Cross-published at Upstate Earth
Although I haven’t written a diary here for a long time, I thought I might try a series on poets I’ve been reading while separated from those I love. For me the most important such companion in isolation has been Anna Akhmatova.
For those who don’t know her, Anna Akhmatova (accent on second syllable) is one of the most beloved Russian poets of the Soviet era. Unlike her fellow poets who died in the gulag like Osip Mandelstam or took their own lives like Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva, she endured decades of personal pain and official disgrace to survive under Stalin. She never gave up writing even when she had to burn many works to keep them from being found by the secret police.
Anna Akhmatova grew up in privilege, raised at Tsarskoye Selo, the tsar’s summer village outside of Saint Petersburg, and was first recognized as a poet in the intellectual circles of the pre-war capital. Her earliest published poetry was inspired by her difficult marriage to the poet Lev Gumilev who did everything to discourage her from writing. Here’s a poem from that period in her life:
“Heart’s Memory of Sun...”
Heart’s memory of sun grows fainter,
sallow is the grass;
a few flakes toss in the wind
scarcely, scarcely.
The narrow canals no longer flow,
they are frozen over.
Nothing will ever happen here,
oh never!
In the bleak sky the willow spreads
its bare-boned fan.
Maybe I am better off as I am,
not as your wife.
Heart’s memory of sun grows fainter.
What now? Darkness?
From this very night
winter begins.
-Kiev, 1911
This translation is by Max Hayward and the wonderful Stanley Kunitz with the exception of the last line, which is from my own translation. My Russian is terrible but I always read her in dual language versions to get some sense of the original sound. Jane Kenyon’s translations of the early poems are also very good.
Gumilev went off to war and was executed in 1921 for plotting against the new Bolshevik regime. In the relatively mild dictatorship of the early 1920s, Akhmatova continued to be published but this openness was gone with Stalin’s consolidation of power in the mid 1920s.
Akhmatova made the decision to stay in Russia when so many fled to western Europe in those years. I particularly like her poem of 1924 about this decision, in which she likens herself to Lot’s wife who was warned not to look backward lest she be turned to a pillar of salt!
“Lot’s Wife”
And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."
A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.
(also from the Kunitz/Hayward translations)
As Soviet Russia fell deeper into the nightmare world created by Josef Stalin, the dictator found a perfect way to control the beloved poet. He had her son by Gumilev repeatedly arrested and released based on how docile she became. Under this pressure, she did write some doggerel praising the dictator in the sickening fashion that he loved. (I’l make no comparisons here)
“Requiem,” one of her most moving poems, was secretly begun in the 1930s and continued over three decades. Parts were published during the period of relative liberalization under Khrushchev but it did not appear in its entirety in Russia until the Gorbachev era. It is without doubt the greatest poetic response to the “Great Terror” imposed by Stalin.
The poem begins as she is standing in long lines outside the NKVD prison, hoping to communicate or send a parcel of food to her son whose only crime was that he provided the ideal hostage for Stalin to keep his mother obedient to his wishes.
This is the beginning of the poem, as translated by Judith Hemschemeyer:
“REQUIEM”
No, not under the vault of alien skies,
And not under the shelter of alien wings —
I was with my people then,
There , where my people unfortunately were.
1961
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror , I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone recognized me . Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear:
“Can you describe this?”
And I answered, “Yes, I can.”
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.”
-1957
Anna Akhmatova chose to be a witness to the immense suffering of her people, and maybe thats why I find her good to read now. Sometimes, all that we can do is to witness and to remember.
Many good translations of her poetry are in e-book form (not all of them, unfortunately) and there’s a great deal of her work, scattered across the net. There is a very good reading of an English translation of the entire Requiem on YouTube.