Poet and Irish Ambassador to Russia PHILIP MCDONAGHpays homage to Anna Akhmatova, leading light of the literary St Petersburg swept away by world war and revolution

ON A RAINY Saturday afternoon last autumn I went in search of St Petersburg's new statue of Anna Akhmatova – the monument she dreamt of in Requiem. The statue is of a beautiful young woman, tall as Akhmatova was tall, rising off her feet, turning to view the Kresty prison. In her hand she clutches a rosary. Akhmatova in her transfiguration is "harlot and nun" as the police file so famously said. Suddenly in that rain I had come home to Russia, the land of Akhmatova and her people – "no people on earth more tearless / more simple and more full of pride".

A hundred years ago Anna Akhmatova, still in her early 20s, was the brightest star among the artists, poets, actors, painters, musicians, scholars and many others who gathered in the Stray Dog, a cafe-cabaret in St Petersburg. In the Stray Dog the windows were blocked up, and the walls and low ceilings were painted with flowers and birds. The place came into its own at four in the morning.

Osip Mandelstam was remembered as a thin boy with a lily of the valley in his buttonhole. Anna Akhmatova would sit smoking a cigarette at a side table, dressed

in a tight skirt, with a scarf around her shoulders and a necklace of black agate. She wrote:

We are all carousers and loose women

here;

how unhappy we are together . . .

How did this “more than beautiful” woman (to borrow the words of a contemporary) become one of the most important European poets of the last century?

Akhmatova's biography is summed up in the words she addresses to herself in Requiem:

You should have been shown, you mocker,

Darling of all those friends,

Gay little sinner of Tsarskoe Selo,

What would happen in your life –

How three-hundreth in line with a parcel,

You would stand by the Kresty prison . . .

Akhmatova, whose life I researched for a lecture in Dublin earlier this year at the Kildare Street and University Club, lived in Tsarskoe Selo, famous as a summer residence of the tsars and for its association with Alexander Pushkin, the foundational figure of Russian literature.

In the years before the first World War the “gay little sinner” assumed the Tatar name of Akhmatova in preference to her family name of Gorenko and contracted an unhappy marriage to the poet Nikolai Gumilyev, with whom she had a son.

She became the centre of a literary movement that challenged the values of symbolism; and travelled abroad and within Russia. She endured the separation of her parents, the death of a beloved sister, an unfaithful husband. She had famous love affairs.

Her first two volumes of poetry, Eveningand Rosary,both published by the age of 25, gave rise to the famous verdict: "The youth of two or three generations fell in love to the accompaniment of Akhmatova's poetry."

One very short poem illustrates the spine of intelligence and wit that runs through the poetry of this early period:

He loved three things in life:

Evensong, white peacocks

And old maps of America.

He hated it when children cried,

He hated tea with raspberry jam

And women’s hysterics.

. . . And I was his wife.

The first World War and the Russian Revolution swept away, among many other things, the world of literary St Petersburg.

The turning point in Akhmatova’s transition from love poet to poet of the times was her awareness from close to the beginning of the war that she could not share the general enthusiasm for fighting. Already in 1914 Akhmatova was writing war poetry of a kind that the classic war poets of the English language took another two or three years to discover – or perhaps never quite discovered:

The Mother of God will spread her white

mantle

Over this enormous grief.

In a long poem of tribute, written in 1916, Russia’s other great woman poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, salutes Akhmatova as a woman of sorrow and prayer and already “the voice of all Russia”.

After the revolution Akhmatova’s personal life entered a period of even greater turmoil. Her son, Lev, was raised by her separated husband’s family. Her love affairs were unhappy. She struggled with TB. In 1921 her estranged husband, Gumilyev, was shot by the Bolsheviks. The following year her brother killed himself.

With her second husband, Akhmatova lived in an unheated apartment and for a few years wrote no poems at all. She began to experience the serious poverty that was to be a part of her life until after the second World War.

Yet in 1921 Akhmatova wrote the following lyric:

Everything has been plundered, betrayed

sold out,

The wing of black death has flashed,

Everything has been devoured by starving

anguish:

Why, then, is it so bright?

Starving anguish: both Gumilyev and Tsvetaeva had children who died in orphanages. But the varied angles from which Akhmatova's love poems are written and her insistence that the first World War was a disaster prepare us for her ability to defy the seemingly obvious.

There is something remarkable about the way these Russian poets took it for granted that their business was a serious one. Vladimir Mayakovsky, who at one time fooled around on the floor of the Stray Dog in the pose of a wounded gladiator, died young, in 1930, having started to come into conflict with the Soviet state. Marina Tvetsaeva killed herself in extreme circumstances in 1941, writing a letter of apology to her son. Osip Mandelstam died in the Gulag archipelago.

No less than the others, Anna Akhmatova was living dangerously:

A different time is drawing near,

The wind of death already chills the

heart . . .

Akhmatova was unable to publish any volume of poetry between 1921 and 1940 and was never in her lifetime to publish an uncensored poem in her own country. But again and again, "loving our city / And not winged freedom", Akhmatova resolved to stay in Russia. Pasternak would find a literary parallel for such an acte de présenceof the writer in Stalin's Russia. Pasternak's parallel was none other than the Confessioof St Patrick – Patrick, who knew all about escape, who with his Latin literary culture was "cast among strangers" at the very ends of the earth.

Akhmatova divorced her second husband in 1926 and in the second half of her 30s moved in with the famous art critic Nikolai Punin. Their apartment was in the “House on the Fontanka” celebrated in Akhmatova’s writings. Punin’s separated

wife lived in the same apartment, as did his daughter. Akhmatova’s son was allowed to live there, too, but unofficially. They all

shared a kitchen with another family. Akhmatova had almost no income. There were arguments about money and even

about food. Punin was in political

trouble (and was eventually to die in the camps).

Out of boundless personal adversity came Requiem. Although Akhmatova was to live until 1966 – the Siege of Leningrad, her encounter with Isaiah Berlin, her Northern Elegies were still to come – it is in Requiemthat she achieves her full grandeur as a writer.

In one of the many scenes into which this long poem is divided, a man under arrest by the secret police, and sweating heavily, kisses an icon in the kitchen as children cry in the outer room. Akhmatova is writing as an eye witness: it was in the 1930s that the arrests of her intimates began.

Akhmatova’s son, Lev, was arrested for the third time in March 1938 and sentenced to the camps. Akhmatova went often to the prison lines at the Kresty prison, seeking like so many others, mostly women, to have news of her loved one and to pass parcels of food into the prison:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone ‘recognised’ me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me . . . woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

‘Can you describe this?’

And I answered: ‘Yes, I can.’

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

Akhmatova composed Requiemover a number of years. The poem could not, of course, be published. A group of friends memorised it. The manuscripts were burned. The poem was circulated in samizdat under Khruschev and finally published in Munich in 1963. Although it begins with Akhmatova's personal story, Requiemholds in memory all the victims of the terror. The all-Russian perspective is brought out in the poem's most quoted line:

Quietly flows the quiet Don . . .

The widening out of the poem’s purpose continues when it is suggested that Russia is living through the era of destruction evoked in the Book of Revelation:

Everything is confused forever,

And it’s not clear to me

Who is a beast now, who is a man . . .

The raw material of the poem is provided by the experiences of women relatives of the victims. A quasi-narrative runs through 10 numbered sections – a kind of “natural history” of an evil so great that it destroys our whole frame of reference:

Today I have so much to do:

I must kill memory once and for all,

I must turn my soul to stone . . .

The temptation to suicide is the culmination of this natural history. In the real world three major Russian poets – Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Yesenin and Marina Tsvetaeva – were driven to suicide in the years after the revolution. In Requiemdeath is addressed by the familiar form of the personal pronoun:

You will come in any case – so why not

now?

But extravagant evil and sorrow unto death do not have the last word. The breaking of an oppressive silence, in accordance with the promise made to the "woman with bluish lips" outside the prison, is the first level at which we can speak of Requiemas a liberating force for us and for the victims.

As the poem develops we acquire an inward disposition that contradicts the violence of the state. The sufferings of Russia’s women are compared to the sufferings of the women at the foot of the cross:

But where the silent Mother stood, there

No one glanced and no one would have

dared.

We are led from thoughts of suicide and placed among the witnesses of the crucifixion. Neither on Calvary nor in the Gulag is the wellspring of conscience exhausted.

Requiemhas an awkward structure, even a somewhat light or loose one:

I have woven a wide mantle for them

From their meagre, overheard words.

A work composed meticulously over many years is a “wide mantle” and draws on “meagre” elements, as if, in the heel of the hunt, beauty were stepping back for a moment, having introduced us to a mystery greater than itself.

The epilogue to Requiem, which many Russians know by heart, is the high point of the poem. It begins with stanzas of remembrance:

Once more, the day of remembrance draws

near.

I see, I hear, I feel you.

Ahkmatova then turns to her public role as a poet. She rejects two options for the location of any future monument, the sea and the tsar’s garden:

My last tie with the sea is broken . . .

The “inconsolable shade” in the garden at Tsarskoe Selo suggests the heartbreak of failed relationships. But if Akhmatova can no longer be defined as a poet of the sea or the tsar’s garden, how will she be remembered? She consents to a future monument only on condition that it stands opposite the prison where she stood for 300 hours:

And may the melting snow stream like

tears

From my motionless lids of bronze,

And a prison dove coo in the distance,

And the ships of the Neva sail calmly on.

Requiemends tranquilly. That word painting of the River Neva, Pushkin's Neva, means that darkness does not have the last word. The image of the dove may suggest very lightly the spirit that is undefeated or the dove that flew from Noah's ark.

A younger writer said of the two greatest Russian woman poets of the 20th century: “Tsvetaeva was a poet who had no paradise. Akhmatova had paradise.” We can agree with this assessment, but Akhmatova’s paradise is that of a person under severe trial – the paradise of a great 20th-century prophet.

Philip McDonagh's has a new collection, T he Song the Oriole Sang