Keeping the Flame. - Review - book review

The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, by Gyorgy Dalos, translated by Antony Wood (Farrar, Straus, 256 pp., $13)

That all-night conversation in Leningrad haunts one's imagination. Every aspect of it is charged with meaning, not least that it took place during the Christmas season of 1945, which coincided with the beginning of the Cold War. In this elegant and concentrated book, Gyorgy Dalos, novelist and literary critic, a Hungarian fluent in Russian, has the equipment to explore it in depth.

Isaiah Berlin, then 36 and an Oxford don, had spent the war in the British embassy in Washington writing astute reports on American moods and opinion. Born in Riga and fluent in Russian, he had been posted to Moscow in September 1945. Perhaps best described as a historian of ideas, Berlin was an impressively civilized man of the West-learned, a rationalist, a democrat. He was to write no major book, and, to be truthful, his prose does not give the impression of a mind of the highest order; but he was an extraordinary conversationalist, an ability that carried him far.

Isaiah Berlin came to that apartment in Leningrad from one side of the great conflict between freedom and totalitarianism that defined the 20th century. Anna Akhmatova, a giant in chains, was a semi-prisoner in the other. Perhaps the greatest Russian lyric poet of the last hundred years, she possessed a passionate intelligence. Her poetry is personal (though she can see herself in world-historical terms), often difficult, full of symbolism and mystery, a mixture, if this is imaginable, of Whitman and Yeats.

Berlin and Akhmatova talk all night in her apartment. For Berlin, it is fascinating. For her it is an explosive epiphany. She is the more drastic spirit, and so experiences a revelation. Suddenly she, who has been harassed and persecuted, who has seen friends imprisoned and murdered and for long periods been confined and refused publication, sees before her a civilized, and actual, human being. She is overwhelmed. She writes Berlin into her poem-in-progress as "the Guest from the Future," the man a man can be, and he also inspires a burst of shorter love lyrics. But the KGB has followed Berlin. Stalin is personally furious over the visit. He considers Berlin a "British spy." And she becomes a non-person once more, losing her ration privileges and license to publish.

Akhmatova, then 56, had emerged into the first rank of modernist poets during the decade before the First World War. Born Anna Gorenko into an aristocratic family, she named herself Akhmatova after a Tatar forbear from the time of Genghis Khan. Accounts of her then are striking indeed; she was a woman of exotic beauty. Her high cheekbones evoked her distant Tatar ancestry. Her black bangs were cut low across her forehead. Her bearing was charismatic as, tall and thin, she moved with remarkable grace. Modigliani, her lover in Paris, drew 16 nude sketches of her. As Berlin later wrote, she "was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness . . . She looked and moved like a tragic queen."

In her poetry she is a virtuoso of metrical forms, and while expert in classical Russian literature, especially Pushkin, she also aspires in the modernist way to moments of concentrated perfection. She weaves into her verse echoes of Russian literature, and also the rhythms and verbal echoes of Russian folk songs and even nursery rhymes. Holy Russia is ever present with its still lakes, trees of pine and birch, and golden turnip domes.

That night in her apartment she thirsted for news of the West. (Berlin noticed that she never said "Soviet Union," always "Russia.") She had been cut off from all news about European culture since 1925, when the regime turned inward and brutal. She wanted to know about Joyce, Eliot, Virginia Woolf. They talked music and painting. She railed against Chekhov and his "mud-colored soul." They discussed Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pasternak. She wanted to know about current writing in Europe, the United States. They talked about Kafka, Proust, Beethoven, Mozart, and her idol Pushkin. She recited her unpublished poetry from memory. That night Isaiah Berlin was the West: freedom, mind, creativity, civilization.

Soon afterward she would write, "The gift you gave me was brought from afar. / It seemed to you idle diversion / On that fiery night." And, "Thus, torn from the earth, / We rose up, like stars." And, "That late- night dialogue turned into / The delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows."

Berlin returned to England. In Russia, a nationwide smear campaign against Akhmatova commenced; cultural commissar Andrey Zhdanov denounced her to the Central Committee as "a nun and a whore." In 1956, during the Khrushchev "thaw," Berlin visited the USSR again, and she was afraid to see him. In 1965 she was permitted to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary degree, and saw Berlin again. They discussed Russian poetry. Her heart was failing. On March 5, 1966, she died peacefully in a hospital near Moscow. The funeral Mass took place at St. Nicholas Cathedral in Leningrad, and she is buried in that city. Today all her works are in print in Russia, and Leningrad is once again St. Petersburg. She was an enormous figure in 20th-century literature, and she probably knew that she and Berlin would win at last. Great poets know things like that.

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