Russian muse of the Italian genius: the love story of Anna Akhmatova and Amedeo Modigliani.

The most beautiful, bright and short love of the early 20th century. Love embodied in creativity.

They were representatives of two bohemians of the early twentieth century: she was from St. Petersburg, he was from Montparnasse. He was a great artist, she was a great poetess. Both became famous throughout the world: she during her lifetime, he after his death. They both loved Verlaine's poems and equally despised bourgeois morality. Freedom and the search for one’s own creative path were considered the most important things in life. Their paths crossed in Paris. They spoke in French, a language alien to both: after all, she was Russian, he was Italian. The real story of their love was unknown for a long time. But both were completely betrayed by their creativity: his - drawings about her, hers - poems about him.

Three sentences

Anya Gorenko was born on June 23, 1889 in Odessa near the Black Sea. The name Anna was inherited from her grandmother. But an even richer legacy was left to her by her great-grandmother, the Tatar princess Akhmatova, who descended from Genghis Khan himself: legend claims that their ancestor, Khan Akhmat, was killed at night in a tent by a Russian assassin, which ended the Mongol yoke in Rus'. A beautiful, very proud and regal legend. After all, the Romanovs themselves are also proud of the fact that they descend from the Tatar Mirza Chet.

All this will be useful to the future poetess for her myth-making. In the meantime, she is Anya Gorenko.

When she turns one, their family moves to Tsarskoye Selo. There Anya will spend her youth. She studies at the Tsarskoye Selo women's gymnasium. Education at that time was very different from the present one, and, as Akhmatova later writes in her autobiography, “I did everything that a well-bred young lady was supposed to do at that time. She knew how to fold her hands, curtsy, and answer the old lady’s question politely and briefly in French.” Anya walks a lot in the park and thinks about Pushkin: “The dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys...”. Summer spends in New Chersonesos, near Sevastopol. Thin, black-tanned, the “daring girl” swims in the sea and makes friends with fishermen. Even then she didn’t care about anything, even then she wasn’t afraid of prohibitions.

Akhmatova’s famous royal pride and inaccessibility manifested itself already in 1905, when Kolya Gumilyov proposed to her for the first time. The impoverished noble family of the Gumilevs returned from Tiflis to Tsarskoye Selo in 1903. Nikolai is seventeen years old and he again enters the Tsarskoye Selo Nikolaev Gymnasium, the director of which at that time is Innokenty Annensky. Gumilyov is concerned not only with the “Cypress Casket” of the famous poet, but also with the thin, unapproachable girl, Anya Gorenko. He receives the first refusal to his proposal. But Gumilev is a conqueror, a conquistador. He's used to getting his way.

In 1907, Anya Gorenko left for Kyiv, where she graduated from the last class of the Fundukleevskaya gymnasium. Afterwards he enters the Faculty of Law of the Higher Women's Courses, to which, however, he quickly loses interest.

When in 1908 Nikolai Gumilyov, already famous for his collection of poems “The Way of the Conquistador,” comes to her and wooes her again, he receives a second refusal. Of course, the black-eyed girl is very flattered by the offer of a talented aspiring poet, but the innate pride and awakening gift of the poetess take precedence over the tempting prospect of becoming the poet’s wife. Upset, Gumilev leaves for Paris to study at the Sorbonne. He does not study well, he chews more. But there, in the capital of the arts, with his own money he publishes the magazine “Sirius”, where he publishes poems: his own and Ani Gorenko’s. His second book of poems, “Romantic Flowers,” is also published in Paris. This is followed by adventurous travel to Africa.

Upon returning to St. Petersburg, Nikolai Gumilyov releases the third book of “Pearls”. And he becomes a critic of Apollo, which is directed by Makovskaya. He has a lot of life experience and great fame behind him. He proposes to many young ladies, but his only goal, unattainable and worthy, is Anya Gorenko.

And Anna herself believes that it was not for nothing that she was born on the ancient Midsummer night; calls herself a clairvoyant, says that she reads minds, sees other people's dreams, and “smells water.” She kept the great secret of love, and her young husband would later call her a witch in his poems.

In 1910, Gumilyov's father dies. Then he asks Anya for her hand in marriage for the third time and... receives consent.

On April 25, 1910, their wedding took place in Kyiv. There were no relatives at the ceremony. After the wedding, the newlyweds go on a honeymoon to Paris.

Tuscan

On July 12, 1884, in Tuscany, in the city of Livorno, also on the seashore, only the Mediterranean, Amedeo Modigliani was born.
He grew up as a sickly child, but inherited his subtle artistic nature from his mother, Eugenia Garsen. She had an excellent knowledge of European literature and several languages, translated and taught English and French to children at home. Amedeo graduates from the Lyceum in Livorno and goes to study painting, first in Florence at the School of Fine Arts, and then at the Venetian Academy. But with all his heart he strives to go to Paris. He is confident that only there he will be able to realize his abilities. In 1906, his dream comes true: he comes to Montmartre. He is twenty-two years old and among the lost Parisian bohemia.

Modigliani amazed his contemporaries with his erudition and his rich Latin culture. He was a great fan of philosophy and poetry, read the works of D’Annuzio about the superman, and always carried a rare volume of Lautréamont’s “Les chants de Maldoror” in his pocket. He adored the old archaic masters of painting, and at the same time loved Cezanne and Matisse. Amedeo was a strange conservative innovator.

There was a myth about him in Montmartre. They said that this poor aristocrat was the son of a banker, and he was also a descendant of Spinoza. Indeed, Eugenia Garsen was related to the Spinozas, but, as you know, the sage from Amsterdam himself was childless. And on the side of his father, a simple merchant, there was once an ancestor, the “papal banker,” but it was a short story that did not bring wealth to the family.

In Paris, Modigliani is terribly begging. But he is not interested in money. At that time, the myth of the artist’s selflessness was extremely important. He desperately tries to find himself and follows his own lonely creative path. Noble, generous, wearing an eternal red expensive scarf, he is very cheerful and friendly until he gets drunk, and then sudden outbursts of rage and doom follow. His health was undermined by wine and hashish. One of his idols, Baudelaire, wrote about them as “means of expanding individuality,” and Modi uses these means to the detriment of his health to lift the “veil of infinity.”

He paints portraits. He is interested in man and only man, the soul in the shell of a body, man alone with the artist. The credo of his work can be expressed in words spoken by him: “The human face is the highest creation of nature.” Unlike other artists of that time, who called for pure art and proclaimed new movements - cubism, primitivism, fauvism - Modigliani directly connects painting with the social and psychological aspects of existence. He is also heavily involved in sculpture.

Money is constantly in short supply, and, like many artists of that time, Modi moves from apartment to apartment, fleeing from ruthless creditors.

Meeting in Paris

At the corner of Boulevard Raspail, Rue Vavin and Boulevard Montparnasse is the famous Café Rotunda, a meeting place for Parisian bohemians. Artists, writers, poets, performers, fashion models - all future celebrities from all over the world - gathered here. Gumilyov’s future executioner, Trotsky, was also present there in the spring of 1910.

Arriving in Paris, the Gumilevs settled in a hotel. For Nicholas, the capital of France was no longer a novelty, but Anna looked with all her eyes. Of course, they visited the Rotunda. Here for the first time Akhmatova met Amedeo Modigliani. She noticed him immediately. Handsome, black-haired, with a blue notebook in his hands, he draws while sober, and then tears the lovely drawings into pieces, since they did not reach the height known to him alone. Amedeo also immediately noticed the thin, fragile woman, who struck him with her unusual regal beauty.

They were talking, and Gumilyov noticed this. And he realized that he could no longer stop Anna, too free, too willful. Again, when they return to their room and are alone, they will have nothing to talk about.

But time passes. The Gumilevs return from Paris to St. Petersburg. They are traveling on the train with Makovsky, Gumilyov’s editor. They discuss Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons” and museum exhibitions. But Anna is mostly silent. She is already taking with her back to Russia a certain secret, a secret that will then remain with her for the rest of her life, until her death.

The discord between the spouses is already obvious. After all, both are not adapted to living together, both are proud and freedom-loving, touchy, and do not know restraint or laws. After all, the desire and will of the poet are above all. They constantly have quarrels and explanations. Gumilev often leaves to achieve new “victories” in order to prove to himself and Anna that he is a conqueror, complaining to his frequent fans that Anna is “always sad, always has a suffering look.” Such a life is unbearable. Then Gumilev leaves for Africa, and Anna settles in Tsarskoe Selo and writes poetry. He often travels to St. Petersburg and visits Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “tower”.

All winter Amedeo Modigliani writes her loving, frenzied letters: “You are like an obsession in me...”. It is he who is constantly present in her new poems and his voice, which, as she later admitted, “remains in my memory forever.”

In 1911, in “Apollo” by Makovsky, the first publication of Anna Akhmatova’s poems and the first critical acclaim appeared. Gumilev returns from Addis Ababa and he can only admit the fact that his wife is an original and talented poetess. It would seem that Anna should be happy. But at the very height of her poetic success, after her husband’s return from Africa, she commits a daring and willful act: she leaves alone for Paris, to visit her Amedeo.

Summer of their love

Anna arrived in Paris in the late spring of 1911, just before the beginning of the Parisian summer. She settled on the left bank of the Seine, in an old house on Bonaparte Street.
The meeting of lovers was long-awaited and joyful.

They walked through Paris at night, slightly intoxicated; went to brightly lit cafes; lovers read poems to each other. They met in the Luxembourg Gardens. It was raining. Hiding under his huge old umbrella, they sat huddled closely together and read Verlaine, whom they remembered well by heart, in two voices.

Modi listened to her poems and hid the fact that he was writing his own, amazed by the musicality and rhythm of the lines in the Russian language he did not understand. Desperately, he thought about the wall separating the artist from self-expression, and with tenderness - about this woman who sought perfection in everything, just like him. He pulled out a volume of Lautréamont, that dashing forerunner of the surrealists, who lived in Paris half a century before them and, like the lovers, despised the Pharisees and the bourgeoisie, and quoted wonderful lines.

Anna saw his poverty and was amazed at what he lived on. But she didn’t talk to him about money, because she knew that he despised it. They sat in the garden on free benches, so he didn’t even have money to pay for chairs. But when Modi had money, he was unbridledly generous. They wandered around the cafe or went to the Bois de Boulogne, where Anna broke her ostrich feather on the top of the carriage - the same famous feather described later in her poems, which Gumilev brought her as a gift from Africa.

One day Modigliani will come to her on Bonaparte Street and paint her. She will pose obediently, put on heavy African beads, wring her hands above her head and stand in the “snake woman” pose that amazed him.

They both served art, which replaced their service to God. The nights belonged only to them. But sometimes he didn’t come, and she was sad, alone, in a strange city, dying of jealousy and remorse that it was all her fault. She waited for him, standing by the window, and looked at the maple tree, illuminated by the lantern light. These were hours of waiting, painful and happy at the same time. And he was late at work. She wanted to think that way, and not that he was being detained by those women whose portraits he painted. Who is sitting opposite him now, to whom is he looking into the eyes? After all, to work he needs a living human being, not an abstraction.

Anna came to his workshop herself. He sat down to paint her portrait.

She showed off her flexibility. She raised her leg behind her back and clung it to her own neck. She hung from the ceiling beam, like a trapeze. He called her either a circus performer or a rope dancer.

She really walked like on a tightrope: just look, you will fall into the abyss. And now this abyss loomed very close. These were the last holidays, the last festivities in the Latin Quarter. But here is the station. She herself asked him to leave. And he left.

From Paris, Anna returned to Slepnevo, the family estate of the Gumilevs in the Tver province.

Poetry

Upon Anna’s return, the worst thing for her was the explanation with her husband, who had already forgiven everything in advance. But she was ashamed, scared, and she hid everything in order to spare Nikolai’s feelings.

She settles in Slepnevo, thinks a lot about Modi, writes new poems. And all the time he waits for a letter: “I waited for a letter that never came, never came. I often saw this letter in my dreams; I tore open the envelope, but it was either written in a language I didn’t understand, or I was going blind...”

She wrote a lot of poetry. They contained the melancholy and jealousy of the heroine who is waiting under the maple tree (that same maple near the lamp on Bonaparte Street!) the “mysterious count” or for whom the prince broke the feather (that same ostrich feather!) on his hat. And Modi’s image is everywhere: you can recognize his appearance by his cloak and dark curls.

In March 1912, Akhmatova’s first book of poems, “Evening,” was published. The young poetess is only twenty-three years old. Soon the second book, “The Rosary,” is published, and young Anna Akhmatova becomes known throughout Russia.

The Gumilevs are still often present together at bohemian evenings at the artistic cafe “Stray Dog”. Akhmatova is the queen at these evenings: poems are dedicated to her, portraits are painted of her. Anna becomes a symbol and myth of St. Petersburg bohemia, just as Modigliani becomes a symbol and myth of Montparnasse bohemia.

In the spring, when her first book was published, Anna was pregnant. The couple decide to go to Italy, the country of Amedeo. They visit Florence, where he studied painting. Relations between them are still very tense. Upon returning to Russia, in the fall of 1912, Anna gave birth to a son, Lev. But this changed little in the lives of the spouses. Anna starts new novels: Nikolai Nedobrovo, Boris Anrep. Gumilyov, surrounded by fans, sadly realizes that he has lost Anna completely.

In 1914, the war began. Gumilyov was at war and received two St. George Crosses. After the war, he visits Paris and experiences a strong love interest there. Returning to St. Petersburg, Nikolai Gumilev breaks up with Anna Akhmatova completely.

There was a revolution, there was famine, there was poverty. And Gumilyov fell. In 1921, he was shot in the basements of the St. Petersburg check. Anna lost her son's father. And in the early twenties, during the time of the New Economic Policy, in some foreign magazine Anna saw a portrait of Amedeo Modigliani, a funeral cross, and an obituary. She found out that he had become a great artist and that he was no more...

Modi after Anna

After Anna left Paris, Amedeo's aunt Laura Garcin was horrified - he looked so bad. She sent him money, even found a villa for him. But it was all in vain. The artist squandered his money and drank terribly. It was as if he had decided to burn his entire life and decided to lay everything on the altar of Art. Amedeo worked like hell from morning to night. His last sculptural portraits have her face, her eyes, her bangs... Anna is always in front of him: Anna the model.

But he really drinks a lot, works, lives, and gradually her image fades further and further. His body is greatly weakened by wine, hashish and hunger. Friends send Modigliani to his homeland, to the sea, but he can no longer settle down there and returns to Paris.

A young, beautiful and eccentric woman, Beatrice Hastings, appears in Modigliani's life. She was a talented journalist and poet, and she had considerable life experience. She once performed in the circus, and Akhmatova noted in poetry about this: “Another rope dancer.” Modigliani was very passionate about Beatrice and painted her portraits. He even moved in with her. They had frequent clashes and quarrels, and both drank a lot. But Modigliani continued to work furiously. And at this time he finds himself, his color and his style. He creates portraits of Diego Rivera, Jean Cocteau, Lev Bakst. He paints many women, and, of course, mainly portraits of Beatrice.

When the war came, he wanted to join the army. But he didn't leave. He had another fierce battle: for his place, for himself. His creations are not in demand. Sometimes you have to give armfuls of them for pitiful pennies to some merchant just to survive.

Amedeo soon breaks up with Beatrice, but Leopold Zborowski finds him and takes him under his wing. This Pole, who fell in love with the work of the poor Tuscan, settled him in his apartment and supplied him with the best models for work. He was Modi's marchand (art dealer) and his staunch ally. But the wonderful paintings still cannot be sold for decent money, and fame still does not come. Modigliani continues to beg.

In 1917, Zborovsky organized an exhibition of Modigliani's works. The exhibition begins with a scandal. The police ordered to remove all the artist’s nudes: apparently, Modigliane’s piercing sensuality embarrassed them. And again nothing was sold.
One day Amedeo, no longer young, ugly, since his beauty had long been ruined by wine and drugs, was introduced to nineteen-year-old Jeanne Hebuterne, a student at the Art Academy. Zhanna fell in love with him and followed him to life and death. She became his last faithful life partner.

In the winter of 1918, Zborowski sent Modigliani to Nice to improve his health. Zhanna goes with him - she is expecting a child. Soon she gives birth to a girl. Since their marriage was not registered, Amedeo’s daughter was also named Jeanne Hebuterne. Zborovsky helps them with money, which he himself has difficulty obtaining.
In the spring of 1919 Amedeo returned to Paris. Zhanna is pregnant again. Modigliani is very ill. He continues to drink a lot. He develops tuberculosis. At the end of January he goes somewhere with friends on the Rue de Tomb-Issoire. From there he is taken to the hospital, where he dies, whispering his last words: “Cara Italia.”

Montparnasse and the Rotunda held a magnificent funeral for their Tuscan prince. A huge crowd followed the coffin, strewn with expensive wreaths. Pablo Picasso, as always, one of the first to grasp the meaning of what was happening, said while watching the magnificent ceremony: “You see, he has been avenged.”
Distraught with grief, nine months pregnant, Zhanna was taken to her parents' house. She did not go to bed, stood at the window. In the morning, her brother Andre heard the window frame slam. He rushed to the window, looked down from the sixth floor... Jeanne went to get her Amedeo.

In the ancient Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaise, there is a grave in the area where the poor were buried. The inscription in Italian on the tombstone reads: “Amedeo Modigliani, artist. Born in Livorno on July 12, 1884. Died in Paris on January 24, 1920. Death overtook him on the threshold of fame.” And a little lower on the same board: “Jeanne Hebuterne. Born in Paris on April 6, 1898. Died in Paris on January 25, 1920.”

A little time passed, and Modigliani began to be called a genius. And at the Sotheby’s auction, a portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne by her impoverished husband was sold for $15 million...

Drawings

By 1925, Anna Akhmatova fell silent. It was not published until 1939.
After a short marriage to the Assyrian scholar Shileiko, she remarried the art critic Nikolai Punin, who brought her to live in the Fountain House, in the apartment where his entire abandoned family lived. It was a difficult time, there was fear for my son, who was wandering around camps and prisons. And she lived on the edge of an abyss, and then wrote “Poem without a Hero,” where Modigliani was mentioned in one of the draft versions.

During World War II, Anna was sick and hungry like everyone else in Tashkent. At the end of the war she returned to the Fountain House. For a long time, her voice was drowned out from above, but she continued to live and create. And then the thaw came. Akhmatova was given freedom, “allowed” to live. His son Lev came out of prison and became a scientist.

In the 1960s, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova became venerable and famous. She decided to finish the tiny memoir essay she had begun about Modigliani. She said that nothing remains from past love affairs either in the soul or in the memory. Remains - when it is real. With Modigliani it was real. Modi lived next to her during all these difficult half-century. His only drawing she saved hung at her head all these last years, as her only property.

In 1964, Akhmatova went to England at the invitation of Oxford University, which awarded her a doctorate. And a year earlier there was a London exhibition of Modigliani’s works, where the drawing “Nude with a Cat” was exhibited for the first time. If Anna had been there, she would have recognized herself in the drawing. From London Akhmatova went to Paris. And there she again visited Rue Bonaparte, the house where she once lived, where a lantern was visible from the window, and next to it a maple tree.

In her old age, she understood everything, and, having forgiven everything, wrote about her young lover: “This one, too, has had enough of grief and shame, and has had enough of it.”
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova died in 1966 in a Moscow hospital. She was buried in Leningrad, in Komarov.

At the end of the twentieth century, in 1993, an exhibition was held in Venice. The public was presented with nude drawings by the artist Amedeo Modigliani from the collection of Dr. Paul Alexandre, who at one time unconditionally believed in the Tuscan’s talent and was his only buyer. In these drawings Anna Akhmatova was identified.

The secret of love, carefully guarded by the Russian poetess, was revealed. The decency of her essay about her lover, a great and poor artist who dreamed of building a “Temple in honor of humanity” according to his own architectural plan, immediately disappeared. The building could not be built, but the poor creator, with the power of his genius, erected a temple miraculous for humanity. And one of the main goddesses of love in this temple was the St. Petersburg poetess, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova.

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