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
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