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 20th-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
