The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory

341 Pages·2004·1.09 MB·English

by  Anna Akhmatova

The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat

A N N A A K H M AT O VA
The Word That Causes
Death’s Defeat
Poems of Memory
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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.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
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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
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Preface
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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
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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
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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
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