Eight
months ago, I came across a passage in a book that has haunted me
since. It was in Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin,
and it concerns a night Berlin spent in Leningrad in 1945. Berlin was
hanging out when a friend asked if he’d like to go visit Anna
Akhmatova. Not knowing much about her, Berlin said yes.
Twenty
years older than Berlin, Akhmatova had been a great pre-revolutionary
poet. Since 1925, the Soviets had allowed her to publish nothing. Her
first husband had been executed on false charges in 1921. In 1938,
her son was taken prisoner. For 17 months, Akhmatova had stood
outside his prison, vainly seeking news of him.
Berlin
was taken to her apartment and met a woman still beautiful and
powerful, but wounded by tyranny and the war. At first, their
conversation was restrained. They talked about war experiences and
British universities. Visitors came and went.
By
midnight, they were alone, sitting on opposite ends of her room. She
told him about her girlhood and marriage and her husband’s
execution. She began to recite Byron’s “Don Juan” with such
passion that Berlin turned his face to the window to hide his
emotions. She began reciting some of her own poems, breaking down as
she described how they had led the Soviets to execute one of her
colleagues.
By
4 in the morning, they were talking about the greats. They agreed
about Pushkin and Chekhov. Berlin liked the light intelligence of
Turgenev, while Akhmatova preferred the dark intensity of
Dostoyevsky.
Deeper
and deeper they talked, baring their souls. Akhmatova confessed her
loneliness, expressed her passions, spoke about literature and art.
Berlin had to go to the bathroom but didn’t dare break the spell.
They had read all the same things, knew what the other knew,
understood each other’s longings. That night, Ignatieff writes,
Berlin’s life “came as close as it ever did to the still
perfection of art.” He finally pulled himself away and returned to
his hotel. It was 11 a.m. He flung himself on the bed and exclaimed,
“I am in love; I am in love.”
Today
we live in a utilitarian moment. We’re surrounded by data and
fast-flowing information. “Our reason has become an instrumental
reason,” as Leon Wieseltier once put it, to be used to solve
practical problems.
The
night Berlin and Akhmatova spent together stands as the beau ideal of
a different sort of communication. It’s communication between
people who think that the knowledge most worth attending to is not
found in data but in the great works of culture, in humanity’s
inherited storehouse of moral, emotional and existential wisdom.
Berlin
and Akhmatova could experience that sort of life-altering
conversation because they had done the reading. They were spiritually
ambitious. They had the common language of literature, written by
geniuses who understand us better than we understand ourselves.
The
night also stands as the beau ideal of a certain sort of bond. This
sort of love depends on so many coincidences that it only happens
once or twice in a lifetime. Berlin and Akhmatova felt all the pieces
fitting amazingly into place. They were the same in many ways. There
was such harmony that all the inner defenses fell down in one night.
If
you read the poems Akhmatova wrote about that night, you get the
impression that they slept together, but, according to Ignatieff,
they barely touched. Their communion was primarily intellectual,
emotional and spiritual, creating a combination of friendship and
love. If friends famously confront the world side by side and lovers
live face to face, Berlin and Akhmatova seemed to somehow enact both
postures at once. They shared and also augmented each other’s
understanding.
For
Berlin, this night was the most important event of his life.
Akhmatova was stuck in the Soviet Union, living under a regime of
manipulation, fear and lies. She suffered horrendously for it. The
regime decided that she had cavorted with a British spy. She was
expelled from the Writers’ Union. Her son was thrown into prison.
She was desolated but never blamed Berlin, speaking of him fervently
and writing movingly about the numinous magic of that night.
I’m
old enough to remember when many people committed themselves to this
sort of life and dreamed of this sort of communion — the whole
Great Books/Big Ideas thing. I am not sure how many people believe
in or aspire to this sort of a life today. I’m not sure how many
schools prepare students for this kind of love.
Text
by David Brooks
