing Requiem, on which she started working in the 1930s, and parts of which Anna and her friends remembered and kept in their memory, or published here and there in "samizdat".
At one point, her reading of a poem was recorded on tape.
In 1963. Requiem was published in its entirety for the first time in "Tamizdat". About 500 copies in circulation Requiem was published on November 27, 1963 by the Society of Russian Writers Abroad (Tovarishestvo Zarubezhnykh Pisatelej) based in Munich. That association published the works of Russian authors Boris Zaitsev, Ivan Bunin, Ivan Shmeljov, Nina Berberova...
Requiem was published after Boris Pasternak's novel was first published Dr. Zhivago in Italy in 1957. The works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, like One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, began to be published in the USSR in 1962, but many of his works were banned for a long time.
According to some claims, Akhmatova's text arrived in Munich thanks to the émigré critic and professor at Berkeley Gleb Struve, who allegedly received it typed from Moscow by diplomatic mail, with a note that the manuscript was actually authorized, since it was offered to the magazine "Nova Misao" in Moscow. Otherwise, Akhmatova did not want a public connection with emigration. It seems that the "typescript" of the text arrived through other channels as well.
Parts Requiem also published the newspaper "Russian Thought", whose official sponsor, starting in 1947, was the State Department. Under the leadership of editor-in-chief Zinaida Šahovska, "Ruska Misao" has been publishing the works of dissidents since 1968.
After 1963. Requiem were printed by many well-known publishers: Posev in Frankfurt and Éditions de Minuit in Paris. In the USSR, at the time of Gorbachev's perestroika in 1987, the magazines "Oktobar" and "Neva" published the poem.
Ana's son Lev Gumilyov did not like the poem. Joseph Brodsky, referring to the Russian émigré journalist Solomon Volkov, the author of Shostakovich's biography, claimed that Gumilyov told his mother something like: "It would have been even better for you if I had died in the camp. Requiem was written in memory of the dead, but I remained alive".
When reminded that she was standing in line in front of the Kresti prison in Leningrad, he replied – and I was sitting. In prison.
After he was rehabilitated in May 1956 (he was rehabilitated only for the 1949 case, and only in 1975 for the 1938 case), he said: "Before the war he sat for his father, and after the war – for his mother."
He resented his mother for not begging for his release again. For that reason or for some other reason, he broke off the relationship with her.
In the situations they went through, as Vladimir Vysotsky sang, horror cuts the soul in half….
"WHAT BIOGRAPHY ARE THEY WRITING WITH OUR RIGDE! "
In 1955, when, after Stalin's death, Anna Akhmatova's poems began to appear in print again, the Literary Fund provided her with a small house in Komarovo, at Osipenko Street No. 3, which she named "Cabin".
Dacha became the destination of pilgrimage for poets and intellectuals. It was visited by Dmitri Likhachev, Lydia Chukovskaya, Faina Ranevskaya, Nathan Altman, Alexander Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and young poets, called the "orphans of Anna Akhmatova", and they called themselves the "magic choir": Anatoly Naiman, Yevgeny Rein, Dmitri Bobyshev and Joseph Brodsky. Anna Akhmatova's statement during Brodski's trial for piracy and parasitism was recorded: "What a biography they are writing with our red hair!"
A year before her death, Anna Akhmatova decided to draw up a will, but, as Josif Brodsky remembered, she did not feel well during the formalities at the notary and said sadly: "What legacy can we talk about? Take Modi's drawing in your hand and go!"
In Sicily, at the Etna-Taormina award ceremony, in the Ursino Castle, in Catania, Anna Akhmatova was ushered up the high, steep stairs a little too early (for the rest of her stay she was afraid of those stairs) and seated at a long table on the podium... Akhmatova was in a black silk dress with a white lace scarf draped over it, probably from ancient times. That evening she was smiling, subdued by this elemental poetic tribute - kind. At the ceremony of the Etna-Taormina award, poets from various countries and different aesthetic orientations read or recited their verses in honor of Anna Akhmatova - among them the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Spanish playwright and poet Rafael Alberti, the Italian Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo, the editor of the Russian magazine "Noviy Mir" Alexander Tvardovsky and others.
When a young Irishman stood behind her to recite his poem, Akhmatova threw her head back, pretending to look at him from the opposite position. Just to look at him, not just to hear him. The Irishman blushed. It was a gesture of a ruler who is in a good mood. To the Polish poet Kazimierz Bandis, the author of the famous Letters to Mrs. Z, who in 1966 reported for Warsaw's "Politika", it seemed as if she belonged to the eighteenth century.
In 1965, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
The author of the book Ana Ahmatova: Poet and prophet, Roberta Reeder, who studies the relationship between Russian culture and its social and political context, shows how Anna Akhmatova initially, as a young poet, wrote touching love poems that express the joy of first meeting, and later the pain of a broken heart; and as the repressive Stalinist period began to destroy the very fabric of society, she never expressed self-pity; instead, she began writing songs like those in the cycle Requiem in which she turned the personal pain and tragedies of her nation into immortal verses.
When, on March 10, 1966, after the funeral service in the church of St. Nicholas, she was buried at the cemetery in Komarovo, the poet Yevgeniy Rein, one of the "poetry orphans of Akhmatova", it seemed that the sounds of the frozen earth falling on the coffin marked that Anna Akhmatova was taking with her the entire poetic Silver Age.
