In Our Time - Anna Akhmatova

Episode Date: January 18, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work, ideas and life of the Russian poet whose work was celebrated in C20th both for its quality and for what it represented, written under censorship in the Stalin years. Her best known poem, Requiem, was written after her son was imprisoned partly as a threat to her and, to avoid punishment for creating it, she passed it on to her supporters to be memorised, line by line, rather than written down. She was a problem for the authorities and became significant internationally, as her work came to symbolise resistance to political tyranny and the preservation of pre-Revolutionary liberal values in the Soviet era.The image above is based on 'Portrait of Anna Akhmatova' by N.I. Altman, 1914, MoscowWithKatharine Hodgson Professor in Russian at the University of ExeterAlexandra Harrington Reader in Russian Studies at Durham UniversityAndMichael Basker Professor of Russian Literature and Dean of Arts at the University of BristolProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Anna Akmatava, 1889 and 1966, was all the most famous Russian poets of the 20th century and won a few to survive Stalin's terrorists,

banned at home that are published abroad. Her first husband was executed, their son was jailed as a warning to her, and her third husband died in the gulags, and she dared not even write down her most subversive requiem at trusting it instead to the memory of her friends until a time after her death when Russians might read it. To the Cold War West, she was a symbol of Soviet oppression of creative freedom.

In Russia, she was treasured for keeping alive the flame of poetry from before the revolution, the nation's literary heartland, and for doing it so brilliantly. with me to discuss Anna Akmatiba and Catherine Hodgson, Professor in Russian at the University of Exeter, Alexandra Harrington, reader in Russian studies at Durham University, and Michael

Basker, Professor of Russian Literature and Dean of Arts at the University of Bristol. Catherine Hudson, what signs were there, if any, in her childhood that she might become a poet? Well, her father actually teased her from an early age, called her a decadent poetess, and she was showing signs of starting to write her own poetry aged about 11.

So that was around 1900. She showed an early interest in poetry, both French and Russian, and she was also very interested in the poetry of Alexander Pushkin. She was, after all, living in a small town near St. Petersburg for most of her childhood, called Sarska Silor, and that is the place where Pushkin went to school. It's also a place he wrote about a great deal, so that she was walking through the landscape, that he wrote about, looking at the statues and the buildings

and the monuments that he wrote about in his poetry. So in many senses, she was a poet who created herself. She didn't grow up in a very bookish household. I think they had maybe one book of poetry in the house. So how did you know about Pushkin? Well, she went to school. She went to the local girls' grammar school. and Pushkin was the main canonical poet,

still is the main canonical poet in Russia. So he was part of the furniture, really, and quickly became part of her internal furniture. She was, I think, very interested in poetry and actually quite isolated because of it. Apparently in her schooling, she was seen as a rather reserved character. someone who didn't mix very easily with the girls around her.

But maybe her interest in poetry also brought the attention quite early on of a young poet also growing up in Sargkesilou, Nikolai Gumilov, that was to be her first husband. So there's poetry that seems to be taken on by herself. Her father, as we understand from what I've read of view, it was not entirely approving of this. One of the reasons she changed her name because he didn't want his distinguished name to be associated with this activity called poetry.

So she turned to Akhmatipa. But her household was political as well. Both her parents were engaged in political acts. Yes, they were sympathizers of the People's Will movement. What? People's will. And that was a movement that was trying to push for some kind of revolution in Russia. So basically they were populists in their sympathies.

Is it sympathies or did they take any actions? As far as I know, they didn't actually do a great deal. They will have talked and they will have sympathised. And her father did get thrown out of his naval engineering job because someone he was associated with had got hold of some explosives. So he was on the fringes of something that looked like a planned terrorist act. When you said she decided to be a poet at 11, lots of people decided to be a poet, and the age of 12 and a half, they'd give up.

Why did she keep going on? What pushed her along? I think it was something that satisfied some kind of inner need. She seems to have had a rather unsettled character and not an easy childhood. It wasn't very stable and happy. She lost one of her sisters quite early on, and it seems to have been a family secret,

something they didn't talk about very much. Another sister would die later on, And the parents split up when Anna was in her early teens. So the family life was quite disrupted. She was also a sleepwalker, which got in the way of her studying at the small institute in St. Petersburg. Apparently it was too disruptive to have her roaming the dormantries. So she was there for a couple of months maybe and then sent home.

Alexandra Harrington, Alex Hamilton, what impacted Ahmadineva have on the literary world of set people? and vice versa when she got stuck into it in her late teams. Quite a large impact. In the first place, she was married to Gormilov, as Catherine said, who was already involved in modernist circles in Peaceburg. How old was she when she married him? It was 1910, so she was, hold on a minute, she was born in 18.

21. Thank you very much. My maths, not great. He's been trying to marry her for five years. He'd been trying to marry her for a long time, kept various suicide attempts in order to persuade her. It strikes me. It's not a charming way to make... No, it was quite typical of the time, though.

There was a rather melodramatic way of behaving that was culturally encoded. He was a poet. He was a poet. He was a poet. He was a poet. He was a poet. Yes.

And this gave her access to Petersburg literary life. And she also watched and waited very carefully. One of the things that's notable at Mahmartar is that she planned her entrance onto the literary stage quite carefully. So she adopted this exotic pseudonym. Why was it exotic? It sounds a bit unrucied. it has a tartar background, so it was immediately quite striking.

Joseph Bodki called it her first successful line of poetry. And she emerged at a point where there was quite a hunger amongst what were mostly male modernists for a female poetic star. And she fitted the bill, absolutely. She, in the first place, looked and behaved like the cultural fantasy of a female modernist poet. You know what to tell us more about that. How do you look and behave like an officer? She was, well, the whole atmosphere.

A bit of detail will be great here. The whole atmosphere had been very much influenced by the poetry of Alexander Block, who was Russia's greatest poet at this point. And the women in his poetry are very ephemeral beauties who are unattainable, rather floaty. And Ahmadivar was very striking physically. She behaved in a very aristocratic, restrained way. She planned her poetry. She doesn't have got the detail.

Well, she looked like a kind of fan-fatal figure. She seemed to embody this sort of ideal of female beauty. And she traded very much on that. And her poetry, she often arranges her poems around her own persona, so that the speaker of the poems looks like Ahmadinev. She seems to occupy the same cultural milieu, and she describes her love affairs and so on in a very restrained way. It was a love poetry that caught the attention of quite a lot of readers.

So quite so on these first two or three volumes, which are not very long. She established a name for herself. Now you say strategic, most poets are strategic, a lot of brides. That's nothing much knew about that. But what was it about her poetry that got hold of them? I think two things, a sort of double effect. So the first is that she was able to appeal to a growing mass readership because her poetry is very concrete.

She describes very successfully the details of the material world around her. She uses little impressionistic details. In one poem, a pond. The algae on the pond is described as like brocade. In another one, there's a small grey cloud in the sky that's like a stretched out squirrel skin. So she's very good at these concrete little details. And then she also describes love in a particular way.

So lots of poets wrote about love, lots of female poets wrote about love. but she does it with a kind of restraint and almost a sort of analytical, objective manner that was strikingly different. Yes, so for instance, one of her very famous early poems is a poem called A Song of the Last Meeting. It was written in 1911. It's almost cliched now.

It's so famous. But what she does is rather than describing the speaker's feelings in kind of directly, she hones in on a small but telling gesture that belies the speaker's sort of surface calm and as she pulls the glove for her left hand onto her right hand and it's just these little micro-gesters. What does that signifies by as you're going?

Why is that so significant? Because what it allowed people to do was read into the gesture to see what emotion there was underneath. So what do you read into her, pulling the wrong glove onto the right hand? Her sort of confusion and emotional shock. We know from the title that it's about a last meeting

and so it's very much actually built on the way in which 19th century psychological prose operated, little gestures that revealed the psychology and emotions of characters and Ahmadine kind of imports this into poetry. And it gave readers that it sort of provoked their active interest. They were able to read the poems for details, try and make links.

She's very, very condensed and so they could fill in gaps for themselves. Michael Besker, we're going to go into a roller coaster of the first hour of the 20th century now, the two wars, the revolution, the purges, and she's involved in a lot of that. But let's start with the First World War. How did she react to that?

She reacted as though it was a great cataclysmic, dramatic event. And it strikes me that she was almost looking for a theme at that stage in her work. So as Alex says, she perfected these miniature love poetry, this miniature love poetry, dramatic scenes in effect, which became more and more condensed, and small gestures on behalf of the participants would give you an insight into the state of mind, the relationship between them. So there was evidence

upon which to build, for the reader to build a narrative, if you like. They're immensely popular, widely imitated, but by 1914 she got so good at them that cynically, it wasn't quite clear where she was going to go next. And they were very straightforwardly written, weren't that? I mean, easy to pull out in translation, simple lines, direct and so on. They read like small dramatic scenes with dialogue. They're not avertly poetic almost. The words, the conjunctions that pull the lines together

tend to be causal. Because this happened, that happened. And that was quite unpoetic in people's minds. But she perfected this. She also read about writing poetry and where poetry comes from. There was quite a lot to do with the interplay between poetry and love. Pushkin had a great. line in Yvgenia Njig in his novel.

Love disappeared, the muse came in, and my dark mind became clarified. Bad translation, but that's what Pushkin's about it. And there's something about that in Ahmadine as well that's analysing the emotion after the event. But even so, there were limits to that miniature form. The First World War came along, and she read a series of poems on the advent of war.

There was one called 19 July 1914, which is the day that Russia declared war. And it begins by saying, we grew older by 100 years, and it happened in a single hour. So there's a sense of transition from the 19th century to a different world, the true 20th century,

she called it in poem without a hero, which was a late masterpiece. And that poem 19th of July, 1914, ends with us saying that the Almighty had ordained that I should clear my mind of the memories of songs and passions and become the grim book of stormy news.

Her job was to record the tribulation of the people. You brought in the almighty, she was a religious person. It's hard to say how religious she was. I put it in, it's in the poetry. It's very difficult to link the persona of the poems with the real Ahmadivar throughout the early period. So she used a lot of religious imagery

how devout she was, how devout she was, I struggled to say even now. It's a powerful religious and nationalistic image in that poem. She was in a circle, a tight circle in St Petersburg, and we know some of the writer's names to this day. It was influential. It was a top circle, as it were.

And she was accepted there and acclaimed that. Can you just give us a very brief sketch of that lot? Okay. So, as Alex said, the leading writer before Ahmadineharto, and her circle came a lot. with Alexander Block. And he was a symbolist.

And essentially the symbolists were looking beyond this world to something revelatory beyond, to a greater existence of a more perfect reality than that which we experienced in the here and now. And Ahmadinevah and her husband Gummelyov and also Mandelstam, who is the other great Russian body of the 20th century, were part of a small group that came together gradually to the 1910s.

They call themselves acmeists. and acmeists were meant to be the pinnacle of creation. What they had in mind is that they would take the achievements of the symbolists, but develop them further and develop them back into an acceptance of this world, a concentration on this life is the only one we've got, and an attempt to celebrate the fullness of existence in this life. And the example used is that for them a rose was a rose, it wasn't a significant, it didn't signify,

all sorts of hundreds of other things. It was the flower there in front of your eyes. That's the, there may Garadetsky used that phrase in his Acmeus Manifesto. It says something of what they're about, but to me only a small bit of what we're about, because to the Acmeus the rose was a flower with petals and thorns, what have you, and colour and scent. But it was also a symbol of divine love, which had been for the symbolist. So they try to integrate all these things together to produce a more complex poetry about the human condition and the human cultural heritage. Thank you very much. Catherine, Catherine Hodgson.

She never emigrated. Others did. She had a chance to. Why did she stay in Russia when she was banned and denigrated and so on? That seems like a very good question to ask, because when you're living in a country and finding it increasingly difficult to publish, and people are writing things about you in the press. First of all, let's just tell the listeners, why was she finding it increasing and difficult to publish? She didn't fit.

She didn't fit the new revolutionary culture. So she wasn't a poet who was writing hymns about the triumphant onward march of the workers and the glorious future that was coming. She didn't want to join in that kind of celebration of something she didn't see as something to celebrate. So for her the revolution was a bit like the war, a massive national catastrophe. So this was not a cause for celebration, this was a cause for sober reflection and endurance, but definitely not joyful embracing of events. She was unofficially banned.

She lived in great poverty, so she still wouldn't leave. She wouldn't leave. And if you look at some of her poems from that early post-revolutionary period, you can see that she is stating quite clearly that she's, feels it's her moral duty, actually, to remain in the country, even amidst all the suffering, the terror, the civil war, that the people who have emigrated are actually seen as people who've taken a wrong path. There's one poem, for example, she wrote in, I think, 1922, about a voice, a voice that she heard summoning her to leave Russia forever, take on.

a new name. And she actually says in that poem, I blocked out this voice with my ears, and she calls what this voice was saying to her unworthy speech. And of course, a lot of the people, as you said, that she knew, did leave. And some of them left fully expecting her to follow them. But she made what you can see in her poetry as a conscious decision to commit herself to her country not to run away. But Alex Harrington, she, one of a masterpieces is the poem Require. Now, first of all, when did she write that? She wrote it, well, it's actually not one continuous piece, so it's a series of poems.

She started to write it in 1935. Right, so can you tell us how this poem was written, because it's as interesting how it was written and transferred into eventually the public domain, not as interesting. it's also interesting. There's a poem itself. Yeah, absolutely it is. And I think it's one of the reasons why it's such a canonical piece of writing is the story of its inception and distribution. So it, she started writing it in 1935. It was so dangerous. It's assembled of different pieces, as I said. So in fact, they extend to 1961, which is when she appended an epigraph

to it, so it has a long history. But the central poems in it were all written between 35 and 45 and too dangerous for her to keep a written copy. So what's it about? Why is it? dangerous. Because it's about the purges at the end of the 1930s and about Ahmediva's own biographical experience of standing

in prison queues which people did. They extended across Leningrad and people would wait in them to find out news of a loved one or hand over a parcel or in the worst circumstances have that parcel refused which indicated that something horrible had happened.

And so her poems described... And she was queuing to hand a to her son. Absolutely. And the doors never opened for her. Yeah, absolutely. And so the cycle was inspired by that experience. The different poems of it chart speakers.

They sketch out a narrative and they chart the speakers' kind of emotional breakdown at the arrest and then the sentencing and ultimately the execution of her son. It's very powerful, very simply written, but very dangerous. And therefore she didn't write it down. and the way in which it was preserved initially was in the memories of a few trusted friends who would come to Ahmadineffa's apartment. She'd scribbled down lines on a scrap of paper

for fear of surveillance. They wouldn't be uttered aloud. And while she chatted innocuously about the weather or something else, the friend would memorize the lines and then the scrap of paper would be burnt. And so the way in which it was preserved for quite some time was in a very secret, furtive way.

I understand there about ten of these friends. When did they get together to put the poem together? Well, Ahmadine was able to do that herself, in fact. She had the whole thing in it. Although that, of course, there was no guarantee of that. But when, during the saw, when it became clear that it might be possible at some point to publish, or to publish a recvium, or at least to circulate it in Samastat, she started to assemble what was the final text and indeed added to it at that point.

So she introduces framing texts, which, explain the poem's significance, its biographical origins, and emphasised in an epigraph, actually this relates to what Catherine was saying, that she was there where her people were. She speaks like a kind of monarch,

where her people were when this happened. Ten people's quite a lot in the Sabayan society, isn't it? How did they keep it dark? Well, she picked the right people, because often actually, you're right, wasn't there a saying that in a group of ten there would always be one informer, so it was a dangerous... One, Judas, and that was in a group of 12, wasn't it?

Absolutely. So she picked the right people quite clearly. Mandelstam, who Mike mentioned, is an example of a poet who apparently quite deliberately recited an equally dangerous poem to a number of people and was informed upon. So it was risky even that. Ahmadiv actually was known to be very careful about naming names. So if you read the record of meetings with Ahmadiva that Lydia Chukovsky wrote, she makes a point of saying that Ahmadiva, when she was talking

about other people, never said their names. So she just said a woman said to me so that names didn't get spread, so that made it safer. Michael, can we go to this wonderful poem in a bit more detail? How autobiographical

is it, or why does it seem autobiographical? Perhaps you could read a little bit in Russian to delight our listeners. I'll have a go of a little bit in Russian. Give me a second. So I'll begin with the question about how autobiographical otherwise it is, which is a complicated one, as often is without mattover.

There's a prose forward which describes her standing in the prison queues in Leningrad for 17 months to hand a package to her son, along with other women. And that prose description says that at one point someone in the queues

identified me, she uses the police word for identification, and at that point she says someone else in the crowd broke free from the stupor that we were all in those days and whispered into my ear because we all whispered, can you describe this? And I said, I can. And then something like a smile flitted across what had once been her face,

which a tremendously moving thing. It's to do with a sense of mission again, but partly also it identifies Ahmadine as one who was absolutely with the women she writes about, going through that suffering as personal pilgrimage is the way that one of the biographers described this. There's then a sequence of ten short lyric poems with a female persona, a lyric heroine if you like, in each of them.

And it's not absolutely clear there any more than it is in the early love poetry, whether this is really Ahmadah or not. It's quite difficult in some ways to see Ahmadine as the persona behind them all. because she's talking in different places. There are different settings, different experiences. But what it's about is the breakdown of personality. And so whether it's Ahmadine or not doesn't really matter because everyone's personality is compromised,

they lose integrity. In the end, they lose a sense of self. She says, I can't even see, this can't be me, the suffering is too great for me to know. It must be someone else. Could you read a little bit and tell us what you're really? after you read it. So I'll read a little bit from,

so she snaps out of this sense of lots of self in two epilogs, which are really very powerful. And the second epilogue has Ahmadine describing and judging what's going on. There's a bit in Russian, she says, "'A if you ever never in this country, "'vazdvignt, the saddum of a pamettling me, "'saglassie on it,

"'daiot derogistvo, "'but only with a-sustovium, He said he was, No, near the Mora, where I Rydides, The last Morgheim,

Asorna s' Vois, In the Csars' Inns Mugn't I'm Echetech'n't I'm

I'm I'm Where they to me They've For the Maw' Bailin'n

Bail's, Noor Maw' Noor, like pastilea lopla d'er, and I could go on, but I won't, that's more than enough. What's you're saying? So she's saying there that she speaks for the millions of people,

of her own people. And if at some stage in the future, they think of constructing a monument to her, she agrees to that, but it must no longer be by the sea where she was born, or in Sarski-Silor where she grew up and whether it an inconsolable shadowed, looking for her, but where she stood in the prison queues for 17 months, because she fears of forgetting

even in death the ordeal that people have gone through. So there's a sacrifice of the ordinary human self and her own personal emotional experience in order to concentrate and focus on the horror they've gone through. Catherine Hotson, what is, when did the requiem get out among its Russian readers and be taken up in such a fond and devout work? It got out in the 60s, not in print. So it was circulated in manuscript form, and so people got to know it. There was an attempt made actually to publish it in the celebrated literary journal Novi Mir, New World, in 1962. That was around the time when things were starting to come out.

So, for example, Soljanaitzin's story, one day in the life of Ivan Dinoevich, came out in the same journal. So there were hopes that this could be published, but it came to nothing in the end. So its first print publication happened in Munich in 1963. It was prefaced with a note saying that it was published without the author's knowledge or consent. But how did the Russian public get hold of it? We're in Munich. Let's get back to Russia. How did they send copies back to Russia? And was it around then? Copies will have come back. Print copies will have come back from abroad.

that was quite a common thing to have publications from abroad being ferried back in. But the main way that the text would have been transmitted in the 60s would have been in typed copies. So self-published Samistat, as it's called. Yes.

Alex Alessang. We come to the Second War, the Great Patriotic War now. It's a bit of a roller coaster. She's on the roller coaster. What was her response to that? Not unlike her response to the First World War in that she had a very dignified, patriotic stance. She'd not been published, as we've said.

She didn't start publishing from the ban in 25, between 1925 and 1940. She didn't publish at all during that time. And then she applied to the Writers' Union, became a member of it. A book was published in 1940 by her, but withdrawn immediately. because Stalin objected to one poem that had actually been written much earlier, but he thought applied to his regime. But when the war started, it became clear that she was a figure who could actually be very useful for boosting morale.

And one of the first things she did was she gave a radio address in besieged Leningrad in the early months of the siege. She was invited to give an address to the women of Leningrad, and she gives a very patriotic rousing speech. She says this is the city of... Peter the Great of Lenin, of Pushkin, of Dostoevsky and Block. She emphasises her own ties with it. And then she describes the heroism of the women of Leningrad who are protecting the city

and says, you know, with women like these, the city will never be taken. And this was broadcast to the whole nation. She was a figure people remembered despite her silence, so it had an immense effect. And then she wrote probably her most famous poem of World War II was written in 1942, while she was in evacuation in Tashkent. It's called Courage. And it was published in Pravda. It describes the hour of courage striking on our clocks.

Courage will not abandon us. And then it ends saying, we will preserve you Russian speech, mighty Russian word, and pass you on safe from captivity. Michael, Maska, is it about this time she writes in praise of Stalin? No, she wrote in praise of Stalin later on in the 1950s. So the next phase, if you like, is what happened after the war. As I said, she was evacuated to Tashkent for most of the war.

She came back to Moscow and then Leningrad in 1944. It was very popular there. She gave speeches again, poetry readings. She was applauded, standing ovations. But in 1946, there was a new cultural crackdown in general in the Soviet Union after the war. and Ahmadinev and the prose writer Mikhail Zorshinka was singled out for particular attack in 1946. And Ahmadine thought that that was connected to another event

in her live a visit from Sir Isaiah Berlin who came to see her as a member of the British Embassy at the end of 1945. May it may not have been the case. That seemed to identify her as somebody who is collaborating with the enemy. It's too long a story that Randolph-Churchy, You're behaving like a buffoon. Indeed.

Just a buffoon. We've got these buffoons, haven't we? And then he was a buffoon, and he almost betrayed her and almost said it to her death. Looking for caveat, idiot. Right. So she's there after the war. I went before my horse to market with the Stalin thing.

And she's banned after the war. Why is that? After all these patriotic speeches and so on and so forth. As I say, she thought it was connected to these personal things that she'd been consorting with, some of her British spy. She saw that as a big lady of the British spy. She saw that as a big,

in the Cold War, I think it's much simpler than that. I think that it's simply that the Soviet regime cracked down again after the relative cultural relaxation during the war years. And they're back to the tactics they're used in the 1920s, which is to pick on some of the most prominent figures around. You attack them in public, and that frightens everyone else into submission,

and that martyr was one of those. It might surprise people. Sorry, can I just ask Catherine this? I was just going to say she was such a symbol. of pre-revolutionary culture, but she was an obvious target. She symbolised everything the regime. It still might be surprising some listeners that the full force of this

regime is brought against a few poets isn't it? But still cut her in. She's writing away banned again. A second marriage is very unsuccessful, very unhappy, great poverty. And on she goes at a certain stage. They don't know what to make of us or someone

calls her a non and a harlot There's great insults. Crossbeaut are known and a how insults aimed at her. There's this poem, Without a Hero. Can you tell us it's a long and complex work, but it's important for her. What is the nub of that?

Right. Okay, this is quite difficult to summarize in a few sentences, but it was a piece that she started to write in 1940 and then seems to have been at intervals, possessed by. So she actually describes it as an external sort of visitation

that came to her at the end of 1940. It's in three parts. The first part is set on New Year's Eve in 1940. It's a poet alone sitting with candles in a room full of mirrors and into the room come a crowd of New Year's revellers from 1913, none of whom are alive.

So the past and the present merge together, and it's a meeting with her former associates, her friends, even her former self. So that's the beginning of it, and it recounts a number of times in varying amounts of detail. An incident which is a suicide, so perhaps there's a link back to Gumilov's a Temphev's suicide and that kind of melodratic behaviour that Alex was talking about earlier. So a young poet committed suicide in 1913 because he was disappointed in love. And that incident is the core of the first part, which is called 1913. The second part is...

I'm afraid we'll have to speed up a little bit if you don't mind. I know there's lots of parts, but can you just give us a quick summary of it? Okay, so it's an explanation. really. Poet speaking to editor, the editor is baffled by this incomprehensible story about 1913 and what is given there is an explanation that isn't really an explanation. It's more and more mystifications and enigmas and clues. And the final part is set in 1942 in Leningrad. The poet's voice speaking from evacuation in Tashkent reflects on her city, on the past and on the way that Russia in 1941

headed east to escape from the war while Russia from the east came west to save Moscow and that is the point to which the perm ends. Michael, did this poem again not come out into Russia until the 60s? It didn't come out in Russia until the 60s, that's right.

And so she's being allowed to survive and then we have this the Stalin make his entrance about now. Right. So she was surprised some listeners after all this revolution activity with this group who were shot, executed to her husband and so. Was there some link with Stalin? I'm not talking about anything ridiculous,

but I've read in some of you and I said he had written poetry himself and he rather admired her. He was a poet before he became a gangster revolutionary, yes, so he was a published poet in his youth. And he clearly had an interest. in the power of words and in poetry, and he liked playing the dark genius behind Russian literature to some extent. Why did she write in praise of him?

She wrote in praise of him briefly in 1951, 52, because her son was re-arrested, and she thought that the only way of possibly saving his life at that stage was finally to do what she not done for 40 years and write in praise of the regime, whether it really worked or not as difficult to say, but her son survived the camps and was released three years after Stan.

his death in 1956, but she was very surprised that she survived herself at all. She wrote poems about it, about coming back from the grave many times. And people around her disappeared. They began disappeared from 1921 when Gumayorov was shot, her first husband. And she felt complicit in that in many ways. But she and Bois Pasternak, and until he died in 1940, Mikhail Bulgark of the author of Master Margarita, survived against the odds. And it's a very much of the odds. And it seems pretty clear that Stalin himself wanted these people to survive. He kept tabs on what they were doing, but must have decreed they shouldn't be put to death. Can you give us, it's a difficult thing to say. Can you give us some idea of the life she was leading? We talk

about her second husband in poverty. Then she moved in with another couple and there was a men that shot going on with very little money, furtive under surveillance. How is she making, how she making, how she's making a living simple things like that. Well, as you say, she had a difficult life and this involved at one point living with her common law husband and his wife and their daughter. She was quite itinerant at various points.

And poor, yeah, she received a state pension for some of the time. She also earned money from translation. She was a prolific translation. She's translated from a great many languages using a prose version in Russian. She also wrote articles on Pushkin. She helped the various men in her life with their own work.

So it was a fairly hand-to-mouth existence. She sometimes received money from friends. So very erratic income. Mostly translation, though. Activity she described as like eating your own brain. But she was extremely good as it. We mentioned Isaiah Berlin, Catherine. He was Oxford Don.

Great intellectual in. this country and went across, spoke Russian among other languages, went across to Russia and saw her in her flat and his cover was blown by Churchill's son. Then she was invited to Oxford to get an hundred degree

and else and she was allowed to go and therefore they thought she would come back. So what was that about? By that time the Soviet regime had actually started to acknowledge Ahmadineva as a world-class poet they were actually getting to admit they were very proud of her

so she had become a cultural capital for them really. So it would have been embarrassing not to let her go and collect the degree. She herself was quite offended by the fact that they wouldn't give her her train ticket to leave the country until just before she left, because she declared, why are you worried, you know, it's not as though I'm not going to come back. She was very clear that she was going to visit

and she was going to come home again. When she did go to Oxford, what she remembered to one of her friends about it was that she spent her time and she said, correcting people's dissertations. So she was always very concerned about her reputation, versions of her biography, what people were saying about her, in Russia, of course, and abroad. So she was actually frequently incensed by what, found its way to her what Emmy Graves were writing about her

biographical accounts that she dismissed as inaccurate and biased and wrong. There wasn't, there were views in Russia there were against her. We've been presenting her, you all have been and some of you who she admire, great poet and so and so forth, but

there was a view that she mythologised herself. When you tell me what they found against her, those that did? Well, at its extreme version because some of this came from quite sensible, scholarly analyses that pointed out that she constructed herself and she was keen to control representations and so on as Catherine said. But at its extreme, there were two books published by a popular article Tamara Kataiva in 2007 and 2011 with the provocative titles anti-achmatera

and then abolition from slavery, anti-Ahmatava too. The abolition, the slavery being the obligation to venerate Ahmadine, this great moral genius. The charges against have sort of Verge from quite astute, so pointing out that she constructed herself, that she was quite controlling about the kind of information that she wanted disseminated, even to the point of dictating passages of biography and so on, to the completely absurd, so the charge that she didn't actually suffer at all, the 1946 resolution against her the ban was nothing, it wasn't serious, to the kind of comical, pointing out that the only husbands she lost

were actually someone else isn't not her own, which is technically, true. But it's the kind of backlash that I think comes from the fact that she was such an important cultural figure. It's inevitable almost. And finally, she emerged. That has been shrugged off. She's emerged as a very great poet indeed, not only in terms of Russia, but in terms of world poetry. Is that right, Michael? I'm sure that's right, yes. She's got an immense ability to generalise about human experience, to transform experience into poetry. And it's not simply the experience and the awful experience you live through. as well as the simple ones at the beginning of her life,

it's the poetry she turns it into that makes it last. And that vindicates what she said throughout her life. She talked repeatedly about poetry being power and poetry outliving those around her. That's what's happened with her verse, I think, to do it very... Well, thank you all very much. I've rushed it along because there's so much to say, but it is marvellous to have talked about her.

Thanks very much, Alexander Harrington, Catherine Hutchinson and Michael Basker. Next week we'll be discussing the life and political, philosophy of Cicero. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Yeah, definitely. We rushed, as you said.

Yeah, no, you can feel like you can. There's a lot more that we were going to say. Yeah, absolutely. Was there anything massive that we didn't cover? I don't know about massive. I mean, we could have given much more coverage to anything. There are things that would interest listeners, perhaps, about her biography that we didn't mention.

For instance, she knew Modiliani, the artist when they were both young before they were famous and wrote a fantastic memoir of him. And she was drawn by him. And she was drawn by him in Paris. The only trip she made abroad actually in some 50 years so she travelled in 1910, 1112 maybe. And met Modiliani when neither of them were famous,

it does appear that her interests in him and the memoir were piqued by the discovery that he was famous. But they had what must have been an affair. They renewed drawings by Madiliana of Oshmatova. Well, I think the people who will listen to the programme will be very annoyed that that wasn't in the programme. Well, there we go. I've said it now. But there's lots of little episodes on her biography that she kept coming back to. So Alex is right about a constructing a biography.

There were turning points, simple years of history that she'd come back to. 1921 was a big one where Alexander Block died, Gummaliov was executed. and another one was 1913 with the beginning of war in 1914. She came coming back to these single points. And she noted 1914 as the beginning of the real 20th century. That's what she calls it in poem without a hero. So at the end of 1913, it's like the passing of an era. These are ghosts that come into poem without a hero

that are from an obsolescent era. There's something that she's actually looking back on and condemning and separating herself from. And it's really unusual in Russian culture to see the First World War as a watershed moment. That was so much subsumed into revolutionary history and that's a really interesting thing about her that she identifies that point.

So it's actually bizarre that we've just been having the centenary of the 1917 revolutions and Ahmadineva doesn't elevate that date particularly. She almost stopped writing, didn't she? She went very little between 1918 and 1920. But the ghost is an interesting thing as well, by 1923, she wrote a poem on New Year 1923, the ghosts of seven people come to a new year party,

and you only realise two-thirds away through the poem that the other guests of the party are already dead. It's quite an eerie thing, it's a short lyric. But this sense that the people, the voice of the past, were speaking through her, is something that goes through a lot of the poetry that she wrote from then onwards, including poem Without a Hero.

A Poem Without a Hero, we could have had a whole programme on, but it's less well known than Rechvian. than Requiem, partly because Requiem is such a kind of clear moral statement. And poem without a heroism is more complex than it perhaps relies a bit more knowledge. Although I think that can be overplayed of Russian culture and Russian literature. But it's a fantastic piece of writing. And it's very unlike other things that she wrote and she placed enormous emphasis on it. She saw it as the sort of kind of crowning glory of her career.

And as Catherine said, it was her obsession for about 25 years writing this long piece of work. so it's well worth reading. It's very densely elusive. So scholars have picked over it many, many times to say, oh, that's Pushkin, that's Pashten, that's Mandelstam, that's Ahmadabah from when she was younger. And she also recalled that some of the things she put in it were borrowed from things people said.

For example, there's the introductory bit, the bit in capital letters saying that she's looking down from the year 1940, as if from a high tower. And this is based on something somebody said, when they heard her recite an early version of the 1913 part of the poem, who actually said this is like looking back on the past as if from Haightower and Ahmadine, wove that one straight in. But as always she's trying to make sense of what's going on. She's recording it. There's nostalgia and there's guilt.

And an attempt to understand how what happened in 1913 led to what happened in the Soviet era. Did she over-emphasise her own importance to these great events, Michael? You're saying yes, yes. In what way? She was very interested in the way that her own life intersected with history. And she would generalise from that intersection, which is what poetry and points do in any case. But that did lead to a fairly biased view of history nonetheless.

The classic example is her meeting with Isaiah Berlin as having provoked the Cold War. Yes. So nothing to do with anything else. It was that encounter. But it's a legitimate thing for a poet in those circumstances to do in the sense that she saw herself as the living representative of a culture that had been stamped out and lost. So it's about her, but it's also about herself as representing something bigger.

But she definitely places herself at the epicenter. Yeah, and tries to locate other people. So she put other writers in their places. For example, she was very dismissive of Tostoy. She thought his attitude to women was disgraceful. And she particularly disliked Chekhov and didn't mind who she told about that. She would repeat her line about Chekhov. What was her line against Chekhov?

Nothing ever happened. There was no drama. Oh, God, did she think that? She did. How could you be so mistaken? I wonder if it's an anxiety of influence. though that's been argued because actually some of her early poets are very Chakovian in the little snatches of dialogue and the sort of miscommunications and the representations of kind of ordinary girls lives you know I think the producer's

about to interrupt us thank you is to your coffee but also what's it Randolph Churchill did was he went to your apartment and yelled out Isaiah Bullion you're in there will you come and translate me so they can get me some caviar I think he wanted it Put on ice. He wanted to put on ice in this story. Yeah. I'd like tea or coffee. I'd love a coffee, please.

Tea for me. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Oh, hey, fancy meeting you here. I'm Sindhuvi. And if you enjoyed that, why not let Radio Force comedy of the week podcast into your feed? I host the podcast, and here's what happens. I bring you comedy, fresh out of Radio Force Funny Factory.

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