HINSEY: I would like to now turn to a significant encounter from this period. When did you first meet Anna Akhmatova?

VENCLOVA: I believe it was in 1963. Our landlady, Elena Vasilyeva, knew Akhmatova personally, although she did not belong to the poet's inner circle. Once, Akhmatova asked Elena to type the manuscript copy of her essay “Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva.” For several decades, Akhmatova had been seriously researching Pushkin's life and work. After Soviet censorship had blocked any publication of Akhmatova's poetry in the 1930s, she became a professional Pushkin scholar (Brodsky considered her among the best, and the only specialist on the same intellectual and artistic level as Pushkin himself ).

HINSEY: What was the impetus behind her Pushkin scholarship?

VENCLOVA: To a certain degree, it helped her prove that she was engaged in “socially meaningful” work. But she also admired Pushkin more than any other Russian (or foreign) poet, and had a good eye for parallels between their two eras. She scolded me when I took the liberty of saying that Pushkin was not necessarily relevant to my generation.

HINSEY: And the essay—

VENCLOVA: “Pushkin and the Banks of the Neva” was not, strictly speaking, a samizdat affair (it was published shortly thereafter), but it had something Akhmatova liked to call a “triple bottom,” like hidden compartments in a smuggler's suitcase. Its topic was Pushkin's lonely wanderings in the Vasileostrovsky district of St. Petersburg—unpopulated islands in the Neva where the poet looked for the unmarked graves of his executed friends, leaders of the failed Decembrist uprising. Exactly one hundred years after Pushkin, Akhmatova used to wander in the same part of the city, since her husband Nikolai Gumilev, a great poet executed by the Bolsheviks, was also presumably buried there. Only a few people close to Akhmatova understood the analogy, which escaped the censors.

Elena Vasilyeva asked me to bring the typescript to Akhmatova, which I did happily, if timidly.

HINSEY: Where was Akhmatova residing at this time?

VENCLOVA: In Leningrad she lived mainly with the family of her ex-husband Nikolai Punin, to whom she had been married in the 1920s and 1930s.