………………………………
It does not belong to me.
—1958
_____
… Snowdrop flowers turn white,
Having forgiven me long, long ago.
—1950s
_____
Neither treacherous husband nor trembling groom,
………………………………a third,
Who preferred another’s nets to mine,
I haven’t dreamt of any of them for so long.
Passed over long ago, all the bridges are burnt
And the mortal gates are ready to accept me.
—1960
_____
If only then a stray bullet
Like the light path of July
Had led me somewhere …
—1962
_____
It’s not with people such as you I parted,
It’s not people such as you I sent into the darkness,
Why does burning pity
Cling to my black heart?
There is little left for us to suffer …
Give me ……… and prison
—1963
FRAGMENTS FOR THE CYCLE “THE MENORAH”
1.
Over my shoulder, where the menorah is burning,
Where there’s the shadow of the Wailing Wall,
An invisible sinner summons
The subconscious awareness of original sin.
Polygamist, poet and beginning
Of all beginnings and end of all ends.
2.
The nut tree, shedding, rustles.
Where the diamond menorah shone
There what shines on me—is only darkness.
We are unworthy of seeing each other
………………………
We are from that meadow preserve.
3.
Along the burning meadow
Where the water is seething
Nothing threw us together.
—1964
***
AFTERWORD
AKHMATOVA REDISCOVERED
The life of Anna Akhmatova spans one of the most brilliant and at the same time most horrifying periods in Russian history—brilliant in its art, but horrible in the terror that loomed over the lives of poets and ordinary people. She grew up in a country ruled by an emperor whose weakness brought down a whole dynasty. He was succeeded by the strong, cruel tyrants of the Soviet regime, who in the end brought down the system they helped create. Born in 1889 in Ukraine, Akhmatova spent most of her life in the Russian cities of Petersburg (which became Soviet Leningrad) and Moscow. Having begun as the voice of women experiencing the ecstasy and agony of love, Akhmatova became the voice of her people, crying out against the threats of external enemies and internal tyrants.
Not only have none of these poems been previously published in English but many of them were unavailable even in Russia until 1990, when they were published by a devoted Akhmatova scholar, Mikhail Kralin. The most controversial of the poems are from her cycle “Glory to Peace.” Many lovers of Akhmatova’s works feel that since these poems in praise of Stalin were written under duress in order to free her son from the Siberian camps, it would be doing her a disservice to publish or translate these verses. However, Kralin disagrees and says in its own way, this cycle is a document of the epoch, no less convincing than her Requiem, and the contemporary reader should become acquainted with this tragic page in the biography of the poet. Not to publish them would be equivalent to leaving out works by Shostakovich or Prokofiev that were written as paeans to the homeland and its leader in a patriotic, rhetorical musical style, or similar poems by Mandelstam and Pasternak. In discussing Mandelstam’s “Ode to Stalin” in her book Hope against Hope, his wife (by that time, his widow) Nadezhda says, “Many people now advise me not to speak of it at all, as though it had never existed. But I cannot agree to this, because the truth would then be incomplete: leading a double life was an absolute fact of our age, and nobody was exempt. The only difference was that while others wrote their odes in their apartments and country villas and were rewarded for them, M. wrote his with a rope around his neck. Akhmatova did the same, as they drew the noose tighter around the neck of her son. Who can blame either her or M.”
After a series of earlier arrests and time incarcerated in the camps, Akhmatova’s son was arrested again in November 1949. They put him in prison in Moscow, then condemned him to ten years in a Siberian camp. Akhmatova went to Moscow every month to bring him packages, and then continued to keep in contact with him when he was in the camps. Not only did she write letters and visit various authorities in person, but she finally decided to use the only weapon she had to set him free—her poetry. Her friend Nina Olshevskaya, a Moscow actress, contacted Alexey Surkov, editor of the popular magazine Ogonyok (Little Light). By this time Akhmatova had been expelled from the Writers’ Union because of alleged contacts with foreigners. She had been visited by the famous Oxford professor Sir Isaiah Berlin at the end of 1945 and again at the beginning of 1946 on his way back to London after serving in the Soviet Union during the war on behalf of Britain. Stalin had resumed his xenophobia and broken with his former WWII allies right after the war, as the iron curtain came down. Apparently, he found out about Akhmatova’s visit by the famous foreign gentleman and in 1946 punished her for it by including her in a condemnation of various writers and journals which published their works. After this it was impossible for Akhmatova to get anything published. However, Surkov, who himself had no qualms about writing anything to please the authorities and who had written many songs of praise to Stalin and patriotic poetry before, during and after the war, respected Akhmatova and risked his own career by allowing her to publish the poems in his magazine Ogonyok.
The war decimated the Soviet Union and millions died. Until the last years the Allies refused to set up a second front and invade France, sending arms instead of men to help the Soviets fight. Stalin remained in Moscow in the embattled capital throughout the war. As Adam Ulam shows in his biography of Stalin, during the war, forgetting for a moment the horrors they suffered under the Terror during the thirties, many people looked on Stalin as a great national leader, the first to deal a military setback to the Fascists. The war ended with a Soviet flag over Berlin and an increase in territorial domain. However, by the time Akhmatova began writing these poems, the situation had changed dramatically. She had been reduced to utter poverty, since expulsion from the Writers’ Union meant the impossibility of being published, and her ration card had been taken from her. Only through the help of friends, including Pasternak, did she survive. She was not alone in her suffering. Not only writers, but Shostakovich, Prokofiev and film director Sergei Eisenstein had also been publicly condemned, and thousands of innocent people were arrested or rearrested after the war, as was the case with her son, who had been freed from the camps in order to fight and had participated in the liberation of Berlin.
Thus, there is no question that Akhmatova’s cycle of poems in praise of Stalin were not written in the afterglow of the euphoric feeling felt by the Russian people, when the Soviets had just beaten the enemy, and that Akhmatova just might have felt some genuine admiration for the Soviet leader. On the contrary, the poems were written after several years of a horrible replay of the years of Terror, and what is expressed in these poems is the obligatory feelings that were required to be displayed toward Stalin, which had already appeared in so many poems by second-rate poets in the previous decades of the Soviet regime.
Some of her friends were not sure how to react to the work. In 1952 Georgy Makogonenko came to see her and she asked him, “How did you like my Derzhavin imitation?” Stalin was not the first despotic ruler of the Russian people to require panegyrics. Like other poets living in the reign of Catherine II, the poet Derzhavin was required to praise a tyrant. In his 1765 Accession Day Ode to Catherine, Alexander Perpchin writes: “Your power, O monarch, has a beauty like the summer days; Russi
a, its glory renewed, is flowering like a lily of paradise … We live in the midst of a Garden of Eden.” Thus Akhmatova was carrying on a long tradition in Russian poetry of using a ready-made repertoire of poetic tropes to praise a ruler who was more famous for misdeeds than noble actions.
As Volodymyr Dibrova has pointed out while working on these translations with me, these poems are brilliant pseudo-imitations of the numerous poems written in praise of Stalin both before and after the war by poets whose aim was to please. What Akhmatova has done is to use the phrases and hackneyed clichés employed in these poems in such a way that they come close to parody. They are reminiscent of musical analogues by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, who were very familiar with the musical rhetoric typical of patriotic hymns and music for marching military bands. They used stereotypical musical phrases and techniques easily recognizable by the people of the Soviet Union in the pieces they wrote to please the authorities.
One who best exemplifies a poet who “writes to please” is Surkov himself. In 1951 he published a collection of poems written before, during and right after the war called Miru—mir! (To the World—Peace, playing on the word mir, which means both “world” and “peace” in Russian). The title is taken from his poem “The Spring of Mankind” written in 1949 about a first of May spring breeze bringing hope to the workers of the world at the same time adding machines, like machine guns, hammer away “in the jungles of New York, in banker’s offices.” Many of the poems in this collection had been published before, and surely Akhmatova was familiar with them. In fact, in one of her incomplete poems, included here, “The Fall of Berlin,” first printed in the Kralin edition, she ends the fragment with “Mir—miru …” (Peace—to the world), echoing the phrase in the Surkov poem.
However, often where Surkov is explicit, Akhmatova is more universal. Both write poems against the threat of an external enemy. Yet she never identifies the enemy or specific events, but warns any future foe: “In vain with a bloody shroud/ You are striving to cover our land.” After confirming that life now flows on peacefully in her land, she ends the poem with the words: “So with shameful slander do not dare threaten us!”
In continuation of her battle to save her son, Akhmatova delivered a manuscript of an anthology of poems entitled Glory to Peace! to the publisher Soviet pisatel’ (Soviet Writer). It included thirty-nine original poems, including the “Glory to Peace” cycle, and seven translations. She began the collection with the section “The Great Patriotic War,” which included popular poems published during World War II. The editorial board all approved the poems praising Stalin, but rejected others for being too rhetorical or incomprehensible. Over four hundred lines were deleted by the editors. However, one of them, Vera Inber, suggested the collection should be published to show readers an example of “the perestorika (restructuring) of consciousness” in the development of a poet like Akhmatova. Other editors understood there was a subtext in these poems criticizing the regime and were afraid to publish the text. The manuscript remained with the publisher for three years. In February 1953, Surkov wrote the director of the Soviet pisatel’, urging that the manuscript be published, but without any results. However, Stalin died in March 1953, and that put an end to any publication of this collection.
Some of Akhmatova’s very early poems, written before 1909, are translated here for the first time. They were written before she was twenty and already show embryonic intimations of the famous Akhmatova style: simple everyday language spoken by the upper classes by a poet thoroughly familiar with and reacting against the often bombastic, opaque and heavily metaphoric poetry of the Symbolists writing at the turn of the century. Until World War I Akhmatova was the voice of women in love, and she describes all the nuances in a romantic relationship: the initial ecstasy of infatuation to the boredom or hatred aroused by an affair that spoils from too much familiarity. Her later poems show the maturity of a woman who has experienced great suffering at the hands of the political system, and she then becomes the voice of her people.
In the section of Kralin’s collection called “From the Unfinished and Forgotten” it is sometimes difficult to discern which are unfinished, which are complete poems but “forgotten” and which are purposely fragmentary but appear to be unfinished, a device that goes back to antiquity. For example, a 1930s poem “Fragment from Destroyed Poems” seems to be a deliberate “pseudo-fragment” and in typical Akhmatova conciseness, it expresses a deep and profound thought with a complex subtext.
… Because we’ll all go
Down the Tagantsev, the Yesenin,
Or the great Mayakovsky road.
Tagantsev was accused of being the leader of a group planning counterrevolutionary activity, and Gumilyov was arrested at the beginning of August 1921 for allegedly participating in this affair and, after futile attempts by his friends to get him released, was shot at the end of the month. The latest evidence shows that Gumilyov’s only crime was not informing the government of the plot. The poet Sergey Yesenin hoped the October Revolution would bring a peaceful peasant utopia instead of an industrial world ruled by the proletariat. His disillusionment with the new Soviet state in combination with his self-destructive alcoholism resulted in his suicide in 1925. Ironically, Mayakovsky wrote a poem in response to Yesenin’s last poem full of despair: “To die—/ in life/ is not so difficult/ To create life—/ is indeed more difficult.” However, in the end Mayakovsky also lost his will to create and succumbed to the same despair as Yesenin. In 1930, the combination of intense criticism of his works and a bad love affair resulted in his suicide. In his last note he says: “Mother, sisters, friends, forgive me—this is not the way (I do not recommend it to others, but there is no other way out for me”).
This was not Akhmatova’s way, however. She was a survivor and had a strong inner core that enabled her to sustain the hardships of the Stalinist Terror. In fact, in her 1963 one-line poem published here, she writes: “I will not go out of my mind and won’t even die,” implying that such alternatives had indeed presented themselves to her. The poem here predicts that she, too, at least psychologically, walked down the “Tagantsev, Yesenin, Mayakovsky road,” for so many of those beloved by her suffered either arrest, death or suicide.
“The Fall of Berlin” refers to a popular film made soon after World War II with the same title, directed by Peter Pavlenko, with music by Shostakovich and the subject of a poem by that name. It depicts the historic capture of Berlin by the Soviet troops through the eyes of one of the soldiers. There is one amazing scene showing a grotesque version of Hitler’s last days, including the marriage ceremony when he weds Eva Braun and his subsequent suicide. At the end of the film Stalin arrives by plane in conquered Berlin. He appears dressed in a dazzling white uniform, and the masses greet him with a rousing song: “We will follow you to wondrous times/ We tread the path of victory.” By watching the film, Akhmatova lives once again a condensed version of both the heroism of the Russian people as well as their suffering during this time.
In 1949 when her son was arrested, Akhmatova burned her archive, which included many valuable works in progress, and this is probably when she destroyed stanzas from “From a Poema that Perished,” which she initially entitled “Poema about the Beginning of the Century.” It was written in the 1940s, both in Tashkent, where she was living during the war, and upon her return to Leningrad. The term poema is used by Russians for a long narrative poem. In the last years of her life Akhmatova was able to recreate some fragments of the poem. The work alludes to famous events and people at a time in Russian history when the threat of imminent revolution hung in the air. It begins with a reference to two peace conferences at The Hague called by Tsar Nicholas II, contrasting that period to when the poem was being written, during the Second World War. The “sovereign of the stage/ queen of the Russian Moderne” is the famous actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, whose theatrical productions in collaboration with Meyerhold changed the nature of modern stage performance.
As we
can see from the above, the poems presented here include a broad range of themes. They also reflect the complexity of the poet herself as well as the times in which she lived.
From Cahiers
E. M. Cioran
—Selected with an afterword by Norman Manea, and translated from French by Richard Howard
Friday April 24 1959
I would give all the poets for Emily Dickinson.
I am a Mongol laid waste by melancholy.
September 27 1959
Evil is as much a creative force as Good. Yet of the two, it is the more active. For too often Good loafs.
January 6 1960
The story of the Fall may be the profoundest thing ever written. Here everything is told of what we were to experience and suffer. All of history in one page.
“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day …” Reading that, one feels, one shares Adam’s fear. “Who told you that you were naked?” God gave Adam and Eve happiness on condition they neither aspire nor attain to knowledge and to power.
January 20 1960
That terrible proverb: “While the sage reflects, the fool reflects too.”
July 20 1960
Since my old enthusiasm (now very much a thing of the past) for Rilke, I have never been so attached to a poet as to Emily Dickinson. Familiar as her world is to me, it would be still more so had I had the audacity and the energy to wed my solitude completely. But I have failed to do so too often, out of inertia, frivolity or else fear. I have dodged more than one abyss, by a combination of calculation and instinct. For I lack the courage to be a poet. Is it because I have brooded too much over my grievances? My ratiocinations have made me lose the best of myself.
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