Each time I have gone to Russia I make my way to Anna Akhmatova’s home in St Petersburg. She is one of the great Russian Silver Age poets (early 20th century) but she lived a life filled with uncertainty, poverty and fear during the Stalin years.
***
It is December and I’m really cold. I walk up the three flights of steps and nothing looks like it has ever been any different. How many times did she walk up these stairs? And then I think about the Cheka (secret police) who climbed these steps to take away her son and husband.
I move into the shallow entrance of her apartment. Her husband’s overcoat still hangs on the hat stand waiting for his return. It is loose and large. Hanging slightly open. Of course I start thinking about the great Russian, Gogol, and his short story, The Overcoat – a tale all about the desire for home. As I stand in Akhmatova’s doorway I want to touch Nikolay’s long brown overcoat but I also don’t want to; it is tired and old and empty. But I know she touched it again and again and again. Waiting for him to come home.
I move into a corridor that runs behind the bedrooms and sitting rooms into the kitchen. There’s an old stove and a rudimentary tap above a deep sink. Overhead, on a short cord diagonally across the stove, hang dishcloths and the like. I walk on further down the corridor in which stands her son’s makeshift bedroom of books, a light and a chair. There is no bed.
I think about her in this apartment. A tentative dweller. Not able to take up too much space, inhabiting the edges of people’s lives; the corners of kindness. A woman’s life. What is that like? To live so carefully on nothing.
I come around to the front of the apartment now and look into Nikolay’s room, where he and she slept. Just there, on a wide couch. His desk, his art and his books. Their friends would come into this room and talk, read poetry, argue.
I move into another small room which became hers when she and Nikolay fell out and his next wife arrived to stay. I am struck by the nothingness of this room. The childlike cell. There’s a small backless couch, a desk and a window. Above her bed the framed nude sketch Modigliani made of her.
Early on Nikolay was a supporter of the Revolution. Not later. Not when their friend Osip Mandelstam came and read his anti-Stalin poem right here to a small intimate gathering. Her husband and son and the beautiful poet, Mandelstam, were arrested for this very act and imprisoned. There had been an informer amongst them.
I think about her. Akhmatova. Anna. So much suffering. And cold. And quiet. Decades under surveillance during the Stalin years. A half life with an extraordinary body of work to show for it.
I step out the front door and notice a small window from the side of the apartment that looks out onto the landing. I am told that this was where the inhabitants of the apartment would look in order to see who had knocked at the door. Unexpected visitors were dangerous.
All I can think, as I walk down the three flights of steps, is that was her life. Trapped. Poor. Black banned for decades. One of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
***
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The Alchemy of Poetry by Elizabeth Guy
Published by Dreaming Big Publications
Paperback; 470 pages; ISBN-13 : 978-1947381414
Genre: Ancient, Classical and Contemporary Poetry; Education and Teaching; Non fiction
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