Friendship in Terror: Lydia Chukovskaya’s 'Akhmatova Journals'
Tom Philips details the personal admiration between the two great writers, and the secret rituals they used to survive Stalin
Anna Akhmatova
Lydia Chukovskaya
Between 1938 and 1941, the novelist Lydia Chukovskaya would get a phone call every few days from Anna Akhmatova, either summoning her to the poet’s Leningrad apartment, or announcing an imminent visit to her own. Such a call introduces almost every entry of the first volume of Chukovskaya’s The Akhmatova Journals (translated into English by Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova), which chronicle the meetings triggered by each call. The diaries, published decades later, provide a snapshot of a friendship built both on literary kinship and shared trauma. Indeed, the years covered by this volume were for both women dominated by surveillance, arrests and prison queues.
It was Chukovskaya’s own experience of this that led her to seek Akhmatova out. Their twin efforts on behalf of imprisoned loved ones — Chukovskaya’s husband Matvey Bronshteyn (who in fact had already been shot in February 1938) and Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilyov, along with talk of friends “who perished in the night” — was the main topic of conversation. Despite this, for obvious reasons the diaries limit references to such topics, generally resorting to code and euphemism: The NKVD is “Pyotr Ivanych”, their headquarters “the big house”, and informants “Mycaenas”. In her foreword (titled, perhaps inspired by Requiem, “Instead of a Foreword”), Chukovskaya writes that words such as “died”, “shot” and “queue” came up as frequently as discussions of literature, but self-censorship of the former pushed the latter to the foreground of her entries.
These literary discussions make for interesting reading by themselves, and Chukovskaya eagerly pries opinions out of Akhmatova, rarely bothering to give the reader her own, which gives these entries the feeling of an interview rather than a dialogue. In one example, Akhmatova gives a “formidable speech against Anna Karenina”, saying: “you may have noticed that the main idea of that great work is this: if a woman leaves her lawful husband to live with another man, this inevitably makes her a prostitute.” She ends the analysis by casually adding “I’m very friendly with [Tolstoy’s] granddaughter Sonya.” It is a critique which Chukovskaya enjoys so much that later on she pretends not to have heard it yet, just for the pleasure of hearing it once more, and similarly she makes no attempt at contributing herself, writing that “I am too interested in listening to speak myself.” This is not the only example of Chukovskaya deferring to Akhmatova as an intellectual authority, and in some ways that mindset is a driving force of the journals.
Akhmatova would scribble new written verse on a scrap of paper and then hand it to Chukovskaya, who would commit the lines to memory. Once ready, she would hand the scrap back, ready to be burnt over an ashtray…
There are more complimentary comments given to other writers: Pushkin, Dante, Joyce and Twain are all praised by Akhmatova — Pushkin of course more than anyone else. Her Russian contemporaries meanwhile are dropped in conversation by their first names, with the more famous surnames quietly provided to the reader in a footnote. Of a few, such as Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandestam, Akhmatova shows great admiration: in one instance commenting that the former’s poems “were written before the sixth day, when God created man… There is everything you want: thunderstorms, woods, chaos, but no people.” Of other 20th century poets, she is less complimentary, as in her remarks on Sergey Esenin: “He’s very bad, very monotonous, and it reminded me of an apartment during the NEP: the icons are still up but the place is already overcrowded, and there’s someone drinking and pouring his feelings out in front of strangers.”
Such conversations and pronouncements are scattered throughout The Akhmatova Journals, but are ultimately relief to the central drama of the diaries. Chukovskaya’s work with Akhmatova covered a range of tasks, from reading proofs for her upcoming collections to collecting train tickets. But the one which provides the centrepiece for the journals was the secretive formulation of Requiem, Akhmatova’s haunting elegy about the Great Purge. The process was a testament to their dangerous existence: Akhmatova would scribble new written verse on a scrap of paper and then hand it to Chukovskaya, who would commit the lines to memory. Once ready, she would hand the scrap back, ready to be burnt over an ashtray. Bookended by two mundane comments (such as “you’re very tanned” or “how early Autumn came this year”), the process was completed in silence, such was the likelihood that the room might be bugged. “It was a ritual: hands, match, ashtray — a beautiful and mournful ritual” wrote Chukovskaya almost 20 years later.
In the actual diaries it is appears only fleetingly and, like all discussions of its topic, in code. On some occasions it is a Pushkin work: Mozart and Salieri and Monument are both used. On another occasion Chukovskaya simply refers to “the black ritual.” In normal circumstances, hearing these lines decades before anyone else might have been a euphoric experience — Chukovskaya had since childhood been memorising Akhmatova’s poetry — but from the diaries one senses that the responsibility gave her more purpose than it did pleasure.
That she was also writing her own piece of terror literature — the novella Sofia Petrovna — points to the role which Chukovskaya assumed in this period, as a steward of its memory. The diaries moreover reveal that the authorities found out about Sofia Petrovna, starting an unsurprisingly distressful investigation into a “document about ‘37”. That Chukovskaya came out unscathed seemed miraculous, leading Akhmatova to tell her “you are like a glass which has rolled under a bench during an explosion in a china shop.”
The ever-increasing personal burden is laid bare by the diary format — time does not fly so much as it bounds and leaps…
All this takes place against a backdrop of mental deterioration for both Chukovskaya and Akhmatova. In one sense this is intensified by the transformation of the latter’s image in the former’s mind: the early entries are those of a fan meeting a famous poet, and the diaries successfully explore the contradictions between Akhmatova and her public persona. In some moments this provides light relief, and one entry sees the pair mock an adoring letter from a reader “of the ‘Dear Anna Akhmatova’ sort”; of another admirer Akhmatova simply exclaims: “The things she said! My God, the things she said!”
More clearly, however, as the diaries progress, Akhmatova comes across as a lonely and helpless figure. The energetic literary opining becomes less frequent and descriptions of Akhmatova reveal an individual in hiding from the world — words such as “withered” become the norm as Chukovskaya meets her at the start of each entry. Aside from the distress of her son’s imprisonment, Akhmatova was dealing with physical health problems, and professional pressure around publishing her first work in years, a book of which could not include her best poetry. It’s not surprising therefore that she appears in diaries overwhelmed by despair. The ever-increasing personal burden is laid bare by the diary format — time does not fly so much as it bounds and leaps — and each entry, starting with one of those calls, appears to bring a new episode out of nowhere.
Both Requiem and Sofia Petrovna consider how the period they cover stripped away people’s sense of self, and on first look, the first volume of The Akhmatova Journals does the same — but it does so in a somewhat optimistic manner. In her foreword, Chukovskaya writes that she felt her own “non-life unworthy of description”, but Akhmatova remained to her “a fact, a certainty amidst all those unwavering uncertainties.” She describes her friend in those years as “a statue of grief, loneliness, pride, courage”- chiselled by her fate. Chukovskaya willingly merged her identity into that of Akhmatova and more importantly that of her work, producing diaries which document two momentarily conjoined lives. Touchingly, it is revealed at the end of the volume, as the pair are on a train to Tashkent (away from the German invasion), that Akhmatova has taken to calling Chukovskaya “my Captain”, revealing the extent of both her affection and dependence on her confidante.
