Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years

Author(s): Roberta Reeder

Source: New England Review (1990-) , Winter, 1997, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp.
105-125
Published by: Middlebury College Publications

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40243154

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Roberta Reeder

Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years

. . . But there is no power more formidable, more terrible in the world, than the poets' prophetic word.
- Anna Akhmatova

A. or a long time now Anna Akhmatova has been known in her own country as one
of the most gifted Russian poets of the twentieth century. Yet in the West she is still
relatively unknown.
For many the only poems by Akhmatova that have been read and recited have been
the love poems which she wrote as a young Russian aristocrat at the turn of the century.
These poems have always attracted large numbers of enthusiasts, for Akhmatova was
able to capture and convey the vast range of evolving emotions experienced in a love
affair - from the first thrill of meeting, to a deepening love contending with hatred,
and eventually to violent destructive passion or total indifference. But others before
her had turned to these themes. What made Akhmatova so revolutionary in 19 12,
when her first collection, Evening, was published, was the particular manner in which
she conveyed these emotions. She was writing against the background of the Symbolist
movement, and her poetry marks a radical break with the erudite, ornate style and the
mystical representation of love so typical of poets like Alexander Blok and Audrey
Bely. Her lyrics are composed of short fragments of simple speech that do not form
a logical coherent pattern. Instead, they reflect the way we actually think - the links
between the images are emotional, and simple everyday objects are charged with
psychological associations. Like Alexander Pushkin, who was her model in many ways,
Akhmatova was intent on conveying worlds of meaning through precise details.
What is less well understood, however, is that Akhmatova was not only a poet but
a prophet. While throughout her life her style remained essentially the same (except
in certain works like Poems Without a Hero or her verse dramas), over the years themes
of political and historical consequence as well as philosophical themes begin to play
an increasingly important role in her writings.

Akhmatova often complained about being immured, "walled in," by critics, into a
conception of her enterprise which was limited to the very early period of her career.
There was good reason for this: except for a trusted few, no one knew of her poems
against the Stalinist Terror. These works certainly were not allowed to be published
in the Soviet Union, and only certain examples - a noted one being her famous cycle
entitled Requiem - were published in the West during her lifetime. Yet many consider

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 these poems to be her greatest. They convey the profound horror as well as the
numbness of the average Soviet citizen in response to the vast number of arrests, trials,
exiles and deaths of so many innocent sufferers.
Akhmatova could have left Russia after the revolution, as so many of her friends
did, but she chose to stay, and in the process took on the burden of speech on behalf
of her people. As the poet says in her poem "To the Many," written in 1922:
I - am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I - am the reflection of your face,
The future trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to the end, in any case.

In fact, Akhmatova's poetic response to the pressure of historical events began before
the revolution. Although until that time her poetry was largely apolitical, when World
War I broke out in 19 14 she had been moved to write a few extremely powerful poems
confronting that development. While her husband, the poet Nicholas Gumilyov,
insisted on combining patriotism with a conscious Nietzschean stance of the male
seeking situations of utmost danger to prove his Superman status, Akhmatova reacted
with a sense of dread and foreboding to the outbreak of the war. In her memoirs, she
observes that the real twentieth century began in 19 14 when war broke out, for the
war brought not only devastation, but revolution and ultimate ruin to the Russian
land. The name of the city Petersburg, with its Germanic associations, was altered to
Petrograd, a Slavic term, and the name itself became a métonymie symbol for the
transformation in the consciousness of the Russian people of its conception of itself
and its relation to its sometimes friendly but often hostile neighbor. Of this first year
of the war, Akhmatova writes:

At the beginning of May the Petersburg season began to fade, and everyone left. This time they
left Petersburg forever. We returned not to Petersburg but to Petrograd. We fell from the 19th
into the 20 th century. Everything became different, beginning with the appearance of the city.

Akhmatova interpreted the war as a spiritual event. She viewed it as a portent of

things to come, as God's way of showing His displeasure with the Russian people.
As she grew older, she became increasingly convinced of this, and later expressed the
belief that war and revolution came to Russia as retribution for the indifference shown

by the intelligentsia and upper classes toward the suffering of the common people.
The war began on July 19th, Russian Old Calendar (thirteen days behind our
calendar). Written the next day, one of Akhmatova's most striking poems about the
war is the first in the cycle entitled "July 19 14." Unlike the religious imagery in the
poems in her earlier collection Rosary, where sacred symbolism was often employed
to convey a sense of intense passion, here as in the ancient Russian chronicles, religious
imagery serves to elevate the historical immediacies of the war to a more philosophical
level. In earlier periods the Russian chroniclers would not only relate facts but interpret
historical events (such as the incursion of the Mongols) allegorically, as a punishment
of the Russian people for their sins. In this poem the themes of retribution and
forgiveness through divine intercession are central. Akhmatova remains secure in her
belief that Russia would be compelled to live through a terrible period, but that in
the end the Madonna would protect them all, spreading her mantle over them as

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she had in earlier times, playing the ancient role of Woman as Intercessor between the
human and the divine, and bringing forgiveness. This image refers here specifically to
an Eastern Orthodox holiday, Pokrov or "Intercession," based on the belief that in
the tenth century the Madonna appeared in a vision to St. Andrew the Holy Fool at
a church in Constantinople and extended her veil over the people as a symbol of her
protection. In the poem it is not the poet who acts as prophet, but a one-legged stranger:
It smells of burning. For four weeks
The dry peat bog has been burning.
The birds have not even sung today,
And the aspen has stopped quaking.

The sun has become God's displeasure,

Rain has not sprinkled the fields since Easter.
A one-legged stranger came along
And all alone in the courtyard said:

"Fearful times are drawing near. Soon

Fresh graves will be everywhere.
There will be famine, earthquakes, widespread death,
And the eclipse of the sun and the moon.

But the enemy will not divide

Our land at will, for himself:
The Mother of God will spread her white mantle
Over this enormous grief."

By 19 1 6 patriotic fervor had been replaced by despair in the minds of most Russians,
including Akhmatova. Her poem "In Memoriam, July 19, 1914," written in 1916,
depicts the poet as a vessel of God Himself, and now she has evolved from a singer
of love songs to a prophet of doom:
We aged a hundred years, and this
Happened in a single hour:
The short summer had already died,
The body of the ploughed plains soaked.

Suddenly the quiet road burst into color,

A lament flew up, ringing, silver . . .
Covering my face, I implored God
Before the first battle to strike me dead.

Like a burden henceforth unnecessary,

The shadows of passion and songs vanished from my memory.
The Most High ordered it - emptied -
To become a grim book of calamity.

In a poem written in 1915, the poet again takes on the mantel of the prophet:
No, tsarévitch, I am not the one
You want me to be.
And no longer do my lips
Kiss - they prophesy.

During the course of the war the evolution of Akhmatova from a poet of personal
themes to a prophet of historical events was noted by the critic Sergey Rafalovich:

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 "Akhmatova has developed into a great poet. . . . She has not changed the former
thread or broken it, she has remained herself, but she has matured. Before, they said
hers was a narrow circle but great. . . . She has broadened her range to include more
universal themes, but has not perceived them on a lofty scale, but the same scale of
themes from ordinary, everyday life."
In February, 1917, the year of revolutions, the country as a whole rose up against
the Tsar - workers, merchants, aristocracts. A Provisional Government was declared,
but the war continued. Another authority arose parallel to the government - the
soviets, or councils of workers and soldiers, which wielded enormous power over
the masses. When the Revolution began on February 25, Akhmatova was spending
the morning at the dressmaker's, oblivious to what was occurring. When she attempted
to go home to the other side of the Neva River, the driver nervously replied that it
was too dangerous to go over, so Akhmatova roamed the city alone. She saw the
revolutionary manifestoes, the troops, and the fires set by the tsarist secret police in
an attempt to keep the masses off the streets. What she captured in recollection, in
"Apparition," written in 1919, was the Tsar's inability to comprehend what was
happening and why:

The round, hanging lanterns,

Lit early, are squeaking,
Ever more festively, ever brighter,
The flying snowflakes glitter.

And quickening their steady gait,

As if sensing some pursuit,
Through the softly falling snow
Under a dark blue net, the horses race.

And the gilded footman

Stands motionless behind the sleigh,
and the tsar looks around strangely
With light, empty eyes.

Akhmatova spent the summer of 19 17 away from the city, on her husband's estate
in the province of Tver. But the overall atmosphere of horror and doom hanging over
the land continues to assert itself in an evocative poem:

And all day, terrified by its own moans,

The crowd churns in agonized grief,
And across the river, on funeral banners,
Sinister skulls laugh.
And this is why I sang and dreamed,
They have ripped my heart in half,
As after a burst of shots, it became still,
And in the courtyards, death patrols.

Akhmatova was back in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks began the October
Revolution. The only record we have of her immediate reaction is a recollection by
her intimate friend Boris Anrep, who was saying farewell to her in January, 19 18 on
his way to London: "For some time we spoke about the meaning of the revolution,"
he writes. "She was excited and said we must expect more changes in our lives. The
same thing's going to happen that occurred in France during the Revolution, but

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maybe even worse." Her prophecies were beginning to prove true. In verses written
in 19 1 7, the poet grieves that her latest poem, which would have been free in the past
to take flight, now begs for a hearing:

Now no one will listen to songs.

The prophesied days have begun.
Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder,
Don't break my heart, don't ring out.

A while ago, free as a swallow,

You accomplished your morning flight,
But now you've become a hungry beggar,
Knocking in vain at strangers' gates.

Despite the devastation and chaos around her, Akhmatova remained in Russia, at
the same time as many of her friends fled. Her reaction to their flight from the homeland
figures in her memorable poem titled "When in suicidal anguish," written in 1918.
Though the speaker is tempted by the voice calling her to leave her suffering country,
she remains, not realizing that the horrors she now faces are small in comparison to
those that she and her companions will have to endure in the future. The first few
lines may refer to the treaty in which the Bolsheviks capitulated to the Germans,
ending their role in the war. (These lines of the poem were not published in Russia
until recently.)
When in suicidal anguish
The nation awaited its German guests,
And the stern spirit of Byzantium
Had fled from the Russian Church,
When the capital by the Neva,
Forgetting her greatness,
Like a drunken prostitute
Did not know who would take her next,
A voice came to me. It called out comfortingly.
It said, "Come here,
Leave your deaf and sinful land,
Leave Russia forever,
I will wash the blood from your hands,
Root out the black shame from your heart,
With a new name I will conceal
The pain of defeats and injuries."
But calmly and indifferently,
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that my sorrowing spirit
Would not be stained by those shameful words.

The brutal Civil War began in 191 8 and lasted three years. No one thought the
Bolsheviks would remain in power for long, but by 19 19 Akhmatova was beginning
to feel the sense of overwhelming dread that permeated the capital.

Petrograd, 1 91 9

And confined to this savage capital,

We have forgotten forever
The lakes, the steppes, the towns,
And the dawns of our great native land.
Day and night in the bloody circle

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 A brutal languor overcomes us ...
No one wants to help us
Because we stayed home,
Because, loving our city
And not winged freedom,
We preserved for ourselves
Its palaces, its fire and water.

A different time is drawing near,

The wind of death already chills the heart,
But the holy city of Peter
Will be our unintended monument.

When her husband Gumilyov returned from the war, Akhmatova asked for a divorce.
Their marriage had disintegrated long before, but they had remained friends. After
the revolution, Gumilyov had become an important figure in the world of art, helping
writers get food and clothing, organizing poetry readings for the masses, and establishing
literary circles and workshops for the intelligentsia where he trained new poets and
new appreciators of the written word. In August, 1 921, however, Gumilyov was arrested
on the ostensible charge of involvement in a counterrevolutionary plot. No one thought
events would move so quickly - some tried to help, but their efforts were in vain. A
possible reason for the arrest of Gumilyov and others was that the Bolsheviks were
reacting to the Kronstadt Rebellion that had taken place during the previous March,
and that they needed to demonstrate vividly what could happen to those who might
have any ideas about resisting the regime. On August 25 th, at the age of thirty-five,
Nikolay Gumilyov was executed.
Gumilyov's death was shattering to Akhmatova: she felt somehow responsible for
it, and she grieved for many years. Her horror was conveyed in a moving poem, "Terror,
fingering things in the dark," dated August 27, 1 921 . In it she personifies the abstract
feeling of terror, which leads "the moonbeam to an ax." It would be better, she
says, to be executed by rifle or to be hanged on the scaffold than to have to endure
the prolonged fear of imminent death, or the pain of someone you love dying. This
is a theme that will be developed in Akhmatova's poems about the Stalinist terror -
the sense that it is not the actual physical event of exile or execution that is most
unendurable, but the anxiety of waiting, waiting for the knock on the door to take
you to prison, to the camps, to your death:

Terror, fingering things in the dark,

Leads the moonbeam to an ax.
Behind the wall there's an ominous knock -
What's there, a ghost, a thief, rats?

In the sweltering kitchen, water drips,

Counting the rickety floorboards.
Someone with a glossy black beard
Flashes by the attic window -

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 And becomes still. How cunning he is and evil,
He hid the matches and blew out the candle.
How much better would be the gleam of the barrels
Of rifles leveled at my breast.

Better, in the grassy square,

To be flattened on the raw wood scaffold
And, amid cries of joy and moans,
Pour out my life's blood there.

I press the smooth cross to my heart:

Go, restore peace to my soul.
The odor of decay, sickeningly sweet,
Rises from the clammy sheets.

Never does Akhmatova mention the revolution directly; her attention remains centered
on its effects on the life around her. One poem, "Everything has been plundered . . . ,"
bears a distinct resemblance to Alexander Blok's famous poem "The Twelve," in which
despite the pervasiveness of looting, rape, and rout there is an intuitive feeling that this
stage of great suffering will lead inevitably to a glorious dawn - symbolized in Blok's
work by Christ and in Akhmatova's by "the miraculous," which is drawing near.

Everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold out,

The wing of black death has flashed,
Everything has been devoured by starving anguish,
Why, then, is it so bright?

The fantastic woods near the town

Waft the scent of cherry blossoms by day,
At night new constellations shine
In the transparent depth of the skies of July -

And how near the miraculous draws

To the dirty, tumbledown huts . . .
No one, no one knows what it is,
But for centuries we have longed for it.

A new society was indeed created in this new Soviet Union, but it was constructed
on the basis of a totalitarian state in which the happiness of the many was to be
determined and controlled by the few. In this new order, the role of artists and
intellectuals was to be a painful one, as became increasingly clear when, in 1922,
over a hundred intellectuals, including the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, were arrested
and exiled. The poet Osip Mandelstam quickly grasped what the new role of the poet
was to be in this society: "He [the modern poet] sings of ideas, systems of knowledge
and state theories, just as his predecessors sang of nightingales and roses." But
Akhmatova did not wish to express in rhyme the accepted theories of the state; as a
result, by 1925 she was no longer published and was considered irrelevant. In 1922
the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the mighty Futurist and poet laureate of the Soviet

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 State, who before the revolution had often declaimed Akhmatova's love poems,
rang the death knell for her verse:

The chamber intimacy of Anna Akhmatova, the mystical verses of Vyacheslav Ivanov and his
Hellenic motifs - what meaning do they have for our harsh, iron age? Of course, as literary
milestones, as the last born child of a collapsing structure, they find their place on the pages
of literary history; but for us, for our epoch - these are insignificant, pathetic, and laughable
anachronisms.

Poets now had to make a choice - to accommodate themselves to the new regime,
or to remain consciously on the periphery. Akhmatova chose the latter. She signals
this in an unpublished poem of 192 1, in which she recalls the ancient name of Russia -
the land of Rus:

A light beer had been brewed,

On the table a steaming goose . . .
The tsar and the nobles are recalled
By festive Rus -

Strong language, facetious remarks,

Tipsy conversation,
From one - a risqué joke,
From the other - drunken tears.

And fueled by revelry and wine,

The noisy speeches fly ...
The smart ones have decided:
Our job - stay out of the way.

Although on the periphery, in her unpublished works Akhmatova was unambiguous

in her negative attitude toward the aftermath of the revolution:

Here the most beautiful girls fight

For the honor of marrying executioners.
Here they torture the righteous at night
And wear down the untamable with hunger.

In the same year in which those lines were written, 1924, Akhmatova produced one
of her most famous poems, "Lot's Wife." Turning to biblical imagery, she takes on
the persona of a woman looking back - on the realistic level, to the familiar locales
of her native city. But these specific places become métonymie symbols for "the past"
that must be let go if one is to make peace with the future, no matter how terrifying
it may be. Although Akhmatova's generation at first thought a return to the former
way of life might be possible, by 1924 both the emigres and those remaining in Russia
felt compelled to admit that the Bolsheviks were probably going to remain in power
indefinitely - perhaps forever - and each individual had to find a way of coming to
terms with this recognition.
Lot's Wife

Lot's wife looked back from behind him and became a pillar of salt.
- Book of Genesis

And the righteous man followed the envoy of God,

Huge and bright, over the black mountain.

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 But anguish spoke loudly to his wife:
It is not too late, you can still gaze

At the red towers of your native Sodom,

At the square where you sang, at the courtyard where you spun,
At the empty windows of the tall house
Where you bore children to your beloved husband.

She glanced, and, paralyzed by deadly pain,

Her eyes no longer saw anything;
And her body became transparent salt
And her quick feet were rooted to the spot.

Who will weep for this woman?

Isn't her death the least significant?
But my heart will never forget the one
Who gave her life for a single glance.

The suicide of the poet Sergey Yesenin on December 27, 1925 was a shock to
Akhmatova, though she had never really liked him as a person or a poet. Of peasant
origin, Yesenin hoped one day Russia would become a land of agricultural communes,
all committed to sharing the fruits of the earth. But the Social Revolutionaries, who
wanted to make this dream come true, lost to the Bolsheviks, who saw the future of
the Soviet Union in terms of accelerating industrial progress. Yesenin died a broken,
drunken man. In spite of all her criticism of him, however, Akhmatova was upset when
she learned the circumstances of his death: "He lived horribly and died horribly," she
observed. "How fragile the peasants are when they are unsuccessful in their contact
with civilization - each year another poet dies. ... It is horrible when a poet dies."
Although it cannot be proven conclusively, it is possible that her poem, "It would
be so easy to abandon this life," written about the death of a poet in 1925, refers
specifically to Yesenin:

It would be so easy to abandon this life,

To burn down painlessly and unaware,
But it is not given to the Russian poet
To die a death so pure.

A bullet more reliably throws open

Heaven's boundaries to the soul in flight,
Or hoarse terror with a shaggy paw can,
As if from a sponge, squeeze out the heart's life.

After her brief time together with Vladimir Shileiko, an Assyriologist whom she married
in 1918 and from whom she separated in 1 921, Akhmatova eventually went to live
with her lover Nicholas Punin, a famous avant-garde art critic and professor, along
with his wife and daughter in a wing of the Sheremetyev Palace. During this time, she

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 began writing less poetry and turned instead to a study of the works of the poet whose
example remained central to her own ambitions, Alexander Pushkin. In his work
and life she saw parallels to her own situation and to that of other contemporary poets
persecuted by the State.
By 1930, in any case, it was becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to publish
at all. Stalin was now firmly in power and his control of society extended to the arts.
In August 1929 there was a conceited attack against the writers Boris Pilnyak and
Yevgeny Zamyatin. The condemnation of their work marked a clear turning point in
the relationship between the intelligentsia and the state. Henceforth the Stalinist
line would become harder, and any trace of criticism of the state would be forbidden.
The increasing storm of abuse against Mayakovsky led to his suicide on April 14, 1930.
During this period of collectivization, many Party members lost their jobs for showing
leniency toward the peasants. The year 1933 saw another vast purge. Stalin's Terror
had begun, but the majority of the population were still unaware of the extent to
which it would touch their everyday lives. Nadezhda Mandelstam attempts to explain
the feeling at this moment:

There had been a time when, terrified of chaos, we had all prayed for a strong system, for a
powerful hand that would stem the angry human river overflowing its banks. This fear of
chaos was perhaps the most permanent of our feelings. . . . What we wanted was for the course
of history to be made smooth. . . . This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appear-
ance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there,
we no longer ventured to act without their guidance. ... In our blindness we ourselves strug-
gled to impose unanimity - because in every difference of opinion, we saw the beginnings
of new anarchy and chaos. ... So we went on, nursing a sense of our own inadequacy, until
the moment came for each of us to discover from bitter experience how precarious was his
own state of grace.

In this situation in the early thirties, Akhmatova began translating Macbeth, but in
the end she only succeeded in working on Act I, Scene iii, the famous witches' scene.
She must have seen parallels between the murders committed by Macbeth and his wife
to gain power and what was occurring in the Soviet Union; Lady Macbeth, the "Scottish
queen," appears in Akhmatova's famous poem written in 1933 evoking the blood
spilled by the Bolsheviks:

Wild honey smells like freedom,

Dust - like a ray of sun.
Like violets - a young maid's mouth,
And gold - like nothing.
The flowers of the mignonette smell like water,
And like an apple - love.
But we learned once and for all
That blood only smells like blood . . .

And in vain the vice-regent of Rome

Washed his hands before all the people,
Urged on by the ominous shouts of the rabble;
And the Scottish queen
In vain washed the spattered red drops
From her slender palms
In the stifling gloom of the king's home. . . .

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 One of the first victims of the Stalinist Terror was Osip Mandelstam, who had been
her dear and intimate friend from before the Revolution. Akhmatova later called the

early 1930s "the vegetarian years," meaning that this would come to be seen as a
relatively harmless period in comparison to the "meat-eating" years that followed, but
when visiting the Mandelstams in Moscow, she felt that "in spite of the fact that the
time was comparatively vegetarian, the shadow of doom lay on this house." She recalls
a walk she took with Mandelstam along Prechistenka Street in February, 1934. "We
turned onto Gogol Boulevard and Osip said, 'I'm ready for death.'" But when he was
finally arrested for the poem in which he portrays Stalin with "cockroach whiskers"
and "fingers as fat as worms," the effect on this gentle, sensitive poet was a progressive
descent into madness. The secret police came for him when Akhmatova was visiting
the Mandelstams in May, 1934. He and his wife were sent away to Voronezh, where
in February, 1936 Akhmatova went to visit them.
When her poem reflecting this visit was first published in 1940, the last four lines
were omitted. At first glance, the poem seems to be a poetic guided tour of Voronezh,
mentioning not only the landscape and townscape, but alluding to the monuments
and historical occurrences associated with the place - the statue of Peter the Great,
who built his fleet here, and the Battle of Kulikovo, a landmark event in Russian history,
which was fought nearby in 1380 (in that encounter, the Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy
defeated the Tatars after many years of domination). As the poem progresses, the
mood shifts. At first the images evoke winter stillness, lack of life - crows, ice, a
faded dome; but then a sound breaks the stillness - there is a roaring in the poplars,
compared in a simile to the sounds of a happy event, to cups clashing together at a
wedding feast toasting the joy of the poet and her companions. After the expectation
created by this simile - the sense that more happy events are to follow - suddenly in
the last four lines anxiety is palpably personified, as in Akhmatova's poem on the death
of Gumilyov, "Terror, fingering things in the dark." In the room of the poet in
"Voronezh," Fear and the Muse keep watch together:

And the whole town is encased in ice,

Trees, walls, snow, as if under glass.
Timidly, I walk on crystals,
Gaily painted sleds skid.
And over the Peter of Voronezh - crows,
Poplar trees, and the dome, light green,
Faded, dulled, in sunny haze,
And the Battle of Kulikovo blows from the slopes
Of the mighty, victorious land.
And the poplars, like cups clashed together,
As if our joy were toasted by
A thousand guests at a wedding feast.
But in the room of the poet in disgrace,
Fear and the Muse keep watch by turns.
And the night comes on
That knows no dawn.

Before Mandelstam's death, Nadezhda had experienced what thousands of other

women in the Soviet Union endured during those years - hours of standing in endless
lines in front of prison windows, waiting for a glimpse of those they loved. Now it was

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 Akhmatova's turn to stand in line. Her son Lev had been arrested in the past and
released, but this time, after arresting him on March 10, 1938, he had been tortured.He
was sent first to the Leningrad Kresty Prison and condemned to be shot, but then the
feared head of the NKVD, Yezhov, was removed, and the beating of prisoners ceased
for a time. Lev's sentence was commuted to five years, and he was sent to Siberia.
During the period of waiting, Lydia Zhukova, a member of the intelligentsia, had
stood in one of those long lines in front of the prison. She remembers seeing Akhmatova.
"Wearing something long, dark, and heavy," she recalled, "she appeared to me like
a phantom from the past, and it never entered my mind that this old-fashioned lady
in an ancient coat and hat would still write so many more brilliant new poems."
Indeed, Akhmatova had begun to throw herself into her work with new energy.
Her "mute" period was over, as the impressions of many years of quiet suffering finally
rose to the surface. When her creative powers returned, Akhmatova wrote the cycle
of poems about the Great Terror that was to capture the attention of the world,
Requiem (1935-1940). That this work is characterized by a portrayal of intense suffering
did not signify, however, that Akhmatova had lost her faith and arrived at unrelieved
despair. Inherent in the works of great Russian writers like Dostoyevsky is the Russian
Orthodox belief that suffering is at all times an essential aspect of life, a means by
which one's faith is continually tested. Never in any of Akhmatova's writings or
conversations with trusted friends did she admit to doubt or lack of faith in the
mysterious and often incomprehensible ways of a divine Creator.
A short prose piece, entitled "Instead of a Preface," introduces this memorable cycle:

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, of course, 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.

In this great work Akhmatova fulfills her destiny as the voice of her people, taking
on the persona of the Mourner in the Russian village, and of the Madonna. This poetic
cycle is both universal and specifically Russian in its symbolic implications. On the
universal level it depicts the suffering of women in general who, like the Madonna,
must stand on the side and witness helplessly the suffering of those who are compelled
to meet an incomprehensible destiny. In such circumstances, the woman can only
provide comfort and prayer so that the pain and agony may be alleviated somehow.
But there are specific Russian references here as well. In the first verse of the cycle the
poet compares herself to a peasant woman performing the ancient Russian ritual of
vynos - the carrying out of the dead from the house to the vehicle that will take the
body to the cemetery. Instead of a dead body, however, this time it is a live prisoner,
someone beloved. Another specifically Russian cultural allusion is to the icons, the
sacred images painted on wood to which the Orthodox pray, and the icon shelf, placed
in a special corner of the house where meals and rituals take place. At the end of this
work, the poem's speaker compares herself to the wives of the Streltsy or Archers,
the military corps employed by Peter the Great's sister Sophia, whom they supported

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in her unsuccessful fight for the throne and who were subsequently executed. Their
wives grieved for them under the Kremlin towers, and the event was immortalized
in the nineteenth century in a well-known painting by Vasily Sûrikov. Through this
comparison with women caught up in a famous historical event, the poet elevates the
actual situation in which she finds herself, transforming the immediate event into one
of universal significance:
They led you away at dawn.
I followed you, like a mourner.
In the dark front room the children were crying,
By the icon shelf the candle was dying,
On your lips was the icon's chill.
The deathly sweat on your brow . . . Unforgettable! -
I will be like the wives of the Streltsy,
Howling under the Kremlin towers.

In another poem not included in Requiem, a poem written in 1939, Akhmatova

compares her speaker to another Sûrikov painting, one depicting the Boyarina
Morozova, a seventeenth-century noblewoman in a sleigh, in chains, being taken into
exile for her rebellion against the reforms being introduced into the Orthodox church.
The poem also alludes to Viy, the chief of gnomes, whose eyelids reach to the ground
(the Gogol story uViy" contains such a creature):

I know I can't move from this place.

Because of the weight of the eyelids of Viy.
Oh, if only I could suddenly throw myself back
Into some sort of seventeenth century.

On Trinity Eve to stand in church

With a fragrant branch of birch,
To drink of sweet mead
With the Princess Morozova.

And then at twilight in the sleigh,

To sink in the dingy snow.
What mad Sûrikov
Will paint my last journey?

In some of the poems in Requiem, there are allusions to Tsarskoye Selo, the lovely
area near Petersburg where Akhmatova grew up. The town is represented by the poet
as symbolic of the womb-like existence of the upper classes before the revolution, a time
when they attempted to shut themselves off from the sufferings of the people; reflecting
on this milieu, the speaker comes to regard her earlier self as a "gay little sinner":

You should have been shown, you mocker,

Minion of all your friends,
Gay little sinner of Tsarskoye Selo,
What would happen in your life -
How three-hundredth in line, with a parcel,
You would stand by the Kresty prison,
Your fiery tears
Burning through the New Year's ice.
Over there the prison poplar bends,
And there's no sound - and over there how many
Innocent lives are ending now. . . .

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 Other less-known poems written at this time express Akhmatova's pervasive sense
of terror and grief. In the simple but powerful quatrain, "And I am not at all a prophet,"
for example, the simple image of prison keys brings into focus a network of ominous
associations linked with the Stalinist terror - associations centered on arrest, exile, and
death. Here the poet disowns her claim to be a prophet:

And I am not at all a prophet,

My life is pure as a stream.
I simply don't feel like singing
To the sound of prison keys.

In another unpublished work, "Imitation from the Armenian," Akhmatova pretends

merely to be presenting a variation on a theme, reworking a poem by someone else.
But the theme of the original (a poem by the Armenian poet H. Tumanjan) has
been chosen with great care, and its theme coincides with that of other poems by
Akhmatova written during the Terror. Here once again, the vulnerable female, in this
case an innocent ewe, witnesses the slaughter of a loved one:
I will appear in your dreams as a black ewe.
On withered, unsteady legs
I will approach you, begin to bleat, to howl:
"Padishah, have you supped daintily?
You hold the universe, like a bead,
You are cherished by Allah's radiant will . . .
And was he tasty, my little son?
Did he please you, please your children?"

One of Akhmatova's most powerful responses to the Terror is her poem "Stanzas"
(written in 1940 but not published in the Soviet Union until 1989), in which she
indirectly addresses Stalin himself. She enumerates infamous figures in Russian history
who have lived in the Kremlin and implies that the leader now in residence there is
living up to and even surpassing his predecessors in the enormity of his cruelty. The
poem addresses a "Streltsy" or "Archer" moon - which might refer to late winter
(associated the astrological sign Sagittarius, the Archer), or to the Streltsy corps rebellion
against Peter the Great mentioned earlier, or to both. There are allusions here to tsars
like Boris Godunov, the various Ivans, and Dmitry, the Pretender to the Russian throne
at the beginning of the seventeenth century who, in attempting to capture Russia with
the aid of the Catholic Poles, had alienated the Russian people:
Archer Moon. Beyond the Moscow River. Night.
Like a religious procession the hours of Holy Week go by.
I had a terrible dream. Is it possible
That no one, no one, no one can help me?

You had better not live in the Kremlin, the Preobrazhensky Guard was right;
The germs of the ancient frenzy are still swarming here:
Boris Godunov's wild fear, and all the Ivans' evil spite,
And the Pretender's arrogance - instead of the people's rights.

In another unpublished poem, "Why did you poison the water?" (1935), the poet
complains that instead of being rewarded for staying in her motherland, she is being
punished by having her freedom taken away:

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 Why did you poison the water
And mix dirt with my bread?
Why did you turn the last freedom
Into a den of thieves?
Because I didn't jeer
At the bitter death of friends?
Because I remained true
To my sorrowing motherland?
So be it. Without hangman and scaffold
A poet cannot exist in the world.
Our lot is to wear the hair shirt,
To walk with a candle and to wail.

The implications of the hair shirt and walking with a candle as penance become
clearer in Akhmatova's poem on Dante. While Pushkin turned to the Roman poet
Ovid as the archetype of the poet in exile, Akhmatova turned to Dante, whom she
and Mandelstam were both reading in the thirties. Like the Pushkin poem on Ovid,
Akhmatova's work is a thinly disguised reflection on the dignity a poet must retain no
matter what external conditions are tormenting him - whether it be the political regime
of fourteenth-century Florence or that of twentieth-century Leningrad. After being
forced to leave Florence in 1302, Dante was offered the possibility of returning under
condition of a humiliating public repentance, which he rejected. He refused to walk
"with a lighted candle" in a ritual of repentance:

Dante

II mio bel San Giovanni

- Dante

Even after his death he did not return

To his ancient Florence.
To the one who, leaving, did not look back,
To him I sing this song.
A torch, the night, the last embrace,
Beyond the threshold, the wild wail of fate.
From hell he sent her curses
And in paradise he could not forget her -
But barefoot, in a hairshirt,
With a lighted candle he did not walk
Through his Florence - his beloved,
Perfidious, base, longed for. . . .

One of those who had gone into voluntary exile abroad after the revolution was Marina
Tsevtayeva. She and Akhmatova had never met, but in the 1910s Tsvetayeva had
written a series of adoring poems to Akhmatova, calling her the "Muse of Lament."
She had spent many years in Prague and Paris, but in 1937 her husband, Sergey Efron,
was implicated in the murder of a Western official by the Soviet secret police and
fled to the Soviet Union. Two years later Tsevtayeva and her son followed, joining
Efron and her daughter, who had returned earlier. The regime turned on the family,
arresting her husband and daughter. Tsvetayeva herself continued to live on a meager

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 sum from a job as a translator which Pasternak had obtained for her. She asked a friend
of Akhmatova's to arrange for a meeting between them. The meeting took place in
1940; in March of that year, Akhmatova had written a poem to Tsvetayeva, but she
did not read it to her. There is an allusion in the poem to the Marinka Tower - the
Kremlin tower in the town of Kolomna near Moscow, a town where Akhmatova
sometimes spent the summer during the nineteen- thirties. According to legend, this
tower was the site of the incarceration of Marina Mnishek, who had the same first
name as Tsvetayeva. She was the aristocratic Polish wife of Dmitry, the seventeenth-
century Pretender to the Russian throne:

Belated Reply

My white-handed one, dark princess.

- M. Ts.

Invisible, double, jester,

You who are hiding in the depths of the bushes,
The one crouching in a starling house,
The one flitting on the crosses of the dead.
The one crying from the Marinka Tower:
"I have come home today,
Native fields, cherish me
Because of what happened to me.
The abyss swallowed my loved ones,
The family home has been plundered."
We are together today, Marina,
Walking through the midnight capital,
And behind us there are millions like us,
And never was a procession more hushed,
Accompanied by funeral bells
And the wild Moscow moans
Of a snowstorm erasing all traces of us.

No one knows what the two poets discussed at their meeting - two women so very
different in their attitudes toward life and their conceptions of poetry: one a product
of the muted elegance of Petersburg, expressing her emotion through verse
distinguished by restraint, and the other reflecting the noisy bustle of Moscow, declaring
her feelings in writings charged with raw emotion. Not having read Akhmatova's
unpublished poems from the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Tsvetayeva assumed that
Akhmatova had remained fixed in the style and themes of her early period, and in
her diary she was critical of Akhmatova's verse. They met behind the closed door of
Akhmatova's room in the apartment of the poet's friend Nina Olshanskaya. Later on,
during the war, Tsvetayeva was evacuated and ended up in Yelabuga, a town near
Kazan, where she could find no work. On the afternoon of August 31, 1941, she was
found hanging from a hook inside the entrance of her hut.
Along with many other artistic figures such as Shostakovich, Akhmatova herself was
evacuated during the war to Central Asia, where she lived for several years in Tashkent.
On the way there she learned about Tsvetayeva's suicide. In "Over Asia - the mists
of spring," written on June 24, 1942, Akhmatova included the following lines alluding
to her sense of the predicement they shared:

I've earned this gray crown,

And my cheeks, scorched by the sun,

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 Frighten people with their swarthiness.
But the end of my pride is near:
Like that other one - Marina the sufferer,
I will have to drink of emptiness.

As arrest after arrest intruded on the lives of those around her, around 1940
Akhmatova wrote that she wished emphatically to cast a vote in favor of something
positive - not something extraordinary, merely a return to an ordinary situation in
which a door could once again be seen as nothing more than a door:

And here, in defiance of the fact

That death is staring me in the eye -
Because of your words
I am voting for:
For a door to become a door,
A lock - a lock once more,
For this morose beast within my breast
To become a heart. But the thing is,
That we are all fated to learn
What it means not to sleep for three years,
What it means to find out in the morning
About those who have died in the night.

At the end of the nineteen-forties, when the situation was unchanged, Akhmatova
wrote "The Glass Doorbell," in which the glass doorbell performs a function similar
to that of the lock as a focus of terror:

The glass doorbell

Rings urgently.
Is today really the date?
Stop at the door,
Wait a little longer,
Don't touch me,
For God's sake!

In keeping with this persisting sense of anxiety, on August 14, 1946 the Central
Committee of the Communist Party passed a Resolution condemning the journals
Zvezda and Leningrad for publishing the works of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. As
Churchill was to observe, the iron curtain had been rung down earlier that year by
Stalin, and the Resolution was a symbolic act confirming this. A few weeks later, on
September 4th, Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were expelled from the Union of Writers.
In his speech that evening to the Leningrad branch of the Union, Andrey Zhdanov,
Secretary of the Central Committee, said: "What positive contribution can Akhmatova's
work make to our young people? It can only sow despondency, spiritual depression,
pessimism, and the desire to walk away from the questions of public life." After her
expulsion, and for many years thereafter, Akhmatova retained a few loyal friends,
including Pasternak, who helped her and supported her both spiritually and financially;
but most of the people she had known avoided her. She expresses her profound
state of alienation in her poem "Prologue," written sometime in the nineteen-fifties,
in which she presents herself as a leper:

Not with the lyre of someone in love

Do I try to captivate people -

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 A leper's rattle
Sings in my hand.
You will have ample time to exclaim
And curse and howl.
I will teach all the "courageous ones"
To shy away from me.
I didn't look for any return,
And glory I didn't expect,
I have lived for thirty years
Under the wing of death.

Akhmatova's son Lev also suffered from the effects of the Resolution. Released from

the camps to fight in the war, he had taken part in the capture of Berlin. He was allowed
to return to Leningrad after the war had ended, but was arrested again in November,
1949 and sentenced to ten years in a camp in Siberia. It was around this time that Akhmatova
wrote a series of short poems as part of a cycle entitled "Shards" - as if to suggest that the
individual poems were like fragments of an ancient vessel. She begins the cycle with an
epigraph, a phrase taken (and misquoted slightly) from Joyce's Ulysses: "You cannot leave
your mother an orphan." In the brief quatrain serving as the second poem of the cycle,
Akhmatova contrasts the various verbal definitions that may be applied to a single person -
in this case, in the biographical subtext, Lev Gumilyov. For the regime he bears the signifier
"rebel," but for Akhmatova he is designated by another, more personal, name:

How well he's succeeded, this fierce debater,

All the way to the Yenisey plains . . .
To you he's a vagabond, rebel, conspirator -
To me he is - an only son.

The West knew little of Akhmatova's life or her works written during the nineteen-
forties and fifties. Many thought she had stopped writing verse altogether. By not
allowing her to be published for so long - except for a book in 1940 that was
immediately confiscated and some poems which were permitted to appear during the
war - Stalin had condemned Akhmatova to silence, at least to Western readers. She
expresses her sense of this choking silence in part V of "Shards," in which, without
mentioning him directly, she compares Stalin to a butcher who had hung her (like
Marina Tsvetayeva) "on a bloody hook":

You raised me up, like a slain beast

On a bloody hook,
So that sniggering, and not believing,
Foreigners wandered in
And wrote in their respectable papers
That my incomparable gift had died out,
That I had been a poet among poets,
But my thirteenth hour had struck.

Akhmatova's lament for her imprisoned son is heard at the end of one of her greatest
works, Poem without a Hero. It is a long narrative poem, in a style more reminiscent
of the complex opaqueness and erudite allusions of the Symbolists at the beginning of

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the century than representative of Akhmatova's characteristically direct assertions seizing
on métonymie symbols from everyday life. In this work the poet looks back to the
period before World War I, to the year 1913, when she and her friends had hidden in
the cellars of cabarets, devoting themselves to a life of pleasure while the common
people suffered. The Epilogue takes place on a white night of June 24, 1942, with
Leningrad left in ruins. The text is chanted in the voice of the author - seven thousand
kilometers away from the scene, in evacuation in Tashkent. In this Epilogue, Akhmatova's
son is depicted as her double, and death takes the form of a Noseless Slut:

And from behind barbed wire,

In the very heart of the taiga -
I don't know which year -
Having become a heap of "camp dust,"
Having become a terrifying fairy tale,
My double goes to the interrogation.
And then he returns from the interrogation,
With the two emissaries from the Noseless Slut
Assigned to stand guard over him.
And even from here I can hear -
Isn't it miraculous!-
The sound of my own voice:
I paid for you in cash.
For exactly ten years I lived under the gun,
Glancing neither to the left nor to the right.
And after me came rustling ill repute.

There are several stanzas thought to be conceived for possible inclusion in Poem
Without a Hero but not included in the text. In one of these the poet identifies herself
and other women suffering during the Stalinist Terror with the ancient heroines of
Troy - Hecuba, queen of Troy, who looked on helplessly as her dear son, the hero
Hektor, died, and the Trojan princess Cassandra, who was condemned to know the
future but whose fate it was to have her prophecies ignored:

Sealing our bluish lips,

Mad Hecubas
And Cassandras from Chukloma,
We roar in silent chorus
(We, crowned with disgrace):
"We are already on the other side of hell". . . .

But finally, on March 5, 1953 an event occurred that changed the life of Akhmatova
and millions of others in the Soviet Union: Joseph Stalin died. Not long afterward,
in a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress that took place in February, 1956,
the new First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin
as a cruel, bloodthirsty tyrant. The "Thaw" had begun. While the Thaw certainly
did not fulfill all the hopes of the intelligentsia or the people at large, it did at least
mean that the harshest aspects of the reign of Terror were ended, and there was a
perceptible loosening of the iron rule of the former regime. Lev Gumilyov, Akhmatova's
son, was released in May, 1956, and her own works went into circulation again, though
it was not until 1958 that a whole collection of her writings would appear.
In 1957, unsure when - or whether - her works would engage a wide audience again,
Akhmatova wrote the poem "They will forget? - How astonishing!" It was her

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 equivalent of Horace's "Exegi monumentum" - a poem imitated by Pushkin - in
which the poet asserts that while he may be persecuted and unappreciated in his
own time, his spiritual legacy, in the form of his works, will be eternal. In this poem
Akhmatova turns to an ancient mythical image of death followed by certain rebirth -
the image of the phoenix, symbolic of the everlasting nature of verse:

They will forget? - How astonishing!

They forgot me a hundred times,
A hundred times I lay in the grave,
Where, perhaps, I am today.
But the Muse, both deaf and blind,
Rotted in the ground, like grain,
Only, like the phoenix from the ashes,
To rise into the blue ether again.

Although Akhmatova spent the last years of her life under the somewhat looser
regime of Khrushchev, she never stopped writing about his feared predecessor, and
sometime around 1962 she addressed a poem "To the Defenders of Stalin." These
defenders are placed in a long historical line of those who supported the despots, who
tormented the innocent:

There are those who shouted: "Release

Barabbas for us on this feast,"
Those who ordered Socrates to drink poison
In the bare, narrow prison.

They are the ones who should pour this drink

Into their own innocently slandering mouths,
Those sweet lovers of torture,
Experts in the manufacture of orphans.

A decade earlier, in 1950, hoping to please Stalin so that he would free her son,
Akhmatova had written a cycle of poems, "In Praise of Peace," simple poems with a
clear message praising the victory of Russia in the war. Despite this effort on her part,
her son remained a prisoner in the camps. These poems in this group were written
in the officially-sanctioned style of Socialist Realism, and they include the kinds of
trite phrases found in hundreds of poems produced during the Stalinist period. The
poem entitled "In the Pioneer Camp," for instance, ends with the lines: ". . . There
the children marched by with their banners/ And the Motherland herself, admiring
them, / Inclined her invisible brow toward them." In a poem called "No, we didn't
suffer together in vain," written later (in 1 961, five years before her death), Akhmatova
seems implicitly to' refer to this uncomfortable episode in her life. And yet in her
own eyes, throughout this grim period when she felt compelled to make some
compromises, she retained her inner freedom even as she outwardly groveled before
the "bloody puppet-executioner." She had chosen to stay in her country - and she
suffered for it, in many ways; but in the end she affirmed her decision to share this
appalling epoch with her own people:

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No, we didn't suffer together in vain,
Without hopes of even drawing a breath.
We took an oath, we voted -
And quietly followed our path.
Not in vain did I remain pure,
Like a candle before the Lord,
Groveling with you at the feet
Of the bloody puppet-executioner.
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.

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