cathartic enactment of the invigorating poetic witnessing to the dignity of people exposed to state violence. I will quote this preface, or as Akhmatova put it “Instead of a preface” (“Вместо предисловия”), in my own translation.3
In the dreadful years of the Yezhov’s4 terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day, somehow, somebody in the crowd “recognized” me. Then, a woman, standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before, moved out of the numbness weighing down on us all and asked me, whispering to my ear (everyone whispered there):
“You can describe this?” (А это вы можете описать)?
And I said (И я сказала):
“I can.” (Могу.)
Then, something like smile passed briefly over what had once been her face.
(Leningrad, April 1, 1957)
I read these lines for the first time after I completed my dissertation on witnessing, violence, and artistry (in 1998),5 upon the turn-of-the-century wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Already then, this Akhmatova’s retrospective Instead-of-Preface6 to her Requiem recalled to me – although in inversion – the structural dynamics of Sigmund Freud’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle,7 which in my work I interpret as a foundational text of postmodernism. That is, the difference in narrative strategies of these two authors appeared to me as making a crucial point. Then, keeping to my belief that the most an author can do is admit the very position from which she or he starts to think, and starting to read closely Akhmatova’s earlier poetry8 – and specifically the poetry of her transition from ravishing lyric subjectivity to profound social commitment to witnessing (here, I offer my own selection from the poems that Akhmatova wrote between 1917 and 1924, as pertaining to the discussion topic)9 – I found yet another proof that this confessing authorial quality is much more inherent in a feminine account10 than a masculine one.
In my contribution to this book collection on the post-Great War violence, I discuss the ways in which Freud and Akhmatova each deal textually and strategically with their encounter with violence and death that interrupted their linear lives, after crashing and burying many of their contemporaries in the Great War and its immediate aftermath. In their “witnessing writing”, they have opened the rhetorical horizons for generations of scholars to come. In feminist criticism, Freud was reproached fiercely for annulling the woman’s voice and presence in this text (of his deceased daughter Sophie) in his self-curing narcissistic cathexis while he formulated the death drive after the repetition compulsion. Hence, I discuss Akhmatova’s strong woman’s voice that poetically and dialogically reflects on the violence of the dissipating worlds.
If these two authors are read simultaneously – relative to their socio-physical positions in two emerging post-imperial, yet different political structures (and with the application to their works of the analytic terms of ‘cathexis’11 and ‘transference’12) – the course of the narrative disclosures of Akhmatova in her poems can be seen as if working through the overt self-protection of Freud’s narrative revelation of repression, repetition, and drive. Henceforward, the discussion could hint toward the claims that understanding of drive13 is also informed by gender, as it is also the understanding of the dreadful materializations of drive within the radical political imaginaries that shaped the realities of these two authors.
1. Death in the Mirror
As evidenced in his letters and in his analytic discourse, Freud suffered two heavy losses upon the war’s end. The more personal loss was the death of his beloved daughter Sophie who suddenly died of pneumonia in February 1920;1 the other, and more widely implicated socially-existentially, was the 1918 loss of the quite sheltering Empire,2 the symbolic (and reigning socio-political) structure in which Freud was born, raised, educated, lived, procreated, practiced his work, and developed his revolutionary thought. The relevance of Freud’s loss of his daughter for his writing of the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, particularly for its second chapter as the exemplification of his theory of the death drive that manifests itself in the compulsion to repeat, is extensively discussed by major 20th-century theorists,3 while the relevance of the loss of the Empire for the same matter was widely ignored or marginalized. Beyond the Pleasure Principle discusses the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in two different spheres: first, the dreams in traumatic neurosis4 that Freud observed in the war survivors, and second, the waking life in a child’s game that Freud observed in Sophie’s son Ernest,5 three to four years before he wrote this essay.
However, informed by my own interpretative relation to transference, I have found the integral dimension of the second chapter as decisive for understanding Freud’s formulation of the death drive (Todestrieb) primarily as a rhetorical delivery of his witnessing function that Freud himself could not confess openly (or, he could not “bind ‘It’” by the secondary processes). That is, I read the missing link between these two losses that Freud experienced (yet not explicitly saying that connection) as placed in the relation between the two activities he studied: 1) the dreams of neurotics caused by an unexpected violence forcing them to wake up repetitively into a new fright and 2) the waking life of generating a play as instinctual renunciation through a cultural achievement.
Freud wrote the first draft of the essay from March to May 1919, while also working on the text The Uncanny,6 mentioning in both texts the “compulsion to repeat” but not the death instincts. He returned to the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle at the beginning of 1920, right after the death of his daughter, Sophie Freud-Halberstadt, and finished it between May and July of the same year, and only then formulated the death drive. However, in the text in which no personal names are given, besides his own name as the text’s signed author, Freud does not mention either Sophie’s death or his own fatherly loss. He describes that only in his letters to his colleagues in the days following Sophie’s death as “a serious narcissistic injury inflicted on him,” so that he is regaining his balance through writing, trying to overcome the painful experience through the continuity of his work: “I work as much as I can, and I am thankful for the diversing […] what is known as mourning will probably follow only later.”7
In the essay, the compulsion to repeat is seen as the universal attribute of instincts and perhaps all organic life – as the impulse for restoring the earlier state of things that was abandoned under the pressure of previous disturbing forces. The essay’s key second chapter consists of seven pages in the standard edition. On the first three pages, Freud speculates on the dark, desolate subject of the manifestations of fright8 in traumatic neuroses. He does not say that this tormenting psychic experience is anchored in and modulated by the hard turning-point of the emerging post-war existential and socio-political uncertainty, which all (of those surrounding him) – including Freud as a member of the Jewish minority in the post-Austro-Hungarian Empire Austrian (Germanic) national formation – inhabited, and certainly feared. Then, in just one sentence, Freud passes to the warmth and comfort of the family narrative, without saying that this is also triggered by the loss that he suffered himself, which certainly must have reminded him of his own mortality. Skillfully, he switches to the reassuring authority of his interpretation of his small grandson’s game (indeed, largely taken from Sophie’s own interpretation)9 that evolved in four different stages: 1) the boy throwing small objects away; 2) pulling back one as the game of disappearance and return to him of his mother as his primary object; 3) most important, the boy crouching down beneath the full-length mirror saying that himself he is “gone”, and 4) a year later, throwing his toys as sending his father “to the front” where his father really was.
In Freud’s own “masculine” and “senior” game of repetitions – where his daughter Sophie disappears repetitively as annulled
