Our constant awareness of echoes and mirror-images is enhanced—to the Russian ear at least—by innumerable echoes of earlier poets, especially Pushkin and Blok himself. The cultural interpenetration is so dense and complete that it is almost as if the poem is being written, not by an individual, but by a line of poets, a tradition. And this, of course, is a deliberate and profound contradiction of Soviet theology, which dismisses the pre-Revolutionary past as worthless.
Images of darkness, play-acting and illusion dominate Part One—phantoms, midnight, candles, dreams, and above all, masks and mirrors. This world of 1913 is glamorous and beautiful, frivolous and touched with corruption and a death which no-one believes in. Akhmatova loves this world, and scorns it. At the poem’s end, after the whole marvellously created shadow world has been exorcised, the terrible truth breaks free: flying east towards Tashkent, Akhmatova sees below her that endless road along which her son, and millions of others, have been driven to the labour camps. Such a tragic moment of revelation and reality exceeds all that art can do; and through her art Akhmatova shares it all with us—agony, recognition, catharsis . . . ‘And that road was long—long—long, amidst the/Solemn and crystal/Stillness/Of Siberia’s earth.’ At this climax, the poem’s predominant major-minor progression is, in the deepest sense, reversed, and we are exalted, as we are at the end of King Lear. We feel the unmistakable presence of moral greatness as well as great art—or rather, the moral greatness is an essential condition of the artistic greatness, of the simplicity and majesty of the style.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s recent memoir, Hope Abandoned, amply and movingly confirms this impression of Akhmatova. The unflinchingly honest strokes of Nadezhda’s pen create a portrait of a woman who, besides her genius, had gifts of life-enriching gaiety and loyalty, and a moral strength which suffering only made stronger. Mandelstam himself foresaw this—almost incredibly—even before the Revolution, when he wrote: ‘I would say that she is now no ordinary woman; of her it can truly be said that she is “dressed poorly, but of grand mien”. The voice of renunciation grows stronger all the time in her verse, and at the moment her poetry bids fair to become a symbol of Russia’s grandeur.’ His prophecy came true, in more terrible circumstances than he imagined or could have imagined.
(1976)
‘Who can refuse to live his own life?’ Akhmatova once remarked in answer to some expression of sympathy. Her refusal not to live her life made of her one of those few people who have given dignity and meaning to our terrible century, and through whom and for whom it will be remembered. In relation to her, the politicians, the bureaucrats, the State torturers, will suffer the same fate that, in Akhmatova’s words, overtook Pushkin’s autocratic contemporaries: ‘The whole epoch, little by little . . . began to be called the time of Pushkin. All the . . . high-ranking members of the Court, ministers, generals and non-generals, began to be called Pushkin’s contemporaries and then simply retired to rest in card indexes and lists of names (with garbled dates of birth and death) in studies of his work. . . . People say now about the splendid palaces and estates that belonged to them: Pushkin was here, or Pushkin was never here. All the rest is of no interest to them.’
Pushkin was the closest of the friends she did not meet even once in her life. He helped her to survive the 1920s and 30s, the first of Akhmatova’s long periods of isolation and persecution. Dante, too, was close. And there were friends whom she could meet, including Mandelstam and Pasternak, whose unbreakable integrity supported her own. But no-one could have helped, through thirty years of persecution, war, and persecution, if she had not herself been one of the rare incorruptible spirits.
Her incorruptibility as a person is closely linked to her most fundamental characteristic as a poet: fidelity to things as they are, to ‘the clear, familiar, material world’. It was Mandelstam who pointed out that the roots of her poetry are in Russian prose fiction. It is a surprising truth, in view of the supreme musical quality of her verse; but she has the novelist’s concern for tangible realities, events in place and time. The ‘unbearably white . . . blind on the white window’ of the first lyric in the present selection is unmistakably real; the last, from half-a-century later, her farewell to the earth, sets her predicted death firmly and precisely in ‘that day in Moscow’, so that her death seems no more important than the city in which it will take place. In the Russian, the precision is still more emphatic and tangible: ‘tot moskovskii den’—‘that Muscovite day’. In all her life’s work, her fusion with ordinary unbetrayable existence is so complete that only the word ‘modest’ can express it truthfully. When she tells us (In 1940), ‘But I warn you,/I am living for the last time’, the words unconsciously define her greatness: her total allegiance to the life she was in. She did not make poetry out of the quarrel with herself (in Yeats’s phrase for the genesis of poetry). Her poetry seems rather to be a transparent medium through which life streams.
Not that Akhmatova was a simple woman. In many ways she was as complex as Tolstoy. She could reverse her images again and again—a woman of mirrors. ‘She was essentially a pagan,’ writes Nadezhda Mandelstam: like the young heroine of By the Sea Shore who runs barefoot on the shore of the Black Sea; but she was also an unswerving, lifelong Christian. She was one of the languid amoral beauties of St Petersburg’s Silver Age; and she was the ‘fierce and passionate friend who stood by M. with unshakeable loyalty, his ally against the savage world in which we spent our lives, a stern, unyielding abbess ready to go to the stake for her faith’ (N. Mandelstam: Hope Abandoned). She was sensual and spiritual, giving rise to the caricature that she was half-nun, half-whore, an early Soviet slander dredged up again in 1946, at the start of her second period of ostracism and persecution. Akhmatova was not alone in believing that she had witch-like powers, capable of causing great hurt to people without consciously intending to; she also knew, quite simply, that she carried, in a brutal age, a burden of goodness. This is the Akhmatova who, in a friend’s words, could not bear to see another person’s suffering, though she bore her own without complaint.
The air of sadness and melancholy in her portraits was a true part of her, yet we have Nadezhda Mandelstam’s testimony that she was ‘a wonderful, madcap woman, poet and friend . . . Hordes of women and battalions of men of the most widely differing ages can testify to her great gift for friendship, to a love of mischief which never deserted her even in her declining years, to the way in which, sitting at table with vodka and zakuski, she could be so funny that everybody fell off their chairs from laughter.’ Her incomparable gift for friendship, and her difficulties in coping with love, are wryly suggested in the lines ‘other women’s/Husbands’ sincerest/Friend, disconsolate/Widow of many . . .’ (That’s how I am . . .) Her love for her son is made abundantly clear in the anguish of Requiem, her great sequence written during his imprisonment in the late 30s; yet she found the practicalities of motherhood beyond her.
In Akhmatova all the contraries fuse, in the same wonderful way that her genetic proneness to T.B. was controlled, she said, by the fact that she also suffered from Graves’ disease, which holds T.B. in check. The contraries have no effect on her wholeness, but they give it a rich mysterious fluid life, resembling one of her favourite images, the willow. They help to give to her poetry a quality that John Bayley has noted, an ‘unconsciousness’, elegance and sophistication joined with ‘elemental force, utterance haunted and Delphic . . . and a cunning which is chétif, or, as the Russians say, zloi.’*