Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

Born in Odessa, Akhmatova spent her first sixteen years at the imperial summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg. She went to law school in Kiev, and married the poet-critic Nikolai Gumilev in 1910. In Paris in 1911, the unknown painter Modigliani did sixteen portrait drawings of her. Her second book of poems, Rosary (1914), brought her fame. At this time, along with her husband and the poet Osip Mandelstamm, she became associated with Acmeism, a movement which strove for clarity after the vagueness of the then-fashionable symbolism. She was divorced in 1918. Three years later Gumilev was executed. After the publication of Anno Domini (1922), for the next eighteen years she was silenced as a poet - as were Pasternak and many of her contemporaries. She earned her living as a translator. She was living with the Mandelstamm family in 1934 when Osip Mandelstamm was arrested, to disappear in the camps, sharing the same fate as Isaac Babel. During the war, she was evacuated to Tashkent, but the political thaw permitted her to become a member of the Writer's Union and publish her own poems. Then in 1946 she was again bitterly attacked, expelled from the Union, and her son arrested. After Stalin's death she was rehabilitated and her son was released. During her last years her work again began to appear in periodicals and she was restored to membership in the Writer's Union. In 1965 she was given an honorary degree by Oxford University. Most of her life she lived in Leningrad, and several poets, particularly Joseph Brodsky, were proteges within her circle. With Pasternak shed was revered for her literary and spiritual integrity and courage. Her long poem "Requiem" combines personal sensibility and national consciousness in a great, yet controlled, lyrical statement.

Lot's Wife

The just man followed then his angel guide
Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;
But a wild grief in his wife's bosom cried,
Look back, it is not too late for a last sight

Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
Where once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
And the tall house with empty windows where
You loved your husband and your babes were born.

She turned, and looking on the bitter view
Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;
Into transparent salt her body grew,
And her quick feet were rooted in the plain.

Who would waste tears upon her? Is she not
The least of our losses, this unhappy wife?
Yet in my heart she will not be forgot
Who, for a single glance, gave up her life.

-----------

He loved three things in life:
singing at vespers, white peacocks,
and worn-out maps of America.
He did not love tea with raspberries,
or feminine hysteria.
... and I was his wife.

--------------------

Tashkent Breaks into Blossom

As if somebody ordered it
the city suddenly became bright --
it came into every court
in a white, light apparition.
Their breathing is more understandable than words,
in the burning blue sky
their reflection is doomed
to lie at the bottom of the ditch.
I will remember the roof of stars
in the radiance of eternal glory,
and the small rolls of bread
in the young hands
of dark-haired mothers.

-------------------------

Your lynx-eyes, Asia,
Spy on my discontent;
they lure into the light
my buried self,
something the silence spawned,
no more to be endured
than the noon sun in Termez.
Pre-memory floods the mind
like molten lava on the sands ...
as if I were drinking my own tears
from the cupped palms of a stranger's hands.

-------------------------------

Requiem 1935-1940

No, not under the vault of another sky,
not under the shelter of other wings.
I was with my people then,
there where my people were doomed to be.

Instead of a Foreward

During the terrible years of Yezhovshchina* I spent seventeen
months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone
recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was
standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name,
came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my
ear - (we all spoke in whispers there):

"Can you describe this?"

I said, "I can!"

Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once
been her face.

1 April 1957
Leningrad

*Yezhovshchina: Yezhov was head of Stalin's secret police in the late 1930s and was himself purged.

Introduction

It was a time when only the dead
smiled, happy in their peace.
And Leningrad dangled like a useless pendant
at the side of its prisons.
A time when, tortured out of their minds,
the convicted walked in regiments,
and the steam whistles sang
their short parting song.
Stars of death stood over us,
and innocent Russia squirmed
under the bloody boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.

1.*

They took you away at dawn,
I walked after you as though you were being borne out,
the children were crying in the dark room,
the candle swam by the ikon-stand.
The cold of the ikon on your lips.
Death sweat on your brow ... Do not forget!
I will howl by the Kremlin towers
like the wives of the Streltsy.*

*This poem refers to the arrest of N.N. Punin, Anna's closest friend.
The Streltsy were a body of soldiers organized about 1550 by Ivan the Terrible. Their suppression enabled Peter I to establish a regular army. In 1698 Peter defeated them outside Moscow, executed 800 of them and disbanded the others.

2.

The quiet Don flows quietly,
the yellow moon goes into the house,

goes in with its cap askew,
the yellow moon sees the shadow.

This woman is sick,
this woman is alone,

husband in the grave, son in the prison,
pray for me.

3.

No, this is not me - someone else suffers.
I couldn't stand this: let black drapes
cover what happened,
and let them take away the street lights ...

Night.

4.

If I could show you, the mocker,
everybody's favourite,
happy sinner of Tsarskoe Selo,
how your life will turn out:
you will stand at Kresty*
three hundredth in the line with your prison parcel,
and set fire to the new year ice
with your hot tears.
There the prison poplar sways,
silence -- and how many
innocent lives are ending there ...

*Kresty: a prison built on the Vyborg side of Leningrad in 1893. It literally means 'crosses' (referring to the layout of the buildings) and the additional sense of 'standing before the cross' should be borne in mind.

5.

For seventeen months I have been screaming,
calling you home.
I flung myself at the executioner's feet.
You are my son and my terror.
Everything is confused for ever,
and I can no longer tell
beast from man,
and how long I must wait for the execution.
Only the dusty flowers,
the clank of censers, and tracks
leading from somewhere to nowhere.
An enormous star
looks me straight in the eye
and threatens swift destruction.

6.

Weightless weeks fly by,
I will never grasp what happened.
How the white nights looked
at you, my son, in prison,
how they look again
with the burning eye of the hawk,
they speak of your tall cross,
they speak of death.

7.

Verdict

The stone wall fell
on my still living breast.
Never mind, I was prepared,
somehow I'll come to terms with it.

Today I have much work to do:
I must finally kill my memory,
I must, so my soul can turn to stone,
I must learn to live again.

Or else... The hot summer rustle,
like holiday time outside my window.
I have felt this coming for a long time,
this bright day and the empty house.

Summer 1939

8.

To Death

You will come anyway - so why not now?
I am waiting for you - it's very difficult for me.
I have put out the light and opened the door
to you, so simple and wonderful.
Assume any shape you like,
burst in as a poison gas shell,
or creep up like a burglar with a heavy weight,
or poison me with typhus vapours.
Or come with a denunciation thought up by you
and known ad nauseam to everyone,
so that I may see over the blue cap*
the janitor's fear-whitened face.
I don't care now. The Yenisey rolls on*
the Pole star shines.
And the blue lustre of loving eyes
conceals the final horror.

19 August 1939

*'blue cap' and 'janitor' - arrested
*'Yenisey' river in Siberia where many of the concentration camps were.

9.

Already madness has covered
half my soul with its wing,
and gives me strong liquor to drink,
and lures me to the black valley.

I realized that I must
hand victory to it,
as I listened to my delirium,
already alien to me.

It will not allow me to take
anything away with me
(however I beseech it,
however I pester it with prayer):

not the terrible eyes of my son,
the rock-like suffering,
not the day when the storm came,
not the prison visiting hour,

nor the sweet coolness of hands,
nor the uproar of the lime trees' shadows,
nor the distant, light sound -
the comfort of last words.

4 May 1940

10.

Crucifixion

"Weep not for Me, Mother,
in the grave I have life."

I.

The choir of angels glorified the great hour,
the heavens melted in flames.
He said to His Father: "Why hast Thou forsaken me?"
and to His Mother: "Oh, weep not for Me..."

II.

Mary Magdalene smote her breast and wept,
the disciple whom He loved tuned to stone,
but where the Mother stood in silence
nobody even dared look.

1940-43

Epilogue
I.

I found out how faces droop,
how terror looks out from under the eyelids,
how suffering carves on cheeks
hard pages of cuneiform,
how curls ash-blond and black
turn silver overnight,
a smile fades on submissive lips,
fear trembles in a dry laugh.
I pray not for myself alone,
but for everyone who stood with me,
in the cruel cold, in the July heat,
under the blind, red wall.