the 1960s) and the dissident intelligentsia. Even Solzhenitsyn came to its defence when it was attacked by the journal Novy mir (the very journal which had made his name by publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962).²⁰⁷ In the 1970s Russian nationalism was a growing movement, which commanded the support of Party members and dissidents alike. There were several journals like Molo-daia gvardiia - some official, others dissident and published underground (samizdat) - and a range of state and voluntary associations, from literary societies to conservation groups, which forged a broad community on 'Russian principles'. As the editor of the samizdat journal Veche put it in his first editorial in 1971: 'In spite of everything, there are still Russians. It is not too late to return to the homeland.'²⁰⁸

What, in the end, was 'Soviet culture'? Was it anything? Can one ever say that there was a specific Soviet genre in the arts? The avant-garde of the 1920s, which borrowed a great deal from Western Europe, was really a continuation of the modernism of the turn of century. It was revolutionary, in many ways more so than the Bolshevik regime, but in the end it was not compatible with the Soviet state, which could never have been built on artists' dreams. The idea of constructing Soviet culture on a 'proletarian' foundation was similarly unsustainable -although that was surely the one idea of culture that was intrinsically 'Soviet': factory whistles don't make music (and what, in any case, is 'proletarian art'?). Socialist Realism was also, arguably, a distinctively Soviet art form. Yet a large part of it was a hideous distortion of the nineteenth-century tradition, not unlike the art of the Third Reich or of fascist Italy. Ultimately the 'Soviet' element (which boiled down to the deadening weight of ideology) added nothing to the art.

The Georgian film director Otar loseliani recalls a conversation with the veteran film-maker Boris Barnet in 1962:

He asked me: 'Who are you?' I said, 'A director'… 'Soviet', he corrected, 'you must always say "Soviet director". It is a very special profession.' 'In what way?' I asked. 'Because if you ever manage to become honest, which would surprise me, you can remove the word "Soviet".'²⁰⁵

8

From beneath such ruins I speak,

From beneath such an avalanche I cry,

As if under the vault of a fetid cellar

I were burning in quicklime.

I will pretend to be soundless this winter

And I will slam the eternal doors forever,

And even so, they will recognize my voice,

And even so they will believe in it once more.²¹⁰

Anna Akhmatova was one of the great survivors. Her poetic voice was irrepressible. In the last ten years of her long life, beginning with the release of her son from the gulag in 1956, Akhmatova enjoyed a relatively settled existence. She was fortunate enough to retain her capacity for writing poetry until the end.

In 1963 she wrote the last additions to her masterpiece, Poem without a Hero, which she had started writing in 1940. Isaiah Berlin, to whom she read the poem at the Fountain House in 1945, described it as a 'kind of final memorial to her life as a poet and the past of the city - St Petersburg - which was part of her being'.²¹¹ The poem conjures up, in the form of a carnival procession of masked characters which appears before the author at the Fountain House, a whole generation of vanished friends and figures from the Petersburg that history left behind in 1913. Through this creative act of memory the poetry redeems and saves that history. In the opening dedication Akhmatova writes,

… and because I don't have enough paper, I am writing on your first draft.²¹²*

* Akhmatova informed several friends that the first dedication was to Mandelstam. When Nadezhda Mandelstam initially heard her read the poem and asked her to whom the dedication was addressed, Akhmatova replied 'with some irritation': 'Whose first draft do you think I can write on?' (Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 435).

The poem is full of literary references, over which countless scholars have puzzled, but its essence, as suggested by the dedication, is foretold by Mandelstam in a prayer-like poem which Akhmatova quotes as an epigraph to the third chapter of her own poem.

We shall meet again in Petersburg

as though we had interred the sun in it

and shall pronounce for the first time

that blessed, senseless word.

In the black velvet of the Soviet night,

in the velvet of the universal void

the familiar eyes of blessed women sing

and still the deathless flowers bloom.²¹³

Akhmatova's Poem is a requiem for those who died in Leningrad. That remembrance is a sacred act, in some sense an answer to Mandelstam's prayer. But the poem is a resurrection song as well - a literal incarnation of the spiritual values that allowed the people of that city to endure the Soviet night and meet again in Petersburg.