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Volume
52, Number 17 · November
3, 2005 A
Great Russian Prophet By Aileen Kelly
The
Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory by
Anna Akhmatova,translated from the Russian, with an introductory
biography, critical essays, and commentary, by Nancy K. Anderson Yale
University Press, 326 pp., $30.00 1. No
poet has been more photographed or painted than Anna Akhmatova: the
unique profile with its imperious nose is instantly recognizable. Since
her debut as a poet in the 1910s her contemporaries were fascinated
with her image: tall, slender, very pale with deep-set eyes and a
melancholy, pensive expression; she was often likened to a nun. All who
met her were struck by her regal bearing, the more impressive in her
later years in its contrast with the shabbiness of her clothes and the
poverty of her surroundings as a pariah under Stalin's regime. Of all
the great Russian poets whom he persecuted, she, more than Osip
Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, or Marina Tsvetaeva, is renowned as a
resister and martyr. She
grew into that image after the Revolution, when the theme of
renunciation (blending with eroticism in her early lyrics on the topic
of hopeless love) took on a heroic dimension in her poetry and her
life. Refusing to leave her country, but labeled an internal émigré by
the new order, she came under attack for her "aristocratic" poetry and
was soon prohibited from publishing it. There followed decades of
extreme privation and official hounding, culminating in the Central
Committee's public attack on her work in 1946. Her son was arrested and
incarcerated three times in the Stalin era. Many of her friends
perished in camps or were shot; undeterred, she pursued a campaign of
passive resistance, commemorating the sufferings of her people in
poems. The best known of them, "Requiem," has been seen as the most
powerful evocation of the horror of Stalinism by a Russian writer. The
symbolic significance Akhmatova began to acquire at this time is
expressed in a comment by her Boswell, the writer Lidiya Chukovskaya,
whose diary records of their meetings continued until just before the
poet's death: "Before my very eyes, Akhmatova's fate—something greater
even than her own person—was chiselling out of this famous and
neglected, strong and helpless woman, a statue of grief, loneliness,
pride, courage." Amanda
Haight's biography (the first to be published in the West) presents the
same picture of the poet as chosen by fate to test the inherited values
of her contemporaries against the Revolution's dream of an earthly
paradise and its hideous embodiment in the Stalinist state. However,
both Haight and Roberta Reeder (author of the most comprehensive
biography of Akhmatova to date) neglect one aspect of her image: her
own active part in its creation.[1]
Contemporaries and close friends, such as the poet Anatoly Nayman and
the critic Emma Gerstein, have commented on the strong element of
self-dramatization that she brought to her poetry readings and personal
encounters, and they have noted her businesslike concern with
controlling what would be written about her after her death, choosing
and closely monitoring her biographers (including Haight, then a young
British graduate student), and correcting their accounts. The
appearance in recent years of these accounts (some in translation) has
prompted various Western scholars to take a fresh look at Akhmatova's
personal and literary life in the light of theories of cultural myth
and "charismatic performance." Concepts such as "image creation" and
the "constructed self" have been brought to bear on her biography,
providing varying degrees of illumination. One critic has dismissed
Akhmatova's preoccupation with her public persona as the
self-glorification of a domineering ego, another focuses on her
dramatization of a "female" self, while one perceptive essay portrays
her relationship with her devoted scribe Chukovskaya as a collaboration
in the task of asserting the power of the poet as a symbol.[2] But
Nancy Anderson's new study and translation of her major poems
demonstrates convincingly that the key to Akhmatova's performance lies
in the moral motivation of her poetry: her obsession with her image
sprang from her vision of the unique role and obligations of a Russian
poet. 2. The
special significance with which Russians endow their poets dates back
to the early nineteenth century, when the Romantic notion of the poet
as outcast, martyr, and visionary blended with the "civic" tradition of
Russian literature established by the radical critic Belinsky, which
proposed that the writer's duty was to express the aspirations of his
society and defend them against oppression. Many members of the
Decembrist movement, which organized an ill-fated revolt against the
autocratic state in 1825, were Romantic poets, one of whom was hanged
on the personal order of the Tsar. Several of the conspirators who were
exiled to Siberia were friends of Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet,
revered not only for his genius but as the voice and conscience of the
people. A victim of slanders from the court aristocracy, he died in a
duel in defense of his wife's honor. The young poet Mikhail Lermontov
wrote an angry poem against the slanderers who had executed "Freedom,
Genius, and Renown." The poem could not be printed, but practically
every educated Russian knew it by heart. Akhmatova's
life and poetry are set firmly in this tradition in Anderson's book. It
presents a sensitive translation, with a commentary and critical
essays, of three major poems, "Requiem," "The Way of All the Earth,"
and "Poem Without a Hero," all connected to the experience of the
Terror, and united by the theme of the poet as witness. Combining
meticulous scholarship and a rare empathy with her subject, Anderson's
study of the poems is preceded by a substantial historical and
biographical introduction, especially valuable to readers unacquainted
with the culture that shaped Akhmatova's understanding of her role as a
writer. Akhmatova
began writing during the Russian Silver Age, a period dominated by
Symbolism, which saw the poet as the bearer of a transcendent truth
that could be expressed only indirectly, through symbols. While the
Acmeist movement, which she headed with her first husband, Nikolai
Gumilyov, and Osip Mandelstam reacted against Symbolism in the name of
clarity, it retained its sense of the poet's destiny. As Anderson puts
it, Akhmatova's poetry combined "a classicist ethos of clear-eyed
observation and self-restraint" with "a thoroughly romantic strain of
self-consciousness, a sense of herself as someone special, someone
fated to live a consuming drama, whether personal or historical." While
she had a strong feeling of communion with Western culture (she taught
herself Italian in the 1920s in order to read Dante in the original),
the poet to whom she gave the most thought was Pushkin. After the ban
silencing her as a poet in 1925, she began work on a series of studies
on him, including an article, "Pushkin's Death," which was not
published until the 1970s. It was, in Anderson's words, a defense
lawyer's speech on Pushkin's behalf, vindicating his reputation by
exposing the unworthy motives of his slanderers. Surely, Anderson
suggests, as Akhmatova sat in the archives poring over the letters and diaries of Pushkin's contemporaries, she reflected on the New Testament dictum that the disciple can expect no better than the master: if Pushkin, the greatest of all Russian poets, had been subjected to such hounding, how could she expect any mercy?
The
fates of other poets under the Soviet regime must have seemed to
Akhmatova strong evidence of their common tragic destiny. The greatest
of the Symbolist poets, Alexander Blok, died in 1921. She was among the
immense crowd that followed the coffin to the cemetery—a traditional
sign both of respect for great Russian writers and of protest against
the state's repression of them. It was commonly believed that Blok had
lost his will to live: those present recalled a speech he had delivered
a few months before, on the anniversary of Pushkin's death. What killed
Pushkin was not his antagonist's bullet, he said, but lack of air, the
deprivation of creative freedom. On
the day of Blok's funeral, Akhmatova learned of the arrest of her
former husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, for alleged counterrevolutionary
conspiracy. He was shot shortly afterward without trial. The peasant
poet Sergei Esenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the self-appointed bard of
the Revolution, both committed suicide. In 1938 the poet Nikolai Klyuev
was exiled and later shot for a poem, "To the Slanderers of Art," in
which he referred to the silencing of Akhmatova. As her close friend
Osip Mandelstam remarked: "Poetry is respected only in this
country-- people are killed for it." He himself met his death as
punishment for his poem on the subject of Stalin, never written down
but recited to a number of friends, one of whom betrayed him. As
Anderson observes, the nightmarish years of the 1930s, when no one was
safe from arrest and execution, served to deepen Akhmatova's sense of
her vocation as a poet and of the price it exacted. When Stalin
unleashed his Terror the poetic inspiration that had deserted her for
some years returned, but, as she wrote, "my handwriting had changed, my
voice sounded different." A number of the first poems she wrote in this
new phase were about poetry and poets, such as Pasternak, Gumilyov, and
Mandelstam. A poem on Dante alludes to his decision not to return from
exile to his beloved Florence at the price of a humiliating public
repentance. Her poem "Voronezh" (the town where Mandelstam spent three
years of exile) describes the "room of the banished poet," where
"terror and the Muse take turns in keeping watch." In a poem dedicated
to Mandelstam she writes of her reluctance to accept the burden of
witness. But conscience will not release her: ... earthly
time is something it doesn't know;
The Terror had given her a precise poetic mission: to preserve the memory of the voices it had silenced and the values it sought to destroy.
3.
As
Anderson observes, the theme of memory and the commemoration of the
dead dominates the three major poems of 1940. "Requiem," composed of
ten individually numbered poems, was born of her personal suffering
during the purges as one of the multitude of Russians whose loved ones
were victims of arbitrary arrest, followed by inquisitions which could
take more than a year. Their families could learn of their eventual
sentences only by queueing before a window at the prisons where they
were kept. After her son Lev's second arrest in 1938, Akhmatova stood
in such a line for months before learning that he was to be sent to a
camp in the North. Those waiting with her were women (men ran a greater
risk of attracting the attentions of the secret police). In place of a
foreword Akhmatova describes the poem's genesis: One
day somebody "identified" me. Then a woman with blue lips who was
standing behind me... awoke from the torpor normal to all of us and
breathed a question in my ear.... "Can you describe this?" And
I said: "I can." Then something like a smile slipped across what once
had been her face. The
city in the grip of terror—"like a tacked-on extra, a useless weight/
from its prisons dangled Leningrad"—is the background for an intense
evocation of unbearable cruelty, suffering, and death, culminating in a
supreme image of suffering and endurance: Mary, the mother of Jesus, at
the foot of the cross. The imperative to preserve the memory of her
people's ordeal will accompany the poet beyond the grave: ...In
the blest ease of death I'm afraid
The
two other poems that began to take shape that year saw the horrors of
Stalin's Russia historically, conveying in visionary and innovative
forms the experience of disintegration of the first half of the
twentieth century. In "The Way of All the Earth" the narrator-heroine
journeys through the bloody chaos of her war-torn century, from the
Battle of Tsushima with Japan in 1905 to the collapse of Europe in
World War II, on her path toward the peace of death. The extremely
complex and mysterious "Poem Without a Hero" would continue to occupy
Akhmatova for the rest of her life; she would never regard it as
finished. In
this three-part work, past, present, and future are intertwined in the
poet's reflections on the themes of guilt, conscience, and fate, as she
finds premonitions of the historical catastrophe in her pre-war milieu:
her contemporaries in the artistic world of Silver Age Petersburg
appear as spectral participants in a brilliant and sinister New Year's
masquerade of 1913. The presence of a demonic "mocking grinner," with a
mask of spite and pain, evokes the sense of doom that pervaded the
mystical visions of the Symbolists. Akhmatova's
preoccupation with the poet as both prophet and victim runs throughout
the poem. The subtitle to the first part, "A Petersburg Tale," is also
the subtitle of Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman," the first in a
line of works, through Gogol and Dostoevsky to the Symbolist poets,
that depict Petersburg as a cruel, deceptive, and unreal city, symbol
both of Russia's grandeur and the human cost of its achievement. The
poem shifts between reality and the supernatural, memory and prophecy.
The masqueraders of 1913 materialize in Akhmatova's apartment of 1940,
and a "guest from the future" appears in a mirror: What
we together will bring about
We
know that the "guest" was Isaiah Berlin, who as a temporary diplomat at
the British embassy in Moscow visited Akhmatova in 1945; they spent the
night talking about literature. (He later explained the impact of his
visit on her by the fact that he was the first person she had met since
the Revolution who could speak her language and bring news of a world
she had been isolated from.) She was convinced that their meeting was a
prime cause not only of the Central Committee's attack on her the
following year, but also of the beginning of the cold war. In view of
Stalin's habit of reacting with unpredictable rage to seemingly
unimportant events, this surmise was not as fantastic as it might seem;
her son Lev's interrogator on his third arrest in 1949 tried to force
him to confess that his mother had spied for England—one consequence of
Berlin's visit. While Akhmatova regarded the poem as the summit of her creative path, she refused requests to elucidate its meaning: "The more I explain it, the more enigmatic and incomprehensible it is." Nadezhda Mandelstam remarked on her obsession with the poem during the two decades she worked on it, and Akhmatova herself described how it resisted completion; it would "go away" for a period of time, and then "unpredictably" come back. Anderson suggests that the poem's obsessive hold on her can be explained by thinking of her continued rewriting of it as an attempt to come to terms with overwhelming memories, triggered by an event that lies at the poem's center: the death of a poet.
In a
foreword to the poem that she subsequently rejected, Akhmatova
describes how it came into existence as a result of her discovery among
her old papers of letters and poems relating to the suicide in 1913 of
an aspiring young poet, Vsevolod Kniazev. In the poem the masqueraders
flee, leaving Akhmatova alone to face the meaning of his death: "that
hour none ever rightly marked." Anderson regards his place in the poem
as symbolic: that Akhmatova saw in this not particularly remarkable
young man, whose death was motivated by unrequited love, "the
archetypal innocent victim, doomed by Petersburg history and by the
sins of his generation—a generation which tried to remove him from its
consciousness, to wipe out every trace of the reproach that his fate
represents." She cites a note of 1959, in which Akhmatova recalls
searching in vain for Kniazev's grave in the cemetery where Blok had
just been buried: "For some reason I remembered that moment forever."
The lost grave prefigures the fate of two more significant poets. In Hope Against Hope Nadezhda Mandelstam describes how in the 1920s Akhmatova became preoccupied with the search for the grave of her former husband Nikolai Gumilyov (as state criminals he and his fellow accused had been buried in a mass grave at an unknown location). It is with Osip Mandelstam (also buried in an unknown grave) that Akhmatova explicitly links Kniazev's fate. Variant editions of the poem include a dedication to the memory of Kniazev, but the date of the dedication was the second anniversary of Mandelstam's death, according to the death certificate issued to his widow, and the words "I am ready for death" ascribed to Kniazev in the poem were said to Akhmatova by Mandelstam shortly before his arrest in 1934.
4.
In
setting Akhmatova's major poems in their historical and biographical
context, Anderson offers persuasive grounds for her contention that
"one of the driving forces of her life [was] the determination to honor
the dead and to preserve their memory among the living." That she saw
herself as following a tradition set by Pushkin seems clear from an
allusion (immediately evident to her Russian readers) in the fourth
line of "Requiem" to his famous poem addressed to the Decembrists,
"From the depths of the Siberian mines," in which he promises that his
"free voice" will reach them "even within your convicts' holes." Akhmatova
offers no such hope: the Stalinist state had developed techniques of
silencing dissidents to a degree undreamed of by the tsars. Its goal
was not merely to suppress public expression of independent thought,
but to wipe Russian minds clean of all memories, facts, and values
other than those it proclaimed: Made
an unperson, every trace wiped out, Such
images in "Poem Without a Hero" remind us that Akhmatova's poems of
1940 were composed under conditions unknown to previous generations of
Russian writers. As the case of Mandelstam showed, a poem that existed
only in one's head, if recited to one other person, could lead to
prison or execution. The fear of further endangering her son, who was already in a camp, made Akhmatova see threats everywhere. She refused to write her poems down for herself or anyone else, yet the fear that if she died they would die with her made her seek a means of communicating them to others. Her friend Lidiya Chukovskaya, who had a gift for memorizing poetry, tells how Akhmatova, not daring to whisper a poem even in her apartment, would write it down on a scrap of paper, pass it to her to read and memorize, and then burn the paper over an ashtray. Later, Akhmatova said proudly: "Eleven people knew 'Requiem' by heart, and not one of them betrayed me."
Those
who understood the magnitude of the risk Akhmatova faced in her
determination to bear witness could appreciate the hidden meaning of
the concluding lines of the first part of "Poem Without a Hero": I,
your olden conscience, here As
Anderson observes, Akhmatova's dedication to preserving the memory of
the dead derived not only from her deep sense of communion with world
culture, but also from her religious faith in the communion of the
present with the past and the living with the dead as part of a
seamless whole in which each person and event has eternal meaning and
value. This faith is reflected in the epilogue to "Requiem," in
Akhmatova's words to the grieving women: "Once more the hour of
remembrance [pominalni chas] draws near,/ I see you, I hear you,
I feel you all here." Anderson writes that the Russian words suggest
the Orthodox practice of prayer for the sick or for the souls of the
dead, a suggestion reinforced by a subsequent couplet's image of a list
bearing the names of each sufferer. The list has been confiscated, and
in its absence, Akhmatova weaves her "mantle of words/Made up of the
snatches that I've overheard," preserving the memory of all the
bereaved women for whom she speaks. She asks in return: Let
them all speak for me, mention me when they pray
The
epigraph to "Poem Without a Hero" expresses the same sense of the
mutual responsibility of past and present: "Deus conservat omnia"
(God preserves everything—the motto on the coat of arms of the former
Sheremetev Palace where Akhmatova occupied a room in the apartment of
her former husband Nikolai Punin). It can be seen in the spirit of a
resigned acceptance of suffering that infuses so much of her poetry, as
in the poem of 1922 where she reflects on her refusal to desert her
country in a catastrophic time: But
here, as the dark fires blaze around This
certitude was a head-on challenge to the official ideology of her time,
which saw the past as something to be negated and mercilessly
extirpated along with its unpersons, in favor of the present which
itself had only instrumental value as a staging post on the march to
the ideal future. For her, no final judgment could be delivered on the
past; the dead retained their right to make their protest heard by the
living. Hence her prescient afterword to Part I of "Poem Without a
Hero," written in 1940: ...The
poem rests now, Akhmatova's openness to such cries from the past explains the numerous revisions of the poem, meticulously documented by Anderson, which occupied her over so many years. It was still growing when the voices she had preserved were heard by her people through samizdat.
5.
In
February 1956 the silence shrouding the country was broken when
Khrushchev admitted to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party
that crimes had been committed in its name. But severe limitations
remained on how much could be said, and by whom. Even after the opening
of the Soviet archives, the full cost in human lives of Stalin's
paranoia is still a matter of educated guesswork; it has been estimated
that over three quarters of a million Soviet citizens were executed
between 1934 and 1953, while 18 million passed through the camps during
Stalin's reign. Delivered
in closed session and transmitted in secrecy to Party cells all over
Russia, Khrushchev's attack on Stalin focused almost exclusively on the
Terror of 1937 and 1938, singling out its victims among the Party
elite. No mention was made of between six and seven million people who
died in the famine of 1933 following forced collectivization. A few
thousand rehabilitations were put in motion—a tiny percentage of those
who had been falsely convicted. Returnees from the camps were often
shunned or met with indifference. Many faced the ordeal of encountering
those who had denounced them, few of whom were brought to account,
while their victims remained objects of suspicion, as witnessed by the
fate of an editor who sought to publish a book of memoirs by Gulag
prisoners. His battle with the censors ended in his detention in a
psychiatric hospital with the diagnosis that he was "obsessed with the
struggle for justice."[3] Collective amnesia about the subject of the Gulag was shattered when in 1962, with the aim of discrediting his enemies, Khrushchev permitted the publication of Solzhenitsyn's novella A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The public's hunger for new revelations was met by the clandestine circulation of hand-typed manuscripts—two of which became key texts in the underground battle against the neo-Stalinist revival under Brezhnev: Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs of the life of the Moscow intelligentsia under the Terror, and Akhmatova's "Requiem."
Anatoly
Nayman, who was a young poet during that period, explains the unique
impact of this work on his generation. Soviet poetry, the theorists had
taught them, was poetry in which the poet was of the people and spoke
on their behalf, in language accessible to the people. Here was a poem
that did just that, yet in its anti-heroic tone and rejection of
taboos, it was the antithesis of contemporary Soviet poetry. Nayman
recalls that "Requiem" began to circulate clandestinely at about the
same time as copies of notes of Joseph Brodsky's responses at his trial
in 1964 (made secretly by a journalist who attended it). Brodsky's
poems were widely admired but not legally published. Excluded from
membership of the Union of Writers, which would have guaranteed him an
income, he supported himself by odd jobs in order to devote most of his
time to writing poetry. Convicted of parasitism, he was sentenced to
internal exile. When the judge asked him who had recognized him as a
poet, Brodsky replied: "No one. Who was it who recognized me as a
member of the human race?" Public
opinion, according to Nayman, made a link between "Requiem" and
Brodsky's retort. In his memoir of Akhmatova, Nayman writes: The
poet defends the right to be a poet and not to have any other
occupation so that he or she should be able when necessary to speak on
everyone's behalf. The transcript of the poet's trial sounded like
poetry on the most profound themes of public concern; and Requiem,
poetry on the most profound themes of public concern, sounded like a
transcript of the repressions,...a record of acts of self-sacrifice and
martyrdom.[4] The
publication of Solzhenitzyn's novella led Akhmatova to hope that
"Requiem" too might be published, but this was a step too far for the
authorities. Even the two less controversial poems of 1940 could not be
published in their entirety. But the Thaw changed her status from
outcast to celebrity. Literary magazines began to publish her work; a
book of her poems appeared in 1958. Even the regime implicitly
recognized her position as the matriarch of Russian letters by allowing
her at the age of seventy-five to travel abroad with a Soviet literary
delegation. She was feted in Italy, and Oxford University awarded her
an honorary doctorate of letters, describing her, in the accompanying
encomium, as "the Russian Sappho." Akhmatova's
friends remarked that she reveled in the admiration and flattery
bestowed on her after the long years of proscription; but as Anderson
observes, more than her own vanity was involved: her new fame showed
that the ethical tradition of Russian literature that she had upheld at
great personal cost had survived. Even
her close friends agree that she was a difficult woman; as Nadezhda
Mandelstam records, old age and fame reinforced the strain of
imperiousness in her character; she would react like an "angry cat" to
the slightest attempt to contradict her, an observation that would
provoke her to even greater fury. But this trait did not diminish their
affectionate regard for her: they understood that when applied to the
subject of her life and times, her intransigence served a higher
purpose. Mikhail Polivanov, one of the young intellectuals who sought
her out in the 1960s, has described her obsessive concern with a
truthful record of herself and her contemporaries: She
was not afraid that she would be forgotten, but that she would be
slandered. She was afraid not only for herself, but for her friends
and, above all, for the Acmeist poets Gumilev and Mandelstam, whose
definitive literary fate she did not distinguish from her own.... Thus,
throughout her life, from her early years on, she kept returning to
detailed memories of events, relationships, and people—to all that
which made up the character of the epoch as she saw it.... Conscious of
her own place in the epoch, she wanted others to talk about it and not
she herself.[5] She
had good reason for her fears. As she put it in "Poem Without a Hero": A
full ten years, no less, I've passed
Akhmatova
lived to be vindicated beyond her hopes, but the tradition she upheld
is now under assault from a different quarter. As Anderson observes in
her conclusion: With
the fall of the Soviet Union, the world in which she lived already
seems far from us. Poets and poetry have perhaps less symbolic value
now than they did then. A
significant factor in this change is surely the deconstructive bent of
contemporary critical theory, as applied to such notions as
"charismatic performance" and the "myth of the poet." The work of
scholars such as Gregory Freidin and Svetlana Boym has shown how such
an approach can expose the tragic ambivalence of poets of the Soviet
period such as Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, whose sense of themselves as
the voice and conscience of the people made them hesitate to condemn a
society where the people were "officially" in power.[6] At the
same time these scholars never lose sight of the historical fact that
the myth of the poet served Russians as a source of inspiration for
resistance against tyranny, and a moral compass in the nightmare world
of the official lie. But
there is no place for this perception in the cruder versions of
deconstructive criticism, which is eager to unmask all expressions of
meaning as self-delusions or power plays. Thus the prominent US Slavist
Alexander Zholkovsky has dismissed Akhmatova's vision of the poet's
ethical responsibility (or, as he puts it, her cultivation of "the
prophet image") as just "self-centered playacting," a smart strategy
for acquiring control in the power play of ideological discourses of
her time. We can see a revealing symmetry between, on the one hand,
Zholkovsky's labeling of Akhmatova's concern to control her image as
the obverse of Stalin's cult of personality and, on the other, the 1946
denunciation of her poetry by Stalin's cultural enforcer Andrei Zhdanov
as the work of "a half-crazed upper-crust lady running between the
boudoir and the chapel." Both deny any ethical importance to the way
she represented herself and her work. For Zhdanov, her ideological sins
deprived her life and art of any moral value, while Zholkovsky's attack
seems rooted in a postmodern intellectual culture which claims to
expose the hidden role of ideology in determining our lives. He also
ridicules, as an instance of the "mania grandiosa" of the Stalinist
age, Akhmatova's belief that her meeting with Isaiah Berlin had changed
history. Berlin
himself took a very different view of what he called "the
historico-metaphysical vision which informed so much of her poetry." In
his memoir of Akhmatova he describes the poem that alludes to their
meeting as "a work of genius...mysterious and deeply evocative" and
goes on to say that if some of her accounts of the personalities and
acts of others had seemed to him implausible at the time, it
may be that I did not sufficiently understand the irrational and
sometimes wildly capricious character of Stalin's despotism, which
makes normal criteria of what can and cannot be believed difficult to
apply with confidence even now. Her
beliefs were
not senseless, not sheer fantasies; they were elements in a coherent
conception of her own and her nation's life and fate.... She was not a
visionary, she had, for the most part, a strong sense of reality. Berlin
did not idealize Akhmatova, but approached her with a moral insight
singularly lacking in her detractors, past and present. His
understanding of the special circumstances that gave rise to the
Russian view of the writer's obligations made him particularly
sensitive to what Anderson's fine book so convincingly shows to have
been the dominant motivation of her greatest poetry: the defense of
justice and moral truth against a system based on lies. As
Berlin put it: Her
entire life was what Herzen once described virtually all Russian
literature as being—one uninterrupted indictment of Russian reality.[7] She
called poetry "our holy trade," "the Word that causes death's
defeat." It is not difficult to share her conviction that its moral
power will outlive ideological fashions and other vicissitudes of
history. Notes [1]
Amanda Haight, Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (Oxford
University Press, 1976); Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and
Prophet (St. Martin's, 1994). [2] See
Alexander Zholkovsky, "Anna Akhmatova: Scripts, Not Scriptures," Slavic
and East European Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring 1996), pp.
135–141, and "The Obverse of Stalinism: Akhmatova's Self-Serving
Charisma of Selflessness," in Self and Story in Russian History,
edited by Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Cornell University
Press, 2000), pp. 46–68; Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women
and Russian Literature (Indiana University Press, 1987), pp.
124ff.; Beth Holmgren, Women's Works in Stalin's Time (Indiana
University Press, 1993), pp. 68–94. [3] On
Living Through Soviet Russia, edited by Daniel Bertaux, Paul
Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch (Routledge, 2004), p. 222. [4]
Anatoly Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, translated by Wendy
Rosslyn (Henry Holt, 1991), p. 135. [5]
Cited in Holmgren, Women's Works in Stalin's Time, p. 72. [6]
Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His
Mythologies of Self-Presentation (University of California Press,
1987), and Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths
of the Modern Poet (Harvard University Press, 1991). [7]
Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions, edited by Henry Hardy (Viking,
1981), pp. 190–208. |
