Shards of Russian History : MY HALF CENTURY: Selected Prose, By Anna Akhmatova edited by Ronald Meyer. (Ardis: $39.95; 439 pp.)

On the morning of May 13, 1934, Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam began to clean up the scattered books and papers left by the agents who had arrested Nadezhda’s husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, the night before. While some papers, including the incriminating poem about Stalin (“And every killing is a treat/for the broad-chested Ossete”) had already been smuggled out by friends and visitors, one pile still lay by the door. “Don’t touch it,” said Akhmatova. Nadezhda, trusting the instincts of her friend, left the papers on the floor. “Ah,” said the senior police agent, back for a surprise visit, “you still haven’t tidied up.”

This instinct for survival, what Nadezhda Mandelstam later called her “Russian powers of endurance,” kept Akhmatova alive through some of the cruelest decades known to Russian writers. In 1921, her husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, from whom she had been separated for three years, was arrested and executed. Her son Lev Gumilyov was arrested three times, exiled, and spent years of his life in prison for being her son. The great writers of the century, her friends, suffered and died under Stalin. The poet Marina Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941; Osip Mandelstam died en route to a labor camp in 1938. Akhmatova herself was “annihilated” in 1919, which meant that she could not publish; resurrected in 1939 by Stalin, only to be annihilated again in 1946 after several visits from Isaiah Berlin in 1945. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers with the enduring epithet: “half nun, half harlot.”

This resolution was not rescinded until 1988, when Akhmatova, dead for 22 years, was again rehabilitated, making available, for the first time, much of her prose; previously censored studies, essays, and sketches. Ardis Press, long a faithful friend of Russian literature, has now published the most complete collection of her prose in the volume “My Half Century: Selected Prose.”

This is not the relaxed, purgative activity that continental memoir-writing is supposed to be. She was, after all, a lifetime poet, telling Kornei Chukovsky in 1921: “I don’t know how to write prose.” She believed, as Emma Gershtein writes in the afterword, that “human memory works like a projector, illuminating individual moments, while leaving the rest in impenetrable darkness.” What you get is a bit of a difficult read, sustained by curiosity about Akhmatova, and admiration for her. If there is any doubt in your mind about this, or you falter along the way, simply turn to her 1914 collection of poems entitled “Rosary” and consider this quote: “Today I see you,” wrote Osip Mandelstam of Akhmatova in 1910, “a black angel in the snow,/and I cannot keep this secret to myself,/God’s mark is upon you. . . . “

While Ahkmatova’s notebooks contain partial outlines and plans for her memoirs, she did not live to complete them. She wrote that she modeled her effort, however, on the autobiographies of Pasternak (“Safe Conduct,” 1931) and Mandelstam (“Noise of Time,” 1922-23), both written in a certain fragmentary style. And fragments are appropriate memorials for lives lived in Russia in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, though Akhmatova describes the frustration of this style in a section called “Random Notes”: “I notice that what I’m writing isn’t quite right: I have almost ten subjects on two pages and everything is very inconsistent, as they like to put it nowadays.”

Indeed, the voice throughout the fragments, many of which were written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is an ornery old-lady voice. Like a real grande dame, Akhmatova repeats herself, tells stories in which she is admired by individuals and crowds, in which her beauty is mythologized, and in which her detractors are drawn and quartered with downright academic precision.

Writing her memoirs was also a historical burden. “I’m surrounded by the past and it is demanding something from me,” she wrote in 1957. What it was demanding of her, it seems, was the need to clarify a period in Russia’s literary history that was mercilessly and whimsically perverted by various regimes. Of course she sounds defensive! Of course she sounds petty! Who said what to whom in 1919 or 1945, random comments in journals could mean literal or figurative annihilation. Akhmatova labored, as Olga Carlisle writes in her memoir “Under a New Sky” (reviewed on Page 3), to correct the misperception spread internationally by the Stalin regime that Russia’s greatest poets (the ones they’d annihilated) had not been heard from because they had simply “lost their poetic voices in the twenties.”

The first two sections of the book, “Pages from a Diary,” and “My Half Century” are the most interesting. “Pages from a Diary” includes delightful memories from the author’s childhood, and it is in these passages that she is able to abandon herself to the smells of St. Petersburg’s staircases, or winters in Tsarskoe Selo, the northern town where she grew up, and whose most famous resident was none other than Pushkin. Born on June 11, 1889, Anna Gorenko took, as her literary name, the Tatar name of her maternal great-grandmother, a descendant of Genghis Khan: hence the resonant Anna Akhmatova.

And she was beautiful; angular, severe, with dark, deep-set eyes, a majestic manner and an ego for drama. But beautiful women, said Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, “eat a crazy salad with their meat,” and the flirtations, romance, and reshuffling that we associate with a bohemian lifestyle conspired with history to fragment Akhmatova’s life and memories. She “gave in,” as she put it, at age 21 to the young Symbolist poet Gumilyov, writing in 1907, “I swear by all that is holy to me that this unhappy man will be happy with me.” They were married in 1910.

The Symbolists, led by Blok, were dying off, and a new faction, led by Gumilyov and the poet Gorodetsky, sprung up to reject the vagueness of Symbolism. They formed, in 1912, the Poet’s Guild, and called themselves Acmeists, proclaiming the poetry of real experience. The most talented among them were Mandelstam, Gumilyov, and Akhmatova; a triumvirate that one detractor called “those Adams and that skinny Eve.” They argued and danced and rejected the old at a cabaret in St. Petersburg called the Stray Dog, where, as Akhmatova wrote in her poem of January, 1913, “We are all carousers and loose women . . . “

These days did not last long.

Akhmatova tries, in “Pages,” to set aright the misconceptions about Acmeism and Symbolism and her relationship to Gumilyov which dissolved in 1918 (the cover of one of her poetry collections apparently boasted that the author had been “divorced”!), but all this is done more clearly in Judith Hemschemeyer’s preface to the second edition, recently out in paperback, of “The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova” (Zephyr: $24.95). In these years, from 1912 to 1922, Akhmatova published five collections of poetry, and “Pages” also contains brief descriptions of their birth and passage through history.

After 1917, debates over Acmeism and Symbolism and evenings at the Stray Dog seem splendid indeed. The second section of “My Half Century” is composed of portraits of writers and friends, many captured by Akhmatova as they are overwhelmed and suffocated by the Revolution. The portraits of Modigliani (“He never spoke about anything mundane”) and Mandelstam (“Who can show us the source of this divine new harmony, which we call the poetry of Osip Mandelstam?”) are the most affectionate and readable. The others, of Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, etc., are punctuated with brief illuminations from Akhmatova’s memory-projector.

Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966. It is clear that in her last years she wanted not only to correct impressions about her life and times but also to breathe again. The trouble for survivors is that they have survived. Akhmatova did not learn of Gumilyov’s execution on Aug. 25, 1921, until a week after it had occurred. But on the night of Aug. 27 she wrote a poem called “Terror”: “Terror, fingering things in the dark,/leads the moonbeam to an axe./Behind the wall there’s an ominous knock/What’s there, a ghost, a thief, rats?. . . . I press the smooth cross to my heart:/God, restore peace to my soul.”

In this same year, far away, another group of literary friends got depressed, engaged in social quarrels; Virginia Woolf published “To the Lighthouse.” Leonard Woolf published “Hunting the Highbrow.” Akhmatova clutched a cross in her bed at night as her friends’ lives were fragmented and scattered to the wind; then rearranged for international consumption. They learned strange skills like how to recognize an agent, and how to write under censorship. “I can’t sing,” she wrote in “Poem Without a Hero,” “In the midst of this horror.” But sing she did.

Perhaps the most beautiful passage in “My Half Century” comes in “Pages from a Diary”:

And if it was destined that poetry should flourish in the twentieth century, namely in my Homeland, I will be so bold as to say that I have always been a cheerful and trustworthy witness . . . . And. . I am certain that even now we do not truly know what a magical chor us of poets we possess, that the Russian language is young and supple, that we have only recently begun to write poetry, and that we love and believe in it. --1962

Also for your Akhmatova library:

“The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova” translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder (Zephyr: $24.95, paper) .

“Remembering Anna Akhmatova” by Anatoly Nayman with an introduction by Joseph Brodsky (Holt: $29.95, cloth) .

For the finest portrait of this period in Russian literature you must go to the library: “Hope Against Hope” and “Hope Abandoned” by Nadezhda Mandelstam (Atheneum: 1970 and 1974). Both are out of print.