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By Andrew Alexandre Owie
A STORY OF A NUN-WHORE
ANKOLOGY
Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova (born Gorenko) (1889-1966) had received more than 100 poems dedicated to her during her life which she kept in a file entitled `In 100 mirrors`. Strictly speaking, there were two Akhmatovas, a poetess and a woman, and they never coincided. The Akhmatova`s oral memoirs also strikingly differed from her written ones. Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (1895-1925) was taken aback at a discrepancy between her poetic image and her real personality. Akhmatova refused to consider Sergei Yesenin, the summit of the Russian poetry of the 20 c, a good poet. She loved to remember his first visit when wearing the Russian national dress he modestly sat on the edge of a chair and humbly thanked in French: Merci, merci, merci! Once when he tried to remind of himself she absently said, `Yeah, ... once we met ... at the corner of the Pyramid of Cheops ..`.
LIEUTENANT RZEWSKI AND GIRL STUDENT
Once at a party Akhmatova told such a shocking obscene funny story that all blushed not knowing what to say, to do, to cry or laugh or even to run away. Having noticed common confusion, she explained with perfect calm: `Such funny stories we were being told by the hussars in Tsar Village when we were gymnasium girl students`. Akhmatova often lived in the Moscow flat of her close friends Ardovs. One day Viktor Ardov not noticing the presence of Anna Akhmatova in the room relieved his feelings with the obscene words. Having seen her, he got confused, but she just concluded: `Viktor, we"re the linguists after all!`
NOT ALL IS GOLD THAT LITTERS
Akhmatova told poet Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkowski (1907-1989): `Today Alexandre Solzhenitsyn read his poem to me!` Tarkowski asked: `Was it really so good?` She answered: `Very, very good!` `What if to be honest?` `Then it was good`. `What if to swear by God?` Akmatova turned red: `It was a terrible bad poem!` Solzhenitsyn went on to regularly bother her with his weak poems. Akhmatova mildly reproached him: `There"s no mystery in your poems!` Authoritarian Solzhenitsyn who considered himself a genius and even tried to teach Akhmatova how to write poems flared up and blurted: `I see that your poetry is one big mystery!`
COMMON FAITH
Akhmatova was a true Russian Orthodox churchwoman. Once she said: `I just can"t help it! I believe in God as an ordinary dark country twat!` When asked why the Russian Orthodox faith? She answered that only that Christianity really teaches humility. Like Christ Akhmatova was very kind with children. Some attended her literary circle where she was kidding and joking. They laughed. She warned them: `Don"t laugh I am Akhmatova rather than Chaplin. Just consult a literary encyclopedia: `Akhmatova is a tragic poet, a singer of pessimism and decadence`.
FASTIDIOUS AND PRECISE
One day Akmatova said in public: `You all know that I love Jews very much. But they are not tactful! Especially Zoshchenko!` All burst out laughing as he wasn"t a Jew. They said that dramatist Isidor Stock (1908-1980) used to call her `old dame` in public and she allegedly liked it. But still she complained in public that they were not tactful. Besides she found Osip Mandelstamm, her colleague, closest friend and, by the way, brother in Christian faith, with whom they spent many merry hours together to be stinky and shuddered with disgust every time he kissed her hand.
APASSIONATA
Actress Fanny Ranevskaya and Anna preferred the same type of humour, rather rude, often vulgar, humour of the Renaissance, of Leonardo da Vinci and Franзois Rabelais (1494-1553). Akhmatova knew Latin and Italian and, by the way, could quote and recite Dante"s Divina Commedia chapter by chapter by heart. She greatly appreciated Michelangelo as a poet. Ranevskaya, or just Foofa (or Charlie for her), could keep secrets and though knew all about Akhmatova`s love affairs she never told about them even after Akhmatova`s death. She only confined herself to mentioning that Akhmatova was a woman of a great passion, and not of one, of great many passions. (`Fanny, what`s love? I forgot it. I only remember it was something pleasant`).
THE SEWN SONG
Once Akhmatova and Ranevskaya saw soldiers singing a song in the street. Anna said: `How happy would I be if it were my song!` When at home Foofa who shared a room with Akhmatova and used to call her Rabbi or Rabbin pretended to be a poor simple seamstress operating a sewing-machine and singing one of poems by Akhmatova. It was so ridiculous that both burst out laughing! Later Anna often asked Foofa to sing that `sewn song`.
AKHMATOVA AND HER MEN
Akhmatova never spared and shared feelings of her husbands and none of them was able to control her all the way. Her romance with Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) happened during her wedding travel with her first husband Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (1886-1921). A Russian follower of Rudyard Kipling and lover of many women he turned into a kind of Ernest Hemingway`s Francis Macomber and took humiliations patiently from his Venus in Furs. When she was married to the world-famous expert on Hittites Vladimir Kazimirovich Szylejko (1891-1930) she took delight in being a masochist and giving cause for jealousy.
Being a gentleman he couldn"t hit her though he desired it and that made her pleasure even stronger. It was she who ruled in that marriage too. Szyleiko was exhausted by his jealousy. (Modigliani also used to stand under her window nights; she only looked out of it to get convinced he was still standing). That time Szylejko was considered to have been a poet more prominent than Anna and she really learned a lot from him as a poetess. She could have her poems printed only after his permission, and she had to spend much time at home as he closed her because of his not farfetched jealousy. Akhmatova confessed implying all her, Queen`s men: `I was neither kind nor tender with anyone`.
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BITTER, BUT SWEET
Akhmatova defended Maxim Gorky (1869-1936) saying he saved many intellectuals in the Revolutionary years. He really did, but when she asked him to find a job for her he refused to help. To survive she had to work in a vegetable garden and entered his office bare footed and wearing sarafan and headscarf. He looked at her dirty legs and concluded: `You are bare footed and said to be consumptive`. He knew whom she`d been and instead of a job she needed badly he offered her to translate a propagandistic leaflet from Russian into Italian. How to understand her eternal admiration? Either she achieved the only orgasm in her life under him right after that or that treatment was appropriate for her and she wanted men to behave like that with her. Freud, pure Freud whom she disliked very much!
THE PHOCA, MEDICAL REPORT
The third husband of hers Nikolai Nikolayevich Punin (1888-1953) photographed her naked while she was making her famous `wheel` in 1926, she was slender and lissome, and her head could easily reach her feet. Many a man knew it! But you will hardly find this photo in the WWW. Anna was an excellent swimmer and skier! She could swim in the Black Sea, in Crimea that far that she sometimes startled fishers. Yet this bodily strength failed to prevent her from progress of the heart disease. She also suffered from agoraphobia; she could stop all of a sudden amidst of a square, grasp the hand of her companion and stood for an hour drenched in cold sweat. She had regular vertigos and was afraid of descending the stairs.
CAESAR AND POETESS
Svetlana, daughter of Stalin, was quite carried away by the poems by Akhmatova. To some extent they compensated the girl the loss of her mother. And Caesar could not help taking it into account. Thus Akhmatova became an absent member of the August family. Stalin released Akhmatova`s son and husband from the GULAG. All of a sudden, he asked the awarded artistes at the Kremlin reception: `Where"s Akhmatova? Why doesn"t she write anything?` After that two collections of her poems were published after a seven year interval. Akhmatova said those books had been gifts of the father to his daughter. In 1941 Stalin included Akhmatova into the list of persons subject to evacuation from encircled St. Petersburg. Her patriotic poems appeared even in the Pravda, she was awarded a medal, and in 1946 she was invited to the governmental reception where she received a great ovation lasted 15 minutes. It was the Royal honour, before that it was only Stalin who had been honoured like that. So she officially became the Queen of the Russian Poetry until she committed a blunder having secretly accepted Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) and Churchill`s nephew.
A RUSSIAN PATRIOT
After the Revolution the artistic elite of St. Petersburg started emigrating abroad. But Akhmatova shared the fate of her country. Boris Antrep (1883-1969), her lover of that time, escaped too. Many decades later he depicted her as Holy Martyr, St. Anne on a wall of the Cathedral of Christ the King (Mullingar, Westmeath).
When in 1954 British students came to St. Petersburg to meet Akhmatova they asked her about the Decree of 14 August of 1946 against her and Zoshchenko. She hardly glanced at them; she did it rather presumptuously and spoke through clenched teeth: `I agree with the decree. We shall settle our inner arguments themselves without outside interference. I hardly need any sympathy.`
INFERNO AND DANTESS
In the 60s Akhmatova was awarded the `Etna Taormina` Prize (December 1964) in Italy. Initially the authorities offered poetess Vera Mikhailovna Inber (1890-1972) to accept the prize for Akhmatova, but Akhmatova disagreed: `Vera Inber can represent me just at one place, in the inferno!` They offered a candidature of poetess Margarita Iosifovna Aligher (1915-1992). But the Italian press was indignant: `Instead of a follower of Dante Alighieri we are to be sent his namesake!` Ranevskaya wrote about that event: `She spent her prize worth of one million liras on presents for her friends, but though I"m also considered to be her friend I received not a penis, because she thinks that I don"t need anything any longer and maybe she"s right`. THE END
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