The Slavonic and East European Review Volume 89 Issue 3 2011 (Doi 10.5699 - Slaveasteurorev2.89.3.0455) Alexandra K. Harrington - Anna Akhmatova's Biographical Myth-Making - Tragedy and Melodrama

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Anna Akhmatova's Biographical Myth-Making: Tragedy and Melodrama

Author(s): Alexandra K. Harrington
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (July 2011), pp. 455-493
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
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SEER, Vol. 89, No. 3, July 2011
Anna Akhmatova’s Biographical

Myth-Making: Tragedy and
Melodrama
ALEXANDRA K. HARRINGTON
‘I have lived my own unique life, and my life lacks nothing; it has no
need to borrow from other people. [. . .] Why should I invent another
life for myself?’1 Anna Akhmatova, who reportedly made this remark
towards the end of her life, certainly had no need to appropriate or
manufacture an alternative biography: hers was unusually eventful,
intimately connected to the cultural and political life of her country.
Akhmatova judged the lives of poets against a romantic standard which
accorded particular significance to suffering, drama and heroics, and
her own provided these in abundance.2 However, she was acutely
aware from early in her career, as Pavel Luknitskii noted while receiv-
ing her assistance with his study of Nikolai Gumilev, that composing a
biography was a creative undertaking.3 She objected strenuously to a
draft of Emma Gershtein’s memoirs of Osip Mandel´shtam because
they mentioned a literary scandal which, Akhmatova believed, showed
him in a negative light.4 When Iosif Brodskii was tried for parasitism
in 1964, she famously observed, ‘What a biography they’re making for
our Ginger. As if he’d gone out and hired someone to do it’.5 When
her son, Lev Gumilev, once remarked bitterly that it would have been
Alexandra K. Harrington is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Russian at the School

of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University.
1 Anatoly Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, trans. Wendy Rosslyn, New York, 1991,
p. 211.
2 Akhmatova displayed a pronounced tendency to quantify suffering. For instance, she
did not accept that the campaign against Pasternak in relation to the award of the Nobel
Prize for Doktor Zhivago was in any way comparable to the experiences of either herself
or Mandel´shtam. See Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2 vols, Paris, 1980, 2,
pp. 334–35.
3 P. N. Luknitskii, Vstrechi s Annoi Akhmatovoi, 2 vols, Paris, 1997, 1, p. 233.
4 ‘Without reading to the end of the second page Akhmatova cried out “No, no!
You can’t write about that!” This prohibition referred to passing mention of the squabble
between Mandelstam and Gornfeld. I was astonished. That literary row was widely known
[. . .]. “Why can’t we at least mention it?” “Because, because” (she was incoherent with
agitation), “because Osip was in the wrong!”.’ Emma Gershtein, Moscow Memoirs: Memories
of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Literary Russia under Stalin, trans. John Crowfoot,
Woodstock, VT and New York, 2004, pp. 379–80.
5 Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, pp. 5–6.
456 akhmatova’s biographical myth-making
better for his mother had he perished in the camps, he presumably had
in mind her biography as much as her creative work.6
Conscious awareness of the self as biographical subject has the
potential to invert the usual relationship between life and biography,
as Paul de Man suggests:
We assume that life produces autobiography as an act produces its con-
sequences, but can we not suggest with equal justice that the autobio-
graphical project may itself produce and determine the life and that
whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of
self-portraiture, and thus determined in all its aspects by the resources of
the medium?7
This is perhaps particularly true of poets, who, as David Bethea
remarks, ‘so often shape their lives with the same desperate degree
of artifice as they shape their poems’.8 Akhmatova, an adept self-
marketer, was concerned throughout her career to shape a fitting
image and life-story for herself, and devoted considerable energy to
‘ghosting her own biography’.9 Natalia Roskina recalled that ‘in her
last years she generally spoke to affirm her own conception of her
life’.10 Other contemporaries were similarly struck by the extent to
which she was conscious of her posthumous reputation. Nadezhda
Mandel´shtam observed, ‘She lived always aware of her own biogra-
phy’.11 Sophie Ostrovskaia remarked that she ‘plays at being the good
queen, [. . .] has ceased to live her own life, for she lives only bio-
graphically with an eye on the gesture and the “word for the future”’.12
There is copious evidence demonstrating that Akhmatova regarded the
poet’s life as a text, which could be created and read like any other,
and that she behaved accordingly. In effect, like Mandel´shtam, she
treated her career as poet as a ‘charismatic performance’.13
Akhmatova employed various methods in the construction of her
public image.14 In particular, the confessional intonation of her poetry
6 Solomon Volkov, Vspominaia Akhmatovu: Iosif Brodskii — Solomon Volkov. Dialogi, Moscow,
1992, p. 34.
7 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism,
New York, 1984, pp. 67–81 (p. 69).
8 David M. Bethea, The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically, Boston,
MA, 2009, p. 26.
9 Catriona Kelly, ‘Anna Akhmatova’, in A History of Russian Women’s Writing: 1820–1992,
Oxford, 1994, pp. 207–23 (p. 219).
10 Natalia Roskina, ‘Goodbye Again’, in Konstantin Polivanov (ed.), Anna Akhmatova and
her Circle, trans. Patricia Beriozkina, Fayetteville, AR, 1994, pp. 162–98 (p. 175).
11 Nadezhda Mandelshtam, ‘Akhmatova’, in ibid., pp. 100–29 (p. 121).
12 Sophie Ostrovskaia, Memoirs of Anna Akhmatova’s Years 1944–1950, trans. Jesse Davies,
Liverpool, 1988, p. 48.
13 Gregory Freidin, Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-
Presentation, Berkeley, CA, 1987, p. 55.
14 Akhmatova’s biography and her approach to it implicitly raise the kinds of issues
explored by Formalist and Structuralist scholars such as Iurii Tynianov, Boris Toma-
shevskii, Boris Eikhenbaum, Lidiia Ginzburg, Iurii Lotman and Boris Gasparov in relation
alexandra k. harrington 457
and her extensive use of autobiographical referents encourage readers
to identify the lyrical persona directly with the poet.15 This is not
actually self-exposure but an artistic device (self-advertisement as a
paradoxical form of self-effacement), but it has the appearance of it,
and contributes significantly to the creation of a biographical myth.
The impression of unmediated, sincere confession is even more per-
vasive in Akhmatova’s later poetry than in the early collections, so
that several critics are seduced into believing that the lyrical persona
has completely merged with the author.16 This is a misconception, not
simply because the self in writing is always a fiction, but also because
it ignores the polyphonic effects of intertextual reference in Akhmato-
va’s later poetry and the degree to which the self it projects is fractured
and decentred.17 However, the prevalence of the misconception
highlights the effectiveness of Akhmatova’s blurring of the boundaries
between her poetic persona and biographical person.
Akhmatova also developed some effective extra-literary methods of
shaping her biography and public image in what, following Gérard
Genette, we might call the ‘epitext’ to her work.18 In conversation with
others she repeated particular anecdotes that she wished to be remem-
bered and covertly imposed her own viewpoint on them. This was a
conscious strategy: ‘I have a way of unobtrusively floating my own
14 Continued
to the topic of the writer’s life. The problems outlined in this article map onto concepts
such as Tynianov’s notion of the ‘literary personality’ (distinct from both the actual per-
sonality of the poet and from his or her lyrical persona), and Tomashevskii’s distinction
between ‘documentary biography’, which belongs to the domain of cultural history, and
the ‘biographical legend’, a literary conception of the author’s life, which is essentially
a fiction co-authored by the writer and the literary period. See Svetlana Boym, Death
in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, Cambridge, MA and London, 1991,
pp. 15–16, for a summary of their ideas.
15 As Bethea remarks, ‘during the years when one could buy a postcard with Blok’s
portrait (beginning in 1909, at least), the contemporary scenario for success called for the
presence of a distinct protagonist’ (p. 44). In Akhmatova’s case, ‘It was not difficult to read
her love poems as public expressions of her private life’. See F. D. Reeve, ‘The Inconstant
Translation: Life into Art’, in Sonia I. Ketchian (ed.), Anna Akhmatova 1889–1989: Papers from
the Akhmatova Centennial Conference, Bellagio Study and Conference Center, June 1989, Oakland, CA,
1993, pp. 149–69 (p. 155).
16 E. Dobin writes that Akhmatova’s lyrical persona completely merges with the author
from the 1930s onwards (Poeziia Anny Akhmatovoi, Leningrad, 1968, p. 140), and Amanda
Haight finds that ‘Slowly, during the course of her life, the word and the person giving
the word utterance ceased any longer to be divided, so that the voice of the persona
Akhmatova can be heard speaking to us directly through her poetry, without intermediary
and with the awesome authority of complete integrity’ (Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage,
New York and London, 1976, p. 21).
17 See Alexandra Harrington, The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors,
London, 2006, on the presentation of the self in Akhmatova’s poetry.
18 The epitext comprises interviews, correspondences, diaries, lectures and conversations
assembled by intermediaries. It is ‘overwhelmingly authorial’, even if it involves the
participation of others. See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane
E. Lewin, Cambridge, 1997, p. 35.
thoughts to people. And in a little while they sincerely believe that the
ideas are their own.’19 Other methods of control were rather less subtle,
such as the editorial role she assumed in the production of biographical
material about her by contemporaries. Akhmatova rewrote parts of her
friend Valeriia Sreznevskaia’s memoirs and collaborated with scholar
Amanda Haight — even dictating certain passages — to the point
where the resulting biography can be regarded as a ‘joint effort’.20
She reserved the right, as Naiman observes, to be the definitive
Akhmatoved.21 She even went to considerable lengths to control visual
representations of herself, avoiding appearances on film and, on
occasion, ‘correcting’ portraits by sculptors and painters.22
Akhmatova, whose poetry and behaviour reveal a strong strain of
Romanticism, was an immediate heir to the Symbolist, neo-Romantic
concept of ‘life-creation’ (zhiznetvorchestvo). In a desire to merge art and
life, the Symbolists attempted to impose an ‘idealized grid’ upon their
everyday lives in order to attain the ‘perfect aesthetic organization
of life’.23 In effect, they turned life into an object of artistic creation,
an art form in its own right, acting self-consciously and in such a way
as to suggest a deliberate aesthetic patterning of behaviour.24 The foun-
dations for this Symbolist practice were laid by predecessors such as
Gavrila Derzhavin, Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, who
also constructed their lives according to ideal matrices to varying
degrees.25 Indeed, it is Pushkin’s biographical legend, which revolves
around the poet’s struggle with authority and state power, that provides
the main blueprint for the myth of the poet in Russia — what Victor
Erlich calls the ‘myth of the artist as a tragic hero’ — and Russian
poetry throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries repeatedly
articulates and perpetuates the image of the Russian poet as a tragic,
19 Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, pp. 81–82.

20 Beth Holmgren, Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda
Mandelstam, Bloomington, IN, 1993, p. 195.
21 Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, p. 81.
22 See I. A. Muravéva, ‘Anna Akhmatova i dokumentalńoe kino’, in N. V. Koroleva
and S. A. Kovalenko (eds), Tainy remesla, Moscow, 1992, pp. 148–57. On her ‘correcting’
of portraits, see A. Zholkovsky, ‘The Obverse of Stalinism: Akhmatova’s Self-Serving
Charisma of Selflessness’, in Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (eds), Self and Story in
Russian History, Ithaca, NY and London, 2000, pp. 46–68 (p. 49).
23 Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, p. 6.
24 See Irina Paperno and Joan Grossman (eds), Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian
Modernism, Stanford, CA, 1994 for a wide-ranging examination of this subject.
25 See, for instance, Anna Lisa Crone, The Daring of Derzhavin: The Moral and Aesthetic
Independence of the Poet in Russia, Bloomington, IN, 2001, and David Powelstock, ‘Living into
Language: Mikhail Lermontov and the Manufacturing of Intimacy’, in Monika Greenleaf
and Stephen Moeller-Sally (eds), Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden
Age, Evanston, IL, 1998, pp. 297–324.
Christ-like figure, with remarkably little variation.26 As Svetlana Boym
observes, ‘The worship of the Poet with a capital P is a peculiar form
of Russian religion which survives today’.27
In accordance with this tradition, Akhmatova projects the image
of herself in her late poetry (the ‘Severnye elegii’ [‘Northern Elegies’,
1940–64], Rekviem [Requiem, 1935–61] and elsewhere) as someone who
perished and was subsequently reborn, and highlights the split from
her former self evinced by her encounter with a historical fate.28 This
chthonic narrative of life, death and revival is frequently encountered
in Russian post-revolutionary poetry.29 The mythology which has
arisen around Akhmatova thereby conforms broadly to a traditional
pattern, stressing her fortitude in the face of undeniable suffering in the
tragic terms of the Russian poet’s Golgotha.30
Akhmatova’s obsession with her biography has yet to receive the
thorough-going critical attention it merits, although there is a respect-
able body of work identifying methods she used to control her own
representation and create a compelling personal myth. Individual
studies focus variously on the role of her Muse in her myth-making,
the autobiographical myth projected in her poetry, or the image of her
presented in memoirs. The greatest — and most provocative — con-
tribution has been made by Aleksandr Zholkovskii in several articles
which highlight Akhmatova’s power games in the context of Stalinist
practice.31 However, there is as yet no equivalent of Gregory Freidin’s
26 Victor Erlich, The Double Image: Concepts of the Poet in Slavic Literatures, Baltimore, MD,
1964, p. 100. Lotman demonstrates that Pushkin engaged in self-fashioning, playing with
different Romantic and Realist models in both art and life (Pushkin: Biografiia pisatelia,
Leningrad, 1983, p. 250). On the poet as Christ-like, see Lermontov’s ‘Smert´ poeta’ (‘Death
of a Poet’, 1837), Maksimilian Voloshin’s ‘Na dne preispodnei’ (‘In the Depths of the
Underworld’, 1921), or Boris Pasternak’s ‘Gamlet’ (‘Hamlet’, 1946).
27 Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, p. 120. See also G. S. Smith, ‘Russian Poetry: The Lives
or the Lines?’, Modern Language Review, 95, 2000, 2, pp. xxix–xli. Smith views the Russian
tendency as an attempt to make poetry into a ‘surrogate religion’ which rests upon the
assumption that ‘persecution in any form legitimizes, spiritualizes, ennobles, strengthens or
universalizes’, as a perniciously self-serving myth (p. xl). That this idea survives today was
amply demonstrated by a broadcast of 11 August 2007, of the radio programme ‘Culture
Shock’ (‘Kul´turnyi shok’) devoted to Kataeva’s Anti-Akhmatova, in which callers reacted
with hostility to the book, likening the attack on the poet to raising a hand to strike a saint.
For a transcript of the programme, see <http://www.litkonkurs.ru/?pc=forum&m=3&vid=
151355&project=10> [accessed 2 September 2010].
28 See Harrington, The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova, pp. 20–23, on Akhmatova’s myth of death
and rebirth.
29 Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, p. 155.
30 In connection with Akhmatova’s biography, by myth I mean a popular belief or story
(whether true or invented) that has become associated with her. A body of myths therefore
constitutes a mythology.
31 See O. V. Chervinskaia, ‘Mifotvorchestvo Anny Akhmatovoi’, Voprosy russkoi literatury,
54, 1989, 2, pp. 3–19; Kelly, ‘Anna Akhmatova’; Holmgren, Women’s Works. Articles by
Zholkovskii are ‘Anna Akhmatova — piat´desiat let spustia’, Zvezda, 9, 1996, pp. 211–27;
‘Anna Akhmatova: Scripts, Not Scriptures’, Slavic and East European Journal, 40, 1996, 1,
pp. 135–41, and ‘The Obverse of Stalinism’ (see note 22 above). Tamara Kataeva’s Anti-
Akhmatova (Moscow, 2007) contains some astute insights into the mechanics of Akhmatova’s
myth-making but ultimately buries them amidst unrelenting tendentiousness.
examination of Mandel´shtam’s romantic self-fashioning, Coat of Many
Colors, despite the fertile ground that Akhmatova’s work and biography
provide.
The present article increases understanding of Akhmatova’s complex
mythopoesis by paying particular attention to the genre, or mode, of
her biographical myth and identifying the particular artistic structures
and narrative strategies which underpin it and give it shape. It focuses
primarily, therefore, on various forms of life-writing by and about
Akhmatova. Although it is generally acknowledged that Akhmatova’s
image was a construct and that she was an adept role-player (Zholkovskii,
for instance, signals her use of a ‘dramatic line’ and repeatedly employs
phrases such as ‘masterful performance’, ‘star performance’, ‘directo-
rial, histrionic’), her self-construction has not been examined in relation
to specific theatrical genres.32 Often it is the case that Akhmatova’s
posing is merely theatrical in a general sense, but cumulatively the
discussion will demonstrate that, in striving to construct her biography
according to an ideal, Romantic pattern conforming to the traditional
image of the Russian poet as tragic hero and martyr, Akhmatova
frequently employs the rhetoric and structures of melodrama. The
melodramatic moments occur when she — whether consciously or not
— heightens, distorts and embellishes certain aspects of her biography
with dramatic and sensational effect, or (as de Man suggests can
happen) acts in accordance with a biographical imperative.
It must be emphasized from the outset that the invocation of melo-
drama in relation to Akhmatova’s biography and her approach to her
experience is in no way intended to diminish or deny the horrors of
twentieth-century Russian history or, indeed, the disasters and pri-
vations that Akhmatova personally witnessed and experienced. The
position in which she found herself for much of her career as poet —
faced with a choice between silence and spiritual betrayal — is a gen-
uinely tragic dilemma.33 Often, the sense of loss and historical rupture
expressed in her poetry engender self-examination and feelings of
personal responsibility that provide ample evidence of a tragic cast
of mind. However, as Robert Heilman remarks in his classic study of
tragedy and melodrama, even ‘the most determined partisan of tragedy
could not deny that melodrama is inevitable’.34
32 Zholkovskii, ‘Scripts, not Scriptures’, p. 138 and p. 140, and ‘The Obverse of Stalinism’,
p. 62.
33 See Erlich, The Double Image, p. 15. A tragic dilemma involves being forced to navigate
conflicts between obligations and passions and undergoing the consequences of the choices
made: see Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience, Seattle,
WA and London, 1968, p. 19.
34 Ibid., p. 125.
The article opens with a brief description of the characteristics of
melodrama as artistic structure and way of approaching experience.
This is followed by discussion of the theoretical and practical issues
raised by Akhmatova’s proclivity for theatricality and conscious
creation of a biographical legend, and then by an outline of the tragic
features of her image, since she is far more readily associated with
tragedy than with melodrama. This lays the ground for a consideration
of the melodramatic representations of Akhmatova in biographical
studies of her. Then, a set of detailed readings of key episodes in
her biography, paying close attention to how she conceived and repre-
sented them, explore their relationship to melodrama. The discussion
culminates in an examination of melodrama in connection with
totalitarianism, and assesses the extent to which Akhmatova’s use of
melodrama can be seen to reflect the surrounding political and his-
torical context. Overall, an appreciation of the melodramatic structures
in her biography not only allows identification of points at which
her myth-making can be seen in operation, but also complicates and
forces reassessment of, the customary emotionally restrained, ‘low-key’,
dignified and tragic image of the poet.35 At the same time, Akhmato-
va’s image-creation offers a prism through which to explore some of
the psychological and cultural functions of melodrama. She was both
highly resourceful and very circumspect about political reality, and her
melodramatic sensibility can be seen to play a crucial part in her spir-
itual — if not physical — survival, as well as cementing her formidable
posthumous reputation.
Melodrama: literary structure and version of experience
Classical stage melodrama presents an intense emotional and ethical
drama based on a Manichaeistic struggle between good and evil. The
term itself was originally coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to designate
a drama accompanied by music, but it was René Charles Guilbert
de Pixérécourt (1773–1844), the ‘Corneille of the Boulevards’, who pro-
duced the first representative corpus of plays. Melodrama’s popularity
spread rapidly throughout Europe, and Russian translations of French
melodramas played regularly on Russian stages during the nineteenth
century.36 Melodrama soon infiltrated other art forms, in particular
literature and film, and by the twentieth century was firmly established
within Russian cultural production.
35 See Zholkovsky, ‘The Obverse of Stalinism’, p. 63.

36 For an account of stage melodrama in the Russian context, see Julie A. Buckler, ‘Melo-
dramatizing Russia: Nineteenth-Century Views from the West’, in Louise McReynolds
and Joan Neuberger (eds), Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, Durham,
NC and London, 2002, pp. 55–78.
Since the 1960s melodrama has been rescued to some extent from
academic disrepute and several major Western studies reflecting on its
history and constituent features have been devoted to it.37 In Russia,
melodrama was the object of serious scholarly interest at an early date,
attracting the interest of the Formalists. Sergei Balukhatyi, who was
loosely connected with the Formalist circle, wrote a study of melodrama
in 1926 determining its basic constructional principles and typical char-
acteristics, on the evidence of French melodramas and the repertory of
the Russian theatre of the final quarter of the nineteenth century.38 His
essential points were as follows: melodrama is primarily concerned with
moralizing; it teaches, punishes and rewards. It does this by dramatiz-
ing the struggle between polarized ethical forces, primarily good and
evil; hence its typical cast of dastardly villains and virtuous heroes or
heroines. Its main distinguishing feature is emotion, so that everything
is subordinated to the central aesthetic goal, which is to elicit the
greatest possible intensity of feeling. The monologues and dialogue of
the characters therefore take the form of impassioned speeches, with
copious exclamations and expressive vocabulary. Melodramatic plots
tend to centre on emotionally-charged situations such as the accusation
of an innocent person or the fate of a defenceless heroine, and they are
constructed with unexpected twists and sudden reversals. The action,
which must be extraordinary and spectacular, is justified by the sheer
force of emotions, producing psychologically-primitive characters with
clear functions.
Tragedy and melodrama are, on the face of it, extremely similar to
one another. Both involve suffering and both can be spectacular, both
portray virtue subjected to horror and forced to undergo unbearable
experiences. It is nonetheless possible to draw a broad distinction
between them: critics generally concur (in what is essentially an
extension of the Aristotelian view) that a clear difference between trag-
edy and melodrama is expressed in the figure of the main hero or
heroine. As Heilman formulates it: ‘In the concept of the good man
with the flaw lies the germ of what I take to be a fundamental view of
37 For instance, David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–
1850, Chicago, IL, 1968; Eric Bentley, ‘Melodrama’, in his The Life of the Drama, New York,
1964, pp. 195–218; James L. Smith, Melodrama, London, 1973; Peter Brooks, The Melodra-
matic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven, CT,
1976.
38 See Daniel Gerould, ‘Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama’, in Marcia Landy
(ed.), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Detroit, MI, 1991, pp. 118–34,
for a useful discussion of Formalism and melodrama. The main Russian texts on
melodrama are Sergei Balukatyi, ‘K poetike melodramy’, Poetika, 5 vols, repr. Leningrad
1927 (Munich, 1970), 3, pp. 63–86, and Boris Tomashevskii, ‘Frantsuzskaia melodrama
nachala XIX veka’, Poetika, 2, pp. 55–82.
tragedy.’39 Tragic heroes and heroines, according to this understand-
ing, are in part responsible for the evil with which they are confronted
because the events which befall them are precipitated by their own
actions. Tragedy is in this respect quite distinct from melodrama, in
which evil is external, and in which things happen, unprovoked, to an
undivided, or ‘whole’, and innocent hero or heroine:
Here lies the crucial difference: the tragic protagonist places himself in the
situation by his deliberation and decision, while the melodramatic hero is
forced into danger not by the need to act in response to a moral problem,
but by a villain who presents obstacles of an evil nature.40
In melodrama, unlike tragedy, life itself is conceived as a struggle for
survival, so that there is always an enemy to battle against, or a villain
to unmask. Melodrama’s core operation is to move us to feel sympathy
for the virtues of the beset victim and to experience enmity towards
the villain who causes suffering. The villains in classical melodramas,
appropriately enough, given Akhmatova’s situation for most of her
career, are often tyrants or dictators, who wield political power over
others. Virtue and innocence are trampled and ill-treated, but survive
to triumph eventually over the tyrant.
Melodrama is not merely a prevalent artistic structure. It has
become a distinctly modern mode of conception and expression,
a valid and ubiquitous way of perceiving, shaping and narrating the
circumstances of our lives, a ‘certain fictional system for making sense
of experience’ and ‘semantic field of force’.41 As Louise McReynolds
and Joan Neuberger observe, ‘From its origins in France in the 1790s
as a specific form of staged drama, melodrama has been adapted to
every artistic genre and has entered everyday life as a distinct mode of
behaviour’.42 Peter Brooks remarks that, ‘Melodrama at heart repre-
sents the theatrical impulse itself: the impulse towards dramatization,
heightening, expression, acting out’.43 As these descriptions suggest,
melodrama can legitimately be viewed as a productive genre in its own
right, yet it still tends to be regarded as merely a debased form of trag-
edy, or something that tragedy lapses into when it ceases to be effective.
In the hierarchy of genres and in human experience, Robert Heilman
39 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, p. 7. Arthur Miller, in his 1949 essay, ‘Tragedy and
the Common Man’, advocates a revision of the classical idea of the nobility of the tragic
hero, but still places the tragic flaw at the centre of his definition of tragedy: Robert A.
Martin (ed.), The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, London, 1978, pp. 3–7.
40 Kent G. Gallagher, ‘Emotion in Tragedy and Melodrama’, Educational Theatre Journal,
17, 1965, 3, pp. 215–19 (p. 218).
41 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. xvii.
42 McReynolds and Neuberger, Imitations of Life, p. 4.
43 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. xi.
suggests, tragedy is assigned a superior place and possesses a particular
attraction:
In the very sound of tragedy there is a note of dignity, a scent of nobility,
an aura of the heroic, that we want to claim; in enrolling ourselves as
tragic, we gain a better status in emotional life, we become upper-class
sufferers.44
Heilman explores tragedy and melodrama both as dramatic genres
and versions of experience. He makes the case for viewing melodrama
as a distinctive and valuable generic category, capable of being ‘elabo-
rated with dignity and power’, but he does not ultimately mount a
challenge to the traditional hierarchy of genres.45 Indeed, he is clearly
motivated by a perceived need to reserve a special place for tragedy,
as ‘a specific form of experience that needs to be differentiated from all
other catastrophic disturbances of life’.46 However, he convincingly
equates melodrama (which is concerned with conflict between the
individual and external forces) with the public sphere and the world
of politics, and tragedy (which involves inner conflict, of the psyche)
with the private.47 Heilman thus ascribes to melodrama a significant
function that might operate at both the level of individual psychology
and that of culture or society more broadly:
What melodrama typically offers is the exaltation of victory, indignation at
wrongdoing, the pitiableness of victims, the frustration of the indeterminate
outcome, the warming participation in courage, the despair of defeat, the
shock of disaster, the sadness of death.48
Melodrama presents itself as a valuable mode of expression precisely
because it concerns itself with what Brooks has called the ‘moral
occult’, the ‘domain of operative spiritual values both indicated within
and masked by the surface of reality’.49 It locates and articulates the
emotional and moral dimensions of human existence.
Famous women and ‘bad theatre’
Helena Goscilo draws a comparison between Akhmatova and star of
silent film melodramas Vera Kholodnaia, noting that a ‘substantial
basis for comparison is the theatrical nature of Kholodnaia’s on-screen
and Akhmatova’s off-screen behaviour’.50 As a consequence of her
44 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, p. 28.

45 Ibid., p. 79.
46 Ibid., p. 7.
47 Ibid., p. 108.
48 Ibid., pp. 300 and 95.
49 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 5.
50 See Helena Goscilo, ‘Playing Dead: The Operatics of Celebrity Funerals, or, The
Ultimate Silent Part’, in McReynolds and Neuberger, Imitations of Life, pp. 283–319
(p. 315).
theatricality and treatment of her career as poet as performance,
Akhmatova’s biography presents particular problems. Stories about her
fall into at least three categories, as enumerated by Kees Verheul:
1. Stories about the persona; that is, stories confirming and reinforcing the
artistic image that Akhmatova herself created.
2. Stories about the actress [. . .] who created her persona and who at
times related to this pursuit with striking irony.
3. Finally, the stories about Akhmatova the person, that is about the
individual who engaged in all of the above, and also quite often did not
[. . .], with or without irony.51
As Verheul’s reference to ironical and non-ironical role-playing
suggests, matters are significantly complicated by the fact that, for all
her efforts to shape her an appropriate image, Akhmatova’s attitude to
her own myth-making was highly ambivalent. Nadezhda Mandel´shtam
observes that ‘her volatile character would permit neither the secrecy
nor the idealization she longed for’.52 Both she and Anatolii Naiman
suggest that the aristocratic poetess ‘Akhmatova’ was a public role that
Akhmatova performed when expected, but which remained separate
from the private and informal ‘Anna Andreevna’: ‘she had to behave
like “Akhmatova”, and did so.’53 Yet it is often impossible to distinguish
between the selves that Verheul refers to as the person, the actress and
the persona. These are not clear-cut divisions.54 Indeed, it is difficult
to arrive at an understanding of selfhood in which role-playing can
be distinguished safely from authenticity. In this way, Akhmatova’s
biography and image present considerable challenges to interpretation.
To take a concrete example, Abram Gozenpud, a literary scholar,
writer and translator, recollected that when he met Akhmatova in 1956,
he observed that she resembled Catherine the Great. She replied:
‘You’re not the first to say that. I hope that you’re all mistaken. I can’t bear
her. In general, I don’t like famous women. There is something of
bad theatre [chto-to ot plokhogo teatra] in them. Moreover, they were invented
by men.’55
51 Zholkovskii is fond of quoting this passage, which is taken from ‘Neskol´ko

posleakhmatovskikh vospominanii’, in N. V. Koroleva and S. A. Kovolenko (eds), Svoiu mezh
vas eshche ostaviv ten´, Moscow, 1992, pp. 46–50 (p. 49).
52 Mandelshtam, ‘Akhmatova’, p. 121.
53 Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, p. 110. See also Mandelshtam, ‘Akhmatova’,
p. 122.
54 Boym observes that ‘by virtue of certain uncanny mechanisms, a literary image can
turn into a poet’s “second nature,” and the poet’s “real life” might become indistinguishable
from the created one’. Death in Quotation Marks, p. 6.
55 ‘Neuviadshie listía’, in M. M. Kralin and I. I. Slobozhan (eds), Ob Anne Akhmatovoi,
Leningrad, 1990, pp. 311–27 (p. 311).
Akhmatova simultaneously endorses and distances herself from
Gozenpud’s remark: ‘you’re not the first to say that’, but ‘I hope that
you’re all mistaken’. Her response is presumably best understood as
disingenuous or ironic. She actively encouraged the impression of her-
self as aristocratic or queenly; indeed, this had been part of her public
image at least since Marina Tsvetaeva crowned her ‘Anna of all the
Russias’ early in her career.56 Isaiah Berlin thought her a ‘consummate
actress who had mastered a queenly role’, but noted too that she
was ‘shrewd and self-knowing enough to detach herself from it’.57
Ultimately, it is impossible to determine which Akhmatova of Verheul’s
trio is speaking to Gozenpud: the persona, the actress and the person
all overlap and intersect. They are, after all, products of the same
consciousness. The anecdote seems to reinforce the image of her as
aristocratic or queenly at the same time as it appears to reveal her as
an actress playing a role who views her activities with irony. It might
also be taken to constitute a frank revelation from Akhmatova the
person about her ambivalent attitude towards fame.58
Accounts of Akhmatova suggest not only that she was a ‘brilliant
actress’, but that she possessed ‘a very highly developed sense of the
theatricality of life itself’.59 She undoubtedly indulged in theatre —
commentators frequently emphasize the thespian in her — but not, her
remark to Gozenpud implies, bad theatre, and she was careful to invent
herself rather than to allow others the last word. The ‘bad theatre’ that
Akhmatova detected and professed to dislike in famous women is
immediately suggestive of melodrama, which is generally seen as syn-
onymous with a low-grade and rather rudimentary dramatic type, and
is typically associated with the female gender.60 As Svetlana Boym
argues, melodramatic representation is a particular threat for a female
poet, who is always in danger of being objectified, be it as Romantic
heroine or femme fatale (in Akhmatova’s case, it was both). The theatre
of a female poet’s life, she contends, is represented as a ‘provincial
melodrama, and not a visceral theater of cruelty open only to male
geniuses’.61 Akhmatova deals with this potential objectification by
wresting as much control over her own image as possible, shaping
herself according to the predominantly masculine tradition of poet
56 In the poem ‘Zlatoustoi Anne — vseia Rusi’ (‘Golden-mouthed Anna of all Rus´’,
1916).
57 Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, London, 1998, p. 159.
58 Moreover, any interpretation relies on Gozenpud’s accurate recollection of
Akhmatova’s remark.
59 Reeve, ‘The Inconstant Translation’, p. 153; Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova,
p. 110.
60 See Pam Cook, ‘Melodrama and the Women’s Picture’, in Landy, Imitations of Life,
pp. 248–62, on the gender issues surrounding melodrama and the grounds for feminist
scepticism towards it.
as tragic hero, and trying to avoid ‘bad theatre’ in the process. Her
appraisal of Tsvetaeva as excessively emotional and unrestrained is
telling in this regard. When the two met in 1940, Akhmatova made a
point of not writing or talking about their encounter. She reflected that
Tsvetaeva, by contrast, would probably have turned it into a wonderful
emotional drama and created a ‘fragrant legend’ of it.62 In fact,
Akhmatova herself resorted frequently to theatrical and melodramatic
representations, as will be demonstrated below, but these are disguised
and concealed beneath a dignified and markedly unmelodramatic
public image. In this regard, Helena Goscilo’s comparison with Kholod-
naia can be extended: Kholodnaia’s acting style, while remaining
intensely emotional, eschewed the exaggeration characteristic of
melodrama in favour of more economical gestures.63
Akhmatova and tragedy
Akhmatova was inextricably connected with tragedy throughout her
career. Dignity, nobility and heroism, all typically tragic qualities, are
repeatedly associated with her. She tended not to display the kind of
affectation, excess or histrionics that are closely associated with melo-
drama. For instance, when meeting her late in her life, Isaiah Berlin
found that ‘there was nothing falsely melodramatic about her tragic
air’.64 Much earlier on, Kornei Chukovskii pointed to her self-control
and lack of passionate, unrestrained gestures (ascribing this quality
to her upbringing in Tsarskoe Selo).65 She consciously shaped both
her poetic persona and public image by means of reference to tragic
heroines from the Bible, antiquity and the medieval era.66 Osip
Mandel´shtam’s 1914 lyric, ‘Vpoloborota, o pechal´’ (‘Half-turning, oh
grief’), in which he likens her to Europe’s celebrated nineteenth-
century tragedienne Eliza Rachel (another actress renowned for her
understated use of gesture), was particularly instrumental in creating
the public perception of Akhmatova as tragic heroine. As Anatolii
Naiman remarks:
62 See Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, London, 1996, p. 236.
63 See McReynolds, ‘The Silent Movie Melodrama: Evgenii Bauer Fashions the
Heroine’s Self’, in Laura Englestein and Stephanie Sandler (eds), Self and Story in Russian
History, Ithaca, NY, 2000, pp. 120–40 (p. 132).
64 Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 151.
65 ‘Chukovskii ob Akhmatovoi: Po arkhivnym materialam’, Novyi mir, 1987, pp. 227–39
(p. 223).
66 Among her tragic doubles are Cassandra (after Osip Mandel´shtam’s poem of 1917),
the Boiarynia Morozova, Dido, Salome, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Rachael and Michal. See
the poems ‘Posledniaia roza’ (‘The Last Rose’, 1962), ‘Kleopatra’ (‘Cleopatra’, 1940), and
the cycle ‘Bibleiskie stikhi’ (‘Biblical Verses’, 1921–22). See also T. V. Tsivían, ‘Antichnye
geroini — zerkala Akhmatovoi’, Russian Literature, 8, 1974, pp. 103–19 (p. 106), and Anna
Lisa Crone, ‘Genre Allusions in Poèma bez geroia: Masking Tragedy and Satyric Drama’, in
Ketchian, Anna Akhmatova, pp. 43–59.
She was a tragic figure even before the beginning of the new epoch [. . .],
but the epoch was incredibly magnanimous in providing her with all the
components of tragedy: bloodshed, inconsolable grief, innumerable
graves.67
Her post-revolutionary biography consolidated the image of
Akhmatova as tragic heroine, so that, as Beth Holmgren writes, she
‘earned a martyrdom similar to that of Mandel´shtam’ and is com-
monly represented as a ‘tragic figure — a beautiful woman, a creative
genius — who is outcast, persecuted, and despairing within the context
of Stalinism’.68 As this suggests, Akhmatova is still thought of as over-
whelmingly tragic, despite the fact that many of her contemporaries
(including Gumilev and Mandel´shtam) arguably lay greater claim to
tragedy through physical annihilation at the hands of the state.
Yet the bloodshed, inconsolable grief and innumerable graves
mentioned by Naiman are not the exclusive preserve of tragedy: they
are also the components of melodrama. Indeed, melodrama has been
invoked to describe Akhmatova’s early poetry and the attitude of
her lyrical persona towards her experience.69 Akhmatova’s aristocratic,
restrained Tsarskoe Selo identity was actually an assumed one, and it
contrasts sharply with the Southern, wild-child aspects of her self-image
presented in her autobiographical prose. Nadezhda Mandel´stam
insists that Akhmatova’s refined, ladylike qualities were an act, and
remarks that, in old age, her facade of self-control (sderzhannost´) com-
pletely disappeared.70 She recalls Akhmatova describing her young self
as capricious and unrestrained (‘byla [. . .] kapriznoi, [. . .] ne znala
uderzhu’).71 She comments, too, on the poet’s narcissism and self-
regard, both of which are associated in psychological terms with
melodramatic behaviour.72
Narcissism, melodrama and theatricality were ubiquitous in the dec-
adent, bohemian culture that formed the backdrop to Akhmatova’s
youth, with its self-conscious practice of zhiznetvorchestvo; products of its
neo-Romantic desire to merge art and life. In this respect, Silver Age
culture exemplifies the way in which, in the Romantic conception
of the world, the melodramatic tends to replace the tragic and the
theatrical dominates over the dramatic, as Peter Brooks puts it.73 He
67 ‘Lessons of a Poet’, in Polivanov, Anna Akhmatova and her Circle, pp. ix–xvi (p. xv).
68 Holmgren, Women’s Works, pp. 23 and 74.
69 Kelly highlights her ‘melodramatic masochism’ (‘Anna Akhmatova’, p. 211), and Reeve
describes an early lyric as a ‘mini-melodrama’ (‘The Inconstant Translation’, p. 154).
70 Mandelshtam, ‘Akhmatova’, p. 122, and Vtoraia kniga, Paris, 1972 (p. 498).
71 Ibid, p. 497.
72 Mandelshtam, ‘Akhmatova’, p. 114; Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 35.
73 Ibid., p. 81.
makes a link between melodrama and the creation of a personal
myth:
By the end of the Enlightenment, there was clearly a renewed thirst for the
Sacred, a reaction to desacralization expressed in the vast movement we
think of as Romanticism. The reaction both asserted the need for some
version of the Sacred and offered further proof of the irremediable loss of
the Sacred in its traditional, categorical, unifying form. Myth-making could
now only be individual, personal; and the promulgation of ethical impera-
tives had to depend on an individual act of self-understanding that would
then — by an imaginative or even a terroristic leap — be offered as the
foundation of a general ethics. In fact, the entity making the strongest claim
to sacred status tends more and more to be personality itself.74
Melodrama, and myth-making with an emphasis on the individual
personality, Brooks suggests, both arose as part of a broad cultural
response to secularization and the loss of the Sacred. Akhmatova’s
self-construction provides a good example of individual myth-making
with a focus on ethics and the power of personality.75 Moreover, melo-
drama, which emphasizes the categories of virtue or innocence and
their struggle for survival and recognition in inimical circumstances,
plays a crucial part in her shaping of her biography. Before illustrating
this by reference to specific episodes in Akhmatova’s life, it will be
instructive briefly to examine the image of her portrayed in biographies
and memoirs, because it is here that melodrama reaches an extreme
and is most readily perceptible.
Melodrama: from hagiography to hatchet-job
Lidiia Chukovskaia describes her growing compulsion to record her
conversations with Akhmatova in highly melodramatic terms. Melodra-
matic rhetoric, as Brooks observes, insists upon dealing in pure, integral
concepts and tends towards the inflated and the sententious. Its typical
features are hyperbole, antithesis and oxymoron.76 Chukovskaia
writes:
I was drawn to writing about her because she herself, her words, her deeds,
her head, shoulders and the movements of her hands were possessed of
such perfection, which in this world usually belongs only to great works of
74 Ibid., p. 16.
75 As Zholkovskii notes, her ‘personality, poetry and life form a consummate cultural
artifact’ (‘Scripts, Not Scriptures’, p. 138). The very notion of the individual self as sacred
and as the ultimate source of value is one with particular resonance in relation to a lyric
poet operating in a Marxist state bent on effacing the personal.
76 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 40. Eikhenbaum was the first to comment on
the oxymoronic qualities of Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine, ‘Anna Akhmatova: Opyt analiza’,
in his O poezii, Leningrad, 1969, pp. 75–147 (p. 136). His nun-harlot description was then
taken up as vilification by Zhdanov in 1946.
art. Before my very eyes, Akhmatova’s fate — something greater even than
her own person — was chiselling out of this famous and neglected, strong
and helpless woman, a statue of grief, loneliness, pride, courage.77
Helena Goscilo summarizes the development of Akhmatova’s image in
terms that comment implicitly upon Chukovskaia’s description:
Akhmatova’s fame as fascinating charmer and love poet had ceded to that
of preeminent poet laureate, national tragedienne, and noble survivor. She
had become, as the cliché has it, a living monument — a historical work
of art conceived by herself and ‘finished’ by those who followed her cues
for the work’s completion.78
Among those who, like Chukovskaia, ‘followed her cues’ particularly
closely are Akhmatova’s biographers; primarily Amanda Haight,
Roberta Reeder and, more recently, popular biographer Elaine
Feinstein. Aleksandr Zholkovskii terms such accounts of the poet’s
life ‘hagio-biographies’ because they remarkably faithfully relate the
canonical version of Akhmatova’s biography sanctioned by the poet
herself. They do so, too, under the general influence of the Romantic
conception which transformed the Russian poet into a ‘spectacular
figure, his own romantic hero’, who loves tragically and dies tragically.79
These biographies subscribe to a central impulse of the Romantic
imagination; that is, to regard life as the scene of dramatic conflicts and
grandiose struggle, and the writer as extraordinary genius.80 Even their
titles declare this sensibility. Haight’s biography is entitled A Poetic
Pilgrimage, bringing to the foreground the ideas of faith, endurance
and sacrifice. Reeder’s subtitle, Poet and Prophet, and Feinstein’s Anna of
All the Russias also reinforce key features of Akhmatova’s mythology;
namely her gift of prophesy and her regal, monarchist aura.81 The
sense of biography as hagiography or scripture, readily perceptible in
these and many other accounts and memoirs of Akhmatova, conforms
to the conception of the self as sacred highlighted by Brooks as a
quality of modern myth-making.
Despite the scholarship involved in the production of these works
and their immense usefulness and readability, their authors (as
Zholkovskii argues with particular reference to Reeder) display a
marked tendency to accept Akhmatova’s version of events and to
assume that her judgements are always correct.82 This largely uncritical
77 The Akhmatova Journals, trans. Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova, London, 1994,
p. 7.
78 Goscilo, ‘Playing Dead’, p. 293.
80 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 81.
81 Elaine Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova, London, 2005.
82 Zholkovskii, ‘Scripts, Not Scriptures’, p. 139.
attitude towards the writer’s myth, and focus on literary heroics, has
some profoundly distorting effects. Brodskii observes of biographies,
memoirs and diaries in general that they frequently cut the poet down
to the size of his biographer or his public.83 The poet emerges from
them a diminished, one-sided figure, heroics and tragic suffering
notwithstanding. As Gershtein remarks in relation to Akhmatova’s pro-
hibition against including certain events in memoirs of Mandel´shtam:
‘the one-sided description of Mandelstam’s personality led to a series
of distortions.’84 Descriptions of Akhmatova’s life manifest similar pro-
blems.85 Zholkovskii therefore remarks of Reeder’s biography that we
are presented with ‘a simplified image of Akhmatova, which is larger
— but also leaner — than life. [. . .] In a word, instead of a struggling
human, all too human, we get a monument — of the kind preapproved
by the model’.86 The very idea of a monument or statue (which, as the
quotations from Chukovskaia and Goscilo above illustrate, arises fre-
quently in relation to Akhmatova), suggests the kind of psychologically
simple and ‘whole’ character encountered in melodrama.87
As Svetlana Boym observes of biographies of Russian writers in
general:
Although some of the biographies are quite interesting and well written,
most of them are guided by the principles of popular psychology which
83 Brodsky, ‘Introduction’, in Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, pp. vii–xi (pp. vii and
ix).
84 Gershtein, Moscow Memoirs, pp. 39–80.
85 In general, an excess of admiration for their subject generates a desire on the part of
biographers to present an overwhelmingly positive image, leading to clumsy contradictions
and distortions. To take just one example, Feinstein relates how, during the 1930s, when
both Lev Gumilev and Nikolai Punin were in prison, Emma Gershtein received a telephone
call from Akhmatova telling her that an unspecified ‘he’ had come home. As Gershtein
recalls in her memoirs, it quickly became clear that, although Lev had also been released,
Akhmatova had been referring exclusively to Punin. Feinstein apparently struggles with
this piece of testimony, remarking: ‘The implication that Akhmatova cared far more for
Punin than her son is unnerving in so scrupulous an observer’ (p. 152). This oddly phrased
comment almost seems to imply that Gershtein, normally so careful, is mistaken, when in
fact it is evidence of Akhmatova’s unmaternal behaviour that Feinstein evidently finds
perturbing. Yet she does not, even in the face of Gershtein’s evidence, balk at confidently
asserting a mere two pages later that Akhmatova’s ‘maternal role had come to be the most
important relationship in her life’ (p. 154). The desire to adhere to a received and positive
image of Akhmatova also leads to various oversimplifications and defective logic in the
realm of psychological motivation: ‘For the rest of her life, Anna was usually dismissive of
the wives of men with whom she had affairs, so it is unsurprising that she had no good
words to say of her father’s mistress’ (p. 19). Kelly points out that Akhmatova’s greater fame
has made her ill treatment more notorious than that of poets such as Anna Barkova and
Olga Berggolts (both of whom were imprisoned). She adds, ‘This is not said to belittle
Akhmatova’s work [. . .]. But no poet is well served by the sort of unquestioning reverence
which Akhmatova’s work is now accorded; it is detrimental even to the understanding
of her own biography and writing’ (‘Anna Akhmatova’, pp. 209–10).
86 Zholkovskii, ‘Scripts not Scriptures’, p. 141.
87 See Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, on melodramatic ‘wholeness’, pp. 79 and 89.
help to explain the author’s innermost crisis (that incidentally makes him
or her create a masterpiece). They are also spiced with Romantic kitsch
and descriptions of the author’s sentimental attachment.88
Or, to put it differently, they manifest the sort of black and white
morality, sensationalism and psychological simplicity that is typical
of melodramatic representation. A reviewer of Feinstein’s biography
highlights this in a particularly barbed manner:
The facts of [Akhmatova’s] social and sexual adventures read like a British
gossip column. [. . .] The book’s simple organization and straightforward
style make it easy to read on a bus or in a crowd, and the melodrama of
Akhmatova’s life makes it a worthwhile escape. For those who may have
been waiting patiently in line at the airport, dreaming about one of Russia’s
pre-eminent modern poets, here it is: a literary biography for the chroni-
cally distracted. [. . .] ‘Anna of All the Russias’ provides hardly any autho-
rial insight beyond pop psychology [. . .] Russians tend to romanticize the
lives of their great writers [. . .] and Feinstein does not cut through this
hagiographic impulse so much as perpetuate it. [. . .] Feinstein’s telling of
Akhmatova’s life is less a tragedy than a soap opera.89
Melodrama occurs most often when biographers emphasize
Akhmatova’s virtuous/victimized traits (poverty, homelessness, humil-
ity, moral strength) and downplay or suppress elements that threaten
to subvert or complicate this image (egotism, imperious and capricious
treatment of others, habitual drinking, imputations of lesbianism, and
so on). Part of the enduring success of Akhmatova’s myth-making,
in fact, is that it shapes a conservative and widely-acceptable image,
largely devoid of the ‘threatening and embarrassing’ aspects that
accompany the biography of her major female contemporary Tsve-
taeva.90 However, the descriptions in the review quoted above
(‘melodrama’, ‘pop psychology’, ‘soap opera’) suggest that Akhmatova
has been done a disservice: she is no longer the tragic heroine of

89 Benjamin Paloff, ‘The People’s Poet’, St Petersburg Times, 23 June 2006 <http://www.
sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=18015> [accessed 24 September 2009].
Other works dealing with Akhmatova’s biography have been labelled ‘melodramatic’ by
reviewers. For instance, Natalía Ivanova describes Boris Nosik’s Anna i Amedeo (2005) as a
‘not so harmless’ ‘melodramatic fictionalized gew-gaw’, ‘Mythopoesis and Mythoclasticism’,
Russian Studies in Literature, 45, 2008, 1, pp. 82–91 (p. 86).
90 Kelly, ‘Anna Akhmatova’, p. 207. Gershtein’s Moscow Memoirs are among those that do
not follow the established path. Ostrovskaia’s (see note 12 above) create similar problems,
complicating the prevailing image of femme fatale, literary martyr and persecuted genius
with descriptions of lesbian advances made to her by Akhmatova (p. 33). Reeder does not
include Ostrovskaia’s memoirs among her sources at all, and although Feinstein does, she
dismisses them on rather specious and confused grounds: ‘Ostrovskaya protests her own
heterosexuality, but it is hard to imagine such kisses — if they were given — being received
without some consent, and paradoxically it is Ostrovskaya’s reticence about her own
response which makes the passage questionable’ (Poet and Prophet, p. 216).
her own mythology, but has been transformed into the protagonist of
a trite melodrama, a victim of the objectification that Svetlana Boym
describes.
In an article on melodrama and the Russian celebrity funeral,
Goscilo discusses the terms in which Akhmatova was eulogized, finding
that ‘iteration and multiplication inflated discourse into the hyperbole
and extravagant moral claims normally associated with melodrama:
Akhmatova as prophetess and sorceress, as female Christ, as the
incarnation of charitable democracy, the supreme poet’.91 As she
observes:
The conventions of funeral oratory mandate the deceased’s metamorphosis
into saint, hero/ine, martyr, or genius — and sometimes, especially in
Russia, where the soviet intelligentsia haloed its famous representatives in
a martyrological nimbus — all four simultaneously. Because measured
appraisals and allusions to character flaws violate the norms of the genre,
valedictory speeches over the lifeless body inevitably present the latter
in totalized summation as ‘larger than life’ by dwelling exclusively on its
owner’s extraordinary personal qualities, peerless talent, exemplary deeds,
and universal significance.92
The funeral paeans cemented the myth of larger-than-life figure that
Akhmatova had herself helped to generate, which was then perpetu-
ated, for the most part unquestioningly, by others. The inevitable result
of the melodramatic hyperbole and exaggeration is an inherently
one-sided and reductive image.
Sympathetic and positive accounts of Akhmatova do not have a
monopoly on melodrama, however. It is also present in large measure
in a hostile appraisal, Tamara Kataeva’s Anti-Akhmatova. Kataeva’s
book is not a biography (and Kataeva is not a literary scholar by
training, but a psychologist): it consists of extracts from memoirs and
biographical literature about Akhmatova glossed by an acerbic com-
mentary which demonstrates little sensitivity to the contemporary his-
torical context. Like the hagio-biographies, it presents a one-sided and
simplified image of the poet. Kataeva’s mission is an iconoclastic one,
but rather than succeeding in debunking the mythology surrounding
Akhmatova, she performs an unequivocal hatchet-job on the poet
herself. Just as the ‘hagio-biographers’ tend to downplay material that
shows Akhmatova in an unsympathetic light or threatens to complicate
the conventional picture, so does Kataeva omit any evidence of positive
character traits (or, indeed, poetic talent) in her attempt to dislodge
Akhmatova from her pedestal.
91 Goscilo, ‘Playing Dead’, p. 296.

92 Ibid., p. 283.
Kataeva is actually more alert than the ‘hagio-biographers’ to
Akhmatova’s myth-making strategies, and gathers together — in a
chapter entitled ‘The Technology of Myth-Making’ (‘Tekhnologiia
mifotvorchestva’) — much evidence illustrating the extent to which
and means according to which Akhmatova consciously manipulated
her own public image.93 However, she regards all this as conclusive
evidence of deception and falsification rather than as a legitimate
exercise in mythopoesis. As Natalía Ivanova writes, ‘All testimonials
that show the accused in a positive light are excluded from the book.
They are overlooked on the principle of all that is black is ours and the
white we shall cloak in black’.94 Once again, Akhmatova’s biography
and character are subject to the extreme polarization of melodrama.
A case in point is Kataeva’s treatment of the complicated and often
strained relationship between Akhmatova and her son. A chapter
entitled ‘A Mother’s Heroism’ (‘Podvig materi’) opens with the
following diatribe:
Everyone reveres Akhmatova’s heroism [blagogoveli pered ‘Podvigom
Akhmatovoi’]. What heroism? She lived, was healthy, wasn’t sent to the
camps, the only husbands she lost were former ones or someone else’s, she
didn’t fight, wasn’t in Leningrad during the siege [. . .]. Only at a stretch
can all this be called heroism. [. . .] Her only son did time in prison [. . .].
If that is a heroic feat, then Akhmatova’s heroism recalls that of
[mixt-герой] Pavlik Matrosov, who covered the embrasure with his own
father.95
Kataeva, who presumably would not accept that Akhmatova was
made a victim by proxy through the treatment of Lev, takes the vast
majority of her illustrations of Akhmatova’s lack of maternal feeling
from Gershtein’s memoirs, reproducing them out of context and falling
into a trap of which Gershtein herself warns:
This legend of the bad mother [. . .] satisfies the insuperable passion for
melodrama that, strange as it may seem, has taken root in Russian society
as we contemplate the great tragedies of the twentieth century [. . .]. Let us
93 Kataeva, Anti-Akhmatova, pp. 10–49.

94 Ivanova, ‘Mythopoesis’, p. 85. During her examination of the phenomenon of the
anti-biography, Ivanova argues that Zholkovskii is somehow responsible for Kataeva,
having spread a ‘viral illness’ which has infected the ‘dabblers’ of literary scholarship,
and seduced less intellectually gifted writers like Kataeva into attempting to debunk not
the Akhmatova myth, but Akhmatova herself (pp. 83–84). Zholkovskii himself is careful
to emphasize that he means his observations about Akhmatova’s self-fashioning not as
vituperation but rather as testament to her impressive survival strategies in inimical
conditions.
95 Kataeva, Anti-Akhmatova, p. 127. Kataeva refers here to a character featuring in
post-Soviet anecdotes, a conflation of Soviet hero Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his own
father, and World War Two hero Alexander Matrosov, who blocked a machine gun nest
with his own body.
free one of Russia’s best poets from the grips of this saccharine genre and
restore to Akhmatova that which is hers by right, her tragic biography and
the voice of Tragedy that was her muse.96
Gershtein implies here, as does the reviewer of Feinstein’s biography
quoted above, that Akhmatova’s tragic biography is peculiarly vulner-
able to distortion, of being debased and turned into melodrama of
a meretricious kind. Akhmatova has apparently again fallen victim to
the bad theatre which she wished to avoid, and which Svetlana Boym
regards as one of the pitfalls of being a female poet. It is interesting to
note that extreme polarization occurs not merely in, but also between
biographical works on Akhmatova, so that the whole biographical
enterprise itself seems infused with melodrama.97
Akhmatova’s melodramatic scripting: heroes and villains
As the above discussion suggests, due care must be taken to separate
melodramatic representations in works about Akhmatova from her
own self-representation. However, the melodramatic tendencies inher-
ent in her own myth-making prove to be largely responsible for the
polarized extremes of hagiography and hatchet-job, which are simply
opposite faces of the same coin.
To demonstrate this, the focus will now turn to four key areas of
Akhmatova’s biography that she conceived and presented according to
the principles of melodrama. These are a) her infatuation with Nikolai
Golenishchev-Kutuzov prior to her marriage to Gumilev, b) her break-
up with Vladimir Garshin, c) her meetings with Isaiah Berlin and
finally d) her titanic battle with Iosif Stalin. Melodrama is by no means
confined to these episodes: it can be detected throughout Akhmatova’s
literary biography — it is present, for instance, in her descriptions (both
poetic and extra-poetic) of her marriage to Vladimir Shileiko, or in her
domestic arrangements with Nikolai Punin and his family — but the
examples selected here are particularly illustrative of Akhmatova’s
melodramatic approach to her experience.
a) The love life of Anna Gorenko
As previously indicated, the Symbolists’ life-creating strategies lent a
highly-theatrical tone to the literary world of Petersburg in the 1910s.
96 Gershtein, Moscow Memoirs, p. 356.

97 Moreover, it is only possible to determine whether accounts of Akhmatova are inher-
ently one-sided by comparing them with one another, so that we end up with a kind of
hall-of-mirrors effect. This seems particularly apt for Akhmatova, who uses the image of a
mirrored hall in her magnum opus Poema bez geroia (Poem Without a Hero, 1940–65), which
she also describes in her prose as ‘my biography as seen by someone [. . .] in a row of
mirrors’. See ‘Eshche o poeme’, in S. A. Kovalenko and N. V. Koroleva (eds), Sobranie
sochinenii, 8 vols, Moscow, 1998–2004, 3, p. 223.
The stylized and aesthetic organization of behaviour which they
adopted fostered complex and melodramatic emotional situations, such
as those arising from Blok and Andrei Belyi’s idealization of Blok’s wife,
Liubov´, or from Valerii Briusov and Belyi’s intense rivalry over Nina
Petrovskaia.98 Akhmatova, reflecting on the period with hindsight in
Poema bez geroia (Poem Without a Hero, 1940–65), implicitly characterizes
it as melodramatic, ironically evoking the pervasive role-playing and
narcissism which pervaded the period by means of the love-triangle
plot at its centre.99
Notably, Akhmatova does not exempt her younger self from censure
in Poem, and indeed the influence of the melodramatic surrounding
cultural context is manifest in her early biography, before the publica-
tion of her first poems under her pseudonym, in relation to her youth-
ful infatuation with a student, Golenishchev-Kutuzov, and her response
to the obsessive courting of her by Gumilev. Her predilection for melo-
dramatic expression and behaviour is apparent from her confessional
letters to Sergei von Shtein, the widower of her sister Inna.100 A letter
of 1906 concerns Kutuzov, with whom Akhmatova had fallen in love
in 1905:
My dear Shtein, if you only knew how stupid and naive I am! I’m even
ashamed to admit to you: I still love V. G.-K. And there is nothing,
nothing in life apart from this feeling.
I have palpitations from agitation, perpetual torments and tears. [. . .]
I endure such nervous attacks that it seems sometimes as though I am
already dying.101
Later in 1906 she writes of her desire to travel to Petersburg for
Christmas, with a view to seeing Kutuzov:
I have become ill [. . .] from the thought that my trip may not take place.
I have a fever, palpitations, unbearable headaches. You’ve never seen
me in such a frightening state. [. . .] You know, Sergei Vladimirovich,
I haven’t slept for four nights. It is dreadful, such insomnia. [. . .] Sergei
98 See Joan Delaney Grossman, ‘Russian Symbolism and the Year 1905: The Case of
Valery Bryusov’, Slavonic and East European Review, 61, 1983, 3, pp. 341–62 (p. 349), for
instance.
99 She adopts a similar attitude towards it as the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, who con-
demns Symbolism for falling victim to the sort of theatricality and spectacular emotional
excess usually associated with melodrama. See his Samopoznanie (opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii),
Paris, 1949, particularly the chapter ‘Russkii kul´turnyi renassans nachala XX veka.
Vstrechi s liud´mi’, pp. 147–79, and his comments on Romanticism in the 1910s, p. 113.
100 Naiman points out that these letters clearly show the ‘vein of Chekhov’s sylistics’
(Remembering Anna Akhmatova, p. 36), but they also exhibit, as demonstrated here, an un-
Chekhovian melodramatic vein. Zholkovskii remarks that Akhmatova’s dislike for Chekhov
was motivated partly by her inability to forgive ‘his consistent deflation of theatrics and
hierarchical pomp’ (‘Scripts, Not Scriptures’, p. 138).
101 Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia, ed. M. M. Kralin, 2 vols, Moscow, 1990, 2, p. 177.
Vladimirovich, if only you could see how pitiful and useless I am. The main
thing is that I am useless — to everyone, always. It is easy to die.102
In February 1907, having become engaged to Gumilev, Akhmatova
describes her reactions to his letters:
My Kolia is planning, it seems, to come to see me — I am so madly
happy. [. . .] Every time a letter comes from Paris, they hide it from me
and hand it over with great caution. Then there is a fainting spell, cold
compresses and general indisposition. It’s from the passionate nature of my
character, nothing more. He loves me so much that it’s even frightening.
[. . .] I’ve become spiteful, capricious and unbearable. Oh, Serezha, how
terrible to feel such a change in oneself. [. . .] I hate and despise myself;
I can’t bear this lie entangling me . . .103
In a letter of 11 February 1907 Akhmatova describes her feelings
upon finally receiving from von Shtein a portrait of Kutuzov for which
she had made repeated requests:
I am too happy to be silent. I am writing to you and I know that he is here,
with me, that I can see him, — it’s so insanely good. Serezha! I am unable
to wrench my soul away from him. I am poisoned for my entire life, the
bitter poison of unrequited love! Will I be able to begin to live again?
Of course not! But Gumilev is — my Fate, and I submit to it. Don’t judge
me. I swear to you by all that is sacred to me, that this unhappy man will
be happy with me.104
Melodrama, as outlined earlier, is characterized by strong emotion-
alism and extreme states of being. It employs inflated, hyperbolic, sen-
tentious and extravagant expression, with multiple exclamations, in
order to declare moral and emotional states with maximum clarity.105
This aptly describes Akhmatova’s language in these excerpts from her
correspondence. There are a high number of words and phrases in the
letters referring to extreme emotions or their physical effects: ‘madly
happy’, ‘nervous attack’, ‘passionate nature’, ‘loves me so much that
it’s even frightening’, ‘spiteful, capricious and unbearable’, ‘hate and
despise’, ‘can’t bear this lie’, and so on. The notion of an ‘entangling’
lie is in itself highly melodramatic, suggestive of deception and intrigue.
Akhmatova acts like a melodramatic heroine and describes her own
life as though it were a melodramatic plot. Phrases such as ‘nothing,
nothing in life apart from this feeling’, ‘it seems sometimes as though
I am already dying’, or ‘I am poisoned for my entire life, the bitter
poison of unrequited love!’ are particularly hyperbolic. Akhmatova’s
expression is energetic, concerned wholly with conveying her emotional
102 Ibid., pp. 178–79.

103 Ibid., pp. 181–82.
104 Ibid., p. 184.
105 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 11–12 and 40.
state, which is a heightened, extreme one: the force of her emotions
even frequently affects her health adversely and, as in melodrama,
blanching, fainting and other physical reactions all serve to reinforce
and underline the power of the emotions represented.
Feinstein describes Akhmatova’s reference to ‘poisoning’ as ‘over-
dramatic; of a piece with anxious descriptions of her state of health’
and puts the histrionic tone of these letters down to ‘adolescent affecta-
tion’, pointing out that Anna Gorenko had only recently left school.106
The letters are indeed recognizably those of a young girl narcissisti-
cally absorbed in her own emotional world and inclined towards
melodramatic self-dramatization, but they are not merely histrionic:
they are also thoroughly in keeping with the theatrical tonality of
the surrounding neo-Romantic cultural context and its melodramatic
behavioural codes.
The overblown, passionate quality of the expression in these early
letters is markedly unlike Akhmatova’s later epistolary style. Indeed,
following her poetic debut, Akhmatova reportedly became reluctant to
write letters, particularly emotionally expansive ones, partly from fear
that her biographers would divulge the details of her indiscretions.107
She was prone to periodically destroying her correspondence, and
those letters that do survive are laconic to the point of terseness in
comparison to these.108 Yet at this early stage, prior to the adoption of
her pseudonym and cultivation of an appropriate public persona, her
lack of restraint in the expression of her emotions lends credence to
Nadezhda Mandel´shtam’s view of her as ‘volatile’ and to her assertion
that ‘People who knew her when she was young were well aware of
the trouble she had in imposing restraint on herself [chto ona s trudom
spravliaetsia]’.109 Indeed, Akhmatova’s self-assessment in the letters
makes explicit mention of her ‘passionate nature’. The letters to von
Shtein reveal an intensity of feeling combined with a hyperbolic,
emotionally-charged rhetoric that suggest a psychological predisposi-
tion towards melodramatic behaviour which remains perceptible in
Akhmatova’s later approach to experience and the way in which she
narrates it. That this is the case is particularly well illustrated by
Akhmatova’s perspective on her relationship with Garshin.
b) From hero to villain: the unmasking of Vladimir Garshin
Melodrama typically operates according to a black-and-white moral
schema, hence its customary cast of heroes and villains. The canonical
106 Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias, p. 26.

107 See Mandelshtam, ‘Akhmatova’, p. 121.
108 See Sochineniia, 2, pp. 363–64 on her epistolary style.
109 Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Abandoned: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward, London,
1974, pp. 443–44; for the Russian text see, Vtoraia kniga, p. 497.
image of Akhmatova as paragon of moral courage and virtuous hero-
ine/martyr has the inevitable corollary effect of turning other charac-
ters in her biography into equally two-dimensional melodramatic
villains. The story of Akhmatova and Garshin, whom she hoped to
marry in the 1940s, bears this out.
Gershtein refers to the ‘Garshin episode’ as ‘one of the most dra-
matic pages in Akhmatova’s biography’.110 Garshin and Akhmatova
met in 1937, when her relationship with Punin (in itself a rather bizarre
domestic melodrama involving Punin, Akhmatova, and Anna Ahrens,
Punin’s legitimate wife) had almost completely deteriorated. Garshin
was another married man, a professor of pathology and academician.
He and Akhmatova became romantically involved and saw one
another frequently until 1941, when Akhmatova was evacuated from
Leningrad to Central Asia, where she stayed until 1944. Garshin
remained in Leningrad and was appointed chief coroner, a post which
gave him intimate daily contact with the misery and horror of the siege.
In 1942, his wife collapsed in the street and died. He subsequently
wrote to Akhmatova proposing marriage. Akhmatova accepted with
alacrity, but when Garshin came to meet her at the railway station on
her return to Leningrad, he abruptly broke off the engagement.
Amanda Haight furnishes a version of events which, presumably,
given the close contact she had with the poet, was given to her by
Akhmatova directly or mediated by one of her close friends:
Tired of everlastingly living in ‘other people’s homes’, Akhmatova had
agreed to marry Garshin. The war, the blockade, and the poet’s evacuation
from Leningrad had disrupted their plans. In Tashkent she waited anx-
iously for his letters. At one point Chukovskaya wrote to him, begging him
to write, saying that Akhmatova was seriously ill and so distressed at having
no news of him that they feared for her life. When he did write, his letters
made Akhmatova wild. His wife, from whom he had long been estranged,
had died and he wrote that she, the wife, had been the most important
person in his life. Akhmatova was furious and said to Chukovskaya,
‘What if I wrote to him that Lourié had been the most important person
in my life?’ In one of his letters Garshin made Akhmatova a formal
proposal of marriage conditional on her taking his name.111
This highlights various features of Akhmatova’s biography which
place her in the category of defenceless victim, such as homelessness
and chronic illness. Garshin is presented as utterly insensitive: he does
not write to Akhmatova for a long period and when he finally does,
he emphasizes the significance of his wife. The final sentence of the
110 Gershtein and Nina Olshevskaia-Ardova, ‘Conversations’, in Anna Akhmatova and her
Circle, pp. 146–62 (p. 149).
111 Haight, A Poetic Pilgrimage, p. 127.
quotation above conveys the impression that Garshin was acting chau-
vinistically, coercing Akhmatova into relinquishing her name. Although
Haight provides a footnote reference to Nadezhda Mandel´shtam’s
memoirs, she does not quote them. In fact, Mandel´shtam makes it
clear that Akhmatova welcomed a change of name: she describes the
poet’s attraction to the idea of acquiring a ‘real, “legal” surname’, and
her weariness ‘of “figuring” as Akhmatova’.112 The nineteenth-century
literary associations of Garshin’s name made it a particularly appro-
priate choice. Haight’s account is subtly, but unmistakably, weighted
rhetorically to set Akhmatova up as victim and Garshin as the villain
who causes her suffering. She continues:
On 1 June [1944] she returned to Leningrad. There she discovered that
Garshin, without telling her, had married a nurse during the siege. It was
a tremendous shock. He had not even bothered to see that her room was
kept for her.113
This passage contains at least one major piece of misinformation:
namely, the idea that Garshin had already remarried during the siege
(as is now well known, his second marriage took place later, after he
and Akhmatova had separated). Again, in view of the fact that Akhma-
tova dictated passages of her biography to Haight and was her pri-
mary source for factual information, it seems likely that this erroneous
picture came from the poet herself. Once again, Garshin is made
responsible for the whole unhappy situation: Haight’s version intimates
that Akhmatova was not only jilted but callously deceived by him.
Roberta Reeder’s version of events, Zholkovskii points out, also
follows Akhmatova’s script remarkably faithfully, as, albeit to a lesser
extent, does that of Elaine Feinstein.114 Both these biographers lace
the story with considerably more melodramatic detail than Haight.
Feinstein writes, for instance:
It soon transpired that her hopes in Garshin had been misplaced: he was
no longer the man she had known. He had endured terrible privations both
as a doctor and as a man, and witnessed starvation, even cannibalism,
during the long siege. Akhmatova was unsurprised to see darkness in his
face but intended to go off with him nevertheless.115
This description is highly melodramatic, invoking polar concepts
such as light and darkness to hint at the ethical and spiritual dimension
to the situation, and providing the sensational detail of cannibalism.116
112 Mandelshtam, Hope Abandoned, p. 505.

114 See Zholkovskii, ‘Scripts, Not Scriptures’, pp. 139–40.
116 Melodrama routinely invokes pure and polar concepts such as darkness and light,
salvation and damnation (Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. ix).
It lends the plot an emotional reversal such as is frequently encoun-
tered in melodrama by emphasizing the idea of fundamental change in
Garshin, and Akhmatova’s misplaced hopes. This melodramatic colou-
ration was already present in Akhmatova’s own representation of
events, as Haight’s account demonstrates.
Shortly after she and Garshin separated, Akhmatova sent an enig-
matic telegram to Nina Olshevskaia which stated: ‘Garshin seriously
mentally ill. Has left me. You’re the only one I’ve told. Anna.’117 The
notion of insanity was already attached to the name of Garshin by
association with his uncle (the nineteenth-century prose writer Vsevolod
Garshin, who experienced periods of mental illness and died as the
result of a suicide attempt aged thirty-three), and may have suggested
itself to Akhmatova for this reason. Although the insanity hypothesis
has been vigorously denied by Garshin’s family, he certainly endured
extremely traumatic experiences during the siege and may have been
suffering the psychological effects of these when he broke off his
engagement with Akhmatova.118 He was compelled, for instance, to
identify his dead wife by her clothing as her face had been disfigured
by rats (a gruesome and sensational piece of information which is high-
lighted by both Reeder and Feinstein). Friends reported that he was
subsequently haunted by her, which certainly adds credence to the idea
that he was suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress.
Indeed, Akhmatova had herself remarked upon Garshin’s psycho-
logical frailty long before 1944: a letter she wrote to Nikolai Khardzhiev
in 1942 reports that Garshin had been ‘mentally ill and did not write
[. . .] for five months’.119 Given that Akhmatova believed Garshin to
have suffered from mental illness, she behaved towards him with a
notable lack of compassion after their parting. She would not have his
name mentioned in her presence, speaking of him herself only to
reiterate that he was insane, and she effectively ‘shut him out of her life
completely’, as Reeder acknowledges.120 She destroyed their corre-
spondence and removed dedications to Garshin from her poetry.121
Akhmatova’s perspective on her break-up with Garshin as presented
by Haight establishes a script which is taken up with little variation
by both Reeder and Feinstein. Glossing over the harshness of her
treatment of Garshin, they too present Akhmatova as the victim and
117 See Gershtein and Olshevskaia-Ardova, ‘Conversations’, p. 150; Sochineniia, 2, p. 221.

118 T. S. Pozdniakova (ed.), Peterburg Akhmatovoi: Vladimir Georgievich Garshin, St Petersburg,
2002, p. 65.
119 Sochineniia, 2, p. 201.
120 Reeder, Poet and Prophet, p. 280.
121 See Gershtein, Moscow Memoirs, pp. 253–54 on the altered lines in Poem Without a
Hero.
in doing so vilify Garshin. Like Haight, they add infidelity to the charge
of insanity. Reeder observes that ‘another important reason why the
relationship did not work out was that Garshin had an affair with a
woman doctor during the war (not a nurse as Haight suggests), who
was the same age as Akhmatova, and whom he married after the
war’.122 Similarly, Feinstein observes that although ‘Garshin’s distress
is well attested, and some part of it was attributable to his experiences
during the siege [. . .], another factor which had contributed to his
change of mind was his love affair with a woman doctor [. . .] a beau-
tiful woman, though without much spark’.123 Feinstein’s parting shot at
the ‘other woman’ (her lack of ‘spark’) implies insanity again: Garshin
must have been mad to throw Akhmatova over. The possibility that
Akhmatova herself had an affair in Tashkent with the composer
Aleksandr Kozlovskii is not explored, despite the fact that both Reeder
and Feinstein are clearly aware of it.124 Haight mentions Kozlovskii
only once, in a list of Akhmatova’s Tashkent friends.125 In 1943, before
their break-up, Akhmatova had written to Khardzhiev:
Vladimir Georgiyevich is in Leningrad. He works from half past seven in
the morning to eleven at night with no days off. During the shelling and
air raids he delivers lectures and carries out post-mortems and, in general,
is making of himself what it is customary to call, in a modest word — a
hero.126
This solicitous and self-sacrificing hero is ultimately revealed to be
a philandering, demented malefactor, who breaches his promise to
the heroine, in precisely the kind of reversal or unmasking typical of
melodrama. Zholkovskii acknowledges this implicitly, concluding, with
specific reference to Reeder’s account, that ‘this is an Akhmatova script,
dominated by her star performance and relegating Garshin to the role
of a defeated villain’.127 In her subsequent poetry, Akhmatova rein-
forces this script by depicting Garshin as wandering, wolf-like and
rabidly insane, on the margins of society.128 Garshin was in reality
at this time employed as a well-respected professor of pathology, as
Nancy Anderson judiciously points out.129 Zholkovskii summarizes
Akhmatova’s behaviour towards Garshin as follows:

124 Reeder, Poet and Prophet, pp. 266–67; Anna of All the Russias, p. 202.
127 Zholkovskii, ‘Scripts, not Scriptures’, p. 140.
128 ‘A chelovek, kotoryi dlia menia’ (‘And the man who means nothing to me’, 1945).
129 Anna Akhmatova, The Word that Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory, trans. Nancy K.
Anderson, New Haven, CT and London, 2004, p. 103.
Her consistently repressive strategies — concealing the facts from friends,
destroying letters, removing dedications, excising Garshin’s very name
from controllable discourse, and, finally, handing him down to posterity as
a loony — add up to a closed, paranoid, power-hungry, and essentially
hollow emotional attitude.130
This view seems somewhat extreme: it is possible to interpret Akh-
matova’s behaviour less negatively than this. Her treatment of Garshin,
and lack of compassion towards him, can be explained, if not justified,
by her feelings of hurt and disappointment after he changed his mind
about their marriage without warning. Nonetheless, the episode with
Garshin, as conveyed by Akhmatova and her ‘camp’, is given a dis-
tinctly melodramatic tonality. A consideration of Akhmatova’s behav-
iour at the time and after supports this reading: witnesses reported that
she went to see Garshin at the hospital after their break-up and that
she behaved hysterically, eventually fainting.131 This reaction, along
with her indignation at Garshin’s wrongdoing, the blame she directed
towards him, and her conception of herself as defenceless victim of his
cruelty conform to a pattern consistent with melodrama.132
c) ‘The Stage for Melodrama is the World’: Akhmatova and the Cold War
While the Garshin episode was one that Akhmatova might have
preferred to expunge from the record, her relationship with Oxford
liberal philosopher and diplomat Isaiah Berlin was singled out for
special emphasis. Akhmatova’s meetings with Berlin in 1945 and 1946,
and her ‘non-meeting’ with him in 1956, occupy a key place in her
biographical legend. György Dalos, whose account of their meeting is
largely faithful to Akhmatova’s own script in that it is ‘told mainly from
Akhmatova’s viewpoint’, and is presented as ‘a love story’, implicitly
brings out the potential melodrama of their first encounter:
The scene has all the makings of the most intense kind of theatre.
The setting alone, the bleak room with the historic backdrop of the old
Sheremetev Palace, was full of promise of emotional or moral events on a
grand scale. What took place that night was to be true drama.133
Berlin is presented by Akhmatova as one of the great romances of
her life. Her poetry dedicated to him intimates strongly that they were
lovers, although Berlin always maintained that he and Akhmatova
130 Zholkovskii, ‘Scripts, not Scriptures’, p. 140.

131 See Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias, p. 208.
132 Heilman notes that feeling indignation and assigning blame are melodramatic reactions
which have ‘quick psychological rewards’ (Tragedy and Melodrama, p. 104).
133 Gyorgy Dalos, The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, trans. by
Anthony Wood, New York, 1998, pp. 7 and 32.
remained on opposite sides of the room all night.134 This is another
case of the poetry reinforcing a melodramatic biographical script. As
Michael Ignatieff writes in his biography of Berlin:
Akhmatova herself seems to have been responsible for this malentendu.
It has hung over their encounter ever since. No Russian who reads Cinque,
the poems she devoted to their evening together, has ever been able to
believe that they did not sleep together.135
Not only did Akhmatova obliquely suggest that she and Berlin had
a love affair in her poetry, but she seems also to have implied in
conversation with acquaintances that her relationship with him was a
romantic one. Chukovskii received the definite impression from the
poet that Berlin had even come to Leningrad with the express intention
of seducing her.136 Boris Pasternak wrote to Berlin in July 1946, saying
that Akhmatova spoke endlessly about his visit, ‘so dramatically and
mysteriously!’.137 Akhmatova was always, as Dalos notes, ‘concerned to
establish the closest possible relationship with Berlin’.138
In 1956, when Berlin returned to the Soviet Union, Akhmatova
refused to see him. The reason she supplied was her concern for Lev,
who was still in prison. Her fear was doubtless genuine (although a
meeting with a foreigner would probably not by then have been likely
to attract unwelcome attention), but she may have had an additional
motive for bringing about a ‘non-meeting’. Dalos astutely contends that
her refusal to meet Berlin may have been prompted in part by her
desire to preserve the power of her biographical legend:
The appearance of Isaiah Berlin in person would very likely have disrupted
the transcendence. In August 1956, therefore, Akhmatova banished him to
the world of her dreams, and perhaps this had less to do with love than
with the right to her own tragedy. A further meeting with Berlin would
have relativized the tragedy, lowered the drama of fate to the level of
anecdote.139
134 See in particular, ‘Kak u oblaka na kraiu’ (‘As if on the edge of a cloud’, 1945). Other
poems Akhmatova dedicated to Berlin draw parallels with the story of Dido and Aeneas,
a classical blend of romance and international politics that comes closer to melodrama
than tragedy in Virgil’s treatment, according to H. L. Tracy, ‘Aeneid IV: Tragedy or
Melodrama?’, The Classical Journal, 41, 1946, pp. 199–202.
136 Ibid.; Dalos, The Guest from the Future, pp. 162–63.
138 Dalos, The Guest from the Future, p. 132. Akhmatova’s biographers remain faithful to the
poet’s preferred interpretation of events, without ignoring the facts, by emphasizing the idea
of sexual tension: Feinstein writes, for instance, ‘Alone, their conversation became magical.
[. . .] She confessed her own loneliness and, though they sat upon opposite sides of the room
and never touched each other, the erotic charge between the thirty-six-year-old-man and
this ageing beauty of fifty-six was intense’ (Anna of All the Russias, p. 219).
139 Dalos, The Guest from the Future, p. 133.
In other words, Akhmatova’s actions may have been motivated
primarily by an autobiographical and dramatic imperative.
The choice with which Akhmatova was faced — between seeing
Berlin and protecting her son — is indeed arguably a tragic one,
involving a conflict between personal desires and external conditions,
but other aspects to Akhmatova’s conception of the significance of her
relationship with Berlin are decidedly melodramatic.
Melodrama is particularly apparent in her presentation of the
political ramifications of her meeting with Berlin. Akhmatova invested
it with mysterious significance not only in terms of her personal destiny,
but also world history. She repeatedly stated her belief that the onset
of the Cold War was a direct consequence of Berlin’s visits to her. This
idea is reinforced in Poem Without a Hero, which suggests that she and
Berlin would accomplish something that would ‘trouble the Twentieth
Century’ (‘smutitsia Dvadtsatyi Vek’).140 The August resolution
denouncing Akhmatova’s work, and her expulsion from the Writers’
Union in 1946, were certainly prompted in part by her having received
a foreigner when Stalin’s xenophobia was mounting: following Berlin’s
departure to England, uniformed agents were posted at the entrance
to Akhmatova’s staircase and a microphone was installed in the ceiling
of her room. However, to ascribe the onset of the Cold War to these
events, if not altogether wrong, is at least vastly to overinflate their
historical significance. Akhmatova’s assessment is characteristically
idiosyncratic, highly exaggerated and grandiose.141
She steadfastly maintained this viewpoint, however, frequently
describing the 1946 resolution as a major international historical event,
on a par with the outbreak of the First World War: ‘Akhmatova said
that she had never in her life met anyone who did not remember the
day of the 1946 Central Committee resolution. In her view of the world,
this was the day the cold war was declared.’142 Her dogmatic adher-
ence to this idea demonstrates Akhmatova’s desire to present herself
as a major actor on a world stage. As Robert Heilman suggests, melo-
drama concerns conflict between the individual and external forces,
and is played out in the public sphere and world of politics. Akhma-
tova’s version of events presents an intense, excessive representation of

141 Nonetheless, her theory is not without its defenders. Brodskii felt that she was closer to
the truth than many believed her to be: Volkov, Vspominaia Akhmatovu, p. 37. Dalos argues:
‘Akhmatova’s certainty [. . .] that her nocturnal conversation with Berlin in Fountain House
unleashed the Cold War was rooted in the mindset of her time. The meeting between
this celebrated poet and a Western diplomat at a time of growing tensions between the
Allied Powers was an act dense with symbolism and therefore a political event of the first
importance in the Soviet Union’ (The Guest from the Future, p. 65).
142 Naiman, ‘Lessons of a Poet’, p. xiv.
life which turns her meeting with Berlin into a moment of heightened
symbolic significance.
Berlin himself was politely sceptical about Akhmatova’s Cold War
theory. He thought that she had ‘perhaps [. . .] somewhat overestimated
the effect of our meeting on the destinies of the world’, but refrained
from saying so ‘since she would have felt this as an insult to her tragic
image of herself as Cassandra’.143 He was aware, in other words, of the
significant role their encounter played in her tragic self-mythology.
This is, in fact, an identifiable point at which her tragic conception of
her life is amplified and consolidated by melodramatic exaggeration.
d) Akhmatova and Stalin
It is concerning Akhmatova’s presentation of her struggle with tyranny
in the person of Stalin, the arch villain, where the melodramatic
features of her biographical legend are most apparent. Two main char-
acters are usually involved in the conflict at the heart of a melodrama
— the evil-doing villain and the innocent, wronged victim — and
Akhmatova’s conception of her antagonistic relationship with Stalin
conforms closely to this structure. As Zholkovskii asserts, Akhmatova
‘perceived and narrated herself as an actor on a world-size stage, locked
in a direct and mortal combat with Stalin the supreme villain’.144 He
notes that Akhmatova’s version of the 1946 campaign led by Andrei
Zhdanov against not only her, but also Mikhail Zoshchenko, and
the journals Star (Zvezda) and Leningrad, which formed part of a more
extensive campaign to retreat from the relative liberalism of the war
years, ‘characteristically reduces the dramatic plot to only two star
performances — hers and Stalin’s’.145
The way in which Akhmatova described Stalin’s reaction to their
meeting when she saw Berlin in Oxford provides compelling evidence
of her melodramatic conception of Stalin’s attitude towards her:
She told me that Stalin was personally enraged by the fact that she, an
apolitical, little-published writer, who owed her security largely to having
contrived to live comparatively unnoticed during the early years of the
Revolution, before the cultural battles which often ended in prison camps
or execution, had committed the sin of seeing a foreigner without formal
authorisation, and not just a foreigner, but an employee of a capitalist
government. ‘So our nun now receives visits from foreign spies’, he
remarked (so it is alleged), and followed this with obscenities which she
could not at first bring herself to repeat to me. ‘Of course’, she went on,
143 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’, in his Personal
Impressions, London, 1998, pp. 198–254 (pp. 245–46).
144 Zholkovsky, ‘The Obverse of Stalinism’, p. 63.
145 Ibid., p. 50.
‘the old man was by then out of his mind. People who were there during
this furious outbreak against me, one of whom told me of it, had no doubt
that they were speaking to a man in the grip of pathological unbridled
persecution mania’.146
Berlin’s account, which is based on the poet’s own, emphasizes
Akhmatova’s harmlessness, helplessness, and virtuousness (‘apolitical,
little-published’, ‘nun’) in the face of the tyrant’s wrath (‘personally
enraged’, ‘furious outbreak against me’). Berlin is careful, however, not
to present her claims as fact (‘so it is alleged’), as if to acknowledge that
Akhmatova may have exercised a degree of poetic license in her pre-
sentation of the facts.147 Certainly, a number of remarks attributed to
Stalin and quoted frequently in literature about Akhmatova appear,
under scrutiny, to be myths generated by Akhmatova herself. Chukovs-
kaia describes Akhmatova’s account of the famous Hall of Columns
poetry recital:
She [. . .] suggested that Stalin became jealous of her and the standing
ovations she received: in April 1946, Akhmatova recited her poetry in
Moscow and the public stood and applauded. It was Stalin’s conviction
that standing ovations were due to him alone, and suddenly the crowd had
organized an ovation for some poetess.148
While this anecdote about Stalin’s reaction is entirely plausible, given
his characteristic fear of charismatic cultural figures, it may well have
been invented or embellished by Akhmatova herself. Kataeva believes
that the remark allegedly made by Stalin after this spontaneous
applause, ‘Who organized the ovation?’ (‘Kto organizoval vstavané?’),
originated with Akhmatova and was then repeated in good faith by Ilia
Erenburg and others.149 It has also been attributed to Pasternak, and
some versions relate the remark to another standing ovation received
by Akhmatova, in 1944, also in Moscow, but at the Polytechnic
museum.150
Another generally accepted story has it that Stalin, opening Iz shesti
knig (From Six Books) upon its publication in 1940, took exception to the
poem ‘Kleveta’ (‘Slander’, 1922). However, the original source for this
idea is elusive. Reeder reproduces it but gives no reference.151 Haight
146 Berlin, ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’, p. 245.

147 In fact, Akhmatova’s source for the idea that she was spying for England, and for
Stalin’s statement — repeated by the poet to Berlin — that ‘our nun has been receiving
British spies’, may have been her son. Lev was brutally interrogated about Berlin’s visit, as
Gershtein records (Moscow Memoirs, pp. 361–62). His head was repeatedly beaten against the
wall with demands that he admit that Akhmatova had spied for England. Akhmatova’s
version attributes the idea directly to Stalin.
148 Chukovskaia, Zapiski, 2, p. 12.
149 Kataeva, Anti-Akhmatova, p. 13.
relates simply that ‘according to Akhmatova’ it was Stalin personally
who caused the volume to be withdrawn from sale.152 It is also
commonly held that Stalin would ask from time to time ‘What’s our
nun up to?’ (‘Chto delaet monakhinia?’). Kataeva suggests that this too
was a story generated by Akhmatova.153 All this is in keeping with what
is known of Akhmatova’s conversational practices: according to
Naiman’s evidence, she was in the habit of attributing remarks to an
anonymous third person or persons when she herself was their author.
This had the effect of giving her own views the appearance of external
validation or creating the impression that they were common cur-
rency.154 Apocryphal or not, these stories — which Akhmatova
undoubtedly helped to disseminate, even if she was not actually their
author — serve to emphasize the idea of a personal and head-to-head
battle between Akhmatova and Stalin.
Melodrama and totalitarianism
Akhmatova’s melodramatic scripting not only provides her with a way
of making sense of her experience and acts as a useful tool in her shap-
ing of a personal myth, but also constitutes a logical response to Soviet
reality and to Stalin’s own obsessive scripting and myth-making
strategies. Stalinist culture was itself highly theatrical, prone to staging
grandiose spectacles, and is consequently frequently characterized
using theatrical metaphors. Boris Grois highlights the aestheticization
of Soviet life, according to which the population figure as extras and
stagehands, with Stalin assuming the role of author and spectator.155
Similarly, Abram Tertz (Andrei Siniavskii) describes high Stalinism as
a hyperbolic, ‘nightmarish and bloody farce played out according to
theatrical and literary rules’, which brought about the ‘miraculous
transformation of life into the plot of a novel’, producing ‘a certain
intense theatrical pleasure’, even as it ‘sent shivers down everybody’s
spine’.156
Tertz invokes farce, but his description applies more accurately to
melodrama: intense theatrical pleasure, which sends shivers down the
spine of the spectator, is characteristic of the emotional response it
purports to elicit. Melodrama was an integral part of political reality in
the Soviet period, expressed in this theatricality and attachment to

153 Kataeva, Anti-Akhmatova, p. 31.
155 Boris Grois, ‘Stalinizm kak esteticheskii fenomen’, Sintaksis, 17, 1987, pp. 98–110. This
article is to some extent a rehearsal of the argument presented more fully in his The Total
Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle, Princeton,
NJ, 1992.
156 Abram Tertz, ‘Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii’, Kontinent, 1, 1974, pp. 160–62, as quoted
by Holmgren, Women’s Works, pp. 6–7.
spectacle and sensation. Heilman makes passing reference to the place
of melodrama in Marxist political systems, for which capitalism, the
bourgeoisie, and intellectuals are the villains, and characterizes the
‘confession and self-accusation’ of Russian political trials as melodra-
matic.157 Similarly, Lars T. Lih, in his essay ‘Melodrama and the Myth
of the Soviet Union’, contends that melodramatic elements are central
to the constitutive myths of the pre-war Soviet Union and proceeds to
illustrate how an archetypal melodramatic situation — protest against
a villain’s slander — is replayed in the 1930s under Stalin.158 This
particular melodramatic narrative centres on the idea that masked
internal enemies had infiltrated all areas of the state and the party, even
the NKVD, the organization responsible for identifying traitors. In this
way, a ‘highly charged narrative about a threatened virtuous com-
munity’ was propagated.159 The show trials of the 1930s were designed
as the climactic episode of this melodrama. Lih demonstrates that
Stalin himself can legitimately be regarded as author of this narrative,
because it is ‘presented with peculiar intensity in his speeches as well
as in authoritative pronouncements such as the Short Course’.160
All this suggests that Akhmatova’s melodramatic scripting in the
Soviet period is, at least in part, a product of, and response to, the
surrounding cultural and political context. This idea finds support in
Zholkovskii’s thesis that Akhmatova’s exercise of ‘power through weak-
ness’ can be thought of as peculiarly Soviet, ‘grounded in historical
circumstances in ways one would not have easily suspected’. He cites,
for instance, the non-personing manoeuvre she performed against
Garshin.161 Despite Akhmatova’s stoical opposition to the reigning
political climate, or indeed because of it, Zholkovskii argues that she
can be thought of as a kind of ‘totalitarian ideologue’ who displays an
essential affinity with the totalitarian discourse of her oppressors: her
careful manufacture of her own image reveals her to be a ‘power smart’
contemporary of Stalinism, and her practice is effectively the ‘obverse’
of Stalinist image-making.162 Zholkovskii does not dispute the fact that
her ethical-political stance was ‘well-nigh irreproachable’, but he likens
her position to that of a hostage who displays symptoms of the
157 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, pp. 104 and 136.

158 Lars T. Lih, ‘Melodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union’, in McReynolds and
Neuberger, Imitations of Life, pp. 178–207 (p. 178).
159 Ibid., p. 203.
160 Ibid., p. 190.
161 Zholkovsky, ‘The Obverse of Stalinism’, pp. 46 and 64.
162 Ibid., p. 46. Donald N. Mager draws similar conclusions during the course of an
examination of the textual revisions and textological indeterminacies of Poem Without a Hero
in relation to the notion of historical vision. He acknowledges that the poem’s amorphous-
ness and elusiveness constitute evidence of Akhmatova’s oppositional attitude, providing a
means for resisting the state monopoly over cultural production (for a more detailed version
of this argument, see Harrington, The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova, pp. 243–44) but contends
Stockholm Syndrome and begins to adopt the point of view of her
captors.163 Irina Paperno concurs that Akhmatova adopted ‘the power
posture of the oppressor’ as a ‘defense mechanism’, noting that
Chukovskaia observes this phenomenon in her memoirs.164
Zholkovskii’s interpretation of Akhmatova’s behaviour in a ‘Stalinist
key’ is deliberately polemical, but his argument is compelling. His view
of Akhmatova as displaying an affinity with totalitarianism chimes with
an observation Boris Grois makes about the position of the artist in
relation to political power:
The Soviet artist cannot oppose himself to power as something external
and impersonal [. . .]. In the Soviet politician aspiring to transform the
world or at least the country on the basis of a unitary artistic plan, the
artist inevitably recognizes his alter ego, inevitably discovers his complicity
with that which oppresses and negates him, and finds that his own
inspiration and the callousness of power share some common roots.165
A passage in Berlin’s memoir of Akhmatova also implies strongly
that her tendency to see her experience in melodramatic terms may
have been a product of the times in which she lived:
Anna Andreevna spoke to me about her life with an apparent detachment,
and even an impersonality, which only partly disguised passionate con-
victions and moral judgements against which there was plainly no appeal.
Her accounts of the personalities and acts of others were compounded of
sharp insight into the moral centre of both characters and situations [. . .]
together with a dogmatic obstinacy in attributing motives and intentions,
particularly when they related to herself, which even to me — who often
did not know the facts — seemed implausible, and indeed, at times, fanci-
ful — but it may be that I did not sufficiently understand the irrational and
sometimes wildly capricious character of Stalin’s despotism [. . .]. Her
unwavering conviction that our meeting had serious historical consequenc-
es was an example of such idées fixes; she also believed that Stalin had
given orders that she should be slowly poisoned, then countermanded
them; that Mandelstam’s belief, shortly before his end, that the food he was
162 Continued
that these features have an additional function: ‘They enact the work of memory within
a particular epistemological context and historical moment [. . .] of ongoing historical
revisionism conducted programmatically by Stalinist institutions of knowledge-production
[. . .]. Poem Without a Hero is a text imbricated in the epistemology that views the past, and
memory itself, as ever-shifting targets, fraught with traps of deception, error and reversal.
As the poem strains to find a voice and form that set it apart from any tinge of Stalinist
ideology or normative socialist realism, it does so enmeshed in the very epistemological
fraughtness that it seeks to escape.’ ‘Textual Revision, Stalinist Revisionism, and the
Obligations of Memory: Situating Anna Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero’, Issues in
Integrative Studies, 23, 2005, pp. 71–98 (p. 80).
163 Zholkovskii, ‘Piat´desiat let spustia’, p. 214.
164 Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams, Ithaca, NY and
London, 2009, p. 87.
165 Grois, The Total Art of Stalinism, p. 12.
given in the labour camp was poisoned was well founded; that the poet
Georgy Ivanov (whom she accused of having written lying memoirs after
he emigrated) had at one time been a police spy in the pay of the Tsarist
government; that the poet Nekrasov in the nineteenth century must also
have been a government agent; that Innokenty Annensky had been
hounded to death by his enemies.166
Passionate convictions and polarized moral judgements, implausible
and fanciful motivations and intentions, spying, poisoning and so on,
are the stuff of melodrama, albeit that Akhmatova’s predilection for
them is partly concealed beneath her detached, ostensibly unmelodra-
matic exterior. Although Berlin does not express himself so crudely, he
suggests unmistakably here that Akhmatova, not unlike Stalin himself,
was prone to paranoid constructions of reality. Zholkovskii argues that
this paranoia develops into a mania grandiosa, which then serves to
energize Akhmatova’s personal myth.167 Although Zholkovskii’s view
of Akhmatova highlights her egotism and self-centredness to the
detriment of more positive qualities she is known to have displayed
(generosity, self-deprecating humour, and so on), his view of her as
profoundly narcissistic is supported by those who provide a more
balanced picture. For instance, Naiman writes:
She was sometimes capricious, despotic, and unjust to people, she behaved
selfishly at times, and she collected, as if for show, her readers’ latest
raptures, the shyness and trepidation of her admirers, and admiration itself
as the definitive attitude to her, adding them to the phenomenon and con-
cept of ‘Anna Akhmatova’. Consciously or unconsciously she encouraged
people in their desire to see in her an exceptional figure of greater stature
than themselves, someone unique, important to them as a living example
of the superiority and stature which human beings can attain.168
Akhmatova’s narcissism and paranoia are strongly suggestive of
a psychological predisposition towards melodrama: Robert Heilman
contends that paranoia and a sense of one’s own grandeur are prime
indicators of melodramatic character. He observes that one way to
amplify understanding of a character type is to discover its pathological
form, finding that the pathological extreme of the tragic condition
is schizophrenia, in which dividedness or conflict in the psyche is
magnified into a split. By contrast:
The pathological extreme of the melodramatic condition is paranoia — in
one phase, the sense of one’s own grandeur and, implicitly, of the downfall
of others; in another phase, the sense of a hostile ‘they’ who are conspiring
to make one their victim.169
166 Berlin, ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’, p. 250.

167 Zholkovsky, ‘The Obverse of Stalinism’, p. 48.
169 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, pp. 90–91.
Akhmatova’s paranoia was not, of course, pathological. It was
largely justified by contemporary political reality, and the existence of
a ‘hostile “they”’ was no mere fantasy. Nor was she wholly self-centred:
she was just as concerned to preserve the reputations of other threat-
ened figures, such as Gumilev and Mandel´shtam, as she was her own.
Her melodramatic approach to life has a particular function in this
regard. Heilman argues cogently that there are certain historical
moments at which tragedy is redundant and melodrama is the only
appropriate response.170 In particular, there is a ‘psychic and moral
case’ for melodrama on the part of an individual or group faced with
political tyranny or totalitarianism because when physical survival is
under threat, self-examination is simply not expedient: ‘when we see
present life as a fight for survival, we are least inclined to yield to the
tragic sense.’171 Melodrama is legitimate when there is a need to
portray ‘recognizable evil [. . .] or plausible courage and fidelity’.172
Heilman also suggests that melodrama acts as a healthy and useful
form of defence or escape in such circumstances, because melodra-
matic activity can restore a person for the ‘more exacting life of
tragedy’. In short, it contributes to spiritual survival in inimical condi-
tions.173 Melodrama may, by this reading, help to explain Akhmatova’s
own remarkable resilience in the face of political repression, as well as
having a broader cultural function.
The idea that Akhmatova’s use of melodrama is a response to
Stalinist melodramatic discourse, and psychological defence against it,
holds in relation to her presentation of her relationship with Berlin and
struggle with Stalin, but only provides a partial explanation for the
prevalence of melodrama in her behaviour and myth-making more
generally. It carries rather less weight in connection with her treatment
of Garshin (although here Zholkovskii’s interpretation of her behaviour
as ‘Stalinist’ is still applicable). Nor does it explain the propensity
towards melodrama in Akhmatova’s early years, evident in her corre-
spondence with von Shtein. All the evidence suggests that melodrama
was already an important form of self-expression for Akhmatova long
before 1917, so that the Soviet period of her career simply sees the
development of an approach to experience that was shaped prior to the
revolution by the theatrical, neo-Romantic cultural milieu in which she
was formed as poet. The fact that her melodramatic self-presentation
is reflected in, and brought out by, the melodramatic scripting engaged
in by Stalin serves as a reminder that the regime was itself, like
170 Ibid., p. 131.

171 Ibid., pp. 142–43.
172 Ibid., p. 289.
173 Ibid., p. 131.
Akhmatova, heir to Symbolist life-creation and theurgy, and consti-
tuted a political development of the modernist revolution. Grois writes
cogently about Stalinist culture’s fundamental Romanticism, expressed
in its aspiration to extend art into life, so that modernist and avant-
garde life-creation was, in effect, transformed into Stalinist world-
creation. To emphasize the Stalinist influence on Akhmatova’s behav-
iour (as Zholkovskii does), then, is to downplay the extent to which
Stalin himself emulated Akhmatova and her contemporaries. Indeed,
as a consideration of melodrama — an important part of the modern-
ist and avant-garde legacy — indicates, Zholkovskii’s thesis might
with justification be turned on its head: Akhmatova and her fellow
modernists are the pioneering originals, and Stalin merely the
imitator.
The extent to which melodramatic representation features in
Akhmatova’s myth-making throughout her career ultimately calls into
question the conventional view of her as emotionally restrained in her
self-presentation. The overall picture of Akhmatova handed down to
posterity is somewhat paradoxical, given that she is associated with
quiet, dignified restraint yet has the status of a ‘superindividual’.174
Indeed, her canonical image incorporates the polar extremes, oxymo-
ron, antithesis and hyperbole that typify melodramatic expression: she
is simultaneously a low-key and larger-than-life figure, a persecuted
martyr and courageous survivor, femme fatale and nun.
174 Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience, p. 63.

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University College London

Anna Akhmatova's Biographical Myth-Making: Tragedy and Melodrama

Modern Humanities Research Association, University College London, University

Anna Akhmatova’s Biographical

Alexandra K. Harrington is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Russian at the School

19 Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, pp. 81–82.

35 See Zholkovsky, ‘The Obverse of Stalinism’, p. 63.

44 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, p. 28.

51 Zholkovskii is fond of quoting this passage, which is taken from ‘Neskol´ko

88 Boym, Death in Quotation Marks, p. 13.

91 Goscilo, ‘Playing Dead’, p. 296.

93 Kataeva, Anti-Akhmatova, pp. 10–49.

96 Gershtein, Moscow Memoirs, p. 356.

102 Ibid., pp. 178–79.

106 Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias, p. 26.

112 Mandelshtam, Hope Abandoned, p. 505.

117 See Gershtein and Olshevskaia-Ardova, ‘Conversations’, p. 150; Sochineniia, 2, p. 221.

122 Reeder, Poet and Prophet, p. 281.

130 Zholkovskii, ‘Scripts, not Scriptures’, p. 140.

140 Sochineniia, 1, p. 321.

146 Berlin, ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’, p. 245.

152 Haight, A Poetic Pilgrimage, p. 12.

157 Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, pp. 104 and 136.

166 Berlin, ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’, p. 250.

170 Ibid., p. 131.

174 Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience, p. 63.

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