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Three Long Poems The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat ANNA AKHMATOVA The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat Poems of Memory g Translated, with an introductory biography, critical essays, and commentary, by Nancy K. Anderson Yale University Press New Haven & London Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright ∫ 2004 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Nofret Roman type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna, 1889–1966. [Poems. English. Selections] The word that causes death’s defeat : poems of memory / Anna Akhmatova ; translated, with an introductory biography, critical essays, and commentary, by Nancy K. Anderson.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-10377-8 (alk. paper) 1. Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna, 1889–1966—Translations into English. 2. Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna, 1889–1966. I. Anderson, Nancy K., 1956– II. Title. PG3476.A217 2004 891.71%42—dc22 2004006295 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 Contents ggg Preface vii A Note on Style xiii PART I. Biographical and Historical Background Chapter 1. Youth and Early Fame, 1889–1916 3 Chapter 2. Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1922 23 Chapter 3. Outcast in the New Order, 1922–1935 44 Chapter 4. Terror and the Muse, 1936–1941 68 Chapter 5. War and Late Stalinism, 1941–1953 92 Chapter 6. Late Fame and Final Years, 1953–1966 115 PART II. The Poems Requiem 135 The Way of All the Earth 143 Poem Without a Hero 148 PART III. Critical Essays Bearing the Burden of Witness: Requiem 181 Forward into the Past: The Way of All the Earth 194 Rediscovering a Lost Generation: Poem Without a Hero 203 Contents PART IV. Commentary Commentary on Poem Without a Hero 235 Appendixes Appendix I. An Early Version of Poem Without a Hero (Tashkent 1942) 267 Appendix II. Poem Without a Hero: Excerpts from Akhmatova’s Notebooks 280 Notes 301 Bibliography 315 Index 321 vi Preface ggg Enough has been written about Akhmatova that the addition of another book on her calls for some justification. Perhaps the best way to describe what this book proposes to do is to explain how it came into being. Some books are the realization of a preconceived plan, like a building constructed in strict conformity with the architect’s blueprints. Others, including this one, are like the work of a builder who, as he sees the project begin to take form, suddenly realizes how many possibilities it offers and responds by adding feature upon feature, until the result is a vast elaboration of an initially simple concept. In the case of this book, the original concept was to offer a new translation of Poem Without a Hero. While Akhmatova’s first readers had consistently praised the poem for its musicality, most of the English translations of it I had seen were in free verse, which failed to give any sense of the work’s sound or rhythm. The one honorable exception to this rule (at least to my knowledge) is D. M. Thomas’s translation. Thomas chose to keep Akhmatova’s exact meter while reducing the Poem’s end rhymes to assonances (sometimes quite weak ones); I chose to strengthen the stanza structure by keeping the end rhymes (or at least inexact rhymes) while using a meter compatible with, rather than the same as, Akhmatova’s. While the initial idea of translating Poem Without a Hero was straight- forward enough, the first addition to the plan occurred almost imme- diately. Translating the Poem into English, I realized, implied the wish to vii Preface make it accessible to more than just the limited number of specialists in Russian literature and culture (most of whom, after all, would be able to read the work in the original). But the Poem is such a complex work, and so deeply rooted in the experience of Akhmatova’s generation, that a nonspecialist encountering it for the first time might well be disoriented. Accordingly, I decided that guidance was needed, in the form of a critical essay and a commentary. The critical essay would discuss the main themes and images, while the commentary would be keyed to individ- ual lines and would identify historical and literary allusions, give variant readings, point out problems of translation, and so on. I intended that every reader should read the critical essay all the way through; the com- mentary I regard as to some extent optional. Some readers might want to read through it simultaneously with the Poem; others may refer to it only when some individual line baffles them. To make it possible for a nonspecialist to read the commentary straight through, if so desired, I have tried to make it reasonably comprehensive without being overly detailed. For readers whose ambitions to learn more about Poem Without a Hero had not been sated by the commentary, I included two more sections, which I relegated to the status of appendixes to indicate their optional nature. The first is a translation of the earliest known edition of Poem, written in 1942, some two decades before the final version. The second is a selection of entries from the personal notebooks that Akhmatova kept during the last years of her life, from 1958 to 1966, reflecting her thoughts about the Poem in those years. Both of these sections theoretically could themselves have been the object of further exposition and commentary, but because they were included essentially as notes to the Poem, any further comment on them would be glosses on glosses—a form that I found a bit too Talmudic to pursue. This completed the first round of additions. The second round oc- curred when I began to think about Poem Without a Hero in the context of Akhmatova’s creative biography. Work on the Poem began in 1940, a year that Akhmatova would later speak of as her poetic zenith. Thus I turned to the other works written in that fruitful year in order to determine what recurring themes (if any) could be found, what ideas and emotions were dominant in Akhmatova’s artistic consciousness at that time. The year 1940 is associated with two other major works by Akhmatova in addition viii Preface to Poem Without a Hero: Requiem, parts of which were written earlier but which assumed its definitive form in 1940, and The Way of All the Earth. It soon became clear to me that these poems were united by the theme of memory, the danger of its loss over time, and the will to preserve it. Requiem grew out of the experience of the Stalinist terror, when many people close to Akhmatova, including her only son, were arrested. As a poem, it responds to this suffering with both a private lyric response and a public epic one. On a purely personal level, the poet-narrator strives to find a way to bear the burden of her constant awareness of her son’s ordeal. She is tempted to escape, to forget her pain, whether by simply numbing herself, emotionally distancing herself from a life that is at once agonizingly real and grotesquely unreal, or by the more dramatic means of death or madness. Ultimately, however, she finds the strength to take upon herself the role of witness to suffering and death, as she invokes the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, standing at the foot of the Cross. This personal act of witness gives rise to a public one, as the grieving mother recognizes her own pain in the face of every woman who lost a loved one to the Terror and accepts the responsibility to speak for all those who are too frightened or crushed in spirit to tell their own stories. The poet cannot save the victims; but through her conscious act of memory, through the creation of a poem that serves as a monument to them, she can prevent the second death that would occur if they were forgotten. Whereas Requiem seeks to ensure that the memory of the present (as seen from the poet’s vantage point in 1940) will be preserved in the future, The Way of All the Earth seeks to return from the world of the present to a past preserved in memory. Its central image is the holy city of Kitezh, which, according to an old Russian legend, escaped desecration at the hands of marauding infidels by miraculously vanishing from the earth. The narrator of The Way of All the Earth is described as a woman of Kitezh trying to find her way home to the now-lost city; on another level, she is clearly Akhmatova herself, trying to find a way back to her past, to her youth in the more innocent era before the First World War. But each past scene to which the poet-narrator returns has been frighteningly altered, as if the terrible events of the future—her present—had already cast their shadows before. In the world of the living, the world of time and change, what is and what has been cannot be disentangled; the clock cannot be turned back from the agonies of the present, there is no earthly ix Preface road that leads to Kitezh.
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