Keeping the Flame.(Review)

The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, by Gyorgy Dalos, translated by Antony Wood (Farrar, Straus, 256 pp., $13)

That all-night conversation in Leningrad haunts one's imagination. Every aspect of it is charged with meaning, not least that it took place during the Christmas season of 1945, which coincided with the beginning of the Cold War. In this elegant and concentrated book, Gyorgy Dalos, novelist and literary critic, a Hungarian fluent in Russian, has the equipment to explore it in depth.

Isaiah Berlin, then 36 and an Oxford don, had spent the war in the British embassy in Washington writing astute reports on American moods and opinion. Born in Riga and fluent in Russian, he had been posted to Moscow in September 1945. Perhaps best described as a historian of ideas, Berlin was an impressively civilized man of the West-learned, a rationalist, a democrat. He was to write no major book, and, to be truthful, his prose does not give the impression of a mind of the highest order; but he was an extraordinary conversationalist, an ability that carried him far.

Isaiah Berlin came to that apartment in Leningrad from one side of the great conflict between freedom and totalitarianism that defined the 20th century. Anna Akhmatova, a giant in chains, was a semi-prisoner in the other. Perhaps the greatest Russian lyric poet of the last hundred years, she possessed a passionate intelligence. Her poetry is personal (though she can see herself in world-historical terms), often difficult, full of symbolism and mystery, a mixture, if this is imaginable, of Whitman and Yeats.

Berlin and Akhmatova talk all night in her apartment. For Berlin, it is fascinating. For her it is an explosive epiphany. She is the more drastic spirit, and so experiences a revelation. Suddenly she, who has been harassed and persecuted, who has seen friends imprisoned and murdered and for long periods been confined and refused publication, sees before her a civilized, and actual, human being. She is overwhelmed. She writes Berlin into her poem-in-progress as "the Guest from the Future," the man a man can be, and he also inspires a burst of shorter love lyrics. But the KGB has followed Berlin. Stalin is personally furious over the visit. He considers Berlin a "British spy." And she becomes a non-person once more, losing her ration privileges and license to publish.

Akhmatova, then 56, had emerged into the first rank of modernist poets during the decade before the First World War. Born Anna Gorenko into an aristocratic family, she named herself Akhmatova after a Tatar forbear from the time of Genghis Khan. Accounts of her then are striking indeed; she was a woman of exotic beauty. Her high cheekbones ...