Natasha's Dance (81 page)

*
The sentence was later changed to five years’ labour in the gulag at Norilsk.

    As Akhmatova explained in the short prose piece ‘Instead of a Preface’

    (1957)
^:

    In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone ‘recognized’ me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

    ’Can you describe this?’

    And I answered, ‘Yes I can.’

    Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.
¹²
’

    In
Requiem
Akhmatova became the people’s voice. The poem represented a decisive moment in her artistic evolution - the moment when the lyric poet of private experience became, in the words of
Requiem,
the ‘mouth through which a hundred million scream’.
¹³⁰
The poem is intensely personal. Yet it gives voice to an anguish felt by every person who had lost someone.

    This was when the ones who smiled

    Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

    And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

    Swung from its prisons.

    And when, senseless from torment,

    Regiments of convicts marched,

    And the short songs of farewell

    Were sung by locomotive whistles.

    The stars of death stood above us

    And innocent Russia writhed

    Under bloody boots

    And under the tyres of the Black Marias.
¹³¹

    This was when Akhmatova’s decision to remain in Russia began to make sense. She had shared in her people’s suffering. Her poem had become a monument to it - a dirge for the dead sung in whispered incantations among friends; and in some way it redeemed that suffering.

    No, not under the vault of alien skies,

    And not under the shelter of alien wings -

    I was with my people then,

    There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
¹³²

    Some time at the end of the 1940s Akhmatova was walking with Nadezhda Mandelstam in Leningrad when she suddenly remarked: ‘To think that the best years of our life were during the war when so many people were being killed, when we were starving and my son was doing forced labour.’
¹³³
For anyone who suffered from the Terror as she did, the Second World War must have come as a release. As Gordon says to Dudorov in the epilogue of
Doctor Zhivago,
‘When war broke out its real dangers and its menace of death were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’
¹³⁴
People were allowed and had to act in ways that would have been unthinkable before the war. They organized themselves for civilian defence. By necessity, they spoke to one another without thinking of the consequences. From this spontaneous activity a new sense of nationhood emerged. As Pasternak would later write, the war was ‘a period of vitality and in this sense an untrammelled, joyous restoration of the sense of community with everyone’.
¹³⁵
His own wartime verse was full of feeling for this community, as if the struggle had stripped away the state to reveal the core of Russia’s nationhood:

    Through the peripeteia of the past And the years of war and poverty Silently I came to recognize The inimitable features of Russia

    Overcoming my feelings of love I observed in worship Old women, residents Students and locksmiths
¹³⁶

    As the German armies crossed the Soviet border, on 22 June 1941, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Minister, gave a radio address in which he spoke of the impending ‘patriotic war for homeland, honour and freedom’.
¹³⁷
The next day the main Soviet army newspaper,
Kras-naia zvezda,
referred to it as a ‘holy war’.
¹³⁸
Communism was conspicuously absent from Soviet propaganda in the war. It was fought in the name of Russia, of the ‘family of peoples’ in the Soviet Union, of Pan-Slav brotherhood, or in the name of Stalin, but never in the name of the communist system. To mobilize support, the Stalinist regime even embraced the Russian Church, whose patriotic message was more likely to persuade a rural population that was still recovering from the disastrous effects of collectivization. In 1943, a patriarch was elected for the first time since 1917; a theological academy and several seminaries were re-opened; and after years of persecution the parish churches were allowed to restore something of their spiritual life.
¹³⁹
The regime glorified the military heroes of Russian history - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov - all of whom were summoned as an inspiration for the nation’s self-defence. Films were made about their lives, military orders were created in their names. History became the story of great leaders rather than the charting of the class struggle.

    Russia’s artists enjoyed a new freedom and responsibility in the war years. Poets who had been regarded with disfavour or banned from publication by the Soviet regime suddenly began to receive letters from the soldiers at the front. Throughout the years of the Terror they had never been forgotten by their readers; nor, it would seem, had they ever really lost their spiritual authority. In 1945, Isaiah Berlin, on a visit to Russia, was told that

    the poetry of Blok, Bryusov, Sologub, Esenin, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, was widely read, learnt by heart and quoted by soldiers and officers and even political commissars. Akhmatova and Pasternak, who had for a long time lived in a kind of internal exile, received an amazingly large number of letters from the front, quoting from both published and unpublished poems, for the most part circulated privately in manuscript copies; there were requests for autographs, for confirmation of the authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author’s attitude to this or that problem.
¹⁴⁰

    Zoshchenko received about 6,000 letters in one year. Many of them came from readers who said they often thought of suicide and looked to him for spiritual help.
¹⁴¹
In the end the moral value of such writers could not fail to impress itself on the Party’s bureaucrats, and conditions for these artists gradually improved. Akhmatova was allowed to publish a collection of her early lyrics,
From Six Books.
Huge queues formed to buy it on the day when it appeared, in a small edition of just 10,000 copies, in the summer of 1940, whereupon the Leningrad authorities took fright and, on the orders of Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov, had the book withdrawn from circulation.
¹⁴²

    In her patriotic poem ‘Courage’ (published in the Soviet press in February 1942) Akhmatova presented the war as a defence of the ‘Russian word’ - and the poem gave courage to the millions of soldiers who went into battle with its words on their lips:

    We know what lies in balance at this moment, And what is happening right now. The hour for courage strikes upon our clocks, And courage will not desert us. We’re not frightened by a hail of lead, We’re not bitter without a roof overhead -And we will preserve you, Russian speech, Mighty Russian word! We will transmit you to our grandchildren Free and pure and rescued from captivity Forever!
¹⁴³

    In the first months of the war Akhmatova joined the Civil Defence in Leningrad. ‘I remember her near the old iron railings of the House on the Fontanka’, wrote the poet Olga Berggolts. ‘Her face severe and angry, a gas mask strapped over her shoulder, she took her turn on the fire watch like a regular soldier.’
¹⁴⁴
As the German armies circled in on Leningrad, Berggolts’s husband, the literary critic Georgy Makogonenko, turned to Akhmatova to raise the spirits of the city by talking to its people in a radio broadcast. For years her poetry had been forbidden by the Soviet authorities. Yet, as the critic explained later, the very name Akhmatova was so synonymous with the spirit of the city that even Zhdanov was

    prepared to bow to it in this hour of need. Akhmatova was sick, so it was agreed to record her speech in the Fountain House. Akhmatova’s address was proud and courageous. She appealed to the city’s entire legacy - not just to Lenin but to Peter the Great, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Blok, too. She ended with a stirring tribute to the women of the old capital:

    Our descendants will honour every mother who lived at the time of the war, but their gaze will be caught and held fast by the image of the Leningrad woman standing during an air raid on the roof of a house, with a boat-hook and fire-tongs in her hand, protecting the city from fire; the Leningrad girl volunteer giving aid to the wounded among the still smoking ruins of a building… No, a city which has bred women like these cannot be conquered.
¹⁴⁵

    Shostakovich also took part in the radio broadcast. He and Akhmatova had never met, even though they loved each other’s work and felt a spiritual affinity. * Both felt profoundly the suffering of their city, and expressed that suffering in their own ways. Like Akhmatova, Shostakovich had joined the Civil Defence, as a fireman. Only his bad eyesight had prevented him from joining up with the Red Army in the first days of the war. He turned down the chance to leave the besieged city in July, when the musicians of the Conservatory were evacuated to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. In between the fire fighting, he began composing marches for the front-line troops, and in the first two weeks of September, as the bombs began to fall on Leningrad, he worked by candlelight, in a city now deprived of electricity, to finish what would be his Seventh Symphony. As one might expect from his Terror-induced caution and St Petersburg reserve, Shostakovich was rather circumspect in his radio address. He simply told the city that he was about to complete a new symphony. Normal life was going on.
¹⁴⁶

    * Akhmatova rarely missed a Shostakovich premiere. After the first performance of his Eleventh Symphony (‘The Year 1905’) in 1957, she compared its hopeful revolutionary songs, which the critics had dismissed as devoid of interest (this was the time of the Khrushchev thaw), to ‘white birds flying against a terrible black sky’. The next year she dedicated the Soviet edition of her
Poems:
‘To Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich, in whose epoch 1 lived on earth’. The two eventually met in 1961. ‘We sat in silence for twenty minutes. It was wonderful,’ recalled Akhmatova (E. Wilson,
Shostakovich: A Life Rtemembered (London,
[994), pp, 319, 321).

    Later that same day, 16 September 1941, the Germans broke through to the gates of Leningrad. For 900 days they cut the city off from virtually all its food and fuel supplies; perhaps a million people, or one third of the pre-war population, died by disease or starvation, before the siege of Leningrad was at last broken in January 1944. Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent soon after the German invasion; Shostakovich to the Volga city of Kuibyshev (now known by its pre-revolutionary name of Samara), where he completed the final movement of the Seventh Symphony on a battered upright piano in his two-room apartment. At the top of the first page he scribbled in red ink: ‘To the city of Leningrad’. On 5 March 1942. the symphony received its premiere in Kuibyshev. It was performed by the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, which had also been evacuated to the Volga town. Broadcast by radio throughout the land, it transmitted, in the words of the violinist David Oistrakh, who was listening in Moscow, ‘the prophetic affirmation… of our faith in the eventual triumph of humanity and light’.
¹⁴⁷
The Moscow premiere later that month was broadcast globally, its drama only highlighted by an air raid in the middle of the performance. Soon the symphony was being performed throughout the Allied world, a symbol of the spirit of endurance and survival, not just of Leningrad but of all countries united against the fascist threat, with sixty-two performances in the USA alone during 1942.
¹⁴⁸

    The symphony was resonant with themes of Petersburg: its lyrical beauty and classicism, evoked nostalgically in the moderato movement (originally entitled ‘Memories’); its progressive spirit and modernity, signalled by the harsh Stravinskian wind chords of the opening adagio; and its own history of violence and war (for the
Bolero-like
march of the first movement is not just the sound of the approaching German armies, it comes from within). Since the Stalinist assault against his music in 1936, Shostakovich had developed a sort of double-speak in his musical language, using one idiom to please his masters in the Kremlin and another to satisfy his own moral conscience as an artist and a citizen. Outwardly he spoke in a triumphant voice. Yet beneath the ritual sounds of Soviet rejoicing there was a softer, more melancholic voice - the carefully concealed voice of satire and dissent only audible to those who had felt the suffering his music expressed. These two voices are clearly audible in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (the

    composer’s ‘Socialist Realist’ rejoinder to those who had attacked
Lady Macbeth),
which received a half-hour ovation of electrifying force when it was first performed in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonia in November 1937.
¹⁴⁹
Beneath the endless fanfares trumpeting the triumph of the Soviet state in the finale, the audience had heard a distant echo of the funeral march from Mahler’s First Symphony and, whether they recognized the march or not, they must have felt its sadness - for nearly everyone in that audience would have lost someone in the Terror of 1937 - and they responded to the music as a spiritual release.
¹⁵⁰
The Seventh Symphony had the same overwhelming emotional effect.

    For it to achieve its symbolic goal, it was vital for that symphony to be performed in Leningrad - a city which both Hitler and Stalin loathed. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated and the Radio Orchestra was the only remaining ensemble in the city. The first winter of the siege had reduced it to a mere fifteen players, so extra musicians had to be brought out of retirement or borrowed from the army defending Leningrad. The quality of playing was not high, but that hardly mattered when the symphony was finally performed in the bombed-out Great Hall of the Philharmonia on 9 August 1942. - the very day when Hitler had once planned to celebrate the fall of Leningrad with a lavish banquet at the Astoria Hotel. As the people of the city congregated in the hall, or gathered around loudspeakers to listen to the concert in the street, a turning point was reached. Ordinary citizens were brought together by music; they felt united by a sense of their city’s spiritual strength, by a conviction that their city would be saved. The writer Alexander Rozen, who was present at the premiere, describes it as a kind of national catharsis: