Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

23Anna Akhmatova

Akhmatova in 1924. •• • 23 Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) ALEXANDRA HARRINGTON Anna Akhmatova is one of Russia’s best-loved and most talented lyric poets. Yet her preeminent position in Russian cultural history rests on more than the quality of her writing. Through a combination of her poetry, the shape of her biography, and the force of her personality she has acquired a legendary status, becoming—even during her own lifetime—a larger-than-life, monumental figure, martyr against tyranny and preserver of prerevolutionary culture, a symbol of persecuted genius, and an example of moral courage. In short, she is a cultural icon. Early in Akhmatova’s career, her contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva crowned her “Anna of all the Russias,” which aptly reflects the fact that her life as a writer was, from the outset, intimately tied to Russian imperial experience. Akhmatova embodied the kind of cultural diversity that is an integral part of Russian identity: she was sympathetic to both Western and Eastern influences on Russian culture and her public image incorporates elements of each. This public image—not wholly invented but nonetheless carefully shaped—was a multicultural one, made up of a Tatar name and “Oriental” ancestry combined with a blend of southern (Ukrainian) and northern (Russian) heritage.1 She was born Anna Gorenko by the sea in Bolshoi Fontan, near Odessa in Ukraine, to an unexceptional gentry family. Akhmatova’s mother, Inna Stogova, was a descendent of a rich Russian landowning family with strong links to Kyiv, and her father, Andrei Gorenko, was a Ukrainian naval engineer descended from Ukrainian Cossacks. He belonged to the minor aristocracy, hereditary nobility having been acquired by his father for his service in the navy. In 1890, Gorenko took up a position in the civil service in St. Petersburg and the family moved first to Pavlovsk and then to Tsarskoe Selo, just outside the capital, where the summer residence of the imperial family was located and many of the nobility kept their summer dachas. In her autobiographical prose, Akhmatova remarks that her first memories were of Tsarskoe Selo, which she calls in her poetry “my little toy town” and valued particularly for its associations with Alexander Pushkin. She was educated from 1900 to 1905 in the Mariinsky Gymnazium, whose richest young pupils had their lunch brought to them 256 Alexandra Harrington on silver trays by valets. Her recorded memories of this period are distinctly monarchist ones, and it was in Tsarskoe Selo that Akhmatova acquired the mannerisms and etiquette of an aristocratic young woman. As a corollary to her development of an Imperial Russian identity, Akhmatova downplayed her Ukrainian origins and family to some extent, complaining with some bitterness in her autobiographical prose that people tended to think of her as Ukrainian. She said this was because of her obviously Ukrainian family name, because she was born in Odessa and graduated from the gymnasium in Kyiv (in 1907), and especially because her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, wrote of her in a famous poem of 1910, “From the city of Kyiv, / From the serpent’s lair / I took not a wife, but a sorceress.” Akhmatova points out that she spent longer in Tashkent, where she lived in evacuation during the World War II (1941–44) than she ever did in Kyiv, where she spent three winters in total—at school and then university. This distancing from her Ukrainian background may have been prompted not only by her conscious assumption of a metropolitan identity, but in part also by her negative feelings towards her father, whose womanizing caused the breakup of her parents’ marriage. Akhmatova’s childhood was, nevertheless, punctuated by the summers the family spent in the southern Russia, and she moved with her mother to the Crimean resort of Yevpatoria when her parents split up in 1905. As the poet herself noted, “Tsarskoe was the winter, the Crimea—the summer.” Although Akhmatova recalled that she pined when in the south for Tsarskoe Selo, the Black Sea shore provided considerable inspiration for her poetry, as her richly descriptive long poem “Right by the Sea” (1914) demonstrates. Akhmatova’s later characterization of herself in her autobiographical prose as the unconventional, tomboyish southern “wild girl” who went around barefoot, sunburned, and hatless, diving into the sea from a boat, provides a striking contrast with the more typically northern Russian refinement and restraint with which she came to be most closely associated. Nadezhda Mandelstam observed...