Lot’s Wife
The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife’s bosom cried,
Look back, it’s not too late for a last sight
Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
Where you once sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
And the tall house with empty windows where
You loved your husband and your babes were born.
She turned, and looking on the bitter view
Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;
Into transparent salt her body grew,
And her quick feet were rooted in the plain.
Who would waste tears upon her? Is she not
The least of our losses, this unhappy wife?
Yet in my heart she will not be forgot
Who, for a single glance gave up her life.
- Anna Akhmatova, adapted by Richard Wilbur
It brought disquiet to the noble Gorenko family when they unearthed that their daughter, Anna, then only seventeen, was about to publish a selection of poetry in a St. Petersburg literary magazine. Disgruntled and cloying her to ‘maintain appearances’ her father beseeched her not to “befoul a good and respected name,” and choose instead a pseudonym. His daughter agreed, but perhaps in spite she chose to write as Akhmatova, with its dissonant sonority and its distant, oriental, Tartar flavour. Yet it was not then that Gorenko’s name exited history, but just over a decade later, when a war and a revolution washed away their landed influence in its unforgiving tides.
The arrival of that balding man at Finland Station would change the course of history, and with it the trajectory of that Russian, but above all Petersburgian culture that had been accelerating with such intensity in the run up to that moment. To touch the memory of that cultural efflorescence, think of those evenings where Mayakovsky, “I’ll play the flute of your spine, on the street 22, good looking, not one of you;” would bang his drum as another futurist entered the smoke-filled chambers of the Stray Dog Cabaret, as Mandelstam would recite verse, swaying Rabbincally for effect, in the same place where Akhmatova would pass indiscreet verse to her lovers. This was not just an atmosphere but a movement made glued together with a young energy so intense it would take a full decade for it to slow down. So it is ironically, that the art-scene of the Soviet Twenties could be mistaken for a triumphal unleashing of talent in a socialist context, as it was for many decades in the West, and not the withering and battering of what was left under the most extreme of circumstances. In Cultural Amnesia Clive James melancholically notes that “had things gone differently the cafés of Vienna, that so dominated the early Century, even those of Berlin, would have been surpassed by those of St. Petersburg, which might have gone on to culturally dominate in the manner that Paris would in the early post-war period.” Akhmatova knew this only too well as she and Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda tried to keep the tradition alive and above all attempt to become the moral anchors of a society adrift in lies under state-terror.
The USSR would send Mayakovsky disjointed and suicidal, Mandelstam wind up dead whilst Akhmatova, the master of the short, perfectly phrased tender love poem would end up writing epic poetry as a bare witness to what she was living through. It is here that she ended up in the Russian literary canon, as the poet of cosmic suffering and emotional transcendence, not exactly what her father might have imagined, or her for herself when she started writing verse that was intensely feminine, sensitive, uncannily exact in capturing the delicate shadings of emotion.
Joseph Brodsky argues that “more than any other art, poetry is a form of sentimental education, and the lines that Akhmatova readers learned by heart were to temper their hearts against the new era’s onslaught of vulgarity. The comprehension of the drama betters chance’s of weathering the drama of history.” Here we can picture the historical significance of A Poem Without A Hero or Requiem, one almost medieval, or dark-age, they were repeated, mouthed around dinner tables in tightly intimate circles, memorised and repeated until they fused in with the interior monologue of a silent generation. Akhmatova not only kept the fragile Petersburgian tradition alive with her, she also through her poetry transpired to hold the dignity of a nation a float by hoping to become through verse a poet of suffering. However suffering does not lead to good art, suffering blinds and often destroys, therefore what she achieved was a way of creating through her own self, a prism into which personal suffering could be comprehended, absorbed and passed across intact to others. Akhmatova’s poems achieve something very rare, her art does not commit a weird ‘theft’ – they hold out a hand to those in distress, like a friend’s might.
Olga Carlisle, the westernised scion of an émigré family, described in her collection of portraits Poets on Street Corners her homage to Akhmatova. “I had the impression that I was being initiated into a poetic rite. She shut the door so as not to be disturbed even by the discreet household activities of her hosts, and sat at a tiny writing table, placing me across from her. Reciting from memory, her eyes half-closed, her head slightly bowed, she seemed to listen intently to the music of her own verse. She usually recited three or four poems in succession. Her voice was muffled yet melodious, and her reading had the incantatory quality of many Russian poets readings: it emphasised the sounds rather than the meaning of the poem. The sound was slightly monotonous yet paradoxically, the poems took on a marvellous life as she recited them, with a strange stinging immediacy.” The fusing of the sonority Asiatic and Slavic folk ballards, their manners of delivery and chant-like qualities in the classical context of Acmeism is a large part of what brings about ‘this stinging immediacy.’ Watching Akhmatova deliver verse on old recordings, recalls both the melodies of Siberian throat singing and the recitations of Nabokov, PBS and the BBC made a generation familiar with in the West. This is the Tartar, the distinctively different element of Russia, separating her from Europe.
Her strict metres provided the skeleton of the sonic momentum, however aged they seemed in comparison to the more modern free-form poetry, Joseph Brodsky argues that she chose them “as the more she did so, the more inexorably her voice was approaching the impersonal quality of time itself, until they merged into something that makes one shudder trying to guess – as in her Northern Elegies – who is hiding behind the pronoun I.” However, as her images take a more classical turn in a Requiem, her ‘Я’ manages through its impersonal intimacy to convey the grieving and foreboding of a generation. This is what gained Akhmatova her popularity and sage like status, to the extent that D.M Thomas notes that she was not alone in suspecting she had “witch-like powers, capable of inflicting great pain, at times joy” but that Requiem “belongs to a select number of sacred texts, which like American Indian dream-poems but for far more sinister reasons were considered too momentous, too truthful to write down.”
Akhmatova’s masterpiece, her Poem Without A Hero, which begins as a hideous returning masquerade of her dead, which she addresses for it was the only way for her song not to turn into a howl, is filled with images of mirrors, murmurs, culture’s dashed and inverted icons and guilt. D.M Thomas argues that A Poem Without A Hero begins with the reckoning of a very personal event, the suicide of the poet Knyazev who killed himself when he realised the great symbolised Alexander Blok was a love-rival. Thomas is insistent Akhmatova sensed a “demonism in Blok nature” and in his symbolist cult that celebrated violence, acceleration and an exhilaration in the destruction of forms. She did after all say that “his eyes were so astonishing, still they compel my memory, And I thought, I must be careful, Not to look at them at all.” As if she was looking into the future’s frenzy.
Poem Without A Hero becomes through the reader’s experience of murmurs, confessions and hallucinations of lost friends of 1913, an attempt for her to deal with her role in a youth movement in which all where anticipating ‘violence’ and some where even relishing its coming, like so many fellow Viennese. As the lines roll on, and the poet is evacuated to Tashkent during the siege of Leningrad, with “her dry eyes lowered, Russia walks before me to the East,” this verse ties personal tragedy with that of the land, drawing both Tsarist and Soviet epochs of her life in its inspiration.
Akhmatova’s poetry is the cultural link between the pre-Revolutionary writers and those that followed, her classical lyrical structure filled with this new world, her childhood spent walking through the gardens of Tsarskoe Zelo, where Pushkin had youthfully wandered, linked through words to the queue outside the prison of Requiem. Pushkin was her closest friend she never met, and as he was to her, she was to become through the samizdat and the spoken word to Russia’s silenced generation.
•
VII
With such an elegant Satan
-So colourful –this motley ancient
Caliogostro, you can’t resist.
It goes against his belief
To mourn the dead, for grief
And conscience do not exist
VIII
Well…it doesn’t smell of a Roman
Carnival. Over the closed domes a
Melody of Cherubim
Trembles. No-one is hammering on my
Door, only stillness watches
Over stillness, mirror of mirror dreams.
XI
Especially when our dreams imagine
All that must still be enacted:
Death everywhere – Our city burnt through…
And Tashkent in flower for a wedding…
Very soon Asiatic wind will tell me
What is eternal and true
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