Swan Songs
Akhmatova and Gumilev
by
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It was in December of 1903, on a wintry street in St. Petersburg that Anna Gorenko and Nikolai Gumilev first met, as Anna’s friend, Valeriya Sreznevskaya, remembered. The Christmas holidays were approaching and the snow-packed sidewalks of the city were bustling with crowds of people. Horse-drawn trams rumbled and bumped over the ice-rutted streets. Brightly painted sleighs, harnesses jingling, slid past, their shaggy horses snorting clouds of crystalline droplets as they scrambled over the bridges arching the ice-choked canals, Ringing in the frigid air were the sing-song cries of hawkers of greenery, sugared buns and tinware. In the shadow of St. Isaacs Cathedral, mountains of blackish-green spruce trees were heaped for sale, ready for the glass ornaments and candles that would light the faces of children. Flocks of pigeons burst up into the grey sky, then wheeled in widening circles before sinking to peck busily through the street litter. Along the Neva, like bare trunks of a floating forest the masts of ships were clustered at the granite embankments. The palaces off Nevsky Prospekt glowed in shades of crimson, lime and rose, set off with ornately-carved, white trim. And floating over the low city, shining like a blessing in the thin, pale northern light, were the rounded vaults and golden onion domes of churches and the gleaming spires of the Admiralty and the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. Valeriya, her brother Seriozha, and Anna had taken the train from Tsarskoe Selo to buy decorations for their Christmas trees. As they approached Gostiny Dvor, the shopping arcade on Nevsky Prospekt, Valya spotted two familiar faces--Dimitri and Nikolai Gumilev. Back in Tsarskoe Selo, Mitya and Kolya took music lessons from the same teacher as she did. The jostling crowds of people, bundled to the eyes in furs and heavy layers of woolens, eddied around them as Valya stopped to greet the boys and to introduce her friend, Anna. The moment of their meeting, when Anna Gorenko drew a gloved hand from her fur muff and offered it to Nikolai, lifting her dark-lashed, luminous grey eyes to acknowledge his greeting, was a fateful one. But as many such moments, it passed unnoticed and only took on its true significance in retrospect. The Gumilev brothers joined the three friends in their shopping expedition and they all returned together on the train to Tsarskoe Selo. Stiff, silent young Kolya, with his rather haughty manner and plain looks, did not make a significant impression upon Anna at their first meeting. But for Nikolai Gumilev, this chance encounter on a St. Petersburg street marked the beginning of a passion that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
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About the Book
On a snowy St. Petersburg street in 1903, Nikolai Gumilev, already a budding poet, met and fell in love with the fourteen year old Anna Gorenko (Akhmatova). In that moment, she would take her place at the center of Gumilev's emotional life and his poetic world. Despite the painful ruptures between the two over the next eighteen years, she would remain there until his abrupt and violent death in 1921 at the age of thirty-three. Swan Songs: Akhmatova and Gumilev is the compelling and tragic story of these two great Russian poets, one well known in the West, the other quite unknown. It is told through their biographies, letters, journals, memoirs and especially the poems that Akhmatova and Gumilev wrote to and about one another. These poems, newly translated by the author and set in the context of their lives, provide the key to unlocking the secrets of this passionate, turbulent and often painful relationship that Akhmatova herself called a "terrifying and burning love." This book will follow the two poets through their childhood and student days in Tsarskoe Selo and Gumilev's years of persistent wooing of Anna that finally ended with their marriage. In the Silver Age of Russian poetry, Akhmatova and Gumilev would play leading roles in the lively literary world of St. Petersburg even as their marriage was coming unraveled. These frenetically creative days soon darkened with the coming of the Great War and Gumilev joined the Russian army as a cavalry officer. After too many betrayals on both sides, Akhmatova and Gumilev were divorced and re-married, but both suffered the terrible privations of wartime. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Gumilev attempted to make a place for himself in a new literary landscape, teaching and lecturing. Akhmatova soon realized that her voice would no longer be heard in this brave, new world. In August 1921, Gumilev was suddenly arrested, accused of being part of a conspiracy and shot. Akhmatova was devastated and spent the rest of her life coming to terms with this loss. Her attempt to redeem this most important relationship in her life culminated in her last, great work, Poem Without a Hero. The author of Swan Songs, in a new and original reading, demonstrates how the deeply encoded figure of Nikolai Gumilev appears in four layers of the poem and that he is, in fact, the Absent Hero.
About the Author
Even before learning the Russian language, the author of Swan Songs: Akhmatova and Gumilev had been fascinated by the life of Anna Akhmatova and her poetry in English translations. While studying Russian at Bryn Mawr College, she began to attempt her own translations of Akhmatova's poems. She went on to study Russian literature and the translation of Russian poetry under Prof. George Kline, the first translator of the poetry of Nobel prize winner, Joseph Brodsky, and Anatoly Naiman, a poet and close friend of Akhmatova. Naiman called Laird's translation of Requiem (1935-1940) the best he had read and an "echo in English" of the Russian original. Frances Laird has traveled and studied in Russia and, since receiving a Master's Degree in Russian Literature from Bryn Mawr College, has published her translations of contemporary Russian poets as well as those of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev.