TV REVIEW : ‘Fear and Muse’: Portrait of Russian Poet

What emerges from “Fear and the Muse: The Story of Anna Akhmatova” (at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28) is the portrait of a virtually fearless poet running the gauntlet of the 20th Century’s horrors, and surviving.

A creature of Russia’s pre-Bolshevik modernist cultural explosion, Akhmatova and her fellow St. Petersburg artists, the Acmeists, established real ties between critics and the public. Jill Janows’ elegantly constructed film details how those ties were violently torn.

Following in the long tradition of poets-as-rebels, young Anna defied her father, developing her poetic impulse while flinging herself into a bohemian lifestyle. The Russian Revolution arrived soon after her fame was firmly established, and trapped her between two eras--the Czarist epoch of privilege and the Bolshevik period of increasing suspicion of all artists.

For all of Akhmatova’s penetrating verse on human relations--for once, a film on a literary figure generously puts the work on display--she clearly could not read events and, before long, found herself silenced during Stalin’s rule by terror. The film never explains why Akhmatova never emigrated, though the question keeps coming back each time we hear from that great Russian emigre writer, Joseph Brodsky.

It gives full measure, though, to Akhmatova’s tragedy: her failed loves, her writing in clandestine isolation, her futile attempts to free her imprisoned son by writing pathetic, party-approved poetry. Her very personal style, anathema to Socialist realism, did re-emerge in “the thaw” of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Janows weaves a tapestry of voices (narrator Christopher Reeve, Claire Bloom reading the poet’s work and letters, and the comments of friends and scholars), archival footage and photos (Akhmatova appears angelic before the camera) and haunting montages of a St. Petersburg blanketed in snow. The film ends with a kind of triumph, as Russia’s children passionately study and read Akhmatova’s work.

The viewer is left to wonder whether there is a place in the United States today where children are feeling as much for the poems of Walt Whitman.