Shostakovich’s inner world was a bunker in which he lived under constant attack. I have a blueprint of it right here. The fact that at any moment one of their eighty-eights or one of our special detachments was going to break through couldn’t help but influence the character of his surroundings.
Konstantinovskaya’s world was a walled garden with a dead fountain within. Once the fountain had jetted into the air, and the trees had borne flowers and fruit—only once. After 1935, what grew there but rubble and mummies? Well, but the reason why I admire her is that unlike Akhmatova, she made no career out of feeling sorry for herself. Good girl! That Order of the Red Star she got, why shouldn’t I inform you that I had something to do with it?
But Akhmatova’s world was the semipublic one of Tsarkoe Selo. In the early years of my assignment, trailing her meant promenading along the long, pale-pillared coast of the Catherine Palace. It used to keep me in shape. As a rule, those scum force us to sit in a chair all day listening in on them, so I can’t say I hated Akhmatova. In fact, one time I told her that I was considering reading Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman.” I asked for advice. Was it really worth my while? I wanted to know. And in that same uninflected voice in which she recited her poetry on demand, she assured me that it would be a waste of my time. I’ll always be grateful to her for that, because I’m a busy man.
Sometimes she took me to the Garden of the Toilers on Uritzky Square, where I could inhale a little sunshine. I’m considered excellent at what I do; she never saw me even when she turned on me that smooth cool face like an enamel icon. For a time the Engineering Academy of the Red Army on Ulitsa Rakova, which she persisted in calling Italyanskaya, was also a favorite destination of hers. I didn’t mind that; I know a lot of engineers.
Where do you think she was when the February Revolution broke out? At one of Meyerhold’s dress rehearsals! It’s true that we did see her gliding from barricade to barricade, but not to participate in our struggle, only to do what poets do: play with fire. And what was she doing when we seized power in the October Revolution? Standing on the Liteiny Bridge. Where might she have been in 1936 when the white-clad Stakhanovite workers came marching toward us on Red Square, with the gigantic white image of Comrade Stalin stretching out his arm toward them from atop his column while R. L. Karmen filmed everything? Where do you think? She was in a certain tree-alley by the Vittolovsky Canal.
That’s why it hurts me when ignorant people claim that we “isolated her.” In 1918, when she divorced Gumilyev and entered into that so-called “marriage” with V. Shileiko (I’ve seen the block warden’s book, and I can assure you that their union was never properly registered), the happy couple withdrew into the icy labyrinth of the Sheremetev Palace, which always reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the Snow Queen: walls of ice, frozen puzzle-pieces, silence, deadness, and a woman with an ice-cold kiss! (Don’t tell me I’m not poetic.) Meanwhile, I took note of a black ring worn around a departing lover’s neck, a poem about weeping, a poem about white crosses. But that’s not the point. What caused us concern is that after we’d arrested those snakes who dared to vote against Soviet power at the Constituent Assembly, we found Akhmatova rallying enemies of the people with a poem entitled “Your Spirit Is Clouded with Arrogance.”
When she was still young and beautiful enough to write that the past’s power can fail, she mourned unkissed lips. When our Revolution proved that the past can in fact be broken, what then? Unkissed lips returned to hang eternally over her in the yellow fog over Leningrad. I’ve seen her linger by a pale archway ornamented with bearded heads; she spent an hour there; my toes were getting cold, I can tell you. She gazed at each effigy as if it were someone she’d loved. Well, with her anything was possible. Unkissed lips! When we were supposed to be building socialism! Each mouth was a noose—oh, she hanged herself a thousand times! But from the beginning she celebrated her mourning in colored icons of words. She needed to doom herself within those opened lips. I’ve uncovered a term for that behavior: sexual asphyxia! Just as the reflections of railings get broken up by ripples, then begin to heal themselves, never finishing, so her pain of love and life pulsated in and out of exaltation.
A kiss, then mourning for a kiss—to know both, one must experience love’s end. One summer night in 1935 while Shostakovich lay in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms, whose arms did Akhmatova rest in? No one’s. She lay down in the wet grass, gazing at the Chinese Pavilion’s crown. I was there; I saw how her cold lips trembled. Shostakovich found salvation within the curtain of Elena’s hair. Akhmatova haunted herself with swans and dead water.
By then she’d begun to learn that even greater than the power of the absent lover is our power, Soviet power! We were going to plait her braids more tightly for her…
I’ve seen her at Gumilyev’s shoulder, gazing away at right angles to him; he wears a rose above his heart, oak-leaves on chest and sleeve; a sword of moonlight fails to cut deeply the black water behind them; statues spy on them from behind the trees. I have every reason to conclude that at that moment he was dreaming about his own Elena, to whom he gave the name “Blue Star.”
In those years it was still believed at my office that her sensibility resembled some rainbow-colored clock whose hands were church-towers creaking round and round Petersburg for the very last time, before we stopped that clock. Nobody could have imagined “Requiem”; we associated her with “At the Seashore.”
Then, thanks in part to her unhappy marriage, and also to her native disposition, she began to more than express her suffering; in typical Russian fashion she treasured it! Her Muse no longer reassured her: Your happiness will be guarded by the statues in the Summer Garden. That was all the same to Akhmatova. Since her suffering was strong, if she could only allow it to define her, why couldn’t she be indomitable? As early as 1915, N. Nedobrovo noted her calmness in confessing pain and weakness.19 By then, Marina Tsvetaeva was already writing love-poems to her. In 1916 a lover whom I have identified as B. Anrep caused her a highly specific agony which shone within her like a white stone in a well. (When it came to grieving, she was far superior to Shostakovich, who jittered and went to pieces.) Then Shileiko caused her sorrow in the Sheremetev Palace, and more sadness in the Marble Palace; that was how she passed her time. Petersburg became Petrograd, then Leningrad; it starved and rotted all around her. The shiny dark lips of A. Lourie, the affected gestures of O. Glebova-Sudeikina, the droopy eyelids of that so-called “poet” Kuzmin, that entire pallid rabble of aesthetes at the Stray Dog Cabaret, one by one we made them all irrelevant.
Do you think our Anna learned any lesson from this? Not at all. She “immortalized” all those individuals in “Poem Without a Hero.”
The introduction to this work bears the dateline of 25 August 1941 from “besieged Leningrad,” which really pisses me off. She never fired a shot in our defense. So she was in Leningrad when the Fascists attacked. So was I. I was always against the medal we gave her. But that’s not the point. Ever since ’48 I’ve become convinced that there’s one person in the poem, a darkhaired woman, whom Akhmatova is shielding with her doubletalk; in other words, this darkhaired woman is still out there; we haven’t caught her yet. Late at night when I can’t sleep, I read the poem over; I know it almost by heart, which is ironic, because quite a number of the “politicals” I’ve sent to the Gulag also quote from it; in my own private museum I have a nearly complete copy, written from memory on pages of birchbark. I don’t mind admitting that it’s got a few nice turns of phrase.
19
In the interests of justice I’m compelled to remind you of her dismissive cruelty to Nedobrovo’s wife, whom she despised for her ignorance of poetry—at least she found the husband to her taste. In the end she left the husband—she abandoned everybody!