Poems Burned Into Memory : THE AKHMATOVA JOURNALS: Volume I, 1938-1941, <i> By Lydia Chukovskaya Translated by Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova Selections from Akhmatova’s poetry translated by Peter Norman (Farrar Straus & Giroux: $27.50; 310 pp.)</i>

It was 1940, in Leningrad. Through the communal kitchen, strung with wet laundry, and past cramped quarters housing her former husband, another of his former wives and assorted relatives, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova sat with two friends in her unswept room, cluttered with broken furniture and a few mementos. In a whisper she recited part of her just-finished “Requiem,” the epic poem that charts the flood-water devastation of Stalin’s terror.

The lives of all three women had been flooded out. Akhmatova, whose first husband was shot early in the Revolution, queued up every week trying to get a letter or a package to her son in prison. Lydia Chukovskaya’s husband, a brilliant physicist, had been shot two years earlier, though the authorities allowed her to spend a year seeking frantically for word of a man who was already dead. Tusya Gabbe, an editor of children’s books, had merely lost her job and her world.

They were not drowning, though, but swimming. Akhmatova’s growled whisper bore them up. When it stopped Gabbe broke the silence. “There is an expression which goes: as necessary as bread, as air. From now on, I am going to say: as necessary as the word. . . . Forgive me, Anna Andreevna, but even you who created this, even you don’t know how necessary it is. . . . If they, THERE”--nobody spoke the name of the Gulag and its victims aloud--”could only imagine that THIS exists. . . . But they will never know now. So many lips have fallen silent, so many eyes have closed forever.”

The scene comes from Chukovskaya’s journals of her long and extraordinary companionship with Akhmatova. They are a treasure thrown up by the flood, and a record of the flood itself. They are a portrait of the incandescent personage who was one of Russia’s greatest poets, and of an incandescent relationship.

Chukovskaya is a powerful writer. In one sense the journals could be the dialogue of Samuel Johnson--whom Akhmatova in no small way suggests--and a Boswell without clownishness but with an equivalent talent to make the mountain speak. In another sense they evoke Cleopatra and Charmian, who was the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragic companions. (Akhmatova’s “Cleopatra” is one of the poems Chukovskaya most often alludes to.) Finally, Chukovskaya has portrayed a time when writers were suppressed and their writing could not quite be; a time when, as Gabbe’s words suggest, hunger created poetry as the abyss creates the waterfall.

Chukovskaya was the daughter of Kornei Chukovsky, Russia’s greatest children’s writer and a friend and protector to other writers more savaged than he. As a child she had been presented to Akhmatova and revered her as a giant. In 1938 she came to seek her out “on business.” She never dreamed she would have the standing to do so; nor that the standing would be on such tragic ground. A letter from Akhmatova to Stalin had briefly won freedom for her son before he was again arrested; Chukovskaya hoped to get some hint of how to intercede for her husband.

It was futile but the two women immediately struck a bond. Akhmatova was only 50 and was to live another 30 years but she put on the feebleness of a dying octogenarian, had as many as five “heart attacks” a night, spent much of the time lying yellow and inert on her bed, neglected to eat and, when accompanied, would come to a panicky dead-stop halfway across the broad Nevksy Prospekt. Alone, she would manage it. She also managed to travel to Moscow from time to time and to vary her usual ragged attire with a stunning black or white gown. “All my life I’ve been able to look however I’ve wanted to--from a beauty to a hag,” she confided.

This first volume runs from the end of 1938 to 1941. The next, not yet translated, runs through the 1950s, beginning with Akhmatova’s and Chukovskaya’s wartime arrival in Soviet Asia along with other writers who, Stalin decided, were now part of the national patrimony and must be denied to the invading German Army.

At home in Leningrad, Chukovskaya would visit several times a week. “Come at once,” was Akhmatova’s invariable reply to her phone calls. She soon was the center of the network of friends who sustained the poet; bringing tea and cakes, ham, lilacs, a sense of protection, an audience, and the memory of a world of art and loyalty. When word came that Akhmatova’s son was to be sent to Siberia, people arrived with scarves and gloves, and women sat on her bed late into the night, sewing.

Chukovskaya records the conversations and the daily traffic. She records Akhmatova’s comments and reminiscences of Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Mayakovsky and many others. She writes of the brief semi-thaw when a collection of Akhmatova’s poems, mostly older ones, was published. Vague and unfulfilled promises were made to increase her pension and find her a new apartment. Mostly, though, the journals invoke the constraints and what managed to survive them in a room that was assumed to be bugged.

The entries are elliptic and disguised, because the author knew the journals might be seized. (Decades later she added footnotes that act as a kind of dialogue with the original and flesh it out, along with end-notes and a selection of poems translated by Peter Norman.) But how eloquent her muffled voice can be! The NKVD is referred to as “the torture chamber” or “the big house,” but Chukovskaya scornfully comments that it “wished to remain at once all-powerful and non-existent; it would not let anyone’s word call it out of its almighty non-existence.”

Akhmatova was composing some of her most powerful poetry, which could not be published until decades later. Sometimes she whispered it, sometimes she wrote on scraps of paper, which she then burned. It was the task of Chukovskaya and others to memorize and later transcribe it. The scene is haunting: “It was a ritual: hands, match, ashtray--a beautiful and mournful ritual.”

Chukovskaya was many things to Akhmatova: her comrade in loss, her literary interlocutor and the human assurance that her poetry would live in a future generation. She was her companion and helper in the sheer effort to get from day to day. On their month-long train trip across Asia--two carriages were assigned to writers--she took care of things while Akhmatova looked out the window converting the passing camel caravans into imaginary ones. “My captain,” Akhmatova calls her.

What the poet meant to the author provides one of the most beautiful passages in the book. When she came to see Akhmatova in 1938, her world, present and past, seemed to have vanished. She had lost not only a husband but all the artistic and human assumptions she had lived by.

“In the mental state in which I existed during those years--stunned, deadened--I seemed to myself less truly alive and my non-life unworthy of description,” she writes. “By 1940 I had virtually ceased making notes about myself, whereas I wrote about Anna Andreevna more and more often.” Only by writing an “Akhmatova” journal, that is, could she write her own.

“Before my very eyes, Akhmatova’s fate--something greater even than her own person--was chiseling out of this famous and neglected, strong and helpless woman, a statue of grief, loneliness, pride, courage. I had known Akhmatova’s earlier poems by heart since childhood, and the new ones, together with the movement of hands burning paper over an ashtray, and the aquiline profile, sharply defined as a blue shadow on the white wall of the transit prison, were now entering my life with the same inescapable naturalness as the bridges, St. Isaac’s, the Summer Garden or the embankment had already entered it long ago.”