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.
(1976)
‘Who can refuse to live his own life?’ Akhmatova once remarked in answer to some expression of sympathy. Her refusal not to live her life made of her one of those few people who have given dignity and meaning to our terrible century, and through whom and for whom it will be remembered. In relation to her, the politicians, the bureaucrats, the State torturers, will suffer the same fate that, in Akhmatova’s words, overtook Pushkin’s autocratic contemporaries: ‘The whole epoch, little by little . . . began to be called the time of Pushkin. All the . . . high-ranking members of the Court, ministers, generals and non-generals, began to be called Pushkin’s contemporaries and then simply retired to rest in card indexes and lists of names (with garbled dates of birth and death) in studies of his work. . . . People say now about the splendid palaces and estates that belonged to them: Pushkin was here, or Pushkin was never here. All the rest is of no interest to them.’
Pushkin was the closest of the friends she did not meet even once in her life. He helped her to survive the 1920s and 30s, the first of Akhmatova’s long periods of isolation and persecution. Dante, too, was close. And there were friends whom she could meet, including Mandelstam and Pasternak, whose unbreakable integrity supported her own. But no-one could have helped, through thirty years of persecution, war, and persecution, if she had not herself been one of the rare incorruptible spirits.
Her incorruptibility as a person is closely linked to her most fundamental characteristic as a poet: fidelity to things as they are, to ‘the clear, familiar, material world’. It was Mandelstam who pointed out that the roots of her poetry are in Russian prose fiction. It is a surprising truth, in view of the supreme musical quality of her verse; but she has the novelist’s concern for tangible realities, events in place and time. The ‘unbearably white . . . blind on the white window’ of the first lyric in the present selection is unmistakably real; the last, from half-a-century
