What I did in 1998

Letters

Vol. 21 No. 3 · 4 February 1999

From Stuart Hood

Alan Bennett (LRB, 21 January) does not think that Anna Akhmatova's experience of life was sufficiently Kafkaesque. Even with his elementary Russian (and the help of a dictionary) he ought to be able to read her introduction to Requiem – poems out of the worst period of Stalin's purges. In it she describes how for 17 months she stood in the queue outside a Leningrad prison and how one day a woman whispered in her ear (as she says, 'in those days every one spoke in whispers'): 'Is this something you can write about?' To which she replied: 'I can.' He ought certainly to be able to read the crystalline verses (in the very simplest of Russian) which follow and run:

This woman is sick
This woman is alone
Husband in the grave, son in prison.
Pray for me.

Stuart Hood
Brighton

Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999

From Alan Bennett

Stuart Hood (Letters, 4 February) misunderstands me in thinking that when I wrote that what Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin lacked was a touch of Kafka I meant that Akhmatova's experience of life was insufficiently Kafkaesque. I would not say that, nor presume to say it, and 'Kafkaesque' is not a word I particularly like, as nowadays it is often just a synonym for the modish 'weird' or a hackneyed way of saying 'bureaucratic'.

What I meant was that they could both have done with a touch of Kafka's diffidence. I'm not sure if Kafka was as convinced of his own abilities (not to say, genius) as Akhmatova was but he certainly didn't let it seem so. And though Michael Ignatieff makes out a case for Berlin's inner uncertainties, a man who could turn up on Freud's Maresfield Gardens door step in 1938 just because he thought Freud would be interesting to meet could hardly be described as 'diffident'.

On a lighter (or at any rate more English) note, one does not have to wait 17 months outside prison gates to be asked, as Akhmatova was: 'Is this something you can write about?' It happens to me if there's a delay at the check-out or I'm caught by an eccentric on a bus. Pity Pinter: it must happen to him if ever the lift stops between floors. And was it Tennyson whom well-wishers would manoeuvre in front of some enchanting prospect in the hope that this would set the poetic juices flowing?

Alan Bennett
London NW1

From Valentin Lyubarsky

Akhmatova and Berlin met in St Petersburg – not in Moscow, as Alan Bennett has it (LRB, 21 January).

Valentin Lyubarsky
Brooklyn

Vol. 21 No. 7 · 1 April 1999

From Stuart Hood

Alan Bennett's English sensibilities (Letters, 18 February) belong in the world of John Major's warm beer and ladies cycling to church. There is a difference in degree between the experience of waiting at the check-out in a supermarket and that of standing outside a prison gate where one's son, husband, lover, is being held at the whim of a tyranny. Akhmatova records the woman's reaction when she said she could indeed write about what they had lived through together. 'A kind of smile,' she writes, 'flitted across what had once been her face.'

Stuart Hood
Brighton