Meetings with Anna Akhmatova

When did you first meet Anna Akhmatova?

I believe it was in 1963. Our landlady, Elena Vasilyeva, knew Akhmatova personally, although she did not belong to the poet’s inner circle. Once, Akhmatova asked Elena to type the manuscript copy of her essay “Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva.” For several decades, Akhmatova had been seriously researching Pushkin’s life and work. After Soviet censorship had blocked any publication of Akhmatova’s poetry in the 1930s, she became a professional Pushkin scholar (Brodsky, incidentally, considered her among the best, and the only specialist on the same intellectual and artistic level as Pushkin himself).

What was the impetus behind her Pushkin scholarship?

To a certain degree, it helped her prove that she was engaged in “socially meaningful” work. But she also admired Pushkin more than any other Russian (or foreign) poet, and had a good eye for parallels between their two eras. She scolded me when I took the liberty of saying that Pushkin was not necessarily relevant to my generation.

And the essay—

“Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva” was not, strictly speaking, a samizdat affair (it was published shortly thereafter), but it had something Akhmatova liked to call a “triple bottom,” like hidden compartments in a smuggler’s suitcase. Its topic was Pushkin’s lonely wanderings in the Vasileostrovsky district of St. Petersburg—unpopulated islands in the Neva where the poet looked for the unmarked graves of his executed friends, leaders of the failed Decembrist uprising. Exactly one hundred years after Pushkin, Akhmatova used to wander in the same part of the city, since her husband Nikolai Gumilev, a great poet executed by the Bolsheviks, was also presumably buried there. Only a few people close to Akhmatova understood the analogy, which escaped the censors. Elena Vasilyeva asked me to bring the typescript to Akhmatova, which I did happily, if timidly.

Where was Akhmatova residing at this time?

In Leningrad she lived mainly with the family of her ex-husband Nikolai Punin, to whom she had been married in the 1920s and 1930s. Punin was an avantgarde art critic who also perished at the hands of the Soviet authorities: he died in a labor camp a few months after Stalin’s death. Akhmatova also visited Moscow frequently, usually staying with her friend Nina Olshevskaya, whose husband Viktor Ardov—a minor satirist and a witty man—was appreciated by a number of non-conformist writers including Bulgakov and Pasternak. (It was Ardov who recommended that Akhmatova be reinstated in the Union of Soviet Writers in 1951.) Incidentally, Ardov’s family were among the few permitted to call her “Acuma,” which means “witch” or “hag” in Japanese—a nickname Punin invented. Everyone else, including Brodsky and myself, called her “Anna Andreyevna.” Ardov’s residence on Ordynka Street became a semi-legendary address in post-Stalinist Moscow. It was only a short walk from Elena’s flat to Ordynka.

What happened during your first meeting?

Akhmatova was alone in the Ardovs’ rather large apartment—a stout lady with aristocratic bearing (she was sometimes compared to Catherine the Great), looking a bit older than her age, which was seventy-four. We talked in the hallway, perhaps for five minutes—she apologized for not inviting me in, stating that her room was in disarray. I was invited into the various rooms she occupied only during our later meetings. Regardless of whether it was in Moscow or in Leningrad, her living spaces generally looked the same: a cramped room with a writing desk and sofa, and virtually nothing else. There were several drawings on the walls—above all, Modigliani’s famous portrait of Akhmatova in her youth. I believe I saw it in both cities; it may have always accompanied her, though I could be mistaken on this point.

Brodsky said that, after his first encounter with Akhmatova, it took him three or four meetings to fully understand with whom he was dealing. But this wasn’t your case—

I knew very well with whom I was talking. Needless to say, I felt extremely uneasy, almost paralyzed with timidity. For...