Anna Akhmatova

A Russian genius

“Poetry is respected only in this country,’’ wrote Osip Mandelstam, “people are killed for it. There’s no place where more people are killed for it.’’ In modern America, where poetry struggles even to retain its place in the school curriculum, it is singularly instructive to hear such voices from Soviet Russia. Especially at a time when once again Russian tyranny has reared its head and brough death, destruction and misery to thousands - including a brave Ukrainian poet (and novelist), Victoria Amelina, who lost her life to a missile strike on a shopping center in Kramatorsk. In a new era when group of young Russian writers are still kowtowing to Putin and celebrating the war in so-called Z-Poetry, we need to be reminded that throughout the Soviet era poets were leading voices of resistance. Where in today’s Russia is a Mandelstam or a Joseph Brodsky? Are they silenced, exiled, or cunningly writing poems beyond the visibility of the tyrannical state regime?

Not knowing the answer to that question, the killing of Victora Amelina during the Ukraine war sent me not only to her work, but also back to Anna Akhmatova, one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, who still, to my mind, remains insufficiently known in the English-speaking world. This post is a revisiting and expansion of something I wrote about her nearly twenty years ago on the publication of the best possible English-language introduction to her life and work, a beautifully produced volume edited by the scholar Nancy K. Anderson under the title The Word that causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory, a book that offers a concise and compelling biography, elegant and accessible translations of Akhmatova’s three most significant long poems, and a highly informative critical commentary.

“She was not born Anna Akhmatova,” Anderson reminds us, “She came into the world on June 11, 1889, as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, the daughter of a naval officer.’’ When Anna was 17, it came to her father’s attention that she had the unladylike ambition of becoming a poet. He warned her not to bring shame to his name; she replied that she didn’t need his name, “and promptly disowned the entire masculine side of her lineage by choosing as her literary name the maiden name of her maternal grandmother’’.

As Anderson says, this was a creative choice as well as a splendidly rebellious one. Anna Gorenko somehow lacks the resonance of Anna Akhmatova, a name that her contemporary Marina Tsvetayeva compared to “a great sigh / Falling into a depth without name’’. Lovers and husbands would follow father in telling Anna what to do, but she would carry on going her own way.

She was a young woman of extraordinary beauty and charisma. A poet called Nikolai Gumilyov, who had first met her when she was out shopping for Christmas tree ornaments as a 14-year-old girl, courted her for six years – with several suicide attempts along the way – before she finally agreed to marry him. They had a tempestuous open marriage and hung out at a Petersburg cafe called the Stray Dog where, together with Mandelstam, they developed a new school of poetry called Acmeism.

Acmeism offered a finely honed alternative to the noisier new school of the time, Futurism, a movement associated with the flamboyant Vladimir Mayakovsky, who is nicely described by Anderson as “a sort of Russian anticipation of the Beat poets’’.

Akhmatova’s peculiar gift was to combine two diametrically opposed styles in the same poet: she is at once understated and passionate, classical and romantic, matter-of-fact and radiant. To find a comparison from English poetry of the same vintage, you would have to imagine some strange alchemical combination of hot-blooded D. H. Lawrence and Edward Thomas, quietest of the war poets.

Akhmatova is without English peer not only for style but also for subject-matter: she was a major poet of both world wars, of the Bolshevik revolution and the end of Tsarist Russia, of the civil war and above all of Stalin’s terror. In August 1921 she looked at a copy of Pravda posted on the wall of a railway station. It announced that 61 counter-revolutionaries had been summarily executed. Among them was her estranged first husband Gumilyov. “A garment of new grief I made, I sewed it for my love. / Oh Russian earth, it loves the taste, it loves the taste of blood.’’

Her own poems were denounced as reactionary. The Soviet party line was that her work represented a hangover from the era of Tsarist elitism; she failed to address the proletariat, only concerning herself with free love and religion. Half-nun and half-whore, she was born too late and had failed to die in time.

As Stalin’s grip tightened, her friend and fellow-poet Mandelstam spoke out. She was in his apartment when the knock came at midnight. Mandelstam had composed – but sensibly not written down – some verses about Stalin himself: “His cockroach whispers leer / And his boot tops gleam... And every killing is a treat / For the broad-chested Ossete.’’ He would eventually die in a transit camp.

Akhmatova’s son was arrested by the NKVD for, among other supposed counter-revolutionary activities, reciting this poem. Anna interceded with Stalin on his behalf and gained a temporary reprieve, but the boy was re-arrested and eventually sent to the gulag. Anna spent a year and a half on the “prison lines’’, the queues of wives and mothers waiting for news of their loved ones.

This was the experience that inspired her greatest poem sequence Requiem – included in the Anderson volume. Again, it was a poem too dangerous to be written down. Instead it was learned by heart and only committed to print during the thaw of the Khrushchev years.

Akhmatova went on to experience the siege of Leningrad. Her powerful and enigmatic Poem without a Hero – published posthumously and fully translated in the Anderson volume – grew from this wartime trauma. It was then in 1945 that she had her famous meeting with Isaiah Berlin, whom she called “the guest from the future.” Her own future was mixed: a period of post-war poetic stagnation, a campaign to get her son released from his ten-year sentence in a Siberian prison camp, and at last an element of international recognition and internal rehabilitation. Then, shortly before her death in 1966, publication of her final long poem, The Way of all the Earth (which completes the triptych of major works in Anderson’s book). Her sorrowful words live on in the darkness of our time: “What’s left of old Europe, / Is only a scrap, / In its smoke-shrouded cities / Fire and death reign …” But at the end, there is a glimmer of the hope for peace that the art of poetry has the unique power to put into words. Akhmatova writes of how she

Journeys alone,

Without brother, or friend,

Or the man I loved first,

Bearing only a pine branch

And one sunlit verse

Dropped by a beggar

And picked up by me …

In my last dwelling place

May I find peace.

Akhmatova in 1922, portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (public domain)