Anna Akhmatova, Amedeo Modigliani, Nikolay Gumilyov
On 24 March at 8pm Moscow time, the Spanish representative office of St Petersburg University holds an online lecture ‘Anna Akhmatova, Amedeo Modigliani, Nikolay Gumilyov’ in the framework of the lecture cycle ‘The story of one love’. The lecture will be given by Anna Silyunas, a theatre reviewer, art critic, and General Director of the House of Russia in Barcelona.
One evening in May, 1910, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova met Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.
‘Everything that was divine in Modigliani was only sparkling through some obscurity. He wasn’t like anyone at all’, Anna Akhmatova wrote later. He asked Anna for a portrait of her. That was how their love story started, though the future ‘Northern Star’ of the Russian poetry had come to Paris with her husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, and that was in fact their honeymoon trip.
Nikolay Gumilyov was seeking Anna Akhmatova’s hand in marriage for several years, even attempted suicide when she said no. The future spouses met in the Gymnasium in Tsarskoye Selo. The sickly 17-year old young man, keen on Oscar Wilde, and the vivacious and spontaneous 14-year-old Anna Gorenko (the poet would take her great-grandmother’s surname a few years later) were completely opposite to each other. Despite that Gumilyev fell in love at once. They would get married only seven years later, and have a son they called Lev.
In 1911, in spite of her husband being jealous of her, Anna went to Paris again, to see Modigliani, who had written passionate letters to her and kept hoping for another meeting with the Russian poet. They were walking around Paris reciting French poems, and felt happy when they realised they remembered the same verses by heart. ‘Modigliani was really sorry he couldn’t understand my verses; he was sure there were some wonders hiding in them, but those were only the first timid attempts’, Akhmatova wrote. Modigliani guessed a great poet in Akhmatova without even being able to understand her works. Within the two months of their affair Amedeo painted 16 portraits of the poet, mostly nudes, but only one survived. Akhmatova never parted with this portrait, she called it ‘her portrait’ and treasured it a lot. According to Korney Chukovsky, ‘she only treasured the things which contained the memory of her heart’. ‘What inheritance can we talk about? Take Modi’s portrait and leave’, she told Anatoly Naiman about her will.
The lecture will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.
To participate please register here