12 Sept 2022 – Women Poets - #9 of 12 Changers

Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova: An Impossible Poet 

Poetry was taken so seriously in Russia that a poet could be killed for writing it.

Osip Mendalstam

Love, night, fire, and heart, but perhaps most of all, voice. These are some of the themes this remarkable Russian poet worked with. All her critics cite two of her writings as masterworks.

First, with its intricately structured cycles, Requiem (1935–40), is her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror, and dedicated to its victims. Her style, characterized by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries.

Second, she considered “Poem without a Hero” the major work of her life. She worked on the book for twenty years (1940-60). It was originally dedicated to all those friends and countrymen that died at Leningrad (St. Petersburg). It was not published until after her death.

Akhmatova's range is stunning. She could write powerfully from the long view cited above through short lyric poems, less than ten lines long, to romantic, heartfelt verse.

Here are comments from Roberta Reeder (ed) and Judith Hemschemeyer  (trans) from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova:

For most Soviet poets she preserved a steady if good-natured contempt. She was the high priestess of a Russian poetry that was almost an extension of the Russian Church - hieratic, gravely melodious, attracting a vast audience of devotees who knew much of the nation's poetry by heart in the same sense that they knew the Orthodox ritual. Her friend, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died during the Stalinist purges in a distant eastern gulag, once remarked that poetry was taken so seriously in Russia that a poet could be killed for writing it. Pushkin would have understood that, and Mandelstam's satirical verse about Stalin signed his own death warrant. Akhmatova too was persecuted by the Soviet state: her former husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921, and their son was twice imprisoned for long periods for the crime of bearing his father's name.

But Russian poets, like martyrs of the church, have thrived on such treatment and on the holy status it gave their work. Akhmatova herself was very conscious of this status. In 1962, four years before Akhmatova died at the age of 76, Robert Frost visited the Soviet Union and paid a call on her at the dacha lent her for the occasion at the writers' colony near Leningrad. The two distinguished old poets sat side by side in wicker chairs and talked quietly. ''And I kept thinking,'' Akhmatova wrote afterward, ''here are you, my dear, a national poet. Every year your books are published. . . . They praise you in all the newspapers and journals, they teach you in the schools, the President receives you as an honored guest. And all they've done is slander me! . . . I've had everything - poverty, prison lines, fear, poems remembered only by heart, and burnt poems. And humiliation and grief. And you don't know anything about this and wouldn't be able to understand it if I told you. . . . But now let's sit together, two old people, in wicker chairs. A single end awaits us. And perhaps the real difference is not actually so great?''

But she knew it was. Great not so much in terms of suffering - bitter and prolonged as that had been - but in terms of the sheer necessity for poetry in such times, for the Russian poet and for his audience. In a happier country it is one of the amenities, not the needs. The culture that is optional and varied in a civilized society was for many in Stalin's country the only way to stay living and sane.

Somewhere There Is A Simple Life

Somewhere there is a simple life and a world,

Transparent, warm and joyful. . .

There at evening a neighbor talks with a girl

Across the fence, and only the bees can hear

This most tender murmuring of all.

But we live ceremoniously and with difficulty

And we observe the rites of our bitter meetings,

When suddenly the reckless wind

Breaks off a sentence just begun -

But not for anything would we exchange this splendid

Granite city of fame and calamity,

The wide rivers of glistening ice,

The sunless, gloomy gardens,

And, barely audible, the Muse's voice.

I Wrung My Hands

I wrung my hands under my dark veil. . .

"Why are you pale, what makes you reckless?"

-- Because I have made my loved one drunk

with an astringent sadness.

I'll never forget. He went out, reeling;

his mouth was twisted, desolate. . .

I ran downstairs, not touching the banisters,

and followed him as far as the gate.

And shouted, choking: "I meant it all

in fun. Don't leave me, or I'll die of pain."

He smiled at me -- oh so calmly, terribly --

and said: "Why don't you get out of the rain?"

I Hear The Oriole's Always-Grieving Voice

I hear the oriole's always-grieving voice,

And the rich summer's welcome loss I hear

In the sickle's serpentine hiss

Cutting the corn's ear tightly pressed to ear.

And the short skirts of the slim reapers

Fly in the wind like holiday pennants,

The clash of joyful cymbals, and creeping

From under dusty lashes, the long glance.

I don't expect love's tender flatteries,

In premonition of some dark event,

But come, come and see this paradise

Where together we were blessed and innocent.

 

Background

Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko in Odessa, Ukraine on June 23, 1889. Her interest in poetry began in her youth; but when her father found out about her aspirations, he told her not to shame the family name by becoming a “decadent poetess.” He forced her to take a pen name, and she chose the last name of her maternal great-grandmother. She attended law school in Kiev and married Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and critic, in 1910. Shortly after the marriage, he travelled to Abyssinia, leaving her behind. While Gumilev was away, Akhmatova wrote many of the poems that would be published in her popular first book, Evening. Her son Lev was also born in 1912. He was raised by his paternal grandmother, who disliked Akhmatova. Akhmatova protested this situation, but her husband supported his family. She would visit with her son during holidays and summers. Later, Akhmatova would write that “motherhood is a bright torture. I was not worthy of it.”

Upon Evening’s publication in 1912, Akhmatova became a cult figure among the intelligentsia and part of the literary scene in St. Petersburg. Her second book, Rosary (1914), was critically acclaimed and established her reputation. With her husband, she became a leader of Acmeism, a movement which praised the virtues of lucid, carefully-crafted verse and reacted against the vagueness of the Symbolist style which dominated the Russian literary scene of the period. She and Gumilev divorced in 1918. Akhmatova married twice more, to Vladimir Shileiko in 1918, whom she divorced in 1928; and Nikolai Punin, who died in a Siberian labor camp in 1953. The writer, Boris Pasternak, who was already married, had proposed to her numerous times.

Changes in the political climate finally allowed Akhmatova acceptance into the Writers’ Union; but, following World War II, there was an official decree banning the publication of her poetry and Andrey Zhadanov, the Secretary of the Central Committee, expelled her from the Writers’ Union, calling her “half nun, half harlot.” Her son, Lev, was arrested in 1949 and held in jail until 1956. To try to win his release, Akhmatova wrote poems in praise of Stalin and the government, but it was of no use. Later, she requested that these poems not appear in her collected works. She began writing and publishing again in 1958, but with heavy censorship. 

Though Akhmatova was frequently confronted with official government opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and lauded by the Russian people—in part because she did not abandon her country during difficult political times. Her most accomplished works, Requiem (which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987) and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horrors of the Stalinist terror. During Joseph Stalin’s regime, Akhmatova endured artistic repression, as well as tremendous personal loss.

In 1965, she was granted an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive honors were her first travels outside Russia since 1912. Two years before her death at the age of seventy-six, Akhmatova was chosen to serve as president of the Writers’ Union.

Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966.

Exploration 1: Briefly, contrast the social and political context for poets (and all creative writers) during the first half of the twentieth century with the first twenty years of this century.

Exploration 2: If you care to, profile any Soviet Bloc poet; the poet’s character, qualities, or required strengths. Likewise, what would make a poet unfit for the era? In other words, incapable of manifesting his/her art.

Exploration 3: “. . . the sheer necessity for poetry in such times, . . . Compare/contrast “the necessity of poetry in this poet’s lifetime in Russia with any “necessity for poetry that you perceive in our time – 2000 – 2022.