In fact, they hardly touched. He remained on one side of the room, she on the other. Far from being a Don Juan, he was a sexual neophyte alone in the apartment of a fabled seductress, who had enjoyed deep romantic attachments with half a dozen supremely talented men. She was already investing their meeting with mystical historical and erotic significance, while he fought shy of these undercurrents and kept a safe intellectual distance. Besides, he was also aware of more quotidian needs. He had already been there six hours and he wanted to go to the lavatory. But it would have broken the mood to do so, and in any case, the communal toilet was down the dark hallway. So he remained and listened, smoking another of his Swiss cigars. As she poured out the story of her love-life, he compared her to Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and, moving his cigar hand to and fro – a gesture she was to capture in a line of verse – traced Mozart’s melody in the air between them.
…
By then it was light outside and they could both hear the sound of freezing rain falling in the Fontanka. He rose and kissed her hand and walked back to the Astoria, dazed, ‘turned over’, exalted. He looked at his watch and discovered it was eleven in the morning. Brenda Tripp clearly remembered him saying, when he threw himself down on the bed of his room, ‘I am in live, I am in love.’
In his memory, there was nothing else of his visit to the city, only Akhmatova.
Isaiah Berlin: A Life
by Michael Ignatieff
(1998)
Anna Akhmatova
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSakhmatova.htm
In 1945 Isaiah Berlin visited the Soviet Union and asked to meet Akhmatova. Michael Ignatieff, the author of A Life of Isaiah Berlin (1998) has pointed out: “Akhmatova herself had a room looking over the courtyard at the end of the hall. It was bare and denuded: no carpets on the floor or curtains at the windows, just a small table, three chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa, and near the bed a drawing of Akhmatova – head bent, reclining on a couch – rapidly sketched by her friend Amedeo Modigliani during her visit to Paris in 1911. It was the only icon of a Europe she had last seen thirty-four years before. Now stately, grey-haired, with a white shawl around her shoulders, she rose to greet her first visitor from that lost continent.”
Berlin wrote in Personal Impressions (1980): Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness. I bowed – it seemed appropriate, for she looked and moved like a tragic queen – thanked her for receiving me, and said that people in the West would be glad to know that she was in good health, for nothing had been heard of her for many years…. Akhmatova asked me about the ordeal of London during the bombing: I answered as best I could, feeling acutely shy and constricted by her distant, somewhat regal manner.”
Akhmatova was readmitted to Union of Writers in 1951 and after the death of Joseph Stalin she was allowed to publish her poetry. In 1956 Lev Gumilyov was allowed to return from Siberia. Akhmatova’s Poems was published in 1958. This was followed by Poems: 1909–1960 (1961).
Isaiah Berlin met her again in Oxford in 1965: “Akhmatova described the details of the attack upon her by the authorities. 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… She knew, she said, that she had not long to live: the doctors had made it plain that her heart was weak, and therefore she was patiently waiting for the end; she detested the thought that she might be pitied; she had faced horrors and knew the most terrible depths of grief, and had exacted from her friends the promise that they would not allow the faintest gleam of pity to show itself, to suppress it instantly if it did; some had given way to this feeling, and with them she had been obliged to part; hatred, insults, contempt, misunderstanding, persecution, she could bear, but not sympathy if it was mingled with compassion.”