Review

Reviewed Work(s): Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry by David N. Wells and Anna Akhmatova
Review by: Yuri K. Shcheglov
Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 141-143
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2679719
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142 The Russian Review

needs to be done) of establishing "the full hierarchy of poems and poetic theme
book]" (p. 47). One sample will suffice to see that this analysis makes sense to the reader only if
he/she closely follows it with Akhmatova's book in hand: "My imagination obeys me is preceded by
two triplets of poems on the theme of disappointment in love. In the first of these the obstacle is
caused by the failure of one party to respond to the advances of the other. The second takes a
different tack and contrasts a past where the heroine both loved and was loved in return with the
present in which she has been abandoned by the lyric hero. Akhmatova follows My imagination
obeys me with a further pair of triplets of poems, where the emphasis turns to writing as a surrogate
for love" (p. 46).
Chapter 4 is mostly devoted to the gradual deterioration of Akhmatova's situation in Stalin's
Soviet Union, and to her efforts to safeguard cultural and humanistic traditions despite unbeliev-
able pressure and hardships. The author shows how her poetry of this period "depends for the
understanding of its political agenda on a highly sophisticated interpretive technique" (p. 95). One
recurrent technique of this kind, applied both in this chapter and elsewhere across the book, is a
recourse to the full text of the source of an intertextual item (of a quote, epigraph, or literary or
mythological name) as a means to decipher the hidden meaning of the text under scrutiny. Thus,
Akhmatova's epigraph from Pushkin ("Recognize, at least, the sounds once dear to you") is con-
strued as a "metaphor for the political persecutions of the Soviet period," since Pushkin's poem w
addressed to the wife of an exiled Decembrist (p. 62). While it is helpful in some cases, this
procedure (heavily and uncritically exploited by today's intertextualist scholars) most often leads
to overinterpretation and should be used with discretion.
Chapter 5, "Poem Without a Hero," rather summarily addresses various thematic levels (po-
litical, lyrical, metapoetic) of this much-commented masterpiece of Akhmatova's later decades.
The remaining two chapters examine Akhmatova's postwar production largely along the same lines
as the previous chapters, stressing the terms of compositional patterns, themes and veiled political
messages.
The book's free mixture of familiar facts and new observations (as well as the use of translit-
erated Russian quotations) suggests that it is intended for specialists and laymen alike. If that was
indeed the book's objective, the extent of its success is open to question, since both categories of
implied readers are likely to feel tantalized as they wade through the book. The former will prob-
ably miss more sustained and detailed analyses and "discoveries," while the latter may regret that
there are not enough full-fledged quotations and aesthetic comments (in particular, not a single
close look at a specific poem as a verbal artifact) to help them feel for themselves the power of the
much-vaunted genius of this legendary Russian author.
For this reviewer, the thematic aspect constitutes that part of Akhmatova's oeuvre which de-
serves a deeper and more systemic approach than the one displayed in Wells's book. Although
many relevant Akhmatova themes (such as memory, time, and the power of the creative act) are
duly mentioned as the author moves along her poetic collections-often merely as fillers of com-
positional patterns (especially in chapter 3; in the later chapters the themes acquire a somewhat
more independent role)-nowhere in the book do we find anything like a comprehensive demon-
stration of their interdependence within the framework of what might be called the "poetic mythol-
ogy" or "life philosophy," consistent throughout the poet's creative life. The critic's aversion to
generalization prevents him, on the one hand, from any significant insights into the poetic individu-
ality of Akhmatova, and, on the other, from viewing her as part of a broader philosophical and
aesthetic panorama of her time. Except for her ex-husband Gumilev, there are almost no attempts
in this study to correlate Akhmatova with other prominent cultural figures and movements of her
time.
Every now and then does the reader come across more or less arbitrary, rash, or simplistic
statements. To quote just a few, there is no need to endow the word otrok ("adolescent") with the
"XVIIIth century tone," much less to associate it with the Derzhavin-Pushkin episode. Uncritically
endorsing Akhmatova's unorthodox denial of the novel status to Evgen#i Onegin, the author in-
cludes it in the tradition of "the narrative poem", along with The Bronze Horseman or Byronic

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 Book Reviews 143

poems. There is nothing in Akhmatova's sympathetic and poetic description of Voronezh to sup-
port Wells's claim that the city's "superficial beauty and dignity" conceals "a state of moral corrup-
tion" (p. 81). It also takes some stretch of imagination to see Akhmatova's words Ottsy i dedy
neponiatny ("Fathers and grandfathers are beyond comprehension") as a reference to Turgenev's
Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons).
Some factual errors simply cannot be ignored. Peter the Great's first wife Evdokija never was
an "Empress," as she is called twice. San Giovanni is not "the principal cathedral of Florence," but
its baptistery (p. 79). Akhmatova's "The Grey-Eyed King" is written not in "four-stress dol'nik
verse," but in dactylic tetrameter (p. 34). Finally, the line . va/i/is's mostov karety is not a des
tion of an improbable phenomenon of "carriages sliding from the bridges across the Neva" (p.
112), but, as Dmitrii Likhachev pointed out in 1984, a quotation from the last sentence of Gogol's
"Nevskii prospekt": Miriady karet va/iatsia s mostov.

Yuri K.Shcheglov, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Lahusen, Thomas. How ife Writes the Book. Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin v
Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. xii + 247 pp. $29.95.

As the title suggests, this book is an investigation of the relationship between history and fiction,
between the Soviet past and its "mirror image" in Vasilii Azhaev's novel Far From Moscow, which
was awarded the Stalin Prize (first class) in 1949. Thomas Lahusen's focus here is not on the
finished product per se; instead he is exploring the process of production. In other words, he is
interested in a story, the story of an individual life and the novel as a "montage of life" (in the words
of Azhaev himself). Azhaev's story is reconstructed from official sources (critical reviews, ar-
ticles, readers' conferences, and the novel itself) and from Azhaev's private archive, which Lahusen
discovered in Moscow. Azhaev, a "classic of Soviet literature," was arrested during the Great
Terror. Later he transformed his experience-of forced industrialization and reeducation through
labor at "Project No. 15" in the Far East-into a production novel about the heroic construction of
an oil pipeline.
How Life Writes the Book is divided into thirteen chapters and concludes with an epilogue that
summarizes Lahusen's approach, which is both critically thorough and intensely personal. This is
followed by an appendix and well-documented notes. The first five chapters deal with the real-life
Project No. 15 and its mirror-like ficticious version, which posits the locus of Far From Moscow as
a utopian one that "engenders a plurality of spaces and of times" (p. 32). Most interesting, in my
view, is the discussion of the psychological consequences of Azhaev's traumatic experience that
confined, paradoxically, the content of his life to the restrictions of Socialist Realist form: even his
posthumous novel The Boxcar failed to integrate the raw facts of terror and bureaucratese; lan-
guage failed him.
The structure of the book is punctuated by three chapters (six, nine, and thirteen) that Lahusen
calls the "Borderlines" of Azhaev's biography. They are landmarks that deal, respectively, with the
"cleansing" of the Far Eastern branch of the Soviet Writers' Union in 1936; Azhaev's summoning
to Moscow; and, finally, Azhaev's reemergence as a "classic" after his 1949 Stalin Prize. Life and
text become subject to rewriting and erasure-depending on changing circumstances, political
agendas, and the common effort of multiple editors. Chapter 12 deals with the theatrical and
cinematic versions of Far From Moscow, including the Stalin Prize-winning film of 1950 that,
while mirroring Azhaev's mirror image of reality, unwittingly restored the geography of Project
No. 15 that he had taken such pains to conceal. In the discussion of "transference-love" (chapters
four and ten), one might quibble only about some aspects of translation-also a transference of
sorts. Forms of address routinely used between men, such as the familiar "golubchik," or the
slightly ironic "orel," when translated literally into "my little dove" and "my eagle" (p. 137),
become erotically charged. Ironically, such translations stack the deck unnecessarily: the strong

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