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
