In June 1965, a stout, white-haired woman sat in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre and was made a Doctor of Letters. She was too frail to move easily through the tiered benches; her heart was failing, and she would be dead within a year. Half a century earlier she had been the most talked-about young poet in St Petersburg. In the decades between, the Soviet state had shot her first husband, sent her only son to the camps, denounced her in a Central Committee decree and kept her verse out of print. Anna Akhmatova had come to England to be honoured by one of the oldest universities in the West, on what would prove her only visit to the country.
The honour mattered because of what it reversed. For a writer the authorities had spent twenty years trying to turn into a non-person, an Oxford doctorate was a form of public rescue: recognition abroad of a stature her own government refused to acknowledge at home. It arrived when she was less than three weeks short of her seventy-sixth birthday, and nine months before her death.
From celebrated poet to non-person
She was born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko in 1889 near Odessa, and took the pen name Akhmatova as a young woman. Her first collections, Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914), made her famous almost overnight for a spare, exact love lyric that readers memorised. Then history closed over her. Her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in August 1921 on charges of taking part in a monarchist conspiracy. Their son, Lev Gumilyov, was arrested in 1935, again in 1938 and again in 1949, and spent much of his adult youth in Stalin’s prison system before his release in 1956.
Out of the queues she stood in outside the Leningrad prisons, waiting for news of Lev, came Requiem, the poem cycle she composed between roughly 1935 and 1940. It was too dangerous to keep on paper. Trusted friends learned the lines by heart and the drafts were burned. The full text was not printed anywhere for decades: its first complete edition appeared in Munich in 1963, issued by Russian émigrés without her consent, and it was not published in full inside the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.
The public erasure was formalised in August 1946, when the Central Committee attacked the literary journals that had dared to print her. The party’s cultural enforcer, Andrei Zhdanov, denounced her in terms that became notorious, branding her a nun and a harlot at once and dismissing her work as a blend of eroticism and political indifference. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, stripped of her ration entitlement and rendered effectively unpublishable. That she survived at all, and kept working on her long, layered masterpiece Poem Without a Hero, is the backdrop against which the Oxford ceremony has to be read. It is why the event belongs to the history of twentieth-century literature and not merely to academic protocol.
The guest from the future
The Oxford honour had a specific author: Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher, then a fellow of the university, who together with the classicist Sir Maurice Bowra pressed Oxford to confer the degree. Berlin’s connection to Akhmatova was itself part of the story the doctorate quietly acknowledged.
In November 1945, Berlin, then on a temporary posting at the British Embassy in Moscow, visited Akhmatova at the Fountain House in Leningrad, the old Sheremetev palace on the Fontanka where she lived. Their conversation ran through most of the night. The scene was interrupted, farcically, by Randolph Churchill shouting Berlin’s name in the courtyard below, a detail that helped mark Berlin, in the eyes of the secret police, as a foreign agent and Akhmatova as a woman receiving him.
The consequences were grave and lasting. Akhmatova came to believe the meeting had drawn Stalin’s personal fury and helped bring on the freeze of the Cold War, casting herself and Berlin as figures on whom world history had turned. Whatever the truth of that conviction, the surveillance and the 1946 denunciation that followed were real enough. Berlin, for his part, treated the encounter as one of the defining experiences of his life, and he entered her verse as the visitor she cast as the guest from the future. Recalling her in Personal Impressions, Berlin described “a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness”. By the time he stood in Oxford to see her honoured, two decades had passed since that night on the Fontanka.
A scarlet gown in the Sheldonian
The degree was a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa. In receiving it Akhmatova joined a short line of Russians recognised by Oxford: the novelist Ivan Turgenev, honoured in 1879 as the first novelist of any nationality to be so distinguished, and the writer and critic Kornei Chukovsky, given the same doctorate in 1962. For a Soviet poet officially out of favour, the company was pointed.
Accounts of the day describe her frailty shaping the ceremony itself, with the university’s head, the Vice-Chancellor Kenneth Wheare, said to have come down to confer the degree rather than require her to climb to him. She wore the scarlet of an Oxford doctor and was accompanied by Anna Kaminskaya, her step-granddaughter, who acted as companion for the trip. During the visit she gave a reading, recorded at New College, that moved through her work from the 1910s to the 1960s. Among the poems was the five-part cycle Cinque, written in 1945 and 1946 in the immediate aftermath of Berlin’s visit: the private history and the public honour folded into a single visit.
Oxford was in fact the second of two late recognitions from the West. Six months earlier, in December 1964, she had travelled to Sicily to accept the Etna-Taormina International Prize for Poetry, shared with the Italian poet Mario Luzi. Together the two trips were her first journeys outside Russia since 1912. Half a century earlier, as a young woman, she had spent time in Paris, where Modigliani had drawn her.
Her face on a London floor
The British dimension of Akhmatova’s story runs deeper than a single day in Oxford, and it leads to London. During the First World War she had come to know the mosaicist Boris Anrep in Petrograd; the two were briefly and intensely close before Anrep left Russia for good and settled in England. He did not forget her. In 1952 he completed The Modern Virtues, the mosaic pavement he laid in the vestibule of the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, and he set her likeness into the floor as the figure of Compassion, a woman amid the ruins of war attended by an angel.
The result is one of the stranger footnotes in London’s public art: for more than a decade before Oxford honoured her in person, Akhmatova’s face had been walked over daily by gallery visitors who had no idea whose it was. The two old friends finally met again in 1965. Not in London, as it happened, but in Paris, where she stopped on the journey home, nearly fifty years after they had last seen each other. By most accounts they said very little.
What Oxford put on record
No academic gown could return the lost decades, the destroyed manuscripts or the years her son spent behind wire. What the Sheldonian ceremony did was enter into the record, in the West and in public, a judgement the Soviet Union had spent twenty years suppressing: that Akhmatova was a major poet of the century, not an enemy of the people. She had outlived Stalin, outlasted Zhdanov’s decree, and lived to hear a foreign university say so plainly.
She returned to the Soviet Union and died on 5 March 1966, at a sanatorium near Moscow, roughly nine months after the degree was conferred. The vindication came late, and it came once. For a writer who had been made to disappear inside her own country, being seen clearly, even briefly, even abroad, was close to the whole point.
Image: The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, photographed in 1912. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
