SOURCE: "The Death of the Book à la russe: The Acmeists Under Stalin," in Slavic Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 125-35.

[In the following essay, Cavanagh discusses how Akhmatova and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandel'shtam refused to be silenced by Stalinist oppression.]

In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida apocalyptically proclaims what he calls "the death of the book," the death, that is, of the self-contained, organically unified, self-explanatory text. The postmodern age, he continues, has replaced the now defunct book with the notions of "writing" (écriture) and of a "text" that undermines or explodes any metaphorical bindings that might attempt to confine it within the safely "logocentric" limits of a single, self-sufficient volume. "The destruction of the book, as it is now underway in all domains" is a "necessary violence," Derrida claims; and the rhetorical violence with which he marks the unnatural death of the book finds its counterparts in the famous proclamations of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, whose respective essays "What is an Author" (1969) and "The Death of the Author" (1968) commemorate the passing of the autonomous, individual creators of the objects known in less enlightened ages as "books." "[The work] now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author," Foucault announces, and his phrase—indeed, all the phrases I've cited—are bound to give the Slavist pause, not least because such metaphors have had, in recent Russian history, an uncomfortable habit of realizing themselves as they pass from theory into practice.¹

"There are some countries where men kiss women's hands, and others where they only say 'I kiss your hand.' There are countries where Marxist theory is answered by Leninist practice, and where the madness of the brave, the martyr's stake, and the poet's Golgotha are not just figurative expressions." Roman Jakobson's observation dates from 1931; it is peculiarly apt, though, in the postmodern philosophical context in which Barthes, Foucault and Derrida operate. All three theorists developed their concepts in an environment in which men "only say 'I kiss your hand,'" in which, that is to say, the literal implications of "the death of the author" remain unactivated. They deal explicitly with the development of "literature," the "author" and the "book" in western, "bourgeois capitalist" civilization. The notion of the author, and the concept of the autonomous human subject that underlies it, are "the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology," Barthes explains, and "the image of literature" in bourgeois culture is, as a consequence, "tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions."²

What happens, though, when an actual tyrant "tyrannically centers" his attention on the author's person, life and passions? I cannot enter here into all the many ways in which the development of Russian "literature as institution" diverges from its counterparts in the west.³ The student of Stalinist-era writing, though, is uneasily aware of the cultural specificity of Barthes', Derrida's and Foucault's dead authors and books. All the world's a text, these theorists proclaim; and within this textual kingdom, as Derrida says, "the 'literal' meaning of writing [is] metaphoricity itself."⁴ All three theorists are provocateurs or, as Allan Megill puts it, responsive or "reactive" thinkers who seek "to attack received ideas, to demolish previous platitudes."⁵ They are practitioners of what their great precursor Friedrich Nietzsche calls "the magic of the extreme."⁶ Their dead authors and books trace their lineage back to the God whose death Nietzsche celebrates in The Gay Science (1887), and, like Nietzsche, they require a bland backdrop, middle-of-the-road, middle-class, complacent, commonsensical, for their extreme pronouncements to have the desired effect. Like Nietzsche, they demand an audience "made up of us folks here—living in the 'ordinary' world, earning money, raising families, catching buses, experiencing pleasure/leisure of various sorts, and undergoing the vagaries of nature."⁷ That is to say, they require a context in which texts are not responsible for the actual deaths of their creators, in which novels may metaphorically bomb in the marketplace or die, in filmed form, at the box office, but are not literally destroyed by anxious writers in their quest for self-preservation or by a state determined to maintain absolute control over its master script of past and present alike. "The twentieth century has given us a most simple touchstone for reality: physical pain," Czeslaw Milosz comments; one might extend his thought and say that the true test of any literary theory must be a dead body.⁸ The dead authors and books of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida can retain their purely metaphorical status only in a society that has long since lost the habit of literally destroying writers and texts for their verbal crimes against the state. If the literal meaning, in other words, of phrases like "the death of the author" or "of the book" is the first meaning that comes to mind, as it does for the Slavist, it undermines the very core of these theorists' arguments; it undoes our capacity to conceive of language as mere metaphoricity or of the world as pure interpretation.

The "author" was born, Foucault remarks, "only when [he] became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse is considered transgressive … an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous."⁹ This also describes exactly the kind of situation in which the real-life author (not the "author" in quotation marks) may be called upon to die for his or her transgressive verbal actions, and this is the sort of culture in which Osip Mandel'shtam (1891–1938) and Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) found themselves living and writing during the period of so-called "high Stalinism," that is, from the early 1930s until the outbreak of World War II and the nazi assault on the Soviet Union. "If they"re killing people for poetry," Nadezhda Mandel'shtam recalls her husband saying during their years of exile in the 1930s, "that means they honor and esteem it, they fear it … that means poetry is power."¹⁰ What I want to turn to now are the singular poetics and forms of poetic power that Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova derive from writing in a society that paid poets the dubious compliment of taking their persons and their texts with the utmost seriousness.

In her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam speaks of writing in the "pre-Gutenberg era" of Russian literature,¹¹ and her phrase suggests the nature of the "death of the book" as it took shape in Stalinist Russia. By the early 1930s, both Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam had undergone what Akhmatova calls a "civic" or "civil" "death" (grazhdanskaia smert'—a more literal translation might read "death as a citizen").¹² They became official non-persons, practitioners of a suspect genre, the lyric, and adherents of an outmoded, "pastist" poetic philosophy, acmeism. ("It does not make new poets of you to write about the philosophy of life of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists," Trotskii had warned early on.¹³) Both writers were virtually barred from print. As literature and the arts were transformed into handmaidens of the state, only those writers willing to contribute to what Mandel'shtam calls "the book of Stalin" (stalinskaia kniga), the larger text of Soviet letters and life then being scripted by the master artist, Stalin himself, had access to the paper, printers and presses that would guarantee their works a public, "civic" life.¹⁴

Their poetry continued to live, however, a furtive, underground existence as it was written on scraps of paper and hidden, or circulated in manuscript among friends, or read aloud and hastily memorized. Such a situation would hardly seem conducive to the cultivation of the kind of poetic power Mandel'shtam celebrates in his remarks to his wife. Yet it is precisely at the time that the final nails were being driven into Mandel'shtam's and Akhmatova's civic coffins, the time of the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) and the official birth of socialist realism (1932), that Mandel'shtam pronounces his own social command (sotsial'nyi zakaz) for himself and his fellow acmeist. "Now we must write civic verse (Teper' stikhi dolzhny byt' grazhdanskimi)," Akhmatova recalls him announcing in 1933¹⁵; and the ironies of his proclamation are manifold. In the first place, he and Akhmatova had been barred from public life precisely for their failure to write civic poetry, or at least the kind of civic poetry the regime required. They were considered lyric poets par excellence, famed or defamed as the composers of what Soviet critics called "chamber poetry."¹⁶ As such, they were entirely unwelcome in a state that demanded, with increasing insistence, only triumphal marches and collective hymns to accompany the nation's uninterrupted progress towards a glorious future. The dweller in what Mandel'shtam calls "the accidental, personal and catastrophic" realm of the lyric could claim no civil rights in a state dedicated to the eradication of all that is private, personal and unplanned.¹⁷ According to the new work plan for poetry, poets could speak for and to the people only by renouncing their lyric selves as they "dissolve in the official hymn," in Akhmatova's phrase.¹⁸

Under the Soviet regime, Boris Eikhenbaum notes, "the lyric 'I' became almost taboo."¹⁹ How could practitioners of a forbidden genre, non-citizens barred from public discourse, hope to speak for and to the larger audience that a truly "civic poet" requires? For Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam do indeed produce their most ambitious, audaciously "civic" poetry precisely at the height of Stalin's terror—I have in mind Mandel'shtam's great sequence of Verses on the Unknown Soldier (Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate, 1937) and Akhmatova's magnificent Requiem (Rekviem, 1935–1940). Mandel'shtam provides us with a tacit answer to this question by way of the example that he gave Akhmatova of genuine "civic" writing. He followed his social command—"Now we must write civic verse"—with a recitation that was, in effect, his declaration of a sui generis form of civil war (grazhdanskaia voina), that is, of war against the state on behalf of its citizenry. The poem he recited to Akhmatova was the famous "Stalin Epigram" (1933), a lyric published only posthumously that proved to be, nonetheless, his death warrant.

[Translation] We live without feeling the country under us. / Our speeches can't be heard ten steps away. / But whenever there's enough for half a chat— / Talk turns to the Kremlin mountaineer. / His fat fingers are plump as worms. / And his words are as sure as iron weights. / His mighty cockroach moustache laughs, / And his vast boot-tops gleam. / A mob of thin-necked chieftains surrounds him. / He toys with the favors of half-humans. / One whistles, another mews, a third whimpers. / He alone bangs and pokes. / He forges one decree after another, like horseshoes— / One gets it in the groin, another in the head, the brow, the eye. / Every execution is a treat / And the broad breast of the Ossetian.²⁰

On hearing the "Stalin Epigram," Boris Pasternak reportedly exclaimed: "This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide."²¹ It is actually a little of both; it exists on the boundaries between language as metaphor and language as action, and thus incidentally illustrates the problems of speaking, as Barthes and Derrida do, of language as innately, exclusively metaphorical. The poem itself concerns the possibilities, limits and dangers of different kinds of speech. Mandel'shtam contrasts the inaudible "half-conversations" of those who oppose or fear Stalin and the dehumanized mewing and whining of those who support him with the language of the "Great Leader" himself, who demonstrates the real-life consequences of his speech on the bodies of his subjects as he energetically forges new decrees: "One gets it in the groin, another in the head, the brow, the eye." The very energy and efficiency of Mandel'shtam's diction and syntax in these phrases enact the power of the language that he describes.

Mandel'shtam counters this form of language as action with his own verbal deed, the poem itself, and he authorizes the collective "we" he requires for his civic verse precisely by way of his linguistic feat. He proclaims vo ves' golos, at the top of his voice, what the Russian people think but dare not say aloud: "But whenever there's enough for half a chat— / Talk turns to the Kremlin mountaineer." Unlike the leader who reserves the powers of speech for himself alone—"He alone bangs and pokes" with his words like "iron weights"—Mandel'shtam derives his verbal authority and force from the multitudes whose innermost thoughts and fears he articulates.

I have been speaking of the "Stalin Epigram" as a form of action, a deed, and I do not mean the terms metaphorically. Mandel'shtam was prepared to take the real-life consequences of his verbal deed—"I'm ready for death," Akhmatova recalls him saying²²—and the poem precipitated his first arrest, in 1934, which was followed by three years of internal exile, a second arrest in 1937 and finally his death early in 1938 in a transit camp en route to the gulag. Indeed, according to auditors who witnessed his clandestine recitations of the "Stalin Epigram," Mandel'shtam appeared to be staging performance-provocations intended to reach the ears of his epigram's subject: he recited the poem to selected groups of friends and acquaintances, some of whom were almost guaranteed to pass it on to the authorities. The poem in fact existed only in oral form, in performance—Mandel'shtam himself transcribed it for the first time only at his police interrogation in 1934—and it was as oral performance that it precipitated his arrest.²³

This is, I think, not accidental. In the epigram, Mandel'shtam describes the ominous power of Stalin's spoken words. Through his performance of the epigram, Mandel'shtam demonstrates the equal force of the poet's speech. The poet's voice, condemned to "civic death" in the private domain, may seem inaudible—but it travels far further than "ten steps away." It bypasses the whole elaborate state apparatus designed for the control and repression of the written word to reach the ears of the leader himself, who is compelled to countermand it by his own verbal action in the form of the orders that led to Mandel'shtam's arrest and exile. The "Stalin Epigram," as poem and provocation, thus paradoxically becomes Mandel'shtam's most direct testimony to the power and efficacy of the spoken poetic word.²⁴

In Derridian philosophy, western civilization revolves around a misguided, illusory opposition between "fallen," artificial written language and untainted, "natural" speech. We find a similar dichotomy at work in Mandel'shtam's late poetics—and yet, once again, the context in which Mandel'shtam lived and worked gives this opposition a very different coloration than it assumes in Derridian thought. "Writing and speech are incommensurate," Mandel'shtam insists in "Conversation about Dante" (1933), and in "Fourth Prose" (1930) he leaves little doubt about where his own preferences lie. "I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives," he proclaims. "I have no handwriting, for I never write. I alone in Russia work with my voice, while all around me consummate swine are writing." There is an element of truth in Mandel'shtam's characteristic hyperbole: he did indeed compose aloud and on his feet, and he and his wife worked to transcribe his lyrics only after they had been completely composed in the poet's mind and voice.²⁵

For the Mandel'shtam of "Fourth Prose" and the revealingly titled "Conversation," however, the idea of a corrupt and fallen written language is based not on western cultural mythologies but on Soviet reality. When all agencies of printing, reproduction and distribution lie in the hands of the government, any author "who first obtains permission and then writes" becomes involved in an act of collaboration with the state whose blessing he has received. He composes his work on what Mandel'shtam calls in one poem "watermarked police stationery" and his "authorized" writings thus take their place in a continuum that begins with state-sponsored poetry and ends with the state's most ominous decrees: "Crude animal fear hammers on the typewriters, crude animal fear proofreads the Chinese gibberish on sheets of toilet paper, scribbles denunciations, strikes those who are down, demands the death penalty for prisoners."²⁶

In such a society, only unauthorized speech or, more specifically, oral poetry, can speak a language free of complicity in the state's atrocities; only the poet who works "from the voice" can hope to challenge the state's monopoly on written language. "They have sullied the most pure Word, / They have trampled the sacred Word (glagol)," Akhmatova writes in a lyric of the period, and western logocentric mythologies are not what is at stake here, as Akhmatova's own poetry makes clear.²⁷ In the prose text that opens Requiem, Akhmatova derives the authority to compose her tribute to the purges' victims not from any official source but from an unauthorized, oral communiqué from an anonymous fellow sufferer:

[Translation] In the terrible years of the Ezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once somebody "identified" me. Then a blue-lipped woman standing behind me, who had of course, never heard my name, came to from the torpor characteristic of us all and asked me in a whisper [everyone spoke in whispers there], "But can you describe this?" And I said, "I can."

Then something like a smile slipped across what had once been her face.²⁸

As in Mandel'shtam's "Stalin Epigram," the poet justifies her civic, collective "we" by virtue of her ability to articulate aloud what other suffering Russians only whisper.

Akhmatova is like Mandel'shtam, too, in her emphasis, here and elsewhere, on the face and mouth that articulate what Mandel'shtam calls "sounds forbidden for Russian lips." "A human, hot, contorted mouth / Is outraged and says 'No,'" Mandel'shtam writes in one fragmentary late poem; and in their late writings both Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam insistently call attention to the mouths, lips and tongues that firmly root speech in the body that may be called upon to account for its verbal crimes against the state. Mandel'shtam makes these lips the basis for a defiant "underground" poetics in the opening lines of one late poem. "Yes, I lie in the earth moving my lips, / But every schoolchild will learn what I say," he announces defiantly from the grave to which he has been confined following his "civic funeral."²⁹

Oral poetry is not the only genre that Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova practice in their efforts to avoid signing their names to "Stalin's book," the massive, monstrous, collective text being spun out by the state apparatus with the assistance of the obedient tribe of hired scribes whom Mandel'shtam denounces in "Fourth Prose." Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova were effectively barred from print throughout the 1930s. They could have no hope of seeing their own names and poems printed in anything remotely resembling a conventional book, and the written form that their poems took were handwritten copies scrawled on scraps of paper or laboriously transcribed by hand into unprepossessing school copybooks (I'm thinking now, of course, of Mandel'shtam's "Moscow" and "Voronezh Notebooks"). "It is more honorable to be learned by heart, to be secretly, furtively recopied, to be not a book, but a copybook in one's own lifetime," Maksimilian Voloshin had written shortly after the revolution, and his words proved to be prophetic.³⁰ Mandel'shtam follows Voloshin's lead as he makes a virtue of necessity by turning humble, unpublished scraps of paper into a crucial genre of the underground poet. In the "Conversation about Dante," Mandel'shtam inverts the apparent order of things as he condemns "official paper" to oblivion and assigns true permanence only to the rough drafts (chernoviki) that cannot be captured on official paper and made to serve official purposes. "Rough drafts," he insists, "are never destroyed … The safety of the rough draft is the statute assuring preservation of the power behind the literary work."³¹ It is a theory made to order for poets denied access to official paper of any sort, and Akhmatova provides testimony to its efficacy and force in the first dedication to her Poem without A Hero (Poema bez geroia, 1940–1966). "Since I didn't have enough paper, / I'm writing on your rough draft (A tak kak mne bumagi ne khvatilo, / Ia na tvoem pishu chernovike)," Akhmatova explains, and the rough draft she has in mind can only be a page taken from one of Mandel'shtam's perpetually unfinished notebooks.³² She thus bears witness to the power of the unprinted word and to the indestructibility of the rough draft that has already outlived its less fortunate, more perishable creator.

Akhmatova creates a telling variant on this poetics of the incorruptible rough draft in her late work. "Manuscripts don't burn," Mikhail Bulgakov proclaims in a famous phrase.³³ In Akhmatova's late poetics of the unofficial text, however, manuscripts do burn, and poems do perish—and this is precisely what guarantees their integrity and, finally, their immortality. In her Stalin-era writings, Akhmatova cultivates the genre of the "burnt notebook" and its subsidiary, the "poems written for the ashtray," and the phrases' meanings are both literal and metaphorical.³⁴ She was in fact forced to burn her private archives more than once, in the hopes of keeping illicit writings out of official hands. Some of the burned texts vanished for good—but others survived, either in her own memory or in the memories and copybooks of friends.

This literal death and resurrection of the poetic text gives rise to the metaphor that enables Akhmatova, the banned, forbidden lyric poet, to take on Stalin himself as she forges her own collective, civic voice to speak for the masses who have been either figuratively or literally obliterated by Stalinist collective rhetoric. The lyric poem can fall victim to Stalinist oppression just as the lyric poet can, and their voices are suppressed for the same reason: they speak for the realm of the personal, the private and the individual that the regime was bent upon destroying. The poem and the poet become arch-victims, then, the best, most fitting representatives of the millions of victims, both living and dead, whose private, individual selves the state had done its best to efface in the name of the collective.

For both Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam, their civic authority is underwritten by their very perishability and the perishability of their works. It is precisely because the poets and their poems are subject to literal, physical death that they are authorized to speak for the dead and dying victims of a nation under siege by its own rulers. In their greatest "civic" poems, Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova are thus able to turn Stalinist rhetoric on its head, as the artificial collective imposed from above meets its match in the genuinely communal voice that rise from below, through the throat of the poet prematurely consigned to civic burial. Thus in "The Verses on the Unknown Soldier," Mandel'shtam employs the militaristic rhetoric of the five-year plans, with their class warfare, enemies of the people, saboteurs, provocateurs and wreckers, to orchestrate a mutiny among the common foot-soldiers who have fallen prey to their generalissimo's grandiose plans. And, as Susan Amert has shown in her wonderful recent study of Akhmatova's late poetry, Akhmatova in her Requiem counters the state's inflated rhetoric of the "motherland" with her own "song of the motherland" woven from the wails of the wives and mothers left behind by Stalin's victims.³⁵ "I renounce neither the living or the dead," Mandel'shtam announced shortly before his own death³⁶—and in their civic poetry Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova speak for both the living and the dead by virtue of their faith in the lasting powers of dead authors and dead books.

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 8, 18; Michel Foucault, "What is an Author," in Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113-39, esp. 117; Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-43.

2. Roman Jakobson, "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets," trans. Edward J. Brown, in Victor Erlich, ed., Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 164; Barthes, "The Death of the Author," 143.

For a provocative discussion of the notion of the "death of the author" in modern French and Russian poetry, see Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991).

3. This issue has been ably addressed by other Slavists, both in Russia and the west; one might note here the work of William Mills Todd III, among American Slavists. Among scholars who have followed the lead of Iurii Lotmann and Lydia Ginzburg, one might mention, inter alia, Boris Gasparov, Irina Paperno and Aleksandr Zholkovsky, practitioners of a semiotics of culture that might be called the Russian answer to new historicism.

4. Of Grammatology, 15.

5. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 340, 347.

6. The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann, R. G. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 396.

7. Megill, Prophets, 351.

8. The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 66.

9. "What is an Author," 124. For an incisive discussion of the limits of Foucault's theory on Stalinist soil, see Beth Holmgren, Women's Works in Stalin's Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 7-9.

10. Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), 178. Elsewhere in the same volume, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam recalls her husband's reproach: "Why are you complaining?… Only here do they really respect poetry—they kill because of it. More people die for poetry here than anywhere else" (167). It is easy to mythologize the situations in extremis in which poets are called upon to die for their verse. Whether poetry should ideally be a matter of life and death is a vexed question, to say the least; the fact remains that in certain circumstances, the poetic word has consequences that far outreach the limits of postmodern écriture.

11. Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, 200.

12. "Believe me, I've had it up to here / With the triumphs of a civic death," Akhmatova complains in one late lyric ("Torzhestvami grazhdanskoi smerti," Sochineniia, v. 3, 502). She explains the nature of her premature burial and "posthumous existence" in her essay on Georgii Ivanov's Peterburgskie zimy (1961): "They stopped publishing me altogether from 1925 to 1939 … I was witness to my civic death for the first time then. I was thirty-five years old …" ("On Petersburg Winters," in Anna Akhmatova, My Half Century: Selected Prose, ed. Ronald Meyer (Ann Arbor; Ardis, 1992), 57.

13. Leon Trotskii, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 171.

14. Mandel'shtam refers to "Stalin's book" in his last lyrwritten in Moscow before his final arrest. The phrase itself is taken from his chilling "Stanzas" (Stansy), written in July 1937, as printed in Osip Mandel'shtam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. P. M. Nerler (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), v. 1, 316-17. On Stalin as the master artist who fulfills avant-garde dreams of fusing life and art, see Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Joanne Turnbull (New York: Little, Brown, 1990), 93-113; and Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

15. Anna Akhmatova, "Mandel'shtam (Listki iz dnevnika)," Sochineniia, ed. Boris Filipoff and G. P. Struve (vs. 1-2, Washington, DC: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1968, v. 3, Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), 2: 181.

16. Quoted in Anatoly Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, trans. Wendy Rosslyn (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 128.

17. Osip Mandel'shtam, "Literary Moscow: The Birth of Plot," The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary Harris, Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 152. All further translations of Mandel'shtam's prose will be taken, with slight modifications, from this edition.

18. "Poema bez geroia," Sochineniia, 2; 125.

19. "O Mandel'shtame," Den' poezii 1967 (Leningrad, 1967), 167. Eikhenbaum's notes on Mandel'shtam were never completed; although they were written in 1933, they were published for the first time only several decades later.

20. Osip Mandel'shtam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. P. Struve, B. A. Filipoff (vs. 1-3, Washington, DC: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1971, v. 4; Paris: YMCA Press, 1981), 1:202.

21. Quoted in Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 176.

22. "Mandel'shtam," Sochineniia, 2: 179.

23. On Mandel'shtam's recitations of the epigram, see E. Polianovskii, "Smert' Osipa Mandel'shtama I," Izvestiia (23-28 May 1992); and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, esp. 88, 96-98 165-70. According to both sources, Mandel'shtam's interrogator at the Liubianka Prison denounced the poem as a "provocation" and a "terrorist act."

24. In his notebooks of 1931–1932, Mandel'shtam recognizes the real-life implications of certain kinds of speech: "Only in government decrees, in military orders, in judicial verdicts, in notarial acts and in such documents as the last Will and Testament does the verb [or "word"—the modern Russian for "verb" coincides with the Old Russian term for "word," glagol] live a full life" (Complete Critical Prose, 469). By treating his "Stalin Epigram" as a de facto Will and Testament, Mandel'shtam could thus compete with the verdicts and decrees whose "full lives" threatened to deprive him and other Russians of their own more vulnerable lives.

25. Complete Critical Prose, 438, 317.

26. Complete Critical Prose, 316-17, 314; Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 157-158.

27. "Vse ushli i nikto ne vernulsia," Sochineniia, 3: 72.

28. Sochineniia, 1: 361; translation taken from Susan Amert, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 32.

29. "Journey to Armenia" (1933), Complete Critical Prose, 372. Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 170, 214, 169. On the role of articulation in Akhmatova's late poetry, see Amert, In a Shattered Mirror, 32-34.

30. Andrei Sinyavsky quotes Voloshin in Soviet Civilization, 233.

31. Complete Critical Prose, 415-16.

32. "Poema bez geroia," Sochineniia, 2: 101.

33. Bulgakov's phrase is taken from The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita, 1940).

34. "And now I'm writing, just as before, without corrections / My verses in a burnt notebook," Akhmatova notes in a poem of 1956 ("Son," Sochineniia, 1: 291). I am indebted to Amert's discussions of Akhmatova's "burnt notebooks" and "poems written for the ashtray" in In a Shattered Mirror, 143-51.

35. Amert demonstrates that Akhmatova's poem is engaged in a complex, revisionary dialogue with one of the most popular Stalinist-era hymns, "Song of the Motherland" (Pesn' o rodine) (In a Shattered Mirror, 30-59).

36. Akhmatova quotes Mandel'shtam in her recollections of the poet (Sochineniia, 2: 185).