St Petersburg

Dear Mr. President,

I allow myself to appeal to you with this letter only because I am a friend of your great country. I often visit your country, meet many writers, and know that what the Western foes of peaceful co-existence are already calling the Brodsky Affair is nothing more than an inexplicable and regrettable exception. But I would like to inform you that the anti-Soviet press will use it to start a wide campaign and present this exception as a typical example of Soviet justice; it has gone as far as reproaching the authorities for hostility toward the intelligentsia and anti-Semitism. Until the early months of 1965, we proponents of a broad juxtaposition of various cultures had a simple reply to this scurrilous propaganda: our Soviet friends had assured us that the attention of the higher courts is turned to the Brodsky case and the decisions of the court will be reviewed. Unfortunately, time passed, and we learned that nothing had been done. The attacks of the enemies of the USSR, who are also our enemies, are becoming more and more harsh. For instance, I want to note that I have frequently been asked to express my opinion publicly. Until the present time I have been refusing to do so, but remaining silent is becoming as difficult as responding.

I want to let you know, Mr. President, about the anxiety we are undergoing. We are not unaware of how difficult it is within any social system to review decisions that have been made. But knowing your profound humanity and your interest in strengthening cultural ties between East and West within the framework of ideological struggle, I am daring to send you this highly personal letter, to ask you in the name of my sincere friendship for socialist countries, on which we pin all our hopes, to come to the defense of a very young man, who already is or, perhaps, will become a good poet.75

Obviously, Sartre, who in his time had attacked Nabokov for doing nothing—unlike Soviet writers—to build a socialist society, would send such a request (found in the Party archives by the Moscow newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta in 1993) only as the result of extraordinary social pressure. The Kremlin must have understood this. In November 1965 Brodsky was given early release from his northern exile and returned to Leningrad.

A few months later he (and many others of us) suffered a cruel blow: on March 5, 1966, thirteen years to the day after Stalin’s death, Akhmatova died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-six. She had not lived to see the official publication of Requiem or the full text of her masterpiece, Poem Without a Hero. But she knew that these works would not vanish without trace, since they had been bred into the bone of the Russian intellectual elite by then.

Akhmatova also knew that she was leaving behind a poetic movement she had created; the “magic choir,” as she had dubbed them, consisting of Brodsky, Bobyshev, Nayman, and Rein, were now part of the Petersburg literary mythos. (After Akhmatova’s death, the group got another name coined by Bobyshev—Akhmatova’s orphans.)

Brodsky recalled that when someone began a eulogy at her funeral with the words, “With Akhmatova’s departure has ended …,” everything inside him rejected those words. “Nothing had ended, nothing could or would end as long as we existed. Choir magical or not. Not because we remember her poetry or whether we write or not, but because she had become part of us, part of our souls, if you will.”76

According to Akhmatova’s wishes, the funeral service was at the Nikolsky Cathedral, where a large crowd (perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people) gathered on the cold morning of March 10. They were mostly Leningrad’s young people; an old beggar woman at the church gate said, “They keep coming, more and more, and they’re all her students!” A memorial tribute was held for her at the Writers’ Union. Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilyov, a former inmate of the Stalin camps and at this time a famous historian, asked me to play something at the ceremony, adding hastily, “But I’d like it to be a Russian Orthodox composer.” We agreed on Prokofiev. But that evening, at a private wake where Gumilyov was not present, we played Bach, whose works Akhmatova loved.

Music played an important part in Akhmatova’s life. With me she talked about, among others, Schumann, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky, especially his Pathetique Symphony. Akhmatova also talked about Shostakovich and Stravinsky, whose books of conversations with Robert Craft she had read attentively, paying particular attention to the inaccuracies in the description of their mutual friends in old Petersburg.