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Introduction

I

Akhmatova hated the word poetess. If we call her by that name, it is in no condescending sense but from a conviction shared by many critics and readers that her womanliness is an essential element of her poetic genius, a something added, not taken away. Gilbert Frank has pointed to her unusual blending of classical severity and concreteness with lyrical saturation; Andrei Sinyavsky, to the range of her voice ‘from the barest whisper to fiery eloquence, from downcast eyes to lightning and thunderbolts’. No insult is intended, therefore, in saying that Akhmatova is probably the greatest poetess in the history of Western culture.

She was born in 1889, in Odessa on the Black Sea coast, but her parents soon moved to Petersburg. All her early life was spent at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence; her poetry is steeped in its memories, and in Pushkin, who attended school there. In 1910 she married the poet Nikolai Gumilev, and her own first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. She and her husband became a part of that rich flowering of creative talent—the names Blok, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Mendelstam Prokofiev, Meyerhold merely begin the list—which made it the Silver Age: though it might better be described as the second Golden Age. Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilev became the leaders of ‘Acmeism’, a poetic movement which preferred the virtues of classicism, firmness, structure, to the apocalyptic haze and ideological preoccupations of Blok and the other Symbolists.

Gumilev was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 as an alleged counter-revolutionary. Despite the fact that Akhmatova and he had been divorced for three years, the taint of having been associated with him never left her. To borrow Pasternak’s metaphor (from Doctor Zhivago), she had reached the corner of Silver Street and Silent Street: practically none of her poetry was published between 1923 and 1940. At the beginning of the Stalinist Terror, her son, Lev Gumilev, was arrested—released—rearrested, and sent to the labour camps. Nikolai Punin, an art critic and historian, with whom she had been living for ten years, was also arrested, though he was released a year or two later: the first lyric of Requiem is said to refer to his arrest. Her son was released early in the war to fight on the front-line; but he was again arrested and transported to Siberia in 1949. He was finally freed only in 1956, after Stalin’s death and partial denunciation.

For Akhmatova herself, life was relatively happier during the war, when the enemy was known and could be fought. Such ‘happiness’, as she said, was a comment on the times! She endured the first terrible months of the Leningrad siege, and was then evacuated, with other artists, to Tashkent. Some of her poems were published, and in 1945 a collected works was said to be forthcoming. It never appeared. In the renewed repression a violent campaign of abuse was directed at her. She was too personal, too mystical. Zhdanov, Stalin’s cultural hack, described her as a nun and a whore. This would appear to be a marvellous mixture of archetypes for a poet, but of course his remarks were neither meant, nor taken, in that way. She was expelled from the Writers’ Union—tantamount to her abolition—and was henceforth followed everywhere by two secret police agents.

The ‘thaw’ following Stalin’s death led to a cautious rehabilitation. Some of Akhmatova’s poetry was published again, though (and this is still the case) never Requiem, except in isolated fragments. Poem without a Hero, also, has never been published complete in the Soviet Union. Granted permission to visit the West, she received the honorary degree of D.Litt. at Oxford in 1965, and revisited old friends in London and Paris. What was much more important to her than official tolerance, she had become deeply loved and revered by her countrymen. To them, she was the conscience of Russia; she had not fled to safety as others had done after the Revolution; she had chosen to stay and endure, and to ‘bear witness’. She died in 1966. Five thousand people, mostly the young, crowded to her requiem mass in a Leningrad church.

The present volume is devoted to her two greatest achievements, Requiem and Poem without a Hero. Competent translations of many of her shorter poems exist, in the Kunitz-Hayward Poems of Akhmatova. I have however included, as an appendix, three lyrics, as examples of her poetry during the period of her life which Poem without a Hero recalls.

Requiem needs little introduction; it speaks for itself. It belongs to a select number of sacred texts which, like American Indian dream-poems but for more sinister reasons, were considered too momentous, too truthful, to write down. From 1935–40, the period of its composition, to 1957, it is said to have survived only in the memories of the poet and a few of her most trusted friends. It was first published in 1963, ‘without the author’s knowledge or consent’, by the Society of Russian Emigré Writers, from a copy which had found its way to the West.

Faced with the events of the Stalinist Terror—the most monstrous epoch in human history, as Joseph Brodsky has called it—only the bravest and most complete artists can respond with anything but silence. For those few who can speak about such things, only two ways of dealing with the horror seem possible: through a relentless piling-on of detail, as Solzhenitsyn has done in Gulag Archipelago; or through the intensity of understatement. The latter is Requiem’s way. In telling us about one woman, standing in the endless queue outside a Leningrad prison, month after month, hoping to hand in a parcel or hear some news of her son, Akhmatova speaks for all Russia. She achieves universality, through an exquisiteness of style that is at the same time anonymous and transparent—the voice of ‘the orphans, the widows’, in Chukovsky’s prophetic phrase of 1921. Requiem honours poetry, as well as the dead.

Though it was slowly distilled, it comes to us as a single heart-rending cry. Poem without a Hero, in contrast, is sustained, polyphonic, symphonic. It is a fairly long poem; nevertheless Akhmatora’s preoccupation with it over so many years—from 1940 virtually until her death—is astonishing. A poem which describes possession, it possessed her. She writes: ‘For fifteen years, again and again, this poem would suddenly come over me, like bouts of an incurable illness (it happened everywhere: listening to music at a concert, in the street, even in my sleep), and I could not tear myself away from it, forever making amendments or additions to a thing that was supposedly finished.’ Akhmatova regarded it as her crowning achievement, the poem in which—in the words of Yeats, whom she resembles in some ways—she had ‘hammered her thoughts into unity’.

The theme of the poem first came to her, she tells us, on the night of 27 December 1940, in the form of a ghostly masquerade: her friends from the Petersburg of 1913. The whole poem is a superimposition of joyous, talented, light-hearted Petersburg upon tormented Leningrad—or vice versa, since time becomes illusory, and ‘mirror of mirror dreams’; a palimpsest of city upon city, the Tsarist capital erased and the Soviet city becoming so, under the German onslaught. One thing is very clear: whatever else the poem is, it is Akhmatova’s love poem to her city.

That love is a positive and enriching enchantment. But the poem also relates a negative enchantment or obsession: certain personal events of 1913 which Akhmatova faces anew and, by facing them, expiates. These events are related obliquely (‘Don’t expect my midnight Tale of/Hoffmann to be laid bare . . .’).

One of the cultural centres of pre-Revolutionary Petersburg was the Stray Dog, a basement cabaret decorated by a leading set designer, Sergei Sudeikin. It provided a stage for a constellation of poets—Blok, Bely, Kuzmin, Bryusov, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Gumilev, Akhmatova, Yesenin, all read there to large audiences. There were also intimate theatrical performances. The ‘events’ which make up the narrative framework of Part One of Poem without a Hero concern three members of the Stray Dog coterie. One of them is the great Symbolist poet Alexander Blok. Akhmatova, while revering Blok as a poet, not only disliked the whole Symbolist cult but also—as becomes clear in the poem—sensed a demonism in Blok’s nature.

The two other main protagonists are less celebrated. Sudeikin’s wife, Olga Glebova-Sudeikina, was one of the great beauties of a city which cultivated feminine beauty. She acted and danced at the Stray Dog productions, and was a great friend of Akhmatova; they lived together in the same house for several years after the Revolution until Sudeikina emigrated to Paris in 1923. She died there shortly after the Second World War. One of her admirers in Petersburg was Vsevolod Knyazev, a young officer in the dragoons who also wrote poetry. On New Year’s Eve, 1912, Knyazev discovered that Blok was his rival for Sudeikina’s love, and shot himself on the stairway of her house. His pathetic and senseless death is the obsession that the poem brings into the light and ‘weeps out’.

Two other characters enter the poem: Mikhail Kuzmin, described as the Aubrey Beardsley of Russian poetry; and Akhmatova herself. Kuzmin’s role is of an arch-Satan. Akhmatova’s is more mysterious and important; it appears that she took some of the blame for the tragedy, was involved in the affair in a way she felt guilty about. Also, she felt so close to Sudeikina that she regarded her as a ‘double’. Though she was only ‘pressed against the glass—frost’ on the night of Knyazev’s suicide, she too is guilty. Nadezhda Mandelstam has this to say about Akhmatova’s preoccupation with the double: ‘It was something rooted in her psychology, a result of her attitude to people—in whom, as in mirrors, she always sought her own reflection. She looked at people as one might look into a mirror, hoping to find her own likeness and seeing her “double” in everybody. . . . Apart from the element of self-centredness, it was due as well to another quality which she displayed in high degree: a capacity to become so passionately involved in others that she had the need to tie them to herself as closely as possible, to merge herself in them.’¹

More important than the reasons for her remorse is the fact that in the poem it takes on a Russia-wide significance. The ‘Petersburg event’ becomes, in her eyes, ‘a parable for the sins of a world on which, with the outbreak of war in 1914, a long and terrible retribution began to be enacted’ (Max Hayward). We see a somewhat similar parable at work in Doctor Zhivago, in Lara’s seduction by Komarovsky; only in Akhmatova the torment and guilt are accepted as her own.

Part One of Poem without a Hero is in four sections. The first narrates the appearance of the unwelcome and terrifying masquerade at her apartment in the old Sheremetyev Palace on the Fontanka canal. The second describes the heroine, Sudeikina. The third is an evocation of Petersburg, as ‘not the calendar—the existing/Twentieth century drew near’. The fourth relates Knyazev’s death. There is a violent change of tone and mood in Part Two, which opens with the author arguing with a modern Soviet editor, who finds the poem incomprehensible and irrelevant to modern times. The real nightmare of Leningrad’s present then moves into the foreground. Part Three describes Akhmatova’s evacuation from Leningrad to Tashkent. In her flight from her ‘dearest, infernal, granite’ city, love and guilt are again mixed.

Poem without a Hero is complex; but less so, I think, than many critics imagine. Most of the apparent difficulty lies in the obscurity and privateness of the 1913 events and in the precise details of a long-dead era. Once these are sufficiently elucidated, the poem becomes no more complex than any great poem. That is, its depths are almost limitless, if one goes on exploring them, yet its surface is clear, real, ordered and beautiful, no more and no less mysterious than the view from your window.

Or than the music of Mozart. That analogy, in fact, is a particularly apt one; the poem is musical, Mozartian. From the title-page motto, a quotation from Da Ponte’s libretto to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the poem is full of musical references. It is composed in symphonic movements. And its metre, triptychs (normally, two rhymed lines with feminine endings followed by a masculine-ended line), gives it a triple-beat rhythm of ferocious energy, dancing lyrically, demoniacally, tragically—how well it suits the masquerade theme—in one uncurbable impulse from beginning to end.

As important as the poem’s fascination with doubles (Sudeikina-Akhmatova; Petersburg-Leningrad; past-future, etc.) is its use as a leitmotif of three, the magic number. Akhmatova hinted at ‘threeness’ being fundamental to her poem when she described it as a ‘box with a triple bottom’. Often we find a major-major-minor pattern in her groups of three: Blok-Sudeikina-Knyazev, as lovers; Blok-Kuzmin-Knyazev, as poets; Knyazev-Sudeikina-mysterious guest, her dedicatees; the three portraits of Sudeikina in theatrical roles: goatlegged nymph-the blunderer-portrait in shadows; cedar-maple-lilac; Goya-Botticelli-El Greco; Chopin-Bach-‘my Seventh’, which may be the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven or of Shostakovich. In each of these cases, the third element is more tragic or more mysterious, like a minor chord in music. The significance of doubles and threes is suggested even in the metre, triptychs bound into pairs by rhyme.

Our constant awareness of echoes and mirror-images is enhanced—to the Russian ear at least—by innumerable echoes of earlier poets, especially Pushkin and Blok himself. The cultural interpenetration is so dense and complete that it is almost as if the poem is being written, not by an individual, but by a line of poets, a tradition. And this, of course, is a deliberate and profound contradiction of Soviet theology, which dismisses the pre-Revolutionary past as worthless.

Images of darkness, play-acting and illusion dominate Part One—phantoms, midnight, candles, dreams, and above all, masks and mirrors. This world of 1913 is glamorous and beautiful, frivolous and touched with corruption and a death which no-one believes in. Akhmatova loves this world, and scorns it. At the poem’s end, after the whole marvellously created shadow world has been exorcised, the terrible truth breaks free: flying east towards Tashkent, Akhmatova sees below her that endless road along which her son, and millions of others, have been driven to the labour camps. Such a tragic moment of revelation and reality exceeds all that art can do; and through her art Akhmatova shares it all with us—agony, recognition, catharsis . . . ‘And that road was long—long—long, amidst the/Solemn and crystal/Stillness/Of Siberia’s earth.’ At this climax, the poem’s predominant major-minor progression is, in the deepest sense, reversed, and we are exalted, as we are at the end of King Lear. We feel the unmistakable presence of moral greatness as well as great art—or rather, the moral greatness is an essential condition of the artistic greatness, of the simplicity and majesty of the style.

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s recent memoir, Hope Abandoned, amply and movingly confirms this impression of Akhmatova. The unflinchingly honest strokes of Nadezhda’s pen create a portrait of a woman who, besides her genius, had gifts of life-enriching gaiety and loyalty, and a moral strength which suffering only made stronger. Mandelstam himself foresaw this—almost incredibly—even before the Revolution, when he wrote: ‘I would say that she is now no ordinary woman; of her it can truly be said that she is “dressed poorly, but of grand mien”. The voice of renunciation grows stronger all the time in her verse, and at the moment her poetry bids fair to become a symbol of Russia’s grandeur.’ His prophecy came true, in more terrible circumstances than he imagined or could have imagined.

II