the Whites (a motley collection of monarchists, democrats and socialists opposed to the Soviet regime) and the interventionary forces of Britain, France, Japan, the USA and a dozen other western powers which supported them in the civil war of 1918-21.
Popularly seen as a war against all privilege, the practical ideology of the Russian Revolution owed less to Marx - whose works were hardly known by the semi-literate masses - than to the egalitarian customs and Utopian yearnings of the peasantry. Long before it was written down by Marx, the Russian people had lived by the idea that surplus wealth was immoral, all property was theft, and that manual labour was the only true source of value. In the Russian peasant mind there was Christian virtue in being poor - a fact the Bolsheviks exploited brilliantly when they called their newspaper The Peasant Poor (Krestianskaia bednota). It was this striving for pravda, for truth and social justice, that gave the Revolution its quasi-religious status in the popular consciousness: the war on private wealth was a bloody purgatory on the way to a heaven on earth.
By giving institutional form to this crusade, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements among the poor who derived satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether such destruction brought about any improvement in their own lot. They licensed the Red Guards and other self-appointed groups of armed workers to raid the houses of 'the rich' and confiscate their property. They rounded up the leisured classes and forced them to do jobs such as clearing snow or rubbish from the streets. Akhmatova was ordered to clean the streets around the Fountain House.5 House Committees (usually made up of former porters and domestic servants) were instructed to move the urban poor into the apartments of the old privileged elites. Palaces like the Fountain House were sub-divided and made into apartment blocks. Soon after their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks unleashed a campaign of mass terror, encouraging the workers and the peasants to denounce their neighbours to Revolutionary Tribunals and the local Cheka, or political police. Almost anything could be construed as 'counterrevolutionary' - hiding property, being late for work, drunkenness or hooligan behaviour - and the prisons were soon filled. Most of those
arrested by the Cheka in the early years of the Bolshevik regime had been denounced by their neighbours - often as a result of some vendetta. In this climate of mass terror no private space was left untouched. People lived under constant scrutiny, watched all the time by the House Committees, and always fearful of arrest. This was not a time for lyric poetry.
Akhmatova was dismissed as a figure from the past. Left-wing critics said her private poetry was incompatible with the new collectivist order. Other poets of her generation, such as Pasternak, were able to adapt to the new conditions of the Revolution. Or, like Mayakovsky, they were made for it. But Akhmatova was rooted in a classical tradition that had been thrown out in 1917, and she found it hard to come to terms - as did Mandelstam - with her new Soviet environment. She wrote very little in the early Soviet years. Her energy was consumed by the struggle to survive the harsh conditions of the civil war in Petrograd, where chronic shortages of food and fuel reduced the population by more than half, as people died or fled the hungry city for the countryside. Trees and wooden houses were chopped down for firewood; horses lay dead in the middle of the road; the waters of the Moika and Fontanka were filled with rubbish; vermin and diseases spread; and the daily life of the Tsars' capital appeared to return to the prehistoric age, as desperate people scavenged for a piece of bread to eat or a stick of wood to burn.6
And confined to this savage capital,
We have forgotten forever
The lakes, the steppes, the towns,
And the dawns of our great native land.
Day and night in the bloody circle
A brutal languor overcomes us…
No one wants to help us
Because we stayed home,
Because, loving our city
And not winged freedom,
We preserved for ourselves
Its palaces, its fire and water.
A different time is drawing near,
The wind of death already chills the heart,
But the holy city of Peter
Will be our unintended monument.7
For the old intelligentsia conditions were particularly harsh. In the Dictatorship of the Proletariat they were put to the bottom of the social pile. Although most were conscripted by the state for labour teams, few had jobs. Even if they received food from the state, it was the beggarly third-class ration, 'just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it', in the words of Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd.8 Gorky took up the defence of the starving Petrograd intelligentsia, pleading with the Bolsheviks, among whom he was highly valued for his left-wing commitment before 1917, for special rations and better flats. He established a writers' refuge, followed later by a House of Artists, and set up his own publishing house, called World Literature, to publish cheap editions of the classics for the masses. World Literature provided work for a vast number of writers, artists and musicians as translators and copy editors. Indeed, many of the greatest names of twentieth-century literature (Zamyatin, Babel, Chukovsky, Khodasev-ich, Mandelstam, Piast', Zoshchenko and Blok and Gumilev) owed their survival of these hungry years to Gorky's patronage.
Akhmatova also turned to Gorky for help, asking him to find her work and get her a ration. She was sharing Shileiko's tiny food allowance, which he received as an assistant in the Department of Antiquities at the Hermitage. They had no fuel to burn, dysentery was rife among the inhabitants of the Fountain House, and, extravagant though it may appear, they had a St Bernard dog to feed which Shileiko had found abandoned and which, in the spirit of the Sheremetev motto, they had decided to keep. Gorky told Akhmatova that she would only get the most beggarly of rations for doing office work of some kind, and then he took her to see his valuable collection of oriental rugs. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, 'Akhmatova looked at Gorky's carpets, said how nice they were, and went away empty-handed. As a result of this, I believe, she took a permanent dislike to carpets. They smelled too much of dust and a kind of prosperity strange in a city that was dying so catastrophically. Perhaps Gorky was afraid to help
Akhmatova; perhaps he disliked her and her poetry. But in 1920 she did at last find work as a librarian in the Petrograd Agronomic Institute, and perhaps Gorky helped.
In August 1921, Akhmatova's former husband Nikolai Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial on charges, which were almost certainly false, of belonging to a monarchist conspiracy. Gumilev was the first great poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks, although many more would soon follow. With his death, there was a feeling in the educated classes that a boundary had been crossed: their civilization had passed away. The moving poems of Akhmatova's collection Anno Domini MCMXXI (In the Year of Our Lord 1921) were like a prayer, a requiem, for her ex-husband and the values of his age.
The tear-stained autumn, like a widow
In black weeds, clouds every heart…
Recalling her husband's words,
She sobs without ceasing.
And thus it will be, until the most quiet snow
Takes pity on the sorrowful and weary one…
Oblivion of pain and oblivion of bliss -
To give up life for this is no small thing.10
Akhmatova had no hopes for the Revolution - she had only fears. Yet she made it clear that she thought it was a sin for poets to leave Russia after 1917:
I am not with those who abandoned their land To the lacerations of the enemy. I am deaf to their coarse flattery, I won't give them my songs.
But to me the exile is forever pitiful,
Like a prisoner, like someone ill.
Dark is your road, wanderer,
Like wormwood smells the bread of strangers.
But here, in the blinding smoke of the conflagration Destroying what's left of youth, We h
ave not deflected from ourselves One single stroke.
And we know that in the final accounting, Each hour will be justified… But there is no people on earth more tearless, More simple and more full of pride.11
Like all of Russia's greatest poets, Akhmatova felt the moral obligation to be her country's 'voice of memory'.12 But her sense of duty transcended the national; she felt a Christian imperative to remain in Russia and to suffer with the people in their destiny. As did many poets of her generation, she considered the Revolution as a punishment for sin, and believed it was her calling to atone for Russia's transgressions through the prayer of poetry. Akhmatova was a poet of redemption, the 'last great poet of Orthodoxy', according to Chukov-sky, and the theme of sacrifice, of suffering for Russia, appears throughout her work.13
Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song -
This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.14
The fountain House had a special place in Akhmatova's universe. She saw it as a blessed place, the spiritual kernel of St Petersburg, which became the Ideal City of her poetry. In several of her poems she compared St Petersburg ('the holy city of Peter') to Kitezh, the legend-ary city which had preserved its sacred values from the Mongol infidels by vanishing beneath lake Svetloyar to a spiritual realm.15 The Foun-
tain House was another world enclosed by water. Its inner sanctum
represented the European civilization, the vanished universal culture for which Akhmatova nostalgically yearned.* Akhmatova was drawn to the history of the house. She saw herself as its guardian. In her first autumn there she managed to establish that the oak trees in the garden were older than St Petersburg itself. They were longer lasting than any government.16 She researched the history of the Sheremetev clan, and in particular she felt a close attachment to Praskovya, who shared her 'gift of song' and lived, like her, persona non grata, in the Fountain House.
What are you muttering, midnight?
In any case, Parasha is dead,
The young mistress of the palace.17
The cultural history of the palace was a true inspiration to Akhmatova. She sensed the presence of the great Russian poets who had been connected with the house: Tiutchev (a friend of Count Sergei); Viazem-sky, who had visited the house (though Akhmatova was mistaken in her belief that he had died in the room where she lived);+ and Pushkin, above all, the poet she adored, who was a friend of Praskovya's son, Dmitry Sheremetev, the father of the last owner of the house. Rejected by Soviet publishers because they found her verse too esoteric, Akhmatova was drawn even closer to Pushkin from the middle of the1920s. He, too, had been censored, albeit by the Tsar one hundred years earlier, and her identification with him gave a unique edge to her scholarship on Pushkin, the subject of some of her best writing from this period. As a
* During his famous meeting with the poet at the Fountain House in 1945, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin asked Akhmatova whether the Renaissance was a real historical past to her, inhabited by imperfect human beings, or an idealized image of an imaginary world. 'She replied that it was of course the latter; all poetry and art, to her, was - here she used an expression once used by Mandelstam - a form of nostalgia, a longing for a universal culture, as Goethe and Schlegel had conceived it, of what had been transmuted into art and thought…' (I. Berlin, 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956', in Personal Impressions (Oxford, 1982), p. 198). + The room contained a desk with the name Prince Viazemsky written on it, but it belonged to the poet's son, who had died in that room in 1888. The poet died in Baden-Baden ten years earlier (N. I. Popova and O. E. Rubinchauk, Anna Akhmatova i fontanny dom (St Petersburg, iooo), pp. 36-8),
27. Akhmatova and Punin in the courtyard of the Fountain House, 1927
fellow poet, she could draw attention to the way he had defied the authorities by writing about politics and other moral issues in disguised literary forms - much as she was doing in her writing on Pushkin.
Akhmatova and Shileiko were divorced in 1926. He had been a jealous husband, jealous not just of her other lovers but of her talent, too (once in anger he had even burned her poetry). Akhmatova moved out of the Fountain House, but soon returned to live there with her
new lover, Nikolai Punin, and his wife (from whom he was separated) in their apartment in its southern wing. Punin was an art critic, a leading figure in the Futurist movement, but, unlike many of the Futurists, he knew the cultural value of the poets of the past. In one courageous article, in 1922, he had even spoken out against Trotsky, who had written an attack in Pravda against the poetry of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva ('internal and external emigrees') as 'literature irrelevant to October'.18 It was a warning of the terror to come.* 'What', asked Punin, 'if Akhmatova put on a leather jacket and a Red Army star, would she then be relevant to October?' If Akhmatova was to be rejected, 'why allow the works of Bach?'19
Despite his commitment to the Futurist group of left-wing artists, Punin's apartment in the Fountain House retained the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Petersburg. There were always visitors, late night talks around the kitchen table, people sleeping on the floor. Apart from Punin's former wife, her mother and daughter and a houseworker called Annushka, there were always people staying in the tiny four-roomed flat. By Soviet standards this was far more cubic space than the Punins were entitled to, and in 1931 Annushka's son and his new wife, an illiterate peasant girl who had come to Petrograd as a factory worker, were moved in by the Housing Committee, and the flat was reassigned as a communal one.20 Cramped conditions and the crippling poverty of living on Punin's meagre wages (for Akhmatova herself was earning nothing in the 1930s) imposed a strain on their relationship. There were frequent arguments over food and money which would often spill into the corridor so that neighbours overheard.21 Lydia Chukovskaya describes visiting Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1938, just before she broke up with Punin:
I climbed the tricky back staircase that belonged to another century, each step as deep as three. There was still some connection between the staircase and her, but then! When I rang the bell a woman opened the door, wiping soap suds from her hands. Those suds and the shabby entrance hall, with its scraps
* Trotsky's two articles were published just a fortnight after the expulsion from the country of several hundred leading intellectuals (accused of being 'counterrevolutionaries') in September 1921.
of peeling wallpaper, were somehow quite unexpected. The woman walked ahead of me. The kitchen; washing on lines, its wetness slapping one's face. The wet washing was just like the ending of a nasty story, like something out of Dostoevsky, perhaps. Beyond the kitchen, a little corridor, and to the left, a door leading to her room.22
2
The Fountain House was only one of many former palaces to be converted into communal apartments after 1917. The Volkonsky mansion in Moscow, where Princess Zinaida Volkonsky had held her famous salon in the 1820s, was similarly turned into workers' flats. The Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky lived in one of them in the last years of his life, from 1935 to 1936, after the success of his Socialist Realist novel, How the Steel Was Tempered (1932), which sold more than 2 million copies in its first three years and in 1935 earned its author the highest Soviet honour, the Order of Lenin.23 Meanwhile, Zinaida's great-nephew, Prince S. M. Volkonsky, the grandson of the Decembrist, lived in a workers' communal apartment in the suburbs of Moscow between 1918 and 1921.24
Nothing better illustrates the everyday reality of the Revolution than this transformation of domestic space. The provincial gentry were deprived of their estates, their manor houses burned or confiscated by the peasant communes or the local Soviet, and the rich were forced to share their large apartments with the urban poor or to give up rooms to their old domestic servants and their f
amilies. This Soviet 'war against the palaces' was a war on privilege and the cultural symbols of the Tsarist past. But it was also part of a crusade to engineer a more collective way of life which lay at the heart of the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union. By forcing people to share communal flats, the Bolsheviks believed that they could make them communistic in their basic thinking and behaviour. Private space and property would disappear, the patriarchal ('bourgeois') family would be replaced by communist fraternity and organization, and the life of the individual would become immersed in the community.
In the first years of the Revolution the plan entailed the socialization
of the existing housing stock: families were assigned to a single room, and sometimes even less, in the old apartment blocks, sharing kitchens and bathrooms with other families. But from the 1920s, new types of housing were designed to bring about this transformation in mentality. The most radical Soviet architects, like the Constructivists in the Union of Contemporary Architects, proposed the complete obliteration of the private sphere by building commune houses (dom kommuny) where all property, including even clothes and underwear, would be shared by the inhabitants, where domestic tasks like cooking and childcare would be assigned to teams on a rotating basis, and where everybody would sleep in one big dormitory, divided by gender, with private rooms set aside for sexual liaisons.25
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