This love story started in the beginning of the twentieth century in the pre-war Europe. During those years the intellectual class was starting to grow but still was very restricted due to the prevalence of the working class and inaccessibility of education. Writers, poets and artists made a very small group of people who met routinely in Paris (the world capital of art of the time).
Achmatova and Modigliani first met in Paris in 1910. It happened during her honeymoon trip with the husband, a famous Russian poet, Nikolai Gumilev. Amedeo Modigliani had moved to Paris in 1906; he was taking lessons of art, striving to gain recognition of an artist. In her diaries Modigliani’s mother often described him as a very spoiled young boy who had an angelic face and a great talent in painting. However his mother not only predicted a great career of an artist, the woman was also right about her fear of his early death.
Anna Achmatova and Amedeo Modigliani met in a very particular moment of their lives: he was an unknown Italian Jew who just moved to Paris and barely made his ends meet; she was a young poet who had just published her first book of collected poems. They both were very good-looking, intelligent and ambitious, they both had similar interests: they loved Paris, Baudelaire and Shakespeare. As Achmatova defined it herself “everything that happened was for both of us a prehistory of our future lives: his very short one, my very long one”.
In 1910 Anna Achmatova was a charming, young lady with a beautiful slender figure and magnetic eyes. Nikolai Gumilev was aware of his wife’s beauty and what effect it produced on other men, especially during their honeymoon in Paris. She was always surrounded by groups of artists and writers, but her husband was never bothered or jealous until one day they met a charming Italian Jew, Amedeo Modigliani. Half a century later Achmatova wrote in her memoirs: “As I understand it now, what he must have found astonishing in me was my ability to guess rightly his thoughts, to know his dreams and other small things – others who knew me had become accustomed to this a long time before… Everything divine in Modigliani only sparkled through a kind of darkness. He was different from any other person in the world. His voice somehow always remained in my memory. I knew him as a beggar and it was impossible to understand how he existed – as an artist he didn’t have a shadow of recognition.”
When the honeymoon trip was over Anna Achmatova and Nikolai Gumilev returned to Russia. Achmatova mentioned in her memoirs she met Modigliani in the spring of 1910 and only saw him a couple of times but later that year during the winter he wrote her letters. One of his letters was engraved in her memory: “Vous etes en moi comme une hantise”. However it was not until his death that she learned he also wrote her poetry.
In those years Modigliani was obsessed with the Egyptian culture and Egypt. He would take Anna to the Louvre to spend the whole day at the Egyptian department. He often told her that her long neck and elongated body reminded him of Egyptian tsarinas and dancers. As we learn it from Modigliani’s later works, Anna’s body completely answered to his vision of a woman’s body. We might even suppose, that his particular style was shaped thanks to her.
During her stay in Paris, Modigliani made several nude portraits most of which were destroyed during the Revolution in Russia. One of Modigliani’s drawings is still kept at Achmatova’s house in Saint-Petersburg which is now her apartment-museum.
My breast grew helplessly cold,
But my steps were light.
I pulled the glove from my left hand
Mistakenly onto my right.
It seemed there were so many steps,
But I knew there were only three!
Amidst the maples an autumn whisper
Pleaded: 'Die with me!
I'm led astray by evil
Fate, so black and so untrue.'
I answered: 'I, too, dear one!
I, too, will die with you…'
This is a song of the final meeting.
I glanced at the house's dark frame.
Only bedroom candles burning
With an indifferent yellow flame.
“Song of the Final Meeting” - a poem about the love story with a young Italian artist that was not meant to be. It became so popular that Achmatova started hating all the poems she wrote during that period. In 1911 she left Paris and her Italian lover to never return and never see him again. The truth lay in Achmatova’s jealousy and irritation with all his other women, especially Beatrice Hastings. The love affair between Modigliani and Hastings lasted for nearly 2 years.
Achmatova always remembered about Modigliani and from her poetry we might suggest she loved him until her death. In late 1940 Anna started a monumental “Poem without a Hero”. In one of the working variants she has the following lines:
Paris is in dark mist
And probably again Modigliani
Imperceptibly follows me.
He has a sad virtue
To bring disorder even to my dreams
And be the reason of my many misfortunes.
Achmatova was always very reserved about her private life. Only some of her close friends, such as Joseph Brodsky or Boris Pasternak knew everything. Her memoirs written at the age of 70 give us only an idea, a hint to real feelings. She never dared to reveal her true feelings to Modigliani. It is only from her poetry that we learn how deep and how suffered that love was.
A young married woman, a stranger, who couldn’t leave her loving husband and a son and a young poor artist at the beginnings of his career, a Casanova in Paris. What could they have had in common? And why is there so much interest in such a brief love story? Maybe because it was the kind of love that changed them both and influenced their style in art. Maybe because we like to believe that certain love stories are destined to be. Who knows if Anna Achmatova and Amedeo Modigliani will have a happier ending in the next life?
*All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without a permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment