Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Akhmatova was the dazzling Petrograd poet of the Silver Age of Russian poetry
during the first two decades of the 20th century. She was well-travelled, internation-
ally feted and an incorrigible free spirit who, despite having the chance after the re-
volution, decided not to leave Russia and go abroad. This decision sealed her fate, and
within a few years her ex-husband would be shot by the Bolsheviks, and decades of
harassment and proscription would follow as Akhmatova's work was denounced by
Communist Party officials as 'the poetry of a crazed lady, chasing back and forth
between boudoir and chapel'.
However, as a reward for her cooperation with the authorities in the war effort,
Akhmatova was allowed to publish again after WWII. Nonetheless, she was cautious,
and she worked in secret on masterpieces such as
Requiem,
her epic poem about the
terror. Through all this, her love for her city was unconditional and unblinking. As she
wrote in
Poem Without a Hero:
'The capital on the Neva/Having forgotten its great-
ness/Like a drunken whore/Did not know who was taking her'. Despite unending offi-
cial harassment, Akhmatova refused to leave her beloved Leningrad and died there in
1966, having outlived Stalin by over a decade. Her sad life, marked by the arrest and
murder of so many friends and even her own son, is given a very poignant memorial
on, where the poet queued up for days on end to get news of her son following one of
his many arrests.
When Nikita Khrushchev came to power following Stalin's death in 1953, he re-
laxed the most oppressive restrictions on artists and writers. As this so-called 'thaw'
slowly set in, a group of young poets known as 'Akhmatova's Orphans' started to
meet at her apartment to read and discuss their work. The star of the group was the
fiercely talented Joseph Brodsky, who seemed to have no fear of the consequences of
writing about what was on his mind. In 1964 he was tried for 'social parasitism' (ie
being unemployed) and was exiled to the north of Russia. His sentence was shortened
after concerted international protests led by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. He
returned to Leningrad in 1965, only to immediately resume his thorn-in-the-side
activities.
During Brodsky's absence, Khrushchev had been overthrown and replaced by a
more conservative Brezhnev. It was Brezhnev who came up with the plan to silence
troublemaking writers by sending them into foreign exile. Brodsky was put on a plane
to Germany in 1972, and the second wave of Russian émigré writers, which would in-
clude fellow St Petersburg writer Sergei Dovlatov, began.
