LECTURE 13

AKHMATOVA

1. POETRY AND SUFFERING

"Shakespeare's plays–the sensational atrocities, passions, duels–are child's play compared to the life of each one of us. Of the sufferings of those executed and sent to concentration camps I dare not speak.... But even our disaster-free biographies are Shakespearean tragedy multiplied by a thousand."–Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova began her career as a love poet, perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century. But her real achievement was to extend her range over the course of her career, to become a public poet even in the years when she was denied the opportunity to publish her work, to become the tribune of her suffering people. And their suffering is almost incalculable. Several millions died in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution; another six million died in the famine that Stalin created to smash peasant resistance to his policy of agricultural collectivization. Perhaps twelve million perished in Stalin's purges and prison camps. And estimates of premature deaths in the Soviet Union during the Second World War range up to twenty-eight million: seventy times the number of deaths suffered by American soldiers in the same period. And these numbers do not measure the catastrophic shortages of food, housing, consumer goods, and basic services that were chronic throughout the Soviet Union's history, or the fear of the state's power and police that bit into the souls of ordinary citizens. Akhmatova was able to articulate in her poetry what it meant to live in a time when everyday life took on the intensity of Shakespearean tragedy, muliplied by a thousand. 

2. BECOMING AKHMATOVA

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko was born in 1889 near Odessa in the Ukraine, into an upper middle class family; her father was a naval officer. She spent her youth at Tsarskoye Selo (near the Tsar's sumer palace), where the great Russian writer Pushkin had spent his. She began writing verse at the age of eleven, and took the pseudonym Akhmatova as a reminder of a Tatar ancestor. While still in her teens she was courted by a young poet named Nikolay Gumilev, whom she married in 1910. Gumilev was a leading figure in the Acmeist circle of poets, who favored clarity of diction and concreteness of image as opposed to the diffuseness of their rivals the Symbolists. The Acmeists were in the classical rather than the romantic tradtion: they disciplined emotion by strictness of form.

Akhmatova was a modern poet, but not a modernist one: her art was classical rather than experimental. Joseph Brodsky, another great Russian poet whom she befriended at the end of her life, sees her as Russian literature's Jane Austen: "Akhmatova is the poet of strict meters, exact rhymes, and short sentences. Her syntax is simple and free of subordinate clauses whose gnomic convolutions are responsible for most of Russian literature; in fact, in its simplicity, her syntax resembles English. Among her contemporaries, she is a Jane Austen. In an era marked by so much technical experimentation in poetry, she was blatantly non-avant-garde. She felt very much at home within the confines of classical verse, thereby suggesting that her raptures and revelations don't require an extraordinary formal treatment, that they are not any greater than those of her predecessors who used these meters before. She was very much a product of the Petersburg tradition in Russian poetry, the founders of which, in their turn, had behind them European classicism as well as its Greek and Roman origins."

The great Italian critic of Russian poetry, Renato Poggioli, described her love poetry as follows: "The main theme of her poetry is passion, yet she sings of love in the humble tone of the elegy, rather than in the lofty mode of the hymn. She finds love beautiful and terrible for being an all-day reality, an everyday thing: the most intimate of all habits, the daily bread of the soul. The poet savors the experience of love in all its recurring phases, meeting and separation, distance and absence, desire and longing, jealousy and remorse. Each one of these feelings or events is projected outside, within the visible, objective world and finds forever a local habitation and a name in the place to which it is still connected in the poet's memory, which turns that place into a kind of private shrine." Even in this early phase of her career, large numbers of Russians committed Akhmatova's poems to memory.

Brodsky again: "The early poems had a diary-like immediacy; they'd describe no more than one actual or psychological event and were short–sixteen to twenty lines at best. As such they could be committed to memory in a flash, as indeed they were by generations of Russians. Betrayed, tormented, by either jealousy or guilt, the wounded heroine of these poems speaks more frequently in self-reproach than in anger, forgives more eloquently than accuses, prays rather than screams." Akhmatova's persona was aristocratic, resilient, and reticent, so that she could describe her love affairs minutely without seeming to be merely a confessional poet.

The relationship between Gumilev and Akhmatova was a stormy one, but it energized her poetry. She published her first two collections of poetry before the First World War, and there were three more collections during and after the war. She was twenty-five years old when the First World War began, twenty-eight when the Bolsheviks seized power. In 1921 her husband was shot as a counterrevolutionary; and by 1923 she was no longer able to publish her poetry and had to subsist with meager wages as a librarian or a translator. During the Second World War, the Stalinist regime, seeking to tap the pool of Russian patriotism, eased restrictions on poetry: not only could Akhmatova publish patriotic verse, she could recite it on the radio! The regime even ferried her out of besieged Leningrad by airplane.

But after the Second World War, repression returned with a vengeance. Stalin's henchman Andrey Zhdanov denounced Akhmatova: "Akhmatova's subject matter is... miserably limited: it is the poetry of an overwrought upper-class lady who frantically races back and forth between boudoir and chapel... A nun or a whore–or rather both a nun and a whore who combines harlotry with prayer... Akhmatova's poetry is utterly remote from the people.... What can there be in common between this poetry and the interests of our people and our state?" The answer is, of course, everything: Akhmatova may have been the most popular Russian poet of the century, along with her friend Boris Pasternak (better known, perhaps, as the author of Dr. Zhivago). And the voice she had developed in her lyric poetry had proved to be adaptable to the demands of grave and public situations: first, Stalin's terror; then, the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis, the siege of Leningrad, and the exhilaration of victory in what Russians called The Great Fatherland War.

3. COURAGE

Before the First World War, Akhmatova had seemed to be an arrogant and beautiful young poet who was the center of attention in Petersburg cafes like the Stray Dog. After 1921, she was a widow with a young son, persecuted by the regime, and barely able to survive with her translations and the help of friends. In the mid-thirties, with Stalin's terror under way, she shared a terrible experience with millions of her fellow citizens: the arrest, without explanation, of her son, who had done nothing, and of her friend and fellow poet, Osip Mandelshtam, who had written a ferocious poem about Stalin himself. Brodsky again: "The comprehension of the metaphysics of personal drama betters one's chances of weathering the drama of history. The mechanism designed to keep in check emotions of a romantic nature proved to be as effective when applied to mortal fears.... Akhmatova, whose verse always gravitated to the vernacular, to the idiom of folk song, could identify with the people more thoroughly than those who were pushing their literary or other programs: she simply recognized grief. The 'civic' poems were but fragments borne by her general lyrical current, which made their 'we' practically indistinguishable from the more frequent, emotionally charged 'I'.... Since the name of the current was 'love', the poems about the homeland and the epoch were shot through with almost inappropriate intimacy; similarly, those about sentiment itself were axquiring an epic timbre." Grief, then, rather than love, became the subject of Akhmatova's great poems of the 1930s. She wrote fragments of a vast requiem, mourning with the other mourners, the poet of human ties, cherished, strained or severed. And she wondered "why our century is more cruel than ages past."

When the Second World War broke out, Akhmatova wrote her great poems about the cities of Paris and London facing the Nazi threat to civilization. Soon it was the turn of her own city, Leningrad (formerly and now again St. Petersburg) to face the Nazi invaders. Akhmatova spoke over the radio in September, 1941, as the blockade began: "The enemy is threatening death and disgrace to the city of Lenin, of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Blok." The siege of this great city of several million people lasted two and half years, and nearly million of its citizens died. The combined effects of cold and starvation caused many people to collapse on the street and freeze to death. Some of Akhmatova's most memorable poems are devoted to the advance and repulsion of the invaders, and the survival of great cities under siege by barbarism. Not only the great city but nature itself seems to mobilize against the invader in Akhmatova's war poems. And "Courage," her great patriotic anthem, is an ode not only to Russia and the Russian language but also to the power of poetry to preserve civilization from defilment.

The versatility of Akhmatova's work, within the limits of her classical aesthetic, is the subject of the novelist Andrey Sinyavksy's commentary from 1960: "Unlike many of her contemporaries, Akhmatova, wary of sudden shifts and radical transformations of style, was attracted by traditional forms, by the clarity, precision, and harmony of the language of Pushkin. Today, she still tends to poetic reminiscences, which at times have the effect of parallel mirrors deepening the perspective of the poem while bringing distant objects closer together. Literary names and associations, epigraphs, dedications, meetings and partings with the past, the settling of accounts with herself and her memory–all this, so far from hindering her, lightens her task: to create, within the compass of a brief text, a sense of space and freely move about in it, calling out to other times and other spheres of being, communicating with them and recording their voices. The small format proved astonishingly capacious. Akhmatova had the gift of putting a whole human life, with all its mysteries, its psychological twists, into a single quatrain. Such are the scope, the depth of feeling and tone that, in spite of the muted orchestration, they reveal a character of vast, massive, almost monumental stature.... From the barest whisper to fiery eloquence, from downcast eyes to lightning and thunderbolts–such is the range of Akhmatova's inspiration and voice. This it seems, is what later developed and gave her strength to follow a new course, wide enough for anything from patriotic oratory to the silence of lofty metaphysical meditation, and the arguing voices of the living and the dead."

4. THE GUEST FROM THE FUTURE

After the war Akhmatova received a visit from the philosopher/diplomat/historian Isaiah Berlin. He was one of the twentieth century's greatest men of letters. An Oxford don, he had been born in Russia and knew the language fluently. When he visited St. Petersburg in 1945 he asked about Akhamatova but did not even know if she was still alive. She, for her part, had not spoken to anyone from the West for decades. Theirs was an entirely unexpected meeting of two of the greatest minds of the century. Berlin captured the encounter unforgettably in his essay "Meetings with Russian Writers," and Akhmatova immortalized Berlin in her long "Poem Without a Hero," a poem that she began during the siege of Leningrad and worked on for more than twenty years. Berlin appears as "the guest from the future" in that poem, and Akhmatova was someone for whom the guest/host relationship was a sacred and favorite theme. It was as if Berlin had arrived as a visitor from another planet.

Akhmatova fell in love with her guest: "That late-night dialogue turned into/ The delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows." She knew, of course, that they would have to separate, but she addressed the guest from the future in her poem: "Promise to visit my dreams again./ You and I are like two mountains.../ You and I will not meet in this world./ If only at the midnight hour/ You'd send me a greeting across the stars."

The meeting was crucial for both of them. Akhmatova came under suspicion again by the Stalinist regime for espionage, especially as Randolph Churchill, Winston's son, called for Berlin as he and Akhmatova were finishing their all-night conversation. Akhmatova came to think that this incident was the beginning of what would become known as the Cold War. Berlin turned his attention to Russian intellectual history, and wrote some of the finest essays on that subject that we will ever have. "Meetings with Russian Writers" is one of the greatest essays ever written about the fate of the intellectual in the Stalinist universe.

RECOMMENDED:

Joseph Brodsky, "The Keening Muse," in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1986).

Andrey Sinyavsky, "The Unshackled Voice," in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (Oxford, 1973).

Max Hayward, "Anna Akhmatova," in Writers in Russia 1917-1978, ed. Patricia Blake (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983).

Renato Poggioli, The Poets of Russia 1890-1930 (Harvard, 1960).