The Politics of Russian Poetry

...Every poet is a 'disturber of sense'—that is, instead of repeating the ready-made opinions current in his time, he extracts new sense from his own understanding of the world...

...We learn from Max Hayward's luminous and disquieting biographical essay in Poems of Akhmatova (Little, Brown, 173 pp., $7.95), selected, translated and introduced by Hayward and Stanley Kunitz, that she died in relative tranquility in Leningrad, in 1966, at the age of 77...

...The noisy rant and attitudinizing rhetoric of public issues are superfluous to Brodsky's moral vision and contradictory to his craft...

...Yet as one reads Brodsky's Selected Poems (Harper & Row, 172 pp., $5.95), translated and introduced by George F. Kline, with a foreword by W. H. Auden, the external world of politics becomes irrelevant...

...Mandelstam that "we live in a pre-Gutenberg era," because so much Russian poetry circulates in the clandestine typed copies (called samizdat, or self-published) that are passed from reader to reader...

...Bad literature is a form of treason...

...Yet this seems a dubious linkage, for the omnivorous Soviet censorship encompasses an enormous variety of attitudes and opinions in its Index of the forbidden...

...In the west the falling light still glows, and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun, but here Death is already dialking the doors with crosses, and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in...

...In a stupor of grief and dread have we not fingered the foulest wounds and left them unhealed by our hands...

...Her only child, Lev, spent many years in prison and labor camps...

...Mandelstam remarked on "Akhmatova's purely literary vocabulary, spoken as it were through clenched teeth...

...He couldn't stand bawling brats, or raspberry jam with his tea, or womanish hysteria...

...Brodsky's range of subject and manner is extraordinarily diverse—from the naturalistic clarity of "New Stanzas to Augusta," about his banishment to the icebound province of Archangelsk, to the dazzling virtuosity of the elegy for T. S. Eliot, which skillfully echoes and transcends Auden's famous poem on the death of Yeats...

...He is not a dissident in any overt sense of that term...

...Unlike the translator of the earlier Penguin volume of Akhmatova, Kunitz has produced not just English from Russian but poetry from poetry...

...By 1917, a year of war and revolution, she began moving beyond the guarded poignancies of her intensely private world, learning to contain, through the discriminating discipline of language, the blows and lessons of history...

...my changeling life has flowed into a sister channel...

...IN 1964, some of Joseph Brodsky's poetry, and excerpts from his trial for "parasitism" in Leningrad, were first published in America by The New Leader...

...When she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1946...

...Akhmatova once remarked to Mrs...

...Your lips were chill from the ikon's kiss, sweat bloomed on your brow—those deathly flowers...

...and life-in-death...

...When a brilliant Slavist, Max Hayward, and a distinguished American poet, Stanley Kunitz, collaborate to produce a collection such as Poems of Akhmatova, we are thrice blessed—by the scholar's scruples, the poet's English, and by Akhmatova herself, whose work would otherwise remain an unknowable secret to most of us...

...Poetry from the Russian Underground (Harper & Row, 249 pp., $8.95), translated and edited by Joseph Langland, Tamas Aczel and Laszlo Tikor, brings together, in Russian and English, 52 poems smuggled to the West via diplomats, travelers, and Russian sailors whose ships call at foreign ports...

...What can there be in common between this poetry and the interests of our people and State...

...One cannot help being stirred by the outspoken defiance of Alexander Galich's "Conjuration," for example, but the poem itself is banal...

...I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place...

...the "overwrought upper-class lady" spoke of the harsh imperatives of history that had invaded her life: This cruel age has deflected me like a river from its course...

...To the rulers of the Soviet Union it is invariably political, not because it sometimes speaks of politics (or refuses to) but because poetry can be profoundly unsettling and therefore subversive...

...Poetry of such rare power does not need the sustenance of biography...

...He eschews politics and passionately resists the West's attempts to exploit him as a political symbol...

...In opposition to the Symbolists' Romantic fustian, the Acmeists advocated concrete and natural poetic language, and proclaimed the everyday ordinariness of words...

...The table, pictures, carpets, hooks and bolts, clothes-closets, cupboards, candles, curtains—all now sleep: the washbowl, bottle, tumbler, bread, breadknife and china, crystal, pots and pans, bed-sheets and nightlamp, chests oj drawers, a clock, a minor, stairway, doors...

...Strayed from its familiar shores...

...At 33, he has the unfaltering intellectual authority that poets rarely achieve before middle age...

...Among the many disturbers of sense who have been banned, censored, ostracized, abused, excoriated, imprisoned, and even driven to suicide by the official guardians of "sense" in the USSR, few bear more tragic witness to the truth of Mrs...

...None of his poetic themes or allusions are political...

...And he was tied to me...

...Since I greatly admire Kunitz's own work, this confirms my instinctive trust that he has not wrenched Akhmatova's poetry out of its Russian sockets with the misguided and self-adulatory arrogance that consumes many a poet turned translator...

...What, indeed, but love and pain, hope and despair, life and death, language and silence, and countless similar coordinates of human experience in a time of cataclysm...

...In a magnificent poem written toward the end of World War II...

...Between 1923-40, the Central Committee saw to it that almost no original work of Akhmatova's was published in the USSR...

...Like a felon, like a man half-dead, dark is your path, wanderer...

...Though her beginning was in Odessa, Akhmatova spent most of her early life near St...

...Many of Brodsky's settings and meta-phoric points of reference are drawn from classical mythology and from modern English and American poetry—he is intensely, even obsessively, absorbed by the way poets go about their business...

...I CANNOT, being ignorant of Russian, judge the translations in this volume (both the Russian and English texts are given...

...For Brodsky, the power of divinity can be sensed not simply in man and nature but in words and in things...

...Zhdanov, Stalin's lieutenant in Leningrad, aimed his snarling puritanical fury full-blast at her poetry: "Akhmatova's subject matter is utterly individualistic...

...And that is the most subversive doctrine of all...

...I know beginnings, I know endings too...

...The Acmeists were to pay dearly for their esthetic heresy...

...Voznesensky's "Shame," despite the man's courage in attacking the Soviet bureaucrat-intelligentsia, is hortatory and trite...

...From her bitter store of "malevolent memory," Akhmatova distilled a majestic body of poetry...

...As with all great lyric poets, Brodsky attends to the immediate, the specific, to what he has internally known and felt, to the lucidities of observation heightened and defined by thought...

...The book contains, too, an informative introduction by the editors, describing the beginnings of samizdat literature in 1956, when the hope aroused in February by Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin vanished in November with the suppression of the Hungarian uprising...

...She is] a nun and a whore who combines harlotry with prayer...

...She is mainly concerned with amorous-erotic themes which are intertwined with elements of sadness, nostalgia, death, mysticism and doom...

...In the opening section of the "Elegy for John Donne," a poem shaped by the image of death as the sleep of salvation, Brodsky's catalogue of homely domestic objects is gradually transformed into the identifying incantation of naming day in Eden: John Donne has sunk in sleep...

...Brodsky appears, in fact, to have sprung full-grown from some mythical poets-country of the mind, and not from a Russia whose authorities he has, as it seems, inexplicably offended...

...Yet for 40 years before her official "rehabilitation" in the early 1960s, she lived on the rack: No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face...

...Nonetheless, he has written that "for a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language...

...The young Russian poet Joseph Brodsky has taken Kunitz to task for some of his liberties, but he concedes that "the mistakes are more in technical details than in conveying the spirit of the poems chosen...

...But amid all the critical head-wagging and tongue-clucking over how much is lost in translating poetry, it seems worth pointing out how much can be gained...

...More recently, this magazine printed several of his later poems, and reported on his journey from Russia to the United States, where he now lives...

...In an early lyric she compressed the indignity of domestic grief into a few lines that tremble with the tension of her self-control: Three things enchanted him: white peacocks, evensong, and faded maps of America...

...Ideologically and politically, their defense of common reality implied a strong respect for tradition and continuity...

...wormwood injects your foreign breed...

...These are the only reliable means for comprehending love and solitude, death and redemption...

...The Kunitz-Hayward volume admittedly offers merely a small glimpse of her skill and versatility, but these translations bestow a very clear sense of her contemplative intelligence, her proud and reticent temperament, the rigorous economy of her diction, the precise and eloquently compact formality that governed her choice of words and images...

...Like Solzhenitsyn, she consistently rejected the temptations of exile, and chose to remain an "internal emigre": I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies . . . . But I pity the exile's lot...

...Overall, the extraliterary scaffolding of this volume fails to exonerate the largely mediocre quality of the poetry, and it would be condescending to pretend that it does...

...It is the poetry of an overwrought upper-class lady who frantically races back and forth between boudoir and chapel...

...In any case, if one judges this anthology, as the editors claim they did in making their choices, by "customary literary criteria," all that's samizdat isn't gold...

...Petersburg, which she revered as the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky...

...Chaos can be humbled, if not defeated, by the holy orderings of language...

...In "Requiem," her lament for Stalin's victims, she moves almost imperceptibly, in one stanza, to a shattering climax: At dawn they came and took you away...

...Though Poetry jrom the Russian Underground concludes with Akhmatova's "Requiem" (the full text has never been printed in the Soviet Union), Langland, Aczel and Tikor focus on the work of young dissidents...

...During the thaw that followed Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, however, Akhmatova was gradually allowed to recover her public voice, and was granted some of the material ease conferred by official acceptance...

...Gumilev was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 for counterrevolutionary treason...

...In the dark room children cried, the holy candle gasped for air...

...Mandelstam's remarks than Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, who took the pen-name Akhmatova from her grandmother...

...In 1910, during her short-lived and unhappy marriage to Nikolai Gumilev, she began writing poetry in earnest, and, along with her husband and Mandelstam, became one of the three most prominent representatives of the so-called Acmeist poets, a group that deplored the reigning Symbolists' mystic idealism and high-flown rhetoric...

...Because Akhmatova practically never raises her voice and is immune to gaudy bravura and strident extravagance, the effect, when she does for a moment let go, when indignation and pain can no longer be stifled, is lacerating...

...Only Bella Akhmadulina (Yevtushenko's first wife, and a far better poet) has the genuine resonance of originality, especially in her fiery homage to the innovative poet Marina Tsvetayeva, a friend and contemporary of Akhmatova's, who hanged herself in 1941 when her "politically unreliable" husband was shot...

...Most of those poets in the collection whose names are known are still in their 20s, and the editors argue that, by virtue of their dissent, the authors constitute a "movement...

...Most of the work here is thin and crude...

...In a poem of 1919, she turns the desolate landscape of revolution into a vision of death that is all the more harrowing for its quietness: Why is this age worse than earlier ages...

...Toward the end of her life she was even permitted to travel outside Russia for the first time in half a century to receive an honorary degree from Oxford...

...genuine freshness of perspective and language is in short supply...

...Like Akhmatova and Mandelstam, he thinks of language as palpable substance, and material objects for him, as Auden notes in his foreword, are "sacramental signs, messengers from the unseen...

...Mandelstam died in a Siberian prison camp in 1938 for his unpardonable description of Stalin, in a short poem of outrage, as "the murderer and peasant-slayer" with a "cockroach mustache...

...As Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in Hope Against Hope, the remarkable memoir of her husband Osip, who was one of the authentic and most difficult masters of 20th-century Russian poetry: "It seems inevitable that a poet should arouse enmity...

...You were my dead: I walked behind...

...Like the wives of Peter's troopers in Red Square I'll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers...

...All things beside are sleeping too: walls, bed and floor—all sleep...