From Pages Torn from a Diary
SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 1965
(AN UNEXPECTED phone call: Anna Akhmatova is on a brief visit to Paris and wishes to see me. I set off immediately for the hotel in Paris where she is staying. —A note written in pencil right after leaving the house, to which I will add a few details I remembered and didn’t note down.)
•
A large hotel room, Anna Andreyevna in a big armchair, plump, magnificent, serene, slightly deaf. Très dame. I think involuntarily of the eighteenth-century idealized portraits of Russian empresses. Besides her there are in the room: her ward from Moscow, the very young Miss Kaminska, Polish by origin, and her travel companion, a young Englishwoman from London; old friends from the emigration come and go.
•
A year ago Anna Andreyevna was in Taormina, after receiving the international Etna-Taormina award. Akhmatova’s first trip abroad, probably since 1914! She speaks of the award very ironically, as if it were some Bolshevik plot. She had wanted to travel via Paris then but Surkov1 told her: “Vy vernyoties' tak kak prijekhali.” (You’ll return the way you went.) Now they again sent her to England through Ostend, so she wouldn’t stop in Paris.
In London she managed to entreat the Russian embassy and finally received permission, on the condition she didn’t stay in Paris more than two days. Yesterday, not having received the right tickets to Moscow for both ladies, she postponed her departure by one day—sharp reproaches at the embassy in Paris for her insubordination. No one met her officially at the station, there was only Bouchène, her husband’s cousin (I knew him in the 1930s and I owe to him the fact that she found me.)
I was left alone with her for a moment, and immediately I asked after her son (she had spoken of him to me in Tashkent in 1942, of his prewar arrest and deportation to an unknown destination).
She tells me he spent a total of fourteen years in the camps, they let him go, picked him up again, he “liberated Berlin,” now he’s free, a professor, he wrote a dissertation on the Huns, he’s in excellent physical condition, “but something got mixed up in his mind in the camp. When he got back he hated me and doesn’t want to see me, I haven’t seen him for three years.”
“Nu shtozh,” Anna Andreyevna adds, “tak byvayet, shto samyi blizkii chelovek stanovitsya chuzhdym.” (What can you do, it can happen that the person closest to you becomes a stranger.)
The second thing I ask about is the poet Brodsky. She knows him, values him highly. He was released from the camp near Arkhangelsk for three days (for Easter or Christmas?). “The best doctors we sent to him judged his state of health very serious, schizophrenia, etc., he went back to the camp with all the doctors’ testimonies, but the doctor up there thought he was completely healthy.”
“Nie ponimayu v chom delo, ved' nikogo ne arestuyut i vdrug Brodskii!” (I don’t get what’s going on, nobody was being arrested and suddenly, Brodsky!)
Akhmatova goes on: “Stalin brought the country to the final point of depravity, things are still difficult now, but the new generation is terrific, the one after Stalin.” She says this with a warm, animated tone. Generally she speaks calmly, very soberly, without a trace of superlatives, and this gives weight to her every word.
She heard of Kultura from Professor Jakobson.2 She also knows I wrote about her, she found a reference to it in some bibliography, of course she didn’t read it.
I mention Terts and Arzhak (Sinyavsky and Daniel). She reacts very cautiously: “It doesn’t seem to me Terts’s Fantastic Tales could have been written in Russia,” and falls silent. (Is that what she really thinks, or does she know everything, and for that reason use this code?)
For me and Bouchène she recites a poem written in London in her half-singing voice. This poem written down on a piece of paper, inserted in a notebook with London addresses, has fallen to pieces, but she says, “I know it by heart now.” She intends to destroy the notebook, too! When Bouchène expresses surprise that she cannot even bring home her own notes, Akhmatova turns to me: “Vot videtie, sorok let nie byl w Rossiji i dazhe on ne panimayet! Shto govorit' o Frantsuzakh!” (You see, he’s not been in Russia forty years and even he doesn’t remember! What can you expect of the French!)
Émigré acquaintances, friends from the old days, admirers of her poetry come and go. She shows us an article about herself in an American émigré newspaper, an enthusiastic article. She says it may be very harmful to her.
“How could it harm you?” someone present asks.
“Well, even if it just prevents my poetry collection from being published and if they don’t let me leave the country again.” (There is a plan for her to go to America.)
The conversation continues; she corrects some details of her biography, from way back in 1914 (her Paris time, her friendship with Modigliani, etc.). She speaks of those days with great detachment. Supposedly Makovsky was jealous of Mandelstam and someone else, hence the terrible lies about her in a book about to appear in America.3
Among other things, that she was jealous of Gumilyov in Paris or he of her. And she adds jokingly: “Nu shto zhe, my wsye w eti vremena kuverkalis', a teper o nas tezisy pishut!” (Well, so we all went a little nuts in those days, and now they write dissertations about us!) Once again the feeling, as with Maria Dąbrowska,4 that she is a monument, that she has to watch over her biography. Maybe not a monument, but a guard watching over the reputation, or rather the precise details of the biography of . . . Akhmatova.
•
Note added later [1967]. This was my meeting with Akhmatova, the first after twenty-three years and the last. Anna Andreyevna died in March 1966 and now I deeply regret that the note I wrote hastily in pencil in my notebook is so dry and laconic. I wrote about her in Inhuman Land, about my meeting with her in 1942, naturally passing over in silence anything that could have harmed her at that time, like the nocturnal walk with her when I accompanied her home from Aleksey Tolstoy’s. What her life was like since that time: whole periods mysterious to me, poems written not even for the drawer, her closest friends learned them by heart. Tashkent, Alma-Ata, and then suddenly Stalin’s words: Anna Akhmatova—velikii poet, which changed her fate from one day to the next during the war: honors in Moscow, return to Leningrad, and after the war the Zhdanov years, new persecution, then the post-Stalinist period, a partial loosening of the chain of pressure, her growing fame, legend, and poems that reached us from Russia and America, the few that haven’t left me since I read them in Rodnaya zemlya [Native Land] (1961):
I v mire nyet ludei bezlozhnei
nadmennei i proshche nas
(And there’s no people truer
prouder or humbler than us)
and Poslednyaya roza [Last Rose] (1962):
Gospodi! Ty vidish ia ustala
Voskresat' i umirat'i zhit'
(Lord! You see I’m tired
of resurrecting, dying, and living)
and the ones published in 1963 in Munich in the collection Requiem. And the poem “Requiem” itself:
But here, where I stood three hundred hours
And where I was never allowed behind bars
Because even in blessed death, I fear
I’ll forget the rumble of the Black Marias
Forget how a frozen door slammed shut,
And an old woman howled like a wounded mutt
And may from the bronze unmoving lids
the melted snow, like teardrops, slip
And a prisoner’s pigeon coo from afar,
And ships glide quietly down the Neva
In Paris I looked at that woman in the hotel armchair—not the tragic and still beautiful poet I met in Tashkent, but an elderly woman who seemed becalmed, looking from a great distance at her past and the work of her life. A great poet in the aura of her already worldwide fame, surrounded by young women devoted to her and old friends from emigration.
•
It was only after her death that I received a letter from London—I was asked if I knew a poem written by the poet in 1959, which she had apparently dedicated to me. I had never heard of the poem. They wrote me that she did that sometimes, didn’t say to whom a poem was dedicated, let him figure it out. But I didn’t know the poem—maybe she was waiting for me to mention it at the hotel in Paris? I received it only in May 1967. The poem appeared in two successive versions. I quote part of the letter I was sent that told me about it for the first time:
I enclose a photocopy of the poem “Iz tsikla Tashkentskiie stranitsy,” from the book Bieg vremeni (Time’s Flight), Moscow/Leningrad 1965. The first conversation I had in connection with it was with a friend of Akhmatova’s who pointed out the difference between the two versions and told me that Akhmatova hadn’t dared in the first printed version (Moscow 1961) to include the word Warsaw, but that now she could. She asked me if I knew who the poet was speaking of. I said no. And she replied: “I know, but I won’t tell you, I’ll only tell you that the word Warsaw gives you the answer.”
A few days later Miss X. (also someone close to Akhmatova) said to me: “I don’t understand why they wouldn’t tell you who the poem was about, it was a Polish painter who came to Tashkent during the war and whom Akhmatova met. As far as I’m concerned, I’m sure the only Pole she met at that time was you.”
That much was in the letter. For myself I have no doubt that this poem from 1959 is a poetic remembrance seventeen years after that night when I accompanied her from Aleksey Tolstoy’s after an evening I described in my book, the occasion when I read Norwid à livre ouvert and poems by Baliński and Słonimski that had reached us from London.5 I still remember the tears in Akhmatova’s eyes when I clumsily translated “Warsaw Carol”:6
And if you wish to give birth
in the shade of Warsaw’s dust,
it’s best straight afterward
to cast Him on the cross.
Akhmatova promised at the time to translate the poem. Then she recited her “Leningrad Epic.”7 I won’t return to that experience, I’ve described it in the book. I remember accompanying her late at night. There was a moon. Air you could breathe after a stifling day. We were both drunk on poems. After just a few steps, Anna Andreyevna quite unceremoniously got rid of someone who wanted to accompany her with me. And then she confessed to me her mortal anguish and fear for her son. “Ia tselovala sapogi vsem znatnym Bolshevikam, shtoby mnie skazali zhyv on ili miortv—ia niechevo ne uznala.” (I kissed the boots of all the top Bolsheviks to get them to tell me if he’s alive or dead—I didn’t find out anything.) And suddenly this woman whose behavior had seemed so artificial in Aleksey Tolstoy’s salon—he being a Stalinist worthy—and seemed to keep a great distance from all of us, became for me humanly close, became another woman, tragic to the core. She also told me then, “I don’t know what it is, after all we are almost strangers, but you are closer to me than all those people around me.” She simply felt a different air talking to me, a greater freedom, an absence of the fear that at that time throttled every breath, everyone’s, absolutely everyone’s.
How grateful I am to her for this poem, for her having wished to see me again in Paris, and I can’t come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t able to speak with her and listen to her as I had before, that I didn’t even sense that this brief meeting, almost in a crowd, was the last, that I would never see her again, wouldn’t manage to tell her what some of her poems and that Tashkent encounter meant to me.
Kultura 4/246, 1968