A solitary icon hung in Anna Akhmatova’s Leningrad apartment, the story goes—a portrait of her younger self sketched in Paris, decades earlier, by Amedeo Modigliani. In more than a dozen studies, the starving artist had drawn her as if she were a sensual figure in ancient hieroglyphs. The other portraits had vanished, lost during the tempestuous year of the Russian Revolution. Other than the barest of furniture, little else adorned her flat. She was there, alone, when the bombs began to fall.
More than 1 million Soviet citizens had been evacuated from the city on the Neva. The Nazi blitzkrieg had reached the gates. Akhmatova had not yet been offered a place in the exodus. Nor was she permitted to take refuge in the city’s subterranean bomb shelters. Effectively, she was a member of the byvshiye lyudi, a former person. She belonged to the time before the Bolshevik coup d’état and, as such, was discardable. Many of her kind, including her ex-husband, the poet Nikolay Gumilyov, had been executed. Others had died during Chekist (the Communist secret police) torture sessions, drowned in scuttled ships, or wound up getting shot in the back of the neck in floodlit woods. Others had disappeared into the Gulag. Akhmatova remained, though denounced and largely forbidden from writing poetry. To associate with her was to attract the attention of the state. She had gone from being a cultural pharaoh to a pariah.
At great risk and with great courage, a friend, the critic Boris Tomashevsky, came to save the poet from Nazi bombardment. As he shepherded Akhmatova to the relative safety of his home, the air-raid sirens shrieked. The couple darted into the nearest building and down a flight of stairs into its derelict basement. There, they hid in the gloom of the makeshift bomb shelter, as bedlam sounded above them. Gradually, Anna’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and she noticed fading but dazzling paintings on the walls. She had inadvertently returned to her youth. This was the Stray Dog Café, the epicenter of the Russian Silver Age of poetry. With death and destruction all around, she was one of its last survivors.
Anyone writing about the past can sometimes feel that it’s just another battlefield of the politics of the present—territory to exploit. There is objective truth, of course. The bombs did fall. The murdered were murdered. And the Siege of Leningrad was the costliest in human history. Yet history is not simply what happened but rather a series of stories about what happened. Reading of Akhmatova and the Stray Dog Café, deviations are inevitable. We’re justified in trusting the broad details, but one account says that she was hit on the head by falling masonry on her return to the Stray Dog; another says that she was not yet alone but lived with her common-law husband Nikolay Punin and her son, Lev. Figures appear and disappear from the historical narrative. Akhmatova’s persecution was, and would be, horrific—she became a symbol of suffering at the hands of ideological politics—but she got a reprieve at this point, selected to write a rousing address to Leningrad’s citizenry and flown out of the city as a prominent cultural figure, worth preserving. So she did not starve to death among the 100,000 residents who perished each month in Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42.
There are many reasons for these ambiguities: the fog of war; mistranslations; Soviet airbrushing and occidental ignorance; poetic mythmaking; political inflation and deflation of the truth. Part of it has to do with us. In our consumerist age, we’re often granted what we want, not what we need, and this extends to our relationship with the past. We feign time travel to rectify social ills and resurrect forgotten figures, projecting twenty-first-century perspectives and mores onto historical epochs that didn’t possess them. It results in a kind of shadow puppetry, with historical figures becoming ciphers for our wishes and prejudices.
A silver generation to Pushkin’s gold, the Stray Dog Café’s founders had intended to find a garret location, as a beacon above Saint Petersburg. They settled for the wine cellar of the Dashkov mansion. The name, and coat of arms, came during their search, when Count Aleksey Tolstoy remarked to his fellow itinerants, “Don’t we look like a pack of stray dogs seeking shelter?” The title was confirmed when they came fortuitously upon a homeless man selling a puppy, which they bought as a mascot for their “society of intimate theater.” They opened on New Year’s Eve, 1911. More of a cabaret than a café, it was both sophisticated and raucous. Entrants were vetted at the door and placed into the categories of artists (who entered free) or “pharmacists,” who were charged three rubles to get in, under the assumption that they were philistines and voyeurs who could afford it.
The atmosphere within was halcyon, from feverish conversations on the future of art to debauched love affairs. Schisms and heresies abounded, fueled by professional and sexual rivalries. The Stray Dog may have been a refuge, the fierce Baltic winter kept at bay by the roaring fire, but it also could be a dog pit. A constellation of artists is, after all, a constellation of egos. “On the stage someone is reciting poetry,” the poet Georgy Ivanov would recall years later, and “music or a grand piano interrupts him. Someone is having an argument, someone else is making a declaration of love.”
Different groups emerged and vied for prominence—Symbolists, Imaginists, Ego-Futurists, Acmeists, Everthingists—and publications like Satyricon and Apollon sprang up. The only comparisons in Western literature might be with the Romantics or the Beat Generation, but the Russian Silver Age poets outdazzled them in glamour and intrigue. Yet, for all the incandescence, a sense of foreboding was always present. It appears repeatedly, even in their poetry of the time. The café’s fire, Akhmatova noted, cast the dancing, orating, and carousing in a strangely diabolical light.
A moralist might view such youthful indiscretions as degenerate. And certainly, among bohemian scenes, the callous and predatory can thrive. One of the instigators of the Stray Dog was the impresario Boris Pronin, whose “head was filled with plans for unusual evenings, unthinkable performances, crazy cabarets,” Tolstoy recalled. “He considered the ordinary life of friends and acquaintances an oversight, a misunderstanding from a lack of imagination and ardor. If he had the strength, he would have turned the whole world into wandering theaters, crazy holidays, all women into Columbines, and men into characters from the commedia dell’arte.”
At times, their provocations seemed to tempt fate. A flickering chandelier hung above a central table, lined with 13 chairs, as a pastiche of the Last Supper. The walls were painted with arabesques, geometric shapes, mysterious figures, birds, and fantastical flowers, all inspired by Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil—the handbook of the decadent age and the bible of poètes maudits, for whom life did not tend to end well. And so it transpired. Impressionable and romantic, the teenage hussar Vsevolod Gavrilovich Knyazev arrived at the Stray Dog full of poetic aspirations, fell in love there, and, shortly thereafter, lovelorn, shot himself. At his funeral, his mother put a hex on those who had wronged him. Though he had baptized the Stray Dog, Count Aleksey Tolstoy largely abandoned it, seeing it as a symptom of a troubled, depraved city, “tormented by sleepless nights, deadening its misery with wine, gold, and love without love.” Though beloved by the Stray Dogs, the poet Alexander Blok told his wife not to attend, claiming, “The dead drink there.”
In many ways, the Stray Dog was the embodiment of counterculture and its paradoxes: elitist, yet radical; indulgent, yet visionary; avant-garde but nostalgic; sexually liberated but riven with jealousies; frivolous, yet consequential. Like other such cultural moments, it was not a dawn, as its devotees believed, but a twilight. Their damnation, however, would not come from hedonism or czarist repression but from a new world that the Stray Dogs welcomed with the enthusiasm of Pandora receiving the gift of the box.
To envisage the Stray Dog Café today is to walk through rooms filled with ghosts. The world’s most famous ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, would sit talking with Michel Fokine, choreographer of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. Formerly exiled and persecuted writers like Konstantin Balmont and Vladimir Narbut found sanctuary there, the former’s writing hand permanently injured after trying to take his own life. The feminist diarist and socialite Teffi holds court, as she did while dining with Rasputin. The Russian Diogenes, Alexander Tinyakov, sits alone in a corner.
Many of the participants are walking contradictions. With his painted face and top hat, David Burliuk has made his entire life an art experiment, yet he hails from a long line of Cossack horsemen. The boyish Sergei Yesenin comes from a peasant background and plays well the noble savage role of the “last poet of wooden Russia,” despite being urbane enough to seduce a significant proportion of the Stray Dogs. Curious stories orbit another baby-faced poet, Khlebnikov. One is that he has developed a language to communicate with animals. Another has it that he developed a system to foretell the future. He used to laugh and claim that their world would collapse in 1917. The joke becomes less funny with each advancing year.
Two friends, polar opposites politically, are in conversation, looming tall and broad above the seated. One is Nikolay Gumilyov, a roaming playboy-adventurer, always following the “muse of distant travels.” He is deeply patriotic about Russia, and yet more at home on voyages to Egypt and Abyssinia than in the motherland. His writing reflects his restless nature; he calls it “geography in verse,” stretching from conquistadors of the past to the citizens of the future, with safari verses for children in between. His mind learned to roam as a bookish child and never ceased. His remoteness was no act. In the war to come, he would be chastised for “unnecessary bravery”—nonchalantly smoking a cigarette on a riverbank as shells rained down around him, his comrades watching in disbelief from the trenches. His bravery would also earn him two Order of Saint George medals. He has the bravery of someone who is always slightly elsewhere.
Gumilyov’s companion is the handsome, barrel-chested Vladimir Mayakovsky. He came from remote Georgia, hence his brogue. Mayakovsky understood that the bourgeoisie enjoy few things more than denunciations of the bourgeoisie, so he gave it to them, condemning everyone in the cabaret as talentless, indulgent, lecherous deadbeats—to their applause. The poet had already been throwing his weight around in cafés and theaters, publishing a manifesto titled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste: “We alone are the image of our time. . . . Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc., etc. must be thrown overboard off the steamboat of modernity. . . . From the height of skyscrapers, we look down on their littleness.” He sealed his notoriety with a provocative Futurist tour of cities, gatherings that the police broke up with force, resulting in his expulsion from university. He’d even served time for revolutionary activities. For all his fervor, though, Mayakovsky was not an ideologue but a rebel and romantic. Between his stirring recitals, he would sit quietly by the fireside, writing or reading intently, with childlike élan, the writers he’d denounced.
Even among such a motley crew, Osip Mandelstam was an oddity, and regarded himself as an outsider. He looked older than his years. He hid his genius behind dishevelment, and his nervousness behind aloofness. His memory was prodigious. A library of unpublished poetry existed in his mind, which he shared freely—too freely—upon request. He was a wanderer, like Gumilyov, but more of a hobo than a decorated explorer. Yet he was just as brave and foolish, as it turned out.
Passing Mandelstam, moonfaced with dark hair and big green eyes, was Marina Tsvetaeva. The two would later become passionate lovers, writing each other rapturous verses. She is already a supreme poet of the passions and always being led astray by them. Tsvetaeva is affectionate and callous, not least to her future self. Her great love is “Russia’s Sappho,” Sophia Parnok, a collector who treats her, to her despair, as just another conquest. Tsvetaeva, too, is a traveler, a quality that almost all the Stray Dogs share, wandering in the hope of finding home. She has been that way ever since her cultured, dying mother took her around Europe, trying, unsuccessfully, to find the right air to survive tuberculosis.
And there, right at the center of the Stray Dog Café, yet always temperamentally on its edges, is its heart—Anna Akhmatova, pale and angular, piercing, icy, intense, surrounded by fawning admirers she does little to encourage, and who are all the more enraptured. She is dressed in the blackest silk, with a coffee and cigarette, staring far beyond the walls.
Akhmatova’s early poetry is undeniably romantic, elegiac, full of passion and yearning, which lovers would reputedly often recite to each other. Yet something is amiss. These are not poems lost in love but rather acutely aware that love will be lost. These are future ruins in verse form. That’s not to say that they lack magic or invention. Icebergs appear in Saint Petersburg pleasure gardens. Previously unknown galaxies appear in the skies. Mythological images become personal. Akhmatova absorbs storms, speaks birdsong, conjures the dead. Her poems harness the electricity of ambiguity—the heart as the bottom of a well, garlands of flowers blooming in either betrothal or in memoriam. Hers is a poetry of metamorphosis, being terrified and fascinated by the uncertainty of what is to come. Her work revels in debauchery and recognizes the decadence that it leads to. The frisson lies in the fact that she is both appalled and attracted by the idea, if not reality, of self-destruction.
It could be said that poetry is life slowed down until the ordinary appears, as strange as it truly is. Akhmatova doesn’t need to slow it down. She doesn’t miss a step in the dance, a comeback in conversation, a seductive glance, or a dismissive gesture. She is vain and brave, elusive, confessional, and expansive. She enjoys the comforts of her class, as the daughter of a czarist naval engineer with links to nobility, but continually evades the gilded cage of the Muse. She empathizes more with Lot’s wife, defiantly gazing where she is told she should not. Her writing has an intimacy as if you are there, party to a secret or immersed in some liaison. It has a sense of ongoing peril, theater, life happening thrillingly in real time. These qualities make her ahead of her time and modern still. Yet if her work is close to anyone, it’s to Sappho’s fragments of desire and melancholy, those that survived the catastrophe of time. The catastrophe is yet to come for Akhmatova and her compatriots.
Music plays in the Stray Dog Café. Ragtime shakes the grand piano, while Debussy and Ravel compositions arrive in the post as sheet music from Paris, only weeks after emerging from their composers’ fingertips. Ilya Sats played a soundtrack inspired by heavy industry and the periodic table. Arthur-Vincent Lourié applied Cubism to melody. The famed ballerina Tamara Platonovna Karsavina danced in full costume, with a silver mirror below her, doubling her movements. Then the music subsides, and the chatter abates, with the booming voice of Mayakovsky and the lilting voice of Akhmatova reading their poetry. Anything is possible, or so it seems.
Fate came calling one evening, in the form of three undercover members of the czarist secret police, the Okhrana, one carrying a fish under his arm. They arrived with a warrant, under the pretext of clamping down on illegal drinking, only to find Gumilyov, Mayakovsky, and others engaged in illegal gambling—a card game. It was 1915. The Romanov dynasty, 400 years old, had less than two years to live. Most of the Stray Dogs welcomed its oblivion. Here, they escaped punishment. Yet the future did not belong to the artists.
It lay with another avant-garde—political, not cultural, far more decisive and ruthless, lacking the empathy or vertigo of poets. While the Stray Dogs toyed with ideas of reinventing the past and future, the committee men and the secretariats would actually do so. The consequences of their schisms were not broken hearts and disruptive poetry readings but show trials and basement cells, where the lights never went out and Nagant revolvers were pointed at the brain stem. Though both groups claimed internationalism, those who would soon take power had nothing but contempt for those inhabiting the semi-imaginary realm of Bohemia. The new Russia would be directed not by the enlightened few, or even by the workers and peasants, as claimed, but by fanatical ideologues. Not stray dogs but wolves. The Soviet regime would eventually be led, however, by a onetime poet, a voracious reader. It would be a terrible misfortune for the scattered Stray Dogs to have stirred his interest.
The first to die was not one of their own but the poet who had feared the Stray Dog Café as a meeting place of future apparitions. The leading figure of the time, Alexander Blok tried to reconcile with the Bolsheviks via his strange tempest of a poem “The Twelve,” which recruited Jesus Christ to Communism. Blok chaired the local branch of the Bolshevik All-Russian Union of Poets but soon found himself arrested for conspiracy. Though he was released shortly afterward, his health began to fail. Forlorn, he quit writing and began drinking heavily, warning a friend of the arriving era when “we will all suffocate.” Blok began seeing demons. His heart became inflamed. Maxim Gorky begged Lenin to let the poet be sent abroad for lifesaving treatment; but by the time he agreed, it was too late.
Akhmatova stood under a tree, weeping, watching Blok being buried, when a mutual friend told her that Gumilyov, father of her son, had been arrested. Gumilyov was overseas when the Bolsheviks seized power. He had elected to return to his homeland, reasoning that, if he could deal with tigers in the jungles of Africa, he could handle Marxist intellectuals. Back in Saint Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd, Gumilyov got back to work, teaching creative writing. They came for him under the pretense of the Tagantsev Plot, a conspiracy largely invented by the Bolsheviks, in bad faith and paranoia. Gumilyov’s interrogators flattered him, praising his poetry. He humored them; then, when returned to his cell, he scratched on the wall, “God, forgive my sins as I embark on my last journey, Gumilyov.” Nearly 100 intellectuals, writers, and teachers died in this first purge. Its architect, Yakov Agranov, noted: “Seventy percent of the Petrograd intelligentsia had one leg in the enemy camp. We had to burn that leg.” Gumilyov was ten days dead when his reprieve arrived, after some of his braver Stray Dog comrades signed a petition on his behalf.
The intended chilling effect of the first wave of killings failed, however, and public support for the Communists plummeted. The Red Terror temporarily abated. Lenin began merely to exile freethinkers and dissidents, giving rise to the so-called Philosophers’ Ships that set off with some of Russia’s sharpest minds. After Lenin’s death, this temporary liberalization was rescinded, and the annihilation of intellectuals became unremarkable.
The slyer Stray Dogs followed the Philosophers’ Ships into exile. Others stayed to ingratiate themselves with the Marxists, staging theatrical re-creations of the Russian Revolution, rhapsodizing the new regime in verse, or agitating for the Communist cause. Most who stayed would be debased or destroyed, directly or indirectly. Marina Tsvetaeva got out, but foolishly let herself be pulled back to Soviet Russia. The state swallowed up her family, one by one, until she signed off, already entering the past tense: “Forgive me. . . . This is not me anymore. . . . I found myself in a trap.” Lyrical and otherworldly, she’d always had well-founded suspicions about the coming age.
The stranger fates are the illogical ones. Tyranny is, by its nature, arbitrary. Surpassing and dismantling outdated concepts like reason and loyalty, it devours not just the traitorous but the faithful. Narbut, Yesenin, and Mayakovsky all served the new world to varying degrees and watched their dreams turn into nightmares. Narbut vanished into a likely violent death in the Gulag. Yesenin and Mayakovsky, after writing damning poems and plays brilliantly but ineffectively expressing their disillusionment, got entangled with the increasing infiltration of artist circles by the secret police, and had hungry younger generations set upon them by the party. “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution,” Hannah Arendt wrote, and these exceptional poets realized the difference between revolutionary and rebel too late. Both chose the permanent exile of suicide.
One day, Boris Pasternak, one of the quietest, more melancholic Stray Dogs, bumped into Osip Mandelstam on Tverskoi Boulevard, the street where Napoleon’s invading army had once hanged citizens from lampposts. Mandelstam recited his Stalin Epigram to him, in which he castigates the tyrant, with his greasy fingers and his taste for murder as a delicacy. Pasternak begged him never to speak of the poem to a soul, but it was already too late. Akhmatova happened to be at Mandelstam’s apartment when they came for him. He was one of the few who had actually insulted Stalin, yet the party toyed with him, writing “Isolate but preserve” next to his name on the execution list. This went on long enough to break the poet psychologically. When his interrogators recited his Stalin poem to him, he corrected them by reciting an even more incriminating version. He vanished into Siberia. When his wife, Nadezhda, sent him a package, it was returned; the post-office clerk casually informed her that the recipient no longer existed. Pasternak would survive, though not without torment, with another Stalin-penned note in the margins of his death sentence: “Do not touch this cloud dweller.”
The authorities kept a blank letter on file for Akhmatova’s arrest, just waiting for a signature, which somehow never came. The regime officially condemned her as “a feral lady from the salons . . . half nun, half whore, or rather both whore and nun, fornication and prayer being intermingled in her world. . . . Such is Akhmatova, with her petty, narrow private life, her trivial experiences and her religious-mystical eroticism.” What was intended as a condemnation points us toward the beginning of what is glorious and redemptive about her work and life.
I fear the man of a single book,” Thomas Aquinas wrote, mostly in admiration. We, however, are right to be afraid. The world is far too multiplicitous ever to be contained within one cyclopean worldview. Nevertheless, we are mortality-bound creatures, so we seek comfort and order where only flux seems to exist. Ideologies are built on this desire to cling. And the allure of the puritan is powerful, as we see today during our own neo-puritan revival, led by righteous, comfort-seeking, infantilized intellectuals, weaned in an age of consumerism. When reality intrudes, the ideologues ignore, cancel, or attack, seeking to maintain their consoling gospel, even when it is antithetical to their own best interests.
The Stray Dogs were a threat to the Soviet regime because they were strays. They had seen worlds outside Russia and before 1917. They had dreamed other dreams. They did not fit. The party would take Akhmatova’s second husband. His coat would hang on the wall, though he would never return. Her son would have his youth extinguished in the Gulag. Yet Akhmatova’s poetry would outlast an entire superpower—because it was true and because her colossal nemesis was a fabrication. The past is not fiction. It is not a canvas to reenact our desires. It is not exploitable, except in the most derisory, superficial sense. Instead, the past is an inheritance that we depend on. Our fictions deceive as much as flatter us. Truths remain, as they have always been and must be—uneasy, difficult, questioning.
Standing in a Leningrad line for the prisons, to try to contact her imprisoned son, Akhmatova was approached by another mother, who asked her who could possibly articulate this grotesque, brutal world. As recounted in her epic Requiem, Akhmatova replied, “I can.” Everything depends on those with the bravery to step forward, against the invisible tide, and say that they can carry the truth.
Top Photo: A survivor of the siege of Leningrad, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) wrote a poetry of metamorphosis, terrified and fascinated by the uncertainty of what was to come. (© Effigie. All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman Images)
