Reading Chekhov

But when Berlin revisited the Soviet Union in 1956, and spoke with Akhmatova on the telephone (she did not dare see him, for fear of endangering her son, who was briefly out of prison), she told him that she had reread Chekhov, and acknowledged, he writes, that "at least in 'Ward 6' he had described her situation accurately, hers, and that of many others." This, too, is not surprising. It only underscores the divide between Chekhov's Dostoevskian examinations of extreme situations-works full of "depth and darkness and sublimity," "heroism and martyrdom"-and those situated on the blessedly "dreary" other side of the barbed wire. At the museum, a gray-haired woman with a crocheted shawl and a wool cap attached herself to Nelly and me- one of the army of retired women with insufficient pensions who are glad to find ill- or unpaid work in museums-and recited an earnest and na've spiel about the poet's life. The largest part of the museum is given over to Akhmatova's early life: to the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs (among them a drawing by Modigliani, whom Akhmatova met in Paris in 1911) that Akhmatova's contemporaries, ravished by her interesting beauty, tripped over each other to make; and to exhibits of books and manuscripts from the period when she was still able to publish. In addition, there are rooms that supposedly reconstruct the various periods when Akhmatova lived at the Fountain House-first with her second husband, Vladimir Shileilko, an Assyriologist; then with her third husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin (and with his ex-wife and child; such was communal apartment life in those days); then (after her separation from Punin) in a room of her own in the Punin apartment. When her friend Lydia Chukovska visited her in this room in 1938, she found that its "general appearance… was one of neglect, chaos. By the stove an armchair, missing a leg, ragged, springs protruding. The floor unswept. The beautiful things-the carved chair, the mirror in its smooth bronze frame, the lubok prints on the walls- did not adorn the room; on the contrary, they only emphasized its squalor further." By the end of the war, when another friend, Natalia Roskina, visited the room, the beautiful things were gone. "The circumstances in which Akhmatova was then living could not be described as impoverished, for poverty implies having a little of something. She had nothing," Roskina writes in a memoir of 1966. "There was a small, old desk in her room and an iron bed covered with a shabby blanket. The bed was obviously hard and it was obvious that the blanket provided no warmth."

Akhmatova's room in the museum has none of the squalor of Chukovskaya's description or the bleakness of Roskina's. It is of a piece with the elegant young beauty in the drawings and paintings and sculptures and photographs. It is sparsely furnished, but as if by willful design rather than out of pathetic necessity. Only choice and rare pieces of furniture and objects have been admitted: a leather-covered chaise with curved wooden legs on which a small black leather suitcase mysteriously rests; a glass-fronted rosewood cabinet with a few interesting pieces in it (a fan, a strange bottle with a crystal stopper, a porcelain statuette of Akhmatova in her youth); a chair with a white fringed shawl thrown over it; a carved chest with a couple of leather-bound books and three commedia dell'arte rag dolls lying on it. The room looks out on the palace's grassy, tree-filled courtyard. There is no trace in it of the line that stood in front of the Kresty prison or of the corpulent old woman Akhmatova became in the last years of her life. Shrines operate under a kind of reverse Gresham's law: beauty, youth, order, pleasure drive out ugliness, old age, disorder, suffering. In Paris, in 1965, Akhmatova was shown an article in an emigre journal that spoke of her as a martyr, and she protested, "If they want to write about me over here, let them write about me the way they write about other poets: this line is better than that one, this is an original use of imagery, this image does not work at all. Let them forget about my sufferings." Chekhov sounded a similar note of asperity in the summer of 1901 in a letter to Olga: "You write, 'my heart begins to ache when I think of the silent, deep well of melancholy within you.' What nonsense is this, my darling? I am not melancholy and never have been and feel tolerably well and when you're with me I feel absolutely fine." Akhmatova was fourteen when Chekhov died. Had he lived he undoubtedly would have met her in St. Petersburg literary society, and would not have complained about her looks or her clothes. He might or might not have liked her poetry, but he would have known better than anyone what she meant when she said, "Let them forget about my sufferings." Eleven

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