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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN November 19, 2006 
Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova By Elaine Feinstein Alfred A. Knopf, 2006 
A Poetess For All Seasons Of course, all of us living in the communist world back then in the days of the Cold War knew esoteric bits and pieces about Anna Akhmatova precisely because her work was censored. We knew that she had been a stunning beauty, that her husband, also a poet, had been executed presumably for plotting against the Soviet state and that her son had been sent to the Gulag repeatedly. We had read some of her poems and knew that Modigliani, whose works we were also not allowed to see, had drawn her several times. And now comes "Anna of All the Russias," a definitive biography of the poetess by Elaine Feinstein. Besides overwhelming us with details of Akhmatova's life, the author also shows how Akhmatova managed to invent her persona as a poetess. She changed her last name to Akhmatova, the name of a maternal ancestress, a Tatar princess because, she wrote, "to think of a woman as a poet in those days was absurd." She seems to have glided through life, oblivious to the daily grind as well as to political upheavals. Like her mother, who depended on numerous servants, Anna was hopelessly unable to deal with domesticity. She was also oblivious to the accumulation of personal property or possessions. By today's standards, Akhmatova, who did not own anything but some books and could not even afford to rent an apartment but lived in friends' apartments, was basically homeless. She was born in 1889 into an impoverished aristocratic family. In 1910 she married Nikolay Gumilyov, also a poet and an arrogant philanderer even as he pursued Akhmatova relentlessly. It was during their honeymoon in Paris that Akhmatova met Modigliani for the first time. By the time the newlyweds returned to Russia, the marriage had unraveled. Gumilyov left for one of his numerous geological/scientific expeditions to Africa and Akhmatova started to attend more frequently the fabled Stray Dog café in St. Petersburg where poets, writers, musicians, artists and an assortment of bohemians gathered to share their creations. In May 1911 Anna returned to Paris where, a friend recalls, "nobody in the streets could tear their eyes away from her." It is on this trip to Paris that she and Modigliani became extremely close, possibly even lovers. And it is at that time that Modigliani made the famous drawings of her. In October 1912 Anna gave birth to a son about whom Gumilyov, sadly, found out a day later because he had spent the night of Anna's labor with one of his numerous lovers. Akhmatova left their son with Gumilyov's mother in the country and returned to the St. Petersburg area immersing herself into the frenzied intellectual and creative life of the city that characterized the Russian intelligentsia before the revolution. Her intensely personal poetry was becoming very popular. World War I and the subsequent revolution were just as momentous upheavals in Akhmatova's life as they were for all of the Russians. And although she widened the range of her poetry to include these topics, her work remained primarily personal. Akhmatova had numerous affairs and fell in love frequently with men who did not value her love or who tried to control her. Her second husband was a self-centered Babylonian scholar obsessed with his work. Between 1917 and 1921, during the time of her marriage to him, Akhmatova hardly wrote any poetry. In 1921 Gumilyov was executed for allegedly plotting an uprising against the Soviet government. Akhmatova divorced the scholar and plunged into other affairs, the most notable and lasting one with Punin, an art historian and yet another arrogant tyrant. A control freak, by today's standards, Punin did not want to divorce his wife and instead installed Akhmatova in a room in his family apartment where they lived in this miserable ménage a trois through the 1941 siege of Leningrad. Not until the 1960s was the ban on Akhmatova's work lifted. Suddenly she was being published again and even allowed to travel to Western countries. By that time she had become a legend with a cult following not only in the Soviet Union but abroad as well. She died in March 1966. "Anna of All the Russias" is jammed with quotes and poetry translated by Feinstein, which obscure the narrative and preclude any analysis of Akhmatova's life. The research material is simply overwhelming to be contained in just one volume. There are no explanations of the historical and political events that had shaped Akhmatova's life. The reader won't learn from this book why Akhmatova's work was censored or why exactly was her son sent to the Gulag. But reading about the lives of all the poets, writers, artists and musicians of pre-revolutionary Russia made me poignantly aware of the distance of a century separating us. How, I also wondered while reading this tome bursting with quotes from letters, would future biographers do research about the lives of great writers, statesmen, poets and philosophers if they don't have actual correspondence but only the easy-to-delete e-mail? Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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