By Anna Akhmatova
(This brief memoir and personal artistic retrospective was written by Akhmatova during her elder years and first published in 1965 - Ed.)
I was born June 11th (23rd) of 1889 near Odessa (town of Grand Fountain) . My father was at that time a retired naval mechanical engineer. As a year-old-child I was brought to the north - into Tsarskoye Selo (The Royal Village). I lived there until I was sixteen.
My first recollections are Tsarskoye Selo-reared: the green and moist grandeur of the parks, (выгон), where I would be walked by my nanny, the hippodrome, where prounced tiny bright horsies, the old train station and something other, which eventually entered into "The Ode to Tsarskoye Selo". I spent each summer near Sebastopol, upon the shore of the Streletskaya harbor, and that's where I made friends with the sea. The strongest impression from those years is of the ancient Hersones, right next to which we resided.
Pagan childhood. In the environs of our summer home - I received the nickname " the wild girl" because I would walk around barefoot, wandered around without a hat, and etc... I would toss myself from a boat into the open sea, would go swimming in the midst of storms, tan myself to the point of skin peeling off of my body, and in doing all these things would shock the provincial lady dames of Sebastopol.
I learned to read using Lev Tolstoy's alphabet book. When I was five, while listening to the way a teacher woman educated older kids, I also spontaneously started to speak French.
I wrote my first poem when I was eleven years old. Poetry for me began not with Pushkin and Lermontov, but with Derjavin ("For the occasion of a порфирородного (perfirobirthed?) boychild's birth") and Nekrasov ("Frost, Red-nosed"). My mom knew these works by heart.
No one in the family, as far as the eye can encircle, wrote poetry; the only exception is the first Russian poetess Anna Bunina who was the aunt of my grandpa Erasmus Ivanovich Stogov. The Stogovs were not-very-well-off estate-keepersin the Mojayk (уезд) of the Moscow (губернии), who were relocated there
My ancestor Khan Akhmat was murdered in his tent at night by a hired Russian assassin and with this, as relates Karamzin, ended the Mongol domination of Russia. On that day, as if in commemoration of a fortuitous happening, a cross was walked from the Sretenskiy monastery in Moscow. As if we known, this Akhmat was a (kenghisid) (an ancestor of Kenghis Khan).
One of the Akhmatova princesses – Praskovya Egorovna – in the 18th century married a rich and well-respected Simbirian estate-keeper Motovilov. Egor Motovilov was my great-grandfather. His daughter Anna Egorovna – my grandmother. She died when my mom was nine years old and I was named Anna in her honor.
The first time that I began to write my biography I was eleven, in mom's red lined notebook for the transcription of household spendings (in the year 1900). When I showed my writings to my elders, they told me that I nearly remember myself as a two-year-old (the Pavlov park, the puppy named Ralph, and such things...).
The Pavlovsk depot scents. Fated to remember them my whole life through as if I was deaf-dumb-blind. The first is of the smoke from a primitive steam-locomotive which had carried me there – to Tyarlevo, the park called “salon de musique” (which sounds like the Russian words for “salty man”). The second is the polished floor tiles, then some aroma drifting out of the hairdresser's. The third is of tiny strawberries from the depot store (the Pavlovsk strawberry!). The fourth is of the mignonettes and roses (coolness midst the humidity) in fresh, wet bouquets, which are sold in the flower kiosk (to the left), then the cigars and the fatty fowl from the restaurant. And then the ghost of Nastasya Philipovna (from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot -ed). Tsarskoye is always weekdays, because it's home. Pavlovsk ever the celebration, because one must travel somewhere, because it's far from home.
I studied at the Tsarskoye Selo women's gymnasium. At first badly, then much better, but always lacking in enthusiasm. In Tsarskoye Selo she would do everything that would befit a well-bred young lady of that time. Knew how to fold her hands according to the proper form, how to make gestures of reverence, how to consideretly and concisely respond in French to an elder dame's question. During Strastnaya fasted at the gymnasium church. Once-in-a-while father would bring her to the opera with himself (in her gymnasium dress) which would take place at the Maryinskiy theatre (lodge seating). Would visit the Hermitage, at the Alexander III museum. In the spring and fall would be in Pavlovsk for the music – the train station... The museums and the art exhibits... In the winter would frequently go sledding at the park.
In the Tsarskoye Selo park there's also plenty of antiquity, but of a much different variety (statues). Would read a lot and constantly. A large (possibly) influence (upon her) was made by that era's master of thought Knut Hamsun (“Riddles and the Mystery”); Pan, Victoria – much less so. Another master – Ibsen... Studied badly in the lower grades, then well. Always took the gymnasium rather hard (didn't have many friends).
In 1905 my parents became separated and mom took the children with her to the south. We spent an entire year living at the Eupatoria...
There was no railroad there, while steamships couldn't approach the shore. About the events of 1905 we'd only hear in second-hand rumors. I would wander around the deserted beach and for the first time heard the “true-to-life”, rather than practice, shots from the gunship “Potemkin”. I remembered how shivered the hands of the student-tutor when he arrived that winter into the Tsarskoye Selo and would tell us about the events of January 9th.
I passed my final grade in Kiev's Fundukleevskaya gymnasium school, which I completed in the year 1907. I enrolled into the Law department of Kiev's Higher female education. When I was required to study subjects like the history of law and especially Latin I was satisfied; whereas, with the commencement of classes in pure law, I grew cold towards the coursework.
In 1910 (on the 25th of April, according to the old calendar style) I married N. S. Gumilev and we journeyed to Paris for a month.
The paving of new boulevards across the living body of Paris (which Zola described for us) was not yet fully finished (Raspail Boulevard). Werner, a friend of Thomas Edison, showed me two tables at the Taverne du Pantheon and said: "And these folks here are your social-democrats; here sit the Bolsheviks and right over there the Menshiviks". With variable success women alternated between wearing either pants (jupes-culottes) or, otherwise, nearly blanketing their legs (jupes-entravees). Poetry was in a state of utter desolation and people would buy books of it just because of the vignette-style illustrations by more or less famous artists. Even then I understood that Parisian painting has devoured Parisian poetry whole.
I returned to the north in the June of 1910. After Paris Tsarskoye appeared to me as being absolutely dead. There is nothing surprising about that. But where had in those five years vanished my former Tsarskoye Selo life? I didn't run into a single one of my gymnasium classmates and never crossed the doorstep of a single Tsarskoye selo house. A new Petersburg life began. N.S. Gumilev went off to Africa that September. In the winter of the years 1910-1911 I composed the poems which later formed the collection Evening. On March 25th Gumilev came back from Africa and I showed him those poems... Having moved to Petersburg, I studied at Raev's highest historical-literary courses. At that time I was already writing the poems which were to be included in my first book.
In essence nobody knows just what an epoch they're living through. In that same way we did not know at the start of the 1910's that we were living beside the break of the first European war and the October revolution.
The tenth year - the year of the crisis of symbolism, of the deaths of Leo Tolstoy and Kommisarjevskaya. The eleventh year is the Chinese revolution which changed the face of Asia, as well as the year of Blok's notebooks, full of forebodings... "The Cyprus-tree Treasure Chest"... Someone recently said in my presence: " The decade of the "teens" - the most colourless time." Perhaps, that's the thing one is supposed to say nowadays, but I, nevertheless, replied: "Besides all else, that was the time of Stravinsky and Blok, of Anna Pavlova and Scriabin, of Rostovtsev and Shalyapin, or Meyerholdt, and Diaghilev,"
In 1910 took place the crisis of symbolism and beginner poets would no longer join up with that movement. Some would go into futurism, others towards Acmeism. Together with my comrades in the First Poet's Workshop - Mandelshtam, Zenkevich, and Narbut - I made myself into an Acmeist gal.
There XXth century began in the autumn of the year 1914 with the war, just as the XIXth began itself with the Viennese congress. Calendar dates possess no significance. Undoubtedly, symbolism is a manifestation of the 19th century. Our rebellion against symbolism is entirely sensible, for we felt ourselves as being 20th century people and did not wish to remain in the past...
The spring of 1911 I spent in Paris where I was a witness of the first triumphs of Russian ballet. In 1912 I took a tour of Northern Italy (Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice). Italian painting and architecture made an immense impression on me: they resemble a dream-vision which is remembered one's whole life through.
1912 marked the release of my first verse collection - "Evening". Three hundred copies were printed. The critics approached it benevolently.
A poet maintains secret relationships with everything they have ever created and these attitudes frequently contradict whatever impressions or ideas a reader may have of this or that poem.
I, for instance, out of my entire first book "Evening" (1912) now genuinely only enjoy the following lines:
"While getting drunk on sounds of voice
That does resemble yours"
(from the poem entitled "Upon a White Night")
It even appears to me as if out of these little lines grew so much of what my poetry contains. On the other hand, I very much like this sequel-less, somewhat dark, and of my work entirely uncharacteristic poem "I have arrived to replace you, my sister..." - within it I love these lines:
"And for so long ceased the tambourine resounding,
Yet I know just how afraid you are of silence."
Meanwhile, the precise things which are to this day mentioned by critics leave me absolutely cold. On the first of October 1912 my only son Lev was born.
In the March of 1914 my second collection ,"Rosary" came out. It was allotted roughly six weeks of life. At the beginning of May the Petersburg season would start to freeze into stillness and, little by little, everyone would start traveling elsewhere. This time my parting with Petersburg turned out to be eternal. We returned not to Petersburg but Petrograd and from the XIXth century suddenly wound up in the XXth. Everything had become different, starting with the appearance of the city itself. It seemed as if a little book of love-lorn lyrics penned by a beginner author would be fated to drown in the flood of global events. Yet, time commandeered a different outcome.
My every summer I would spend in the former Tverskaya province, fifteen versts away from Bejetsk (*at the Slepnevo estate which belonged to Akhmatova's then mother-in-law Anna Ivanovna Gumilev (1854-1942). Elsewhere, Akhmatova wrote of the estate: "Slepnevo for me is like an archway in architecture... At first its really small, then increasingly larger, and finally - utter freedom (that's if one's exiting)." It is far from being a picturesque place: fields plowed out in even squares over a hilly landscape, windmills, gorges, dried-out swamps, "little gates", breads, breads... There I wrote many of the poems included in "Rosary" and "The White Pack".
... That's where I met the war of 1914, and there also did it I spend the war's final summer (1917).
The trace horse obliquely skewered with its eye and stretched out its neck. Poems came out with a light liberated pace. I was waiting for the arrival of a letter, which didn't come after all -which never came. I would often see that letter in my dreams; I would tear apart the envelope, but it was either written in some unintelligible language, or I would go blind...
(...)
Simple women would come into the field to work while wearing homespun sundresses and, at those times, old maids or lasses who were normally as clumsy in their ways as an axe would appear to have far finer figures than antique statues. (...) I wasn't going horseback riding nor playing tennis, but would merely go out to gather mushrooms in either of the two Slepnovo gardens, and yet right behind my shoulders still flamed Paris in some sort of a final twilight (1911)...
One time I was in Slepnovo during the winter. That was wonderful. Everything somehow entered into the nineteenth century, almost to the point of evoking the epoch of Pushkin. Sleds, felt snow boots, bear-skin rugs, cute enormous semi-coats lined with fur, the ringing silence, the snowbanks, the diamond snows. That's where I greeted the year 1917. After the grim wartime Sebastopol, where I would suffocate from asthma and freeze in a cold rented room, it seemed to me as if I was transported into some promise land. Meanwhile, back in Petersburg was already murdered Rasputin and everyone awaited the Revolution which was scheduled to take place on January 20th (on that day I was having lunch at the home of Nathan Altman (*(1889 - 1970) A famous artist and the creator of a well-known portrait of Akhmatova*-Ed). He gifted me his picture and signed it: "On the day of the Russian Revolution". Another picture (that survived) he signed: "To the soldier-girl Gumileva, from the scribbler Altman"). "The White Pack" came out in the September of 1917.
Towards this book both readers and the critics tend to be unfair. For some reason it is considered that it had less success than "Rosary". This collection appeared under even more thunderous circumstances. Transportation would freeze up - it was impossible to send the book even to Moscow, though it flew off the shelves in Petrograd. Magazines kept getting shut down and newspapers as well. This is why, in contrast to "Rosary", "The White Pack" release was not surrounded by noisy press. Hunger and devastating conflicts arose with each new day. No matter how strange that may seem, these days none of those circumstances are taken into account.
On the 27th of February I was present at the general rehearsal of the play "Masquarade" which took place at the Alexandriyskiy Theatre. When we came out of the theatre, troops were moving down Nevsky boulevard like rivers of lava, making it impossible just to cross the street. Now, by the
25th of October I resided on the Viborg side of town with my close friend, a woman named V.S. Sreznevskaya... One time I walked from there towards Liteyniy Boulevard and, right at the moment when I found myself on the bridge, something entirely incomparable took place: they drew open the bridge right in the heart of that bright day. All the trolleys stopped, as did the (lomoviks), the cabbies, and the pedestrians. Everyone was confusedly flustered...
... Soon after the October Revolution many of my contemporaries, as is well-known, left behind our Homeland. As for me, whether or not to do that never even appeared as a serious question. For some time I had a job working at the library of the Agronomic Institute (would lend out books and write up the tiny cards). During those days I shared in the severe lifestyle which fell upon the lot of those days' Petersburg residents. Starting with the end of 1921 I was a leading member in the controlling echelon of the writers' Union. When books again began to see release, I collaborated with a number of magazines and almanacs, would perform at poetic evenings (among other places, in Moscow and Kharkov).
In 1921 was released my poetry collection "The Plantain" and in 1922 the book "Anno Domini". From roughly the middle of the 1920's I began to very intensively, and with great interest, study the architecture of old Petersburg as well as the life/art of Pushkin. My Pushkin studies resulted in three works - about the "Little Golden Rooster", about Benjamin Konstan's "Adolph", and on the subject of "The Stone-wrought Guest". All of these works became published in due time.
My works " Alexandrina", "Pushkin and the Nevskiy Searise", " Pushkin in 1828", on which I've worked for almost twenty-five years would, it appears, be collected in the book "The Death of Pushkin". Starting with the middle of end twenties my new poems almost completely ceased being published and the older ones reprinted.
The already completed two-tome edition of my work from the publishing house run by Gessen ("Petrograd") was destroyed. Insults to me, from being episodic, became systematised and planned-out (Lelevich in the " At the Post" magazine, Pertsev in "The Life Of Art", and etc...), on occasion reaching the 12th measure on the sea-weather scale, which implies death-bringing storms. I wouldn't get any translation work either (except for the letters of Reubens in the year 1930). However, my first work on Pushkin (" Pushkin's Final Fairy Tale") was published in "The Star" magazine. The forbiddance referred only to my poetic work. Such is the truth without any added colours. And this is what I'm now finding out about myself from the foreign press. It turns out that, after the Revolution, I ceased writing poetry completely and didn't write any more of it until the year 1940. But why then would they have also stopped reprinting my books and my name started to be mentioned only in the company of insulting town-square-style gossip? Clearly, the desire to irrevocably bury me in the 1910's possesses an unmatched power and exists as certain sweet, yet completely unfathomable to me, temptation.
In 1936 I again begin to write with a great fervour. The Great Patriotic war of 1941 found me in Leningrad. At the end of September, when the blockade has already begun, I flew on a plane to Moscow.
Until may 1944 I lived in Tashkent, hungrily hunting for news of Leningrad, of the front. Like many other poets, I would frequently perform in hospitals, reading poems to wounded soldiers. In Tashkent I had learned for the first time how much a tree-tossed shadow and the sound of water could mean in the midst of a fever's burning heat. And I also learned what human goodness truly is: in Tashkent I would get frequently and severely ill. In the may of 1944 I took a plane ride into the springtime Moscow, already full of joyful hopes and the anticipation of a nearing victory. In June I returned to Leningrad.
The frightful ghost pretending to be my city so startled me that I described that meeting with it in my prose. That's when appeared my essays "The Three Lilac-Trees" and "Guesting with Death" - the last about the reading of poems at the front in Terioki. Prose always appeared to me as both a mystery and a temptation. From the very start I've known everything about poems - yet I never knew a thing about prose. Everyone would greatly praise my first experiment; but I, of course, did not believe them. Summoned Zoshenko. He ordered me to get rid of something and said that he could agree with the rest. I was glad. Later, after my son's arrest, burned it along with the entire archive.
For a very long time I've been interested in the questions of artistic translation. In the postwar years I would translate a lot. And I still translate to this day. In 1962 I finished up "The Poem Without a Hero", which I spent twenty two years writing. Last year, at the break of Dante's year, I again for to hear the sounds of Italian speech - spent some time in Rome and on the island of Sicily. In the Springtime of 1965 I traveled to Shakespeare's homeland, saw the British sky and the Atlantic oceans. I got to see many old friends and to make some new ones. Then I visited Paris one more time.
I never did cease writing poems. Within them I find my connection to time, to the new life of my peoples. When I was writing them, I lived out those very rhythms which resounded in the heroic history of my country. I am absolutely happy to have lived through these years and to have beheld events which none could compare to.
- 1965