SOURCE: "The Poet in the Trenches: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova," in Literary Review, Vol. 37, No. 4, Summer, 1994, pp. 689-704.

[In the following essay, Brody discusses the poems in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, and Akhmatova's place in Russian literature.]

Poetry not only occupies a central position in Russian society and plays a primordial role in the life of imagination, it is also a moral force. Russian poets have always been known for their assertion of the free spirit and opposition to tyranny both under the Tsars and the commissars. "When spiritual life is suppressed," Bella Akhmadulina, a contemporary Russian poet, told The Harvard Advocate, "people turn to the poet as confessor and priest. When a nation has Russia's difficulties, people seek something lofty, something spiritual" (Quoted by F. D. Reeve in Akhmadulina). In confrontations with the authorities, they fearlessly and consistently manned the intellectual trenches in the never-ending struggle for human rights, and that is why Russia respects and loves her poets.

Few—if any—countries can lay claim to such a distinguished literary tradition as Russia during the last seventy years. In a century riddled by poisonous ideologies and repugnant visions, Russia had been beaten into the ground morally, intellectually, and politically, yet aspirations to freedom and decency were not quite extinct and were nourished by a small group of heroic dissenters. In the shifting political landscape, Anna Akhmatova and her three great contemporaries—Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva—gave a moving and insightful account of the polarization of society and the discordant intensity of life in the former Soviet Union. To them poetry appeared as a medium of social and spiritual redemption, and their idea of ultimately building a new society was essentially an aesthetic and even mystical process rather than a political one. They offered a basis for sanity and a moderate sort of salvation in a world full of suffering, cruelty, and chaos. It was felt at the time both inside and outside of the Soviet Union that if ever Russia were to be reborn, the poetry of these four great poets would have made a crucial contribution to this renaissance by upholding a national self-awareness that, without them, might have sunk into oblivion. Hence, the poems of Akhmatova and her three friends are essential readings for anyone who wants to understand how Russia succumbed to a brutal dictatorship and how it survived.

A chronicler of the isolated and intimate psychological events of a woman's emotional and intellectual life as well as the political events in the Soviet Union, Anna Akhmatova is one of Russia's greatest poets and perhaps the greatest woman poet in the history of Western culture. When she died in 1966, at the age of 77, the classical Russian literature—"the house that Pushkin built"—which began in the first decades of the nineteenth century, came to its end. She believed that poetry was written to convey the absolute values of people and society. This ideal required considerable courage to sustain in the atmosphere of the utilitarian aesthetics of the day.

In a radical break with the prevailing culture, Akhmatova began her literary career in 1911 as an Acmeist, a rebellious group of young poets fighting against the dominant Symbolists, and wishing to give Russian poetry a new direction. The two groups existed in a state of contention in their attitudes about poetry; it was, despite its inevitable tension, a healthy artistic confrontation concerning intellectual differences. The Acmeists felt that sense is more important than sound and insisted on clarity against the Symbolists' studied vagueness.

Akhmatova's personal life was marked by a long struggle against the domination of exploiting males and, although in the ensuing battle of genders, she occasionally did the dominating, too, in retrospect she can be seen as an early torchbearer for the women's liberation movement. For more than a decade she was the most admired woman in the literary circles, constantly invited to read her poetry before adoring audiences. She was, as Marc Slonim indicates, "one of the most widely read and truly beloved Russian poets. A generation of intellectuals memorized her lines and quoted them in their letters and diaries. She served as their sounding board; they found their own pains, laments and aspirations in her short poems."

Yet, soon the Revolution and Stalin's terror seared her life. Her first husband—the poet Gumilev—was executed, her second husband deported, her son repeatedly imprisoned; and she became routinely persecuted. The authorities banned her from publishing, detesting what she wrote. As they saw it, private yearnings, private joys, and private sorrows were decadent concerns that had no place in the literature of a socialist land. Yet, shattering conventions, she kept her self-respect intact and could not be silenced by fear or sorrow. Art became for her a means of relating morally to the society that she regarded as deeply wounded and indifferent to spiritual values. Her art aspired to a vision of the universe at the same time that it embraced freedom. For many years she had played the foil in the Soviet psychodrama. No matter how terrible her situation had become and how critical her personal traumas, her attachment to her native country was so profound that she refused to leave Russia, and continued to write even if it went unpublished. In her eyes, Russia was greater than her contemporary evils. As she said to Olga Carlisle. "My poetry is my link to our time. When I write, I live with the very pulse of Russian life." To her, the role of the poet was to remember and bear witness.

There was a breathing space in the terror during the Second World War, a significant easing of the ideological straitjacket that had paralyzed intellectual life, when she was able to publish and read her poetry in public. But Stalin changed only tactics for sheer political survival—not strategy—and after the war, she was ostracized again and her son arrested for the third time.

When Stalin died, a new era of tentative rehabilitation began and Akhmatova was invited to publish again. After Pasternak's death in 1960, she had become the sole surviving poet of prerevolutionary Russian literature. In 1964, she went to Italy to receive a high literary prize and next year to Oxford to be awarded an honorary degree. In her old age, she was haunted by the past and visited by the ghosts and legends of her youth, creating "mirrors and masks" (Reeder in AA, I, 21-183) for readers and scholars to study. The fusion of her life and poetry in an artistic unity represents a rich cultural heritage for students of art and politics. It reminds us of all the high hopes of the new revolutionary artistic climate that the Bolshevik Revolution initially inspired and of the tragic aftermath, in which in a catastrophic metamorphosis, all traces of such hope were doomed as a crime against the state. In Isaiah Berlin's words, "[Akhmatova's] entire life was what Herzen once described Russian literature as being: one continuous indictment of Russian reality" (AA II, 24).

Akhmatova is a lyrical poet, full of melancholy, tenderness, and a great feeling for nature. "Her poems had become classics of Russian literature in her own lifetime. At their best, their simplicity, the perfection of their form, the harmonious balance between sound and meaning can only be compared to Pushkin" (Carlisle, "Woman").

The poems express, above all, the sense of someone tirelessly and painfully searching for her identity, not just her identity as a poet, but also as a woman often ensnared in emotional tangles. They also deal with human nature, people's weaknesses, their hypocrisy, and lack of courage. Their expressiveness ranges, in Andrei Sinyavsky's words, "from a barest whisper to fiery eloquence, from downcast eyes to lightning and thunderbolts" (Akhmatova, Selected Poems 18).

The physical world played a major role in shaping her poetry, enabling her to reconstitute the body and texture of particular things. She acquired a precious sense of place and circumstances, and a concern for immediate surroundings. The natural world she creates is, at once, both vibrant and mute as if it were just about to stir again under some powerful impulse. These environmental forces unite with psychological motifs to play on her mind and emotions as her creative process is evolving.

Her poetry draws on many sources, often blending the classical tradition of Pushkin—precision, restraint, concreteness—with such popular elements as the multifaceted Russian folklore with its narrative surprises and symbolic imagery. Yet Mandelstam pointed out that Akhmatova's genesis is in the Russian prose of the nineteenth century. "There never would have been an Akhmatova without Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, Turgenev with Nest of Gentry and all of Dostoevsky" (157).

Because of the long official harassment, during which she could not publish, Akhmatova was not so well-known abroad as her famous contemporaries, and, until now, only a few selections of her poems came to light in the English-speaking countries.

Thus, it is most welcome news that finally a complete collection of her writings—all of her 725 poems, among them more than 200 poems and fragments never printed before—has been published by the Zephyr Press in an excellent translation by Judith Hemschemeyer, in two magnificent volumes in both Russian and English versions[, entitled The Complete Poems]. In addition, the scholarly apparatus includes the translator's preface, a lucid essay on the life and art of Akhmatova by Roberta Reeder, two short sketches by Anatoly Naiman, a young friend and disciple, "A Memoir" by Isaiah Berlin, describing his memorable visit to Akhmatova in 1945, and a veritable mass of useful notes. In its huge quantity of literary material, this edition is a staggering achievement.

To read this marvelous collection may prove irresistible to those who prize the long lost and almost irretrievable world of Russian poetry during and after the Revolution. What makes this publication special is not just its wealth of already familiar and new material, but the deep compassion of the editor and translator for Akhmatova and their passionate involvement in her art and life. While such an intellectual proximity may occasionally rob a translator of an essential detachment and objective distance, Hemschemeyer appears to have overcome the intellectual seduction without losing the freshness, immediacy, and directness of her approach.

"The poet as translator lives with a paradox," says Stanley Kunitz in the notes to his own translation of Poems of Akhmatova. "His work must not read like a translation; conversely, it is not an exercise of the free imagination. One voice enjoins him: 'Respect the text!' The other simultaneously pleads with him: 'Make it new!'" and concludes. "The only way to translate Akhmatova is by writing well. A hard practice!" The translator must also be warned that Akhmatova's words—as those of several other contemporary Russian poets—are not always "innocent" and, in addition to their surface meanings, often carry an extra baggage of veiled political and social implications. This hidden literary minefield might trip up the unwary translator, while in Russia people will immediately perceive the Aesopian ruse and decode the essential message.

Hemschemeyer obviously profited from the work of her predecessors and produced attractive and powerful English versions. It would perhaps be unfair to judge her poetic transplant by the high standard that such superb craftsmen as Kunitz, Walter Arndt (Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, Ardis), D. M. Thomas (Anna Akhmatova, Way Of All The Earth, Ohio University Press), and Ronald Hingley (Nightingale Fever, Russian Poets in Revolution, Knopf) established but, aside from a certain unevenness which is understandable in view of the huge amount of material, she has made felicitous poetic approximations.

Most of the delicate lyric poems of Akhmatova's first volume, Evening, are about aspects of love, personal and emotional, addressed to her present or previous lover or to herself. Her poetry is often one of musing to define the conflict in her own way and face bygone love's shocks and sorrows, such as unhappy encounters (I, 221), confusion (I, 221), suffering (I, 231), jealousy (I, 239, 253), silences (I, 243), desperation after a break (I, 243), yearning for love (I, 247), torment of love (I, 249), sleeplessness (I, 277), quarrels (I, 219, 281), and lack of communication (I, 223). The verses are occasionally suffused with intimations of anxiety (I, 273), doom (I, 239), and death (I, 225, 245). She misses her lover, but often finds differences (I, 261) and indifference (I, 263). Frequently she laments his (I, 263) or her own (I, 265) inability to respond. From time to time there is an uneasy truce between feckless, unlucky lovers who, even when they seem to connect, remain curiously estranged (I, 269, 283). The translator correctly observes: "Poem after poem … shows us two people bound together, grappling with their own and their beloved's emotion, struggling to get free and, once free, bewildered and empty" (I, 7). Memory often keeps alive the love that seemed to have died out (I, 257).

Is love a revelation or a catastrophe? There are only rare moments of true happiness and they alternate with long periods of bitterness. Most of the time it is the woman who suffers from indifference or betrayal. The beautiful nature—the sea and the forest—are often there to console her, but even its peace and calm is not quite satisfactory and we sense that it only momentarily stills her passion.

The theme she treats most originally is that of parting (I, 219, 223, 285), which she must have come across several times in her life. In "The Song Of The Last Meeting" (I, 225), even her customary restraint cannot mute the intensity of feeling when in her embarrassment she "pulled the glove for my left hand / Onto my right," as she was leaving him.

In the midst of these highly ambivalent sentiments, she remains attached to her land and people. In a village balled, she identifies herself with a simple peasant woman whose husband "whipped" her "with a woven belt" (I, 239). In a later poem, she speaks enviously of "the quiet, sunburnt peasant women" (I, 338) of the land, reminding us of Levin, Tolstoy's favorite protagonist in Anna Karenina, who only felt happy among the humble peasants in the peaceful Russian landscape. In one of his poems, "In Memory of Anna Akhmatova," Yevtushenko asked whether in this high priestess of the old intelligentsia there is a peasant woman. He sees two graves; in one lies Akhmatova, the "beauty, prized highly by a Russia" that had been, and in the other, a peasant woman, but "between them there is not frontier" (214-16). The two Russias—the intellectual and the peasant—are harmonized. Her second book—Rosary—gained her a firm place in the literary establishment of the period. While the cycle of love poems continues with its muted, delicate, and fragrant sentiments, this collection is mainly concerned with her anguish over her failed marriage with Gumilev, a growing sense of guilt, a certain awkward resignation, and a repentance for what had happened. She is simultaneously noble and naughty, a refined lady and a courtesan. Religious elements and spiritual zeal dominate many poems. She invokes Christian piety, searching for salvation. Although the male is often indifferent to her—when he touches her, his hand "almost not trembling" (I, 303) and in another, "How unlike a caress / The touch of those hands" (I, 305)—he also suffers, because she does not reciprocate his advances (I, 323, 325).

Her third book—White Flock—was published on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. An epic tone with classical severity is now added to the lyricism of her love poetry with her civic and war verses. This might have been her reaction to the criticism of her having been too private and solipsistic in her artistic expressions. She now wants to "bestow upon the world / Something more imperishable than love" (I, 379).

The First World War is foretold in "July 1914" when "It smells of burning," "the birds have not even sung today," and a one-legged stranger predicts that "fearful times are drawing near" with "famine, earthquake, widespread death" (I, 427), but she believes that "the enemy will not divide / our land" (I, 429). She is even willing to accept sickness, fever, and give up her child and lover in a poem "Prayer," just to have "the stormcloud over darkened Russia" become "a cloud of glorious rays" (I, 435).

All nature becomes a temple for God's glory, whose help is often invoked. "God is now constantly on her lips … One senses in these words, intonations and gestures a nun who makes the sign of the cross as she kisses … There is something Old Russian, ancient about her … The eternal Russian attraction to self-effacement, humility, martyrdom, meekness, poverty which had such an allure for Tyutchev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky fascinates her also" (Chukovsky 33).

Plantain—her next volume of poetry—was published just after the Revolution. The most important poem of the collection is devoted to the war, revealing her deep patriotic spirit and rebuking those who wanted to flee the ravaged country at a time when, on the one hand, "The nation awaited its German guests," and, on the other, the guns of the Revolution began to thunder. She hears a voice: "Leave your deaf and sinful land," but she covers her ears, "So that my sorrowing spirit / Would not be stained by those shameful words" (I, 529-31). In a later collection, Anno Domini MCMXXI, she reaffirms her commitment to remain in Russia in her desperate hour. "I am not with those who abandoned their land … to me the exile is pitiful" (I, 547). There are three poems in the short cycle "Biblical Verses," of which "Lot's Wife" is the most striking. It shows the poet's admiration for those who dare to look back on what they love regardless of the consequences: "… my heart will never forget the one / Who gave her life for a single glance" (I, 569). The poem may reflect Akhmatova's skilled use of Aesopian language—a reference to mythology to express her own love of the past and its culture—in order to hide it from the censor. As Reeder points out, "… Akhmatova knew when she wrote the poem in 1924 how many simple things she took for granted in her past were lost forever in post-revolutionary Russia" (XX, I, 91). Yet, what she could not say openly in "Lot's Wife," she says in another poem dedicated to Petersburg (I, 607), lamenting the fate of "this city of splendid vistas" which resembles "a savage camp." But she is determined, even if she remains alone, to "preserve / Our sorrows and our joys" of the city. The reader must remember the special spiritual place Petersburg has in the heart of the Russian intellectuals as the cradle of literature, the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. The fall of the once mighty Romanov Empire is touched in her poem "Apparition" (I, 609) in which "the horses race" as "if sensing some pursuit" and "the tsar looks around strangely / With light, empty eyes" as if to bemoan the end of his rule.

Written much later—in 1936—and published in a collection, Reed, there is a poem, "Dante" (II, 117), which is similar in feeling to "Lot's Wife," but celebrates those who did not look back, that is, did not submit to the authorities. In her poem, Dante—who had been exiled from his native city Florence and when later permitted to return provided he publicly repent, refused—"Even after his death he did not return," but sent the city "curses" from hell and even in paradise "barefoot, in a hairshirt … he did not walk / Through his Florence …"

The most poignant poem in this group is "Voronezh" (II, 89), dedicated to Akhmatova's good friend, Mandelstam, who, like Dante, was also exiled, but without hope of returning. He died in one of Stalin's gulags in 1938. Akhmatova senses that he will not survive: "… in the room of the poet in disgrace, / Fear and the Muse keep watch by turns. / And the night comes on / That knows no dawn." Hemschemeyer's translation of the last line—in Russian "kotoraya ne vedaet rassveta"—is closer in meaning and sound to the original than either Thomas's "when there will be no sunrise" (63) or Kunitz's "which has no hope of dawn" (87).

There are literary works of certain periods which reveal the menace of history with particular force. In such a synthesis of art and history, certain deep-seated emotional motifs may generate an obsessive tendency of haunting the artist's imagination. Memory becomes a moral command.

A cycle of poems, entitled Requiem, is the outstanding poetic monument of the era. Hauntingly familiar about the political crossfire in cataloguing the anxieties and depredations of Stalin's despotism, the poems describe what it was to live in a society in which these atrocities were never far away, and in which the ideology behind them destroyed altogether the dignity of daily life. They express Akhmatova's feelings during the three hundred hours when she stood in heat and cold outside the prison walls awaiting news of her son. Both passionate and tender, the cycle is dedicated to the victims of the purges of the late thirties and their families, and records the ordeals endured by her and other women whose fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers were jailed, deported, or executed. The poems were never written down for fear of confiscation and punishment but memorized by herself and others. A cry against the inhumanity of the Soviet regime, Requiem reflects on the grief and sorrow of crushed lives, broken families, and the deep, enduring misery that seemed to settle in the very marrow of the streets in Leningrad when "… the ones who smiled / Were the dead, glad to be at rest," as Akhmatova grieves in the Prologue (II, 99).

Requiem is more a series of impressionistic sketches than a single long poem. Majestic, bitter, lamenting, the poems are written in classical form with her customary simplicity and intensity. There is no better or more sensitive account of those dramatic historical days. As a chronicle of the worst excesses of a modern police state and, at the same time, as a witness's testament to the enduring power of the individual conscience, this disturbing, enthralling, and extraordinarily moving work is a triumph of moral indignation. As a fascinating psychological document in its diagnosis of the collective illness of the social body, it crystallizes the pain of loss and betrayal of the era. While it is an acknowledgment of human failure, it also shows a flicker of hope that runs through the experience and "keeps singing from afar" (II, 97). Requiem cuts an iconoclastic swath through Soviet literature, stirs the heart, and opens the mind in its interaction between this woman-poet and her society. Rarely have the impoverished and powerless had such an eloquent advocate.

Akhmatova spent the first months of the Second World War in besieged Leningrad before she was evacuated to Tashkent. The war inspired her to write a cycle of poems—The Winds of War—calling upon the Russian people to fight against the invaders. The best war poem is "Courage," a festive, grave, and solemn acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation—"We know what lies in balance at this moment"—and an assurance that "… courage will not desert us. / We're not frightened by a hail of lead," and a silent promise to continue the fight. Most touching is her forceful plea for the preservation of the Russian language—"the mighty Russian word!"—which she promises to "transmit" to "our grandchildren / Free and pure and rescued from captivity" (II, 185). The words were her magic kingdom and it was natural for her, as a writer, to protect them. She might have recalled Turgenev, who once said that in the days of doubt about his country, "you alone are my support and prop. Oh great, powerful, truthful, and free Russian language" (Quoted by Haight 125).

It is interesting to note that in 1940, at the time of the short-lived Hitler-Stalin pact. Akhmatova thought of Paris under German occupation and of London bombarded by the Luftwaffe, and recorded those momentous events in two poems. Ilya Ehrenburg recalls that Akhmatova read him her poem about the fall of Paris—"In the Fortieth Year"—and although she was not there, "the epoch floats to the surface like a corpse on the spring flood," adding, "What strikes me in this poem is not only the accurate perception of a scene Anna Akhmatova had not witnessed but also its foresight. I often see the past epoch now as 'a corpse on the spring flood.' I know it beyond error, but for the grandsons it is something like a ghost, a broken mooring or a capsized boat" (494). Ehrenburg later wrote a novel, The Fall of Paris, which he personally witnessed. In Hemschemeyer's version, the quote is "And afterwards it floats away / Like a corpse on a thawing river" (II, 173). Both "spring flood" and "thawing river" are close to the original. In the poem, "To the Londoners," (II, 175) she calls the bombardment "The twenty-fourth drama of Shakespeare," and as one of "the celebrants at this terrible feast," she "would rather read Hamlet, Caesar or Lear," and "be bearing the dove Juliet to her grave / Would rather peer in at Macbeth's windows," but this new drama she does not "have the strength to read."

Towards the end of the war, she became again the true voice of Russia for many, and her poetry reading in Leningrad was enthusiastically applauded by several thousand listeners. She hoped to be able to punish her poetry again and her essays on Pushkin, but in 1946 she was denounced by Andrey Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and prevented from publishing. Her son was arrested for the third time and she, anticipating arrest, burned her papers, verses, and a play. At this time she wrote several poems under the title "Glory to Peace" praising Stalin with the idea of obtaining clemency for her son. These "forced confessions" have no literary value. As Max Hayward mentions, "The worst punishment Stalin inflicted on poets was not to kill and imprison them but make them praise him" (25).

Akhmatova's most complex work is Poem Without a Hero, a record of her literary life. It consists of a number of narrative episodes and lyric digressions in the past and present. Personal and historical destiny, private and public events, are organically linked. The present is illuminated by the past, as events flow from Stalinist Leningrad back to Tsarist Petersburg. Akhmatova succeeds in making the reader live within such vanished moments and to feel for a while that the past is as real and urgent as the present. In this journey of discovery and self-discovery she looks mostly backward, as if listening for echoes of the distant voices of the past and skillfully weaves present and past lives into direct, vivid communication.

The actual action begins in 1913, an age decadent and corrupt but also bright and colorful. The main event is a senseless, romantic suicide. This event shook the intellectual circle to which Akhmatova belonged and, in retrospect, she felt that everybody of that group, herself included, was guilty and should repent. She used this senseless death as a prelude to predict the horrors of the impending war and implied that the catastrophe that visited the land later was a parable for the sins of the world; indeed, it was a collective punishment. The portrayal of succeeding epochs is marked by images of devastation, suffering, and retribution involving both the innocent and the guilty. History's muse has been muffled, her poetic voice stilled, and her capacity to seize the imagination lost.

Poem Without a Hero is soul-searching poetry with a remarkable evocation of a life lived both on a daily level and in the mind, an authentic portrait of a troubled society—yet also—an implied testament to the ongoing vitality and greatness of an entire culture. It is an unforgettable account of human existence in one of the most crucial periods and places in world history. A vanished era is poetically resurrected.

There are many veiled and hidden allusions in the epigrammatic statements of this poem, presenting a labyrinth of complexities and ambiguities. According to Hingley, "the work's difficulties derive from the mystification deliberately cultivated" and "mirrors and boxes with hidden compartments" (244). To Berlin, who asked whether she would ever annotate the poem since the allusions might remain totally unintelligible for future readers. Akhmatova replied that when "those who knew the world about which she spoke were overtaken by senility or death, the poem would die too, it would be buried with her and her century … the past alone had significance for the poets …" (II, 41).

Poem Without a Hero can be regarded as a summary of Akhmatova's career and a poetic farewell. She made no secret, in her conversation with Berlin, that it was intended as a kind of final memorial to her life as a poet, and to the past of the city—Petersburg—which was part of her being (II, 29-30).

In the last ten years of her life, Akhmatova was contemplating the value of art she had practiced. In rediscovering life's simple miracles, she realized that her poetry was an act of survival. In composing her poems, her mind could leap, twist, adjust itself, and acquire philosophical dimensions involving fundamental issues in life. She knew that while art cannot completely change the future, it still can, in some essential way, lend to it a picture of its own time, and while art cannot fully eliminate our fears either, it also can, by dissecting and analyzing them in a poetic process, diminish their influence and perhaps even provide a temporary escape. She also knew that culture endows people's lives with meaning, although it cannot, finally, be explained but must be simply felt and experienced. Thus, she became convinced that, in a small way, she succeeded in proving the salutary power of art and of the aesthetic experience in a totalitarian age which was determined to eliminate it.

She now went back to her youth as she grew up in Tsarskoe Selo (II, 279) and had long walks in the Summer Garden in Petersburg (II, 283). In an attempt to repossess the broken links with the past, she wrote the lyric "Komarovo Sketches" also known as the "Four of Us" (II, 315), the only poem by any of the four great poet-contemporaries in which all the other three appear, including three epigraphs from the poems that they had dedicated to her. Now that Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva were all gone, she felt that "We are all a little like guests in life / To live—is only habit." Although she was exhausted by a lifetime of fighting, she still loved beauty over everything else. In "The Last Rose" she wrote, "Lord! You see I am tired / Of living and dying and resurrection. / Take everything but grant that I may feel / The freshness of this crimson rose again" (II, 317).

Deming Brown reviews this period of Akhmatova's life: "In these last years Akhmatova wrote as the conscious representative of an epoch and her personal recollections were designed to embody the historical memory of a whole generation. The subjective impressions in her poetry were now endowed with a generalized cultural and civic intonation…. When most Soviet poets were developing 'modern,' 'contemporary' thematics, Akhmatova, in the words of Yevtushenko, 'returned from Leningrad to Petersburg.' But her own maturity and history itself had prevented her from sealing herself in a time capsule so that her poetry was never archaic and always had contemporary relevance" (26).

Much of her later poetry was not allowed to be printed and, had it not been recorded in memory, would have disappeared. In the end, however, what has disappeared is not her poetry, but astonishingly, the seemingly implacable Soviet system which had furnished much of her poetry's subject matter, and then imposed an awful silence. This is truly poetic justice of the first order.

The thousands who came to her funeral on March 10, 1966, were expressing the country's gratitude that she had preserved for them "the great Russian word" pure and intact as she had promised in her wartime poem "Courage." They realized that the corruption of the language, the twisting of words, would have inevitably led to the destruction of common sense and the perversion of thought. But it was not only the language that she had saved.

To a great extent, as a result of the cultural and spiritual labors of Akhmatova and her equally famous friends for the continuity of the free poetic tradition in Russia, the past decades have witnessed a transformation in the consciousness and political thought of the people. According to Andrei Sinyavsky "… with their nonconformism they [Pasternak, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva] anticipated the dissidence and paved its way. It is not by chance that today they are the most widely read, most respected writers among the Soviet intelligentsia" (226-27). People learned from their poetry how they had been deceived. The appeal of ideology, the notion of having been led through the wilderness to some utopia, faded out. Over this period people have gradually lost their fear of the omnipotent state and acquired a taste for democracy. Finding the political atmosphere looser and less ominous, both dissidents and ordinary citizens were becoming a little bolder in challenging the authorities. In an intellectual autopsy when a new society is being painfully hammered out in Russia after breaking free from the stranglehold of totalitarianism, who can doubt that these four creative artists and their small liberal group of followers—who, against all odds, restored a mutilated folk memory, a culture that was "occupied territory, occupied by the bureaucrats" (Austin) and brought back the tradition of candor, sensitivity, and free thought in Russian literature—played a cardinal role in the ultimate victory of civilized values, laws of morality and common sense? D. M. Thomas asks: "Can it be by chance that the worst of times found the best of poets to wage war for eternal truth and human dignity?" (23).

There is a danger that now as the new Russia emerges, Akhmatova's poetry may seem less defiant and provocative, the pain muted, and the urgency lost. "The plight is not unfamiliar in cultures emerging from repression in which art often assumed the functions of a moral and political opposition," remarks Serge Schmemann. Yet, as an account of collective behavior in times of social upheavals and of the problem of individual comprehension and choice, her poetry remains vibrant and enduring. Every poem breathes the spirit that made her the authentic spokeswoman of living in truth, of the idea that it is not power that matters but values, reason, sincerity and tolerance: a rare combination of artistic skill and intellectual honesty. Although she has been dead for some twenty-eight years, she has so far confounded the rule that former reputations must fade and memories lose their luster. Her stubborn hostility toward fanaticism and her rejection of the false allure of apocalypse has a universal relevance. Not only Soviet intellectuals but freedom-loving people everywhere owe her a debt of gratitude for what she had written to define the never-changing basics of liberty. Thus, it is no wonder that, despite the relative fortunes of the glasnost and perestroika in Russia, she continues to be a unique aspiration for the younger poets and writers of the land, who, at her death, expressed their sorrow and kept celebrating her artistic achievements.

Yevtushenko asks himself "How could we weep?… Alive, / she was beyond belief. / How could she die?" In a reference to her admiration of Dostoevsky he states, "If Pushkin is our sun, surely she is / Our White Night." White Night is an early short story by Dostoevsky. He sees the future when "schoolboys, with their hands in fists, / pressing notebooks tight. / And schoolgirls, bearing in their satchels, / surely, notes and diaries …" continue to read and study Akhmatova (214).

Twenty-one years after her death, Andrei Voznesensky points to the great attraction Akhmatova's poems still retain for the contemporary reader: "A recent volume of her verses, published in an edition of 200,000 copies, was sold out immediately, and is now obtainable only on the black market." In a poem, "Book Boom," he writes, "Just try to buy Akhmatova. / Sold out. The booksellers say / Her black agate-colored tome / Is worth more than agate today." In an evident Schadenfreude he continues, "Those who once attacked her / —as if to atone for their curse— / stand, a reverent honor guard / for a single volume of her verse" (266).

In painting her poetic and physical portrait, Akhmadulina sees her when she was young "with golden eyes" looking—in a reference to her beloved Petersburg—"on two dawns … / on fire along the Neva," and when she became old "Like a heavy, gray-haired bell / with prophetic ear and long summons / she speaks with a voice or with ringing / sent out by star after star, / with her indescribable wattle / full of unearthly song." She envies her a "poor captive of hell or heaven" and would gladly give up "the delight of remaining days" for her poetic riches (141).

I can only regret that these three poems by Russia's outstanding contemporary poets were not included in the Zephyr edition. I also miss a contribution by Joseph Brodsky, one of Akhmatova's "orphans" (I, 129), although there are many references to him in the two volumes. He is, unquestionably, the most talented of her many disciples, strongly influenced by her attention and creative criticism. She thought he was the best among the young poets in Russia whom "she had brought up by hand" (Berlin II, 39). Having been inspired by Akhmatova, no doubt, helped him to win the Nobel prize. Czeslaw Milosz remarks that "Brodsky takes over where young Osip Mandelstam and young Anna Akhmatova were stopped."

Russia's unheroic leap into self-destruction reappears as a cautionary tale for all of us, a tale made only bearable by Akhmatova's fundamental compassion and belief in human decency. How she would have enjoyed to see her Peters-burg—the city of her great teachers Pushkin and Dostoevsky—shed its Leninist sobriquet and become Peter's city again! Although Russian publishing is still recovering from the combined shock of the disappearance of censorship, the gradual advent of market economy, the emergence of hidden tastes, forbidden themes, mysteries, adventures and pornography, and the intellectual atmosphere of the country is still cloudy as various contenders vie for power in an uncertain and often chaotic contemporary political climate, the lively reception of these two marvelous volumes of poetry is one sure sign of Akhmatova's staying power. She is the authentic touchstone of the second Russian Revolution—the revolution of the intellectuals. Let us hope that this time it will last.

Works Cited

Akhmadulina, Bella. The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.

Akhmatova, Anna. The Complete Poems. Judith Hemschemeyer, trans., Roberta Reeder, ed. Somerville, MA: Zephyr Press, 1992. [Referred to as AA I and II.]

――. Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems. Richard McKane, trans. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Austin, Anthony. "For Moscow's Intellectuals, The Night Is Long and Cold." The New York Times Nov. 30, 1980.

Brown, Deming. Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Carlisle, Olga. Poets on Street Corners. New York: Random House, 1969.

――. "A Woman in Touch with Her Feelings." Vogue August, 1979.

Chukovsky, Korney, "Akhmatova and Mayakovsky" in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Ehrenburg, Ilya. Memoirs 1921–1941 New York: Grosset, 1964.

Haight, Amanda. Anna Akhmatova, a Poetic Pilgrimage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Kunitz, Stanley and Max Hayward, trans. Poems of Akhmatova. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973.

Mandelstam, Osip. The Complete Critical Prose and Letters. Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1990.

Milosz, Czeslaw. "A Struggle Against Suffocation." The New York Review of Books Aug. 14, 1980.

Schmemman, Serge. "Without Strictures of the Past, Soviet Literature Languishes." The New York Times Aug. 5, 1991.

Sinyavsky, Andrei. Soviet Civilization, A Cultural History. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990.

Slonim, Marc. From Chekhov to the Revolution, Russian Literature 1900–1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Thomas, D. M., trans., Anna Akhmatova, The Way of All the Earth. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979.

Voznesensky, Andrei, Arrow in the Wall, Selected Poetry and Prose. New York: Henry Holt, 1987.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. The Collected Poems. New York: Henry Holt, 1991.