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At this point, let us reach for “Anna of all the Russias”, as Akhmatova was called,1 not a minority at all, yet herself choosing to be a minority, already when she took her pen name from the Tatarian maternal side of her father (replacing her father’s surname Gorenko with the Tatar name Akhmatova, as relating to her more distant family lore).2 This memorable woman author3 of the same post-Great-War period, after the crash of the Russian Empire, at the onset of Bolshevism, much younger than Freud, was exposed to much tougher circumstances of getting destitute, enduring official scorn, the execution of her recently divorced husband and the father of her son, the lasting and terrible stigmatization, banned publication, close surveillance, persecution, the imprisonment and murders of those closest to her.4 In spite of all that,5 Akhmatova introduces a different view on repetition and repression than the one Freud offers. Likewise, in all her reticence, her quite generous love-life with equally imperiled or persecuted Russian intellectuals6 considerably challenges Freud’s simultaneous speculations on life and death instincts, and (those which he postulated prior to them) of the singularity of ego and plurality of sexual procreation.7 Furthermore, amidst her utterly frightening situation, it is the phenomenology of the (allure of the) mirror that gives Akhmatova a life apart from life so as if to make some other Anna experience the cruelty, against which Anna mirroring art, spirit, and tradition consolidates her witnessing self, repetitively.

Akhmatova’s poems don’t say that we repeat because we repress, but on the contrary – that we repress because we repeat, that we forget because we repeat, that we repress because we can live certain things only in the mode of repetition. Or, also, that we are bound to repress especially the representation that negotiates what was lived before, connecting it to the form of an analogous or identical object. As Freud himself wrote in his text, in some normal people, not neurotics, also there is a perpetual recurrence of the same thing – if it is related to an active behavior, “there is an essential character trait remaining the same, compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences”,8 while the last sentence of the text’s second chapter suggests that “the consideration of these cases and situations – which have a yield of pleasure as the final outcome – should be taken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject matter”.9 And, while the later 20^th-century (psychoanalytic yet anti-Freudian) philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, offered such a (cultural) view of repetition10 with a crucial emphasis on difference involved in the repeating acts, Akhmatova wrote out the same, yet her involved understanding of it, already much in advance. In the Bolsheviks’ realm, Akhmatova asks about establishing a difference between each of the repetitions, retrieving the very biography, psychology, and history that were officially erased,11 while introducing a considerable difference also within repression and that what is repressed.12

Her 1917 poem “When in the Throes of Suicide” (“Когда в тоске самоубийства“) decidedly establishes Anna as a crucial witness to the radical changes that Russia started to undergo by the end of the Great War.13 Since the later 20^th-century studies in witnessing and testimony14 (developed in the Western hemisphere, and significantly rooted in the Holocaust experience), has extended witnessing function also to prophetic function, it would be easy to identify Akhmatova with her that-time growing conviction that above all she is the resilient “embodiment of her poetic voice”.15 As such, she is also an instrument of bearing witness16 to the structures of violence multiplying all around her, as she stayed in Russia during the war and after the Revolution by her deliberate choice.17 However, I also read Akhmatova as an avant-garde prophetess of the later 20^th-century developments in psychoanalysis, according to which the early mirror stage18 remains artistically vital throughout one’s life. And according to which the death drive is entirely rewritten by the elaboration of the approach to the abyss of Das Ding (the [traumatic] Thing; La chose), making out of it partial or transitional objects, and correcting lacks and losses through language and libido that are in tandem in a biological organism.19

“When in the Throes of Suicide” opens into the two-way mirroring field of “our people” threatened by the “German guests” and “our Russian Church deserted by the stern Byzantine spirit”, indeed, both locked up in the – obviously plural – act of the country committing suicide. It is Akhmatova’s singular repetitive “I” that takes upon herself the role of a negotiating medium, as to fend off the soothing, tempting call (“Mne голос был. Он звал утешно, oн говорил“) to Russian people to abandon themselves, “go abroad” (“oставь Россию навсегда“). However, that “Voice” and its repetitive “It,” as talking the Russians into betrayal, comes from within Anna herself, at once speaking to her as a part of her and becoming the new “I” of the “It”, the dialogized “Ich” of the foreigner. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” – that is, “where It was, I shall come into being,” – Freud said (only in 1933),20 yet not confessing it about himself. This poem by Akhmatova delivers two “I”-s as opposing each other. Furthermore, the “Voice”, the “It” turning into “I”, disguises itself as purifying, dignifying, healing in its own right. The poem’s prodigy is that as “It” becomes the “I” of the Voice, the inner voice also rises up to the surface of Anna’s body, becomes external and manageable by Anna’s consciousness so upon that, indifferently, she “simply blocks her ears from the outside” (“Но равнодушно и спокойно руками я замкнула слух”) – “so that the unworthy talk cannot desecrate me, in my grief” (“Чтоб этой речей недостойной не осквернился скорбный дух”). In a few short lines, (as if) Akhmatova translates this seminal dictum by Freud (before he even comes to formulate it) into her own living testimony to the switching power of the conscious over the unconscious. “It” takes courage – to speak the “I”: Anna’s “I” takes courage to speak the “It”.

The subsequent 1917 “Now, Nobody Will Want to Listen to Poems” (“Tеперь никто не cтaнeт слушать песeн”) stages Akhmatova’s departure from her early sumptuous lyricism as her confessed pain of her own mirroring herself in her Poem as her interlocutor and the narratable21 You of her “I”, her own observed physical and spiritual reflection – that begs the Poem “not to shatter Anna’s heart” as the Poem suddenly empties itself in its ruining moves (“Моя последняя, мир больше не чудесен, не разливай мне сердца, не звени”), as the “foretold menacing days have come” (“Предсказанные наступили дни”).

In the next few years, through 1921, as a character in her verses Akhmatova introduces Death as “chalking the doors with crosses”, “calling the ravens to fly in”, as the “age is worse than earlier ages (“Чем хуже этот век предшествующих?”), unhealable by the power of fingers (“Он к самой черной прикоснулся язве, но исцелить ee нe тoг” 1919). Still, with the 1921 poem “Everything is stolen, betrayed, sold…” (“Все расхищено, предано, продано”) – the consolidating mirror of art and spirituality returns to Anna the plural of her “We” who, still however, somehow “do not despair” (“Отчего же нам стало светло?”). As Akhmatova’s profuse temperament and sensibility in the full blow of counteraction cannot but perceive that, still, out there, there is a world of nature, Earth, cosmos, and larger, unrevealed meanings pertaining to them.

Днем дыханиями веет вишневыми	By day, from the surrounding woods,
Небы валый под городом лес,	cherries blow summer into town;
Ночью блещет созвездиями новыми	at night the deep transparent July skies
Глубь прозрачных июльских небес.	glitter with new constellations.
И так близко подходит чудесное	And the miraculous comes so close
К развалившимся грязным домам	to the ruined, dirty houses –
Никому, никому неизвестное	as something not known to anyone at all,
Но от века желанное нам.	yet forever having been desired by us.

Soon after, Akhmatova’s first poetic fellow, and husband, Nikolay Gumilyov22, is shot dead by the officials of the Soviet secret police. Within a few days, Akhmatova wrote down the poem “Fear Fingers All Things in the Darkness” (“Страх, во тьме перебирая вещи”), merging the grasps of the Pre-Christian and Christian motives with the sheer Acmeist23 craft toward a fullest possible perfection of a ‘poetic cathexis’. That is, Anna’s self-controlled expression of the consternation with the cold-blood murder of the one among the closest to her, to whom however she was not allowed even to refer openly, let alone to name him in her poem, as she herself was under the immediate physical life-threat. Unlike her senior contemporary Freud, who himself chose the authorial-safeguard-exit away from naming his daughter’s Sophie part in his text. That is, Anna’s articulation of the fear on the background of the state mechanisms, that nevertheless in her poem make “a moon-bean point to an ax”, while “an ominous knock is heard behind the wall” – “what is there? a ghost, a thief, or rats?” (“Страх, во тьме перебирая вещи, Лунный луч наводит на топор. За стеною слышен стук зловещий – Что там, крысы, призрак или вор?”).24

The 1922 “I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land” (“Не с теми я кто бросил землю”) – “to its enemies to tear it apart” – is a further consolidating poem that develops the dynamics between “I” and “You”, “We” and “They” – the narrative dynamics through which Akhmatova strives to protect her poems as her lone property from any unwanted sharing with or reference to either the internal enemies or refugees from Russia. Her poetry is her self-protective mirror into which she perpetually enters and freely moves (as a character) within its multiplying imaginative and phenomenological planes. There are those who left and those who stayed in the dead ashes of the Revolution’s fire, and the toughest temptation for those who stayed is the word of the same language that has seduced others into either betrayal or departure. Anna’s lovers and friends were leaving Russia one by one25 – it is from what was most intimate to her that her splitting narration has to defend itself. For better or for worse, “resistant and proud, I am not singing about them, yet I feel forever sorry for their exile lot” (“Но вечно жалок мне изгнанник”), as “‘We’ [Anna and her poems] are made straighter by the surrounding wild.”26

The anti-exile topic makes it further to “Lot’s Wife” (“Лотова жена” 1922–1924) that repetitively merges the figurations of a woman witness and a woman prophet, falling back into this Biblical motive.27 Again, the “Voice” comes out loudly from inside a woman as her restless challenge (“Но громко жене говорила тревога: Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть на красные башни родного Codoma”). Yet, in this poem in inversion, for it is the words of staying and not leaving that the Voice is preaching, the woman’s overt opposition to her man Lot who is set out to leave the native land. The voice talks the woman into throwing her last glance to the life she is departing from. Certainly, the glance and its mirror-reflection set the trap, the wife’s single glance with the “arrow of pain stitching her eyes before she could let a sound out”, her “body flaking into transparent salt”, her “shaking legs as a pillar rooting to the ground”. The woman who at the cost of life chose to stay and bear witness, as well as the witnesses to her subsequent punishment – both those who departed and those who stayed – get inseparable within the mirroring reference to the ecumenical script that however glorifies a woman’s choice if only embodied in Akhmatova’s reprise.

The last poem to which I will refer is from the 1924, “The Muse” (“Муза”), repetitively staging Akhmatova’s respectful bow down to Poetry itself, to its messenger and conveyer, the Muse – “whom no one can command”28. In the generous act of self-denial, hanging by a thread, Anna gives all she cherishes most – just for her to come.

Когда я ночью жду ее прихода,		When at night I wait for her to come,
Жизнь, кажется, висит на волоске.		life seems to be hanging by a thread.
Что почести, что юность, что свобода		What (are) honors, what youth, what freedom
Пред милой гостьей с дудочкой в руке.		before a lovely guest with a flute in her hand.

It is the wait and then the encounter between the two, obviously imaginary, dialogized within Akhmatova herself, which opens the poem’s space as to reflect (on) two Infernos 1) the Inferno of the surrounding Soviet terror and 2) the early 14^th-century famed representation of Inferno, which Anna calls to her aid. As Anna is “seeing herself as seeing herself”29 in the mirror of her Muse, who with her unveiled face is “staring Anna down”.30 The rescuing land of the poetry past brings Akhmatova to retaking the pen of the Poet of the spaces after the Last Judgement – “I ask: ‘That’s you whom Dante heard dictate the lines of his Inferno?’ She answers: ‘Me.’” (“Ей говорию: Ты лъ Данту диктовала Страниць Ада? Отвечает ‘Я.’”)31

It takes courage to look at the “I” in the mirror in death, and talk the “I” – back.