In Living Memory
Ericson, Edward E.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "In Living Memory" IN AUGUST 31, 1941, Anna Akhmatova and a couple of friends seeking shelter from a Nazi bombing raid stumbled into a dark basement, only to discover that...
...In the prose opening labeled "Instead of a Foreword," a passage as striking as any of the eight pages of poetry to come, a blue-lipped woman standing behind Akhmatova "awoke from the torpor normal to all of us and breathed a question in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there)": "Can you describe this...
...The poem as a whole imprints into living memory the victims of the terror on both sides of the prison wall, and there they will stay, God willing, unto the third and the fourth generation, and beyond...
...Whereas Requiem shows Akhmatova as part of the "guiltless" Russia enduring the Soviet tragedy, Poem implicates her as part of the "guilty generation" that fails to withstand the advent of Sovietism...
...The fancy has not (yet...
...By the early 1960s Akhmatova was widely viewed as the matriarch of Russian literature, especially by young writers, notably including Joseph Brodsky...
...become reality...
...It cannot repent, and thus cannot be saved...
...Finally, she wrote a long opening essay of biographical and historical background...
...This little random episode can serve as a synecdoche of The Word That Causes Death's a dramatic life in a terriDefeat: Poems of Memory ble century...
...Then something like a smile slipped across what once had been her face...
...Akhmatova delivers on her promise by writing Requiem...
...Thomas's translations of selected brief lyrics (Penguin...
...She met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the publication in 1962 of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich raised her hopes about publication of her poems, hopes that were little fulfilled...
...A brief period of literary triumph came her way in 1946, as she gave readings to large audiences and prolonged standing ovations...
...Readers making their first approach to Akhmatova might try D.M...
...She and her rulers shared only two certainties: that she was a misfit and that her lyric poetry had made her famous...
...DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW In Living Memory _ N AUGUST 31, 1941, Anna Akhmatova and a couple of friends seeking shelter from a Nazi bombing raid stumbled into a dark basement, only to discover that they were in a place familiar from her long-gone youth, the Stray Dog, an artist's cafe...
...In performing "the great spiritual feat of choosing to stand and endure," Akhmatova takes on the role of witness that Mother Mary performed at Golgotha...
...Petersburg had changed into Leningrad, as if a perverted alchemist had mastered turning gold into base metals...
...At that moment she was participating in Reviewed by Edward E. Ericson, Jr...
...Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, stayed home, but her translated by Nancy K. Anderson home kept changing, vi(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 326 PAGES, $30) olently...
...The tragic events that engulfed her Russian people deepened her experience, and she found herself peering out from under the rubble of her old world of high culture (and of the Stray Dog) at the surrounding devastation...
...For the sake of accessibility, Anderson decided to add first a critical essay, then detailed commentary, and then pertinent entries from Akhmatova's notebooks...
...The first-person account conveys one woman's heartbreak, but it is all the more potent for representing all who are silently joined in the fellowship of suffering...
...Poem Without a Hero was drafted in 1940, expanded in a 1942 version (reproduced by Anderson as an Appendix), and doubled in length by 1962...
...Though she rejected opportunities to emigrate, there was no place for this civilized woman in the new, barbaric order...
...Akhmatova was a serious Christian, but she lived a bohemian life...
...Then came the denunciations by the regime's cultural arbiter, Andrei Zhdanov, who memorably tagged her as "both nun and harlot...
...She lived a total of seventy-seven years, which—give her this—is longer than the Soviet Union survived...
...Here the poet stands outside the walls of the Leningrad prison confining her son, along with other women similarly blocked from their loved ones...
...Whereas most Sovietologists, whose expectations were discredited by events, now specialize in forgetfulness, Akhmatova achieves what a scatterbrained woman created by fellow-Petersburger Dostoevsky keeps reminding herself to try: "The main Edward E. Ericson, Jr., professor ofEnglish, emeritus, at Calvin College, is currently collaborating on two books about Solzhenitsyn for ISI Books...
...Anderson started out to render a new English translation of Akhmatova's masterpiece, Poem Without a Hero, which is as "allusive and cryptic" as Jane Kenyon, an American poet with more than a touch ofAkhmatova's gift, says it is...
...She consents, on one condition: that it go up "here," outside the prison wall, "where I stood while three hundred hours passed,/And the gates never budged, and the bolts remained fast...
...thing is not to forget the main thing...
...Of Anderson's three translations, Requiem is the place to start...
...Anderson captures the human drama, though she slights the theological significance carried by the biblical references that structure the text...
...Her dear, imprisoned Lev was always on her mind but out of her reach...
...In the "Epilogue" Akhmatova wonders, in a flight of fancy, if someday Russia might erect a statue in her honor...
...Another writer, Lidia Chukovskaya, called Akhmatova "a strong and helpless woman...
...Having come of age before 1917, and immune to revolutionary excitations, she never wavered in her identification with Russia's centuries-old religious heritage...
...At age 75 she was allowed to travel abroad...
...Many of her early poems were lyrics on unhappy love...
...Akhmatova, after all, stands at the pinnacle of modern Russian poetry alongside her friend, Osip Mandelstam, and today she makes the cut for inclusion in anthologies of world literature...
...Adopting Dostoevsky's principle that everyone is responsible to all for all, Akhmatova "accepts that generation's guilt and repents for its wrongs and her part in them," thereby achieving "a form of salvation" for herself and her contemporaries...
...the civil defense of her adopted home city, but the Nazi siege was far from the greatest upheaval that befell her city and her...
...In the 20th century's hall of fame, then, let Anna Akhmatova be commemorated by a small alcove with just enough space to display her delicacies...
...Thereafter, she decided to add translations of Requiem and The Way of All the Earth, because all three poems "were united by the theme of memory, the danger of its loss over time, and the will to preserve it...
...AFTER THE LIFE STORY, which takes up almost half the book, Anderson turns to the poems...
...She digs into her own past as part of digging into her beloved city's past...
...At every step Anderson chose well, and the book comes out as a unified whole...
...Nancy Anderson's new book earns pride of place on the short shelf of valuable books about Akhmatova...
...In a country ruled by the lie of ideology, she told as much of the truth as 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW could be generalized from her firsthand knowledge, accepting as a burden the poet's responsibility to speak for the people...
...The Great Terror that Stalin unleashed in the late 1930s drove the long-homeless woman from one location to another, first around town and then ever farther eastward, and also drove her to write...
...Her Petersburg "has become so corrupted, so demonic, that it no longer acknowledges the concept of guilt...
...She was in the Mandelstams' apartment when the secret police arrived to haul off Osip, who was never to be heard from again...
...This is a tip-off to the strange, paradoxical melange which is this poet's life...
...During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), when Stalin in desperation appealed to Russian (rather than Soviet) patriotism, Akhmatova did her part by interrupting a productive stretch of composition and reading her poems on public stages, as well as to wounded troops...
...The Way of All the Earth (that is, of all flesh) is Akhmatova's effort to overcome the sharp historical discontinuity wrought by the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Also, she has a knack for making the obscure clear while resisting the temptation to make the complex simple...
...But the fit few who do come will linger awhile...
...The woman with a reputation as a great beauty then engaged in various sexual affairs and two more marriages...
...She keeps alive for future generations the nightmarish memory of what only this century tried, the experiment in totalitarianism...
...Her beloved St...
...And I said: "I can...
...Poetry became for her not just an emotional outlet but a high calling...
...But, as Anderson remarks, Requiem serves in its stead as the monument that "will stand throughout the ages, watching over the dead with grief and faithfulness and love...
...It is easier today than it was for Akhmatova's contemporaries to validate her emphasis on continuity, since the final punctuation mark has now been put on the parenthetical Soviet period in Russian history...
...The Bolshevik reign of terror that followed the revolutionary cataclysm of 1917 eventually packed her only son off to prison and more than one of her husbands to death...
...The poem features her abiding "consciousness of being rooted in an age-old Russian culture...
...The alcove will draw few visitors, for reading poetry is currently an art perhaps more lost than writing it...
...Anderson captures the human drama, though she slights the theological significance carried by the biblical references that structure the text...
...When young, she wedded fellow-poet Nikolai Gumilyov, father of her son Lev, in a marriage that was "open," which is to say disastrous...
Vol. 38 • December 2005 • No. 10
