Anna of All Rus
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry ANNA OF ALL RUS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL EARLY IN THIS CENTURY, a Russian teenager who wanted to begin publishing her poetry was denied use of the family name by her father. So she set...
...Upheavals of feeling are conveyed with economy...
...Akhmatova exploded: "That's not true...
...Poem Without a Hero was started during World War II...
...You understood everything completely even then—don't deceive yourself now...
...The sheer sweep of all this is enthralling...
...The period of social upheaval in the wake of the Revolution was for Akhmatova a time of inner turmoil as well...
...When Khrushchev began to expose the crimes of the Stalin era, a friend of the poet's claimed that many Russians were shocked by the revelations...
...He soon established himself as the leader of a rebellion against the Symbolist movement by founding a new school, Acmeism...
...In Evening (1912), her first collection, she rendered the emotions of a young woman in love with extraordinary sensitivity...
...This outburst makes clear why Anna Akhmatova will always be a vital and necessary poet...
...were experimenting with "imagism," "vortecism," and similarly short-lived verse fads that nevertheless did produce genuine stylistic breakthroughs...
...The jaded intelligentsia in Moscow and Petersburg hoped this return to the culture of "the people" would revitalize an enervated society...
...Those who defied the State, like Osip Mandelstam, found themselves exiled to remote villages...
...Before the Revolution juvenile poetesses dressed like Akhmatova, tried to emulate her Tatar beauty, and aped her artistic mannerisms...
...Everything the government said] was a lie, slander, bloody filth—everyone understood this...
...On concert stages throughout the world, Fyodor Chaliapin enchanted audiences with "The Song of the Volga Boatmen," and Diaghilev's ballets gave cosmopolites the spectacle of exotic village costumes and folk melodies...
...so did Vladimir Mayakovsky...
...The pseudonym, euphonious and resonant of a romantic age, proved to be the first in a series of shrewd choices...
...It is hard in so large a book to keep everything under control...
...Her mother claimed to be related to the last great Tatar chieftain, Akhmat Khan, a descendant of the notorious Genghis...
...Roberta Reeder has spent a decade interviewing Akhmatova's colleagues and intimates, poring over documents, and studying her work...
...This was the era of "ism" literature...
...All this became in her later verse the subject of an ongoing dirge...
...A fellow writer described him in the Symbolist imagery of the period as "a captain of a transparent ship with sails out of clouds," but Reeder suggests that he was considerably more calculating than this implies...
...in Western Europe and the United States, men and women like Amy Lowell, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, and H.D...
...She did not flinch from describing the worst brutalities, and as conditions worsened, composed her greatest works, the ones West-em readers know her by...
...From the days of Catherine the Great, the Russian Imperial family summered there (hence its name, "Tsar's Village...
...The writings of several women have arguably influenced the course of modern verse...
...It may also be that Akhmatova is simply too Slavic for most Westerners to truly comprehend her, that we see her through a glass darkly, just as we fail to hear so much of the music and nuance of her verse...
...Some of her contemporaries who chose exile are captured in one of Reeder's most pathetic vignettes: as exotic creatures mooching around a house party at Lady Otto-line Morrell's, brushing shoulders with precious Bloomsbury butterflies...
...Gumilev was a dubious influence, a kind of Slavic Robert Bly, and their marriage was never happy...
...A third possibility is that the poet hid her private self from everybody and played an exc lus ive-ly public role, as the author and several of her Russian sources hint...
...Anna Akhmatova remains elusive—more of an icon than a flesh-and-blood person...
...Requiem was written during the Great Terror...
...Stones shout, reeds find speech, but according to you, a human being does not see and does not hear...
...After the usual stormy adolescent heartbreak, she married a promising young poet, Nikolai Gumilev...
...Nevertheless, under Stalin the work was often a liability, linking her with the decadent preproletarian culture...
...Only in that way can it be written...
...Though she didn't love him, she admired his idealism...
...Remembering those who did not survive, she wrote, "All the unburied ones—I buried them,/I mourned for them all, but who will mourn for me...
...The author eventually came to slight her debut as "the poor poems of a very vapid little girl which for some reason were reprinted 13 times...
...By 1925, the Bolsheviks had stripped the town's aristocratic tree-lined avenues and taken away its name...
...The fruit of this labor is an authoritative new biography, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (St...
...It didn't matter that her lyric style had begun to change by the outbreak of World War I, and that Evening's heartsick girls shortly gave way to bereaved widows and mothers...
...Can't you hear that here there are no longer any sounds...
...Twice her son was sent off to hard labor as a means of punishing her...
...Akhmatova had an early acquaintance with personal pain, her parents having separated when she was five...
...Pushkin attended the local lyceum...
...Several days earlier Aleksandr Blok, too, had died in despair over the evil climate for writers...
...the Nazis destroyed it...
...The heroine's disturbed state in "The Song of the Last Meeting," for example, is betrayed by an unconscious slip: "I put on my right hand/The glove for my left...
...Sometimes she employs the cadences of Russian folk song: My husband whipped me with his woven belt Folded in two...
...She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and for many years her work was banned...
...Then in 1921, three years after their divorce, Gumilev was executed by the Soviets—an indication of the government's paranoia, since he was apolitical?and Akhmatova felt crushed...
...she felt she had always let him down...
...Her life (1889-1966) spanned a turbulent era of Russian history—both World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Stalin purges, the thaw under Nikita S. Khrushchev, the freeze that followed as Leonid I. Brezhnev consolidated power...
...Perhaps the problem is the author's organization...
...Many literally went crazy...
...He and Akhmatova had numerous affairs...
...Akhmatova was not about to abandon her friends or her country, and she knew poets do not transplant well...
...their son, Lev, had been sent away against her wishes to be raised by his father's family...
...Poetry is catastrophe," she once proclaimed...
...Moreover, she was determined to record the truth...
...Whatever, Akhmatova's greatness is unmistakably apparent from her refusal to succumb to the will of the State and her decision to stay in Russia...
...Yet at every stage she captured the voice of the dispossessed and expressed the elemental sufferings of thousands...
...It is something of an irony, therefore, that the frail Akhmatova, incapable of running a household or even of cooking, proved surprisingly resilient, despite being subjected to cruel harassment by the regime...
...Reeder believes Akhmatova was taking on the role of a klikusha ("screamer")—a female counterpart of the holy fool who, while mad, gives voice to grief others keep locked inside...
...READING Anna Akhmatova is similar to immersing yourself in a novel by Tolstoy or Pasternak, with a cast of thousands to track through a bewildering number of historical events...
...Still, she continued to write secretly...
...Akhmatova's poetry myfhologized most of the places where she lived, making the most of their literary and cultural associations...
...So she set about finding a suitable substitute...
...The poet's life encompassed the artistic milieu of Silver Age Petersburg and the steppes of Central Asia...
...She associated the sufferings of her war-torn land with the Passion of Christ...
...Reeder demonstrates, however, that none approached Akhmatova as an archetypal figure...
...Evening remained beloved by the Russian reading public for generations...
...Martin's, 619 pp., $35.00...
...They did not want to understand—that's another matter...
...Since the budding poet had inherited high Tatar cheekbones, she thought it fitting to call herself Anna Akhmatova...
...Akhmatova endured, according to Reeder, because of an overwhelming sense of mission...
...The genius of Akhmatova," observes Reeder, "lies in Russian prose"—that is, in the psychology she picked up from Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky...
...In fact, few adjusted to the privations and persecutions of Soviet rule...
...Nowhere is this so evident as in her treatment of Tsar-skoye Selo, the charming resort town near Petersburg that was her childhood home...
...All night I've been at the little window With a taper, waiting for you...
...sometimes events are mentioned long before they are fully relevant, or are alluded to several hundred pages after they happened, when the reader has essentially forgotten their significance...
...But as the pages turn it slowly dawns that you are not really getting to know the subject of Reeder's biography intimately...
...All sounds have stopped," he told a friend in his last weeks...
...Deprived of her livelihood, she had to depend on the generosity of admirers for food and housing...
...Contrary to the Symbolists, who saw everything as a trope for something else, Acmeists valued deter-minacy and directness...
...Like her mother, she was beautiful, inept at handling the details of daily living, and unfortunate in romance...
...The second instance occurred after an ill-timed visit from Isaiah Berlin...
...Akhmatova is considered an innovator in her use of folk materials, but peasant motifs were all the rage with Russian artists of the day...
...Out of the movement two significant poets quickly emerged: Osip Mandelstam and Akhmatova...
...Among the poets, only a handful of prescient souls like Aleksandr Blok grasped its political significance...
...There were two marriages and countless poignant love affairs...
...In her postwar cycle City of Pushkin, Tsarskoye Selo is a symbol of the lost Eden: "They burned my little toy town,/And there's no loophole back to the past...
...Akhmatova's only female peer, Marina Tsvetayeva, who had dubbed her "Anna of all Rus," committed suicide...
Vol. 77 • September 1995 • No. 12
