The Metamorphosis of Voice and Being

At 17, bursting with high spirits, black misery and sheer unfledged appetite, Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet-to-be, wrote a series of confiding letters to her brother-in-law, the only artistic spirit in her philistine and troubled family. Innocently self-centered, each sentence was a blizzard of “I’s” and “me’s.” To this sheltered child, “I” was a magic weapon to subdue the great world she could not wait to enter.

For a decade or so, despite the rigors of war and revolution, the world seemed to have been subdued. Russian readers were dazzled by Akhmatova’s young poetry, also by her dark beauty and dramatic ways. Then, around 1920, the world began to hit back and went on hitting for nearly 40 years.

The damage: two husbands and three great fellow poets executed or otherwise brought to their deaths, Akhmatova’s cherished son imprisoned, her artistic and personal world destroyed, and her own work denounced and silenced--with brief intervals of indulgence by a Stalin whose capricious forbearance was as monstrous as his cruelty.

“I” was no longer employable. To think of it was to think of the things done to it.

In 1925, after a Central Committee ban, Akhmatova virtually stopped writing poetry. When she resumed, privately, 10 years later, “my handwriting had changed and my voice sounded differently.” Over the next quarter of a century, she would produce the searing, denunciatory “Requiem” and the visionary epic “Poem Without a Hero.” Her “I” did not so much disappear as become part of a larger, desolate vision; it was no longer a weapon but a cemetery.

All her life she had felt a duty to write a memoir as Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, her friends and peers, had done. She began one just after World War II toward the end of a wartime period of official tolerance. In 1946, she was obliged to burn it after the police, about to arrest her son for the third time, searched her room. “Its only reader turned out to be the investigator,” she wrote.

*

From the mid-1950s and almost to the time of her death in 1966, she made new autobiographical attempts. (After Stalin died, her position improved to the point at which she was publicly honored, though not free to publish the great work of her old age.) It was too late; her vision, turning both inward and outward, no longer saw herself. Memory had given way to prophecy; what was left were notes and glimpses.

These glimpses form a part of “My Half Century,” a collection assembled by Ronald Meyer from Russian archives and studies that have become available since the glasnost period. The collection also includes more finished work, notably a series of studies of Pushkin, written during her period of poetic silence, and luminous recollections of Mandelstam, the poet Alexander Blok and the painter Amedeo Modigliani, as well as a number of briefer sketches and a collection of letters.

The bits of autobiography, collected under the title “Pages of a Diary,” suffer from their fragmentary condition. They are ice shards, hacked in Akhmatova’s attempt to get at a frozen self. But many are precious. Wondering, at one point, whether she had a happy childhood, she is unable to answer: too much ruin lay in between. The inability is poignant:

“Children have nothing with which to compare and they simply do not know whether they are happy or not.”

There are vivid snapshots of pre-World War I St. Petersburg in winter:

“Smoke over the rooftops . . . the Petersburg fires during bitter frosts. The peal of bells that would deafen the city with their sound. The drum roll that always made one think of an execution. The sleds that collided with all their might against the curbstones of the humpbacked bridges, which now have nearly lost their humpbackedness . . . the horse’s muzzle, frozen with icicles, almost touching your shoulder.”

*

There is a glimpse of the bitter time when she stopped writing poems, but it was muteness, not surrender. “I will say that I never fled or skulked away from poetry, although repeated and powerful blows of the oars on my numbed hands, which clung to the side of the boat, were an indication that I should let myself sink to the bottom.”

There are detailed recollections of the literary wars of the early 1900s. Her long enforced silence meant that she had to endure 30 years of twisted versions of her life and work from official writers and, perhaps more painful, the honest ignorance of writers abroad. For many years, for example, they were not aware that she was more than the brilliant young poet, that she had become the profound and tragic old one.

Akhmatova’s Pushkin studies are not only an example of scholarly inquiry but take on a disquieting autobiographical life of their own. Her understanding of what it meant to Pushkin to be adulated by society and the czar’s court for his youthful poems, and then resented and snubbed for his troubling mature work--Eugene Onegin, for example--has a resonance that goes far beyond the academic.

*

Some of the portraits of her fellow artists are rich and moving. There is her recollection of Alexander Blok, an older, established poet whose Symbolist style was very different from the harsher lyricism of Akhmatova’s generation. She revered his work, nonetheless, and there is a whiff of mutual attraction, although she denies convincingly that it was ever an affair.

When, young and relatively unknown, she worries about following Blok at a poetry reading, his rejoinder displays iron as well as tenderness: “Anna Andreyevna, we are not tenors.”

There is a lovely recollection of Amedeo Modigliani, whom she met during a youthful stay in Paris, before either was famous. It was, she writes, “the prehistory of both our lives--his very short, mine very long. The breath of art had not yet charred, not yet transformed our two existences.” Still uncharred--and what a charring hers would be--they would sit in the rain in the Luxembourg Gardens, sheltering under his black umbrella and reciting Verlaine.

The richest portrait is that of her friend and closest poetical comrade, Osip Mandelstam. She recalls him as a young dandy in pre-revolution St. Petersburg “with a lily of the valley in his lapel, his head thrown way back, with fiery eyes and lashes that reached almost halfway down his cheeks.” Also a little gray dust heap on his left shoulder, testifying to his incompetence at grandly tapping his cigarette ash behind him.

*

She evokes the lively contentiousness at the poet’s cafe, the Stray Dog, where Mandelstam deflates a flowery Mayakovsky recital: “Mayakovsky, stop reciting poems. You’re not a Romanian orchestra.”

The portrait turns darker. In the 30s, Mandelstam’s friends try, with initial success and ultimate failure, to save him from Stalin’s punishment. Arrested, released, rearrested and sent to a labor camp, he dies on the way. The starkest image of the times comes in the desolate words of Nadezhda Mandelstam, when she is trying to find out her husband’s fate: “I won’t rest until I know he is dead.”

Pity the country that requires heroes, someone said. Akhmatova’s life, her poetry, and the pieces in this collection suggest rephrasing. Pity the country that requires poets. Russia desperately required them during the dark years. She got them, and history is torn between its pity and its gratitude.