[In the following essay, Ketchian presents an overview of Akhmadulina’s background and of the influences on her poetry.]

The poetry of earth is ceasing never.

—John Keats

Ot strannоj liriкi, gdi кazdyj sag—siкrit.

—Anna Akhmatova

Bella Akhmadulina is Russia's premier contemporary woman poet. In her poetry the Russian language attains a sophisticated symbiosis of meaning, dazzling imagery, rhythm, and sound in articulation that conveys to advantage the artist's unique evolution and service to Russian letters.¹ This new peak for the Russian poetic language, reached in her collection The Secret (Taina, 1983)² and continued in the collection The Garden (Sad, 1987),³ firmly places her in the great pantheon of classic Russian poets.

Izabella Akhatovna Akhmadulina was born on 10 April 1937, in Moscow to a Tartar father and a mother of Russian-Italian ancestry. An only child, she was raised by a doting maternal grandmother. She spent the war years in evacuation in the Urals. Upon graduating from high school in Moscow in 1954, Akhmadulina worked for the newspaper Metrostroevets. Her first poem was published in 1955. Study at the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow (1955-60) was interrupted by expulsion for her overtly apolitical verse. She was reinstated at the institute through the efforts of the writer Pavel Antokol'skii (1896-1978), who had initially launched the career of this promising poet.

Akhmadulina entered the poetic arena with other poets of the Thaw (1953-63), a relatively benevolent period in the history of the Soviet Union following the death of Stalin in 1953. It was a time when many people craved bold new voices untainted by the lies of the past. The most famous poets in this group, often called the “New Wave,” were the Moscow poets—Bella Akhmadulina, Evgenii Evtushenko, Bulat Okudzhava, Robert Rozhdestvenskii, and Andrei Voznesenskii.⁴ Receptive audiences, eager for more freely expressed ideas and for young artists not connected with the personality cult of Stalin, filled the concert halls and stadiums to hear the young poets' declamatory verse and the sung ballads of Okudzhava. The West hailed the fresh voices as well. Akhmadulina commenced with a combination of the declamatory and lyric principles, but she soon adopted a self-reflective stance that frequently addressed the process of creating verse, hence her poems of a metapoetic bent.

Fame came to Bella Akhmadulina in 1962 with the appearance of her first book The String (Struna, 1962). Certain critics, however, accused her of imitating the brilliant lyric poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) whom the authorities had persecuted repeatedly.⁵ What the commentators failed to perceive was the possibility that in evincing overt influence, Akhmadulina was probably following the lead of her idol, the superb poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), in whose early work Akhmatova—a peer—was treated as her Muse.⁶ The cognoscenti, on the other hand, applauded Akhmadulina's classically flowing, often humorous verse, which, coupled with her inspired dramatic public readings and famed beauty, made her a trendsetter for the young. Other books followed: Chills: Selected Works (Oznob. Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 1968), Music Lessons (Uroki muzyki, 1969), Poems (Stikhi, 1975), Candle (Svecha, 1977), Snowstorm (Metel', 1977), Dreams of Georgia (Sny o Gruzii, 1977), The Secret. New Poems (Taina. Novye stikhi, 1983), The Garden. New Poems (Sad. Novye stikhi, 1987), Poems (Stikhotvoreniia, 1988), and Selected Works. Poems (Izbrannoe. Stikhi, 1988).

Marriage to Evgenii Evtushenko did not last, nor did her subsequent marriage to the lyrical prose writer Iurii Nagibin (b. 1920), nor to the writer Gennadii Mamlin. For many years now Bella Akhmadulina, the mother of two daughters, Elizaveta and Anna, has been married to the artist and stage designer Boris Messerer. She defended the physicist and dissident Dr. Andrei Sakharov and the monumental dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918). In 1977 Akhmadulina was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Literature. For her audacity in participating with a prose work, “Many Dogs and the Dog” (“Mnogo sobak i sobaka”), in the unofficial literary almanac featuring twenty-three writers, Metropol (Metropol', 1979), which was sponsored by the popular prose writer Vasilii Aksenov (b. 1932) as an attempt to promote young writers never published by the official press, Akhmadulina suffered a tacit ban on her works until 1983. Forced to leave the country, Aksenov settled in the United States. Meanwhile Akhmadulina used the time of enforced silence to crystallize and hone her verse-writing skills until the poems of a certain period culminated in that rare cohesion and harmony between independent pieces when they seemingly effortlessly coalesce into a unified collection of verse more like a book of the sort the magnificent cerebral poet Osip Mandel'shtam (1891-1938) sought and the lyricist Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) achieved in his My Sister—Life (Sestra moia—zhizn').⁷ In 1989, following the publication of the seminal collections, The Secret and The Garden, Akhmadulina was awarded the Soviet Union's highest prize—the State Prize in Literature.

Thus it is the compelling quality of the refined poetry in the collection of 1983, The Secret, with its leitmotif of poetic creation, which Akhmadulina's lyric persona pursues to its fullest degree, that comprises the main focus of this study—namely, the idea, the attempt, and the act in the past and the present. While the specifics of poetic creation—the metapoetic theme and even stance—assume lyric form in the early verse preceding The Secret as explored in Chapter 2, their scope and profundity are realized in greater scope in this second, mature or “garden” period. Nor does the leitmotif of poetic creation conclude within the covers of The Secret; instead, powerful echoes migrate to the collection The Garden and to the separately published later poems. Her metapoetry, like Pasternak's, in this period concentrates on the verse-creating process.

In The Secret, the succession of major themes establishes sequences of poems that, in turn, are grouped consecutively without formal unification into cycles.⁸ Indeed, only one formal cycle of six poems figures in the collection—the cycle “Tarusa.” The fact of its uniqueness obviously underscores its significance and aligns it to the sole epigraph in the collection, taken from Marina Tsvetaeva. In the absence of formal cycles, the major themes in The Secret originate fleetingly as motifs until the time that each has its moment “on stage” as a theme before being superseded in primacy by its successor. Yet the ebbing themes linger on for some time before each one phases out at its own pace, often migrating into The Garden. These intricately orchestrated themes demonstrate the creation of verse in the midst of nature by a lyrical speaker privy to nature's most intimate secrets. And the poems enable the reader to participate in the stages of gradual disclosure.

Akhmadulina's treatment of poetic creation is a means for her poetic persona to perceive her immediate world of nature and of selected people, as well as of certain depths of art and of history before crafting her own verse through the medium of this same nature and the rhythm of man's accomplishments in art, culture, history, and life. Toward this end, to comprehend and to interpret the concentrated, seemingly all-inclusive poems through the prism of poetic creation, I investigate the collection The Secret in detail in Chapters 3 through 9 with references to the early poetry, to The Garden, and to the recent independent poems. Whereas Chapter 2 charts the variegated directions to which the poems lead and singles out and defines Akhmadulina's approach to poetic creation in the early period, Chapter 3 focuses on the opening poem in The Secret—“I have the secret of wondrous blooming” (“Est' taina u menia ot chudnogo tsveten'ia”)—as the inclusive programmatic piece conveying in capsule form the message, concepts, and ideas that are to be developed. Chapter 4 treats Akhmadulina's approach to the moon as the direct inspirer of verse, a veritable surrogate Muse in whose presence the verse should ideally self-create, leaving only the final honing and form to the ardently observing poetic speaker. Eventually, as seen in Chapter 5, the moon as creator of verse yields to the notion of day as deity, a notion, which, by utilizing ancient mythology as a touchstone, draws on the Russian literary tradition to augment the poet's own imagination and ingenuity. Soon day's position as helpmate in creating verse is usurped by intrusive space, as examined in Chapter 6, and, subsequently, by the fragrant bird cherry as investigated in Chapter 7. Homage to writers past and present, who represent a vital source for Akhmadulina's approach to poetic creation, permeates the collection and is addressed throughout the discussion where relevant, but it is articulated at length in Chapter 8 and 9. Each of these themes, concentrated in a few sequential poems, recedes gradually as the next sequential cluster of poems comes into its ascendancy.

This analysis of Akhmadulina's poetic craft centers, above all, on a chiefly poem-by-poem analysis of pieces in The Secret touching on the wondrous secret, of which each consecutive cluster of poems uncovers an additional aspect and fills in the next piece of the mosaic for the final magnificent picture. In the process of plumbing the secrets of poetic creation, all of the poet's work comes into view through references and comparisons, and numerous literary parallels serve as a steady backdrop to the recent poetry. This poetry is firmly grounded in the rich literary and linguistic tradition of the past.

As a leading artistic creator for her postmodernist generation, Bella Akhmadulina combines Russian cultural and literary points of view with their Georgian and world counterparts. The “exotic” Georgian element, so prevalent in her early work, ostensibly draws on a tradition well established in Russian literature by the nineteenth-century writers—Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), and the great Russian writer and thinker Lev Tolstoi (1828-1910)—as well as the twentieth-century writers Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandel'shtam. History and a sense of religion intertwine in the recent work. Akhmadulina couches her poetic vision and ideas in an idiom that does justice to the subtle nuances and the multiple possibilities inherent in the Russian language. Indeed, the rich literary devices and tradition of Russian literature masterfully enhance her poems. All the while, Akhmadulina's poetry observes continuity with the wealth of nineteenth-century Russian literature as represented by such luminaries as the fountainhead of modern Russian literature, Aleksandr Pushkin, the Romantic poet who introduced the psychological novella to Russian letters, Mikhail Lermontov, and the contemplative, philosophically charged miniaturist Fedor Tiutchev (1803-73), and draws on her immediate modernist predecessors, in particular on Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Mandel'shtam.

It will be seen that although Akhmadulina's poetry has been lauded for forcefulness of expression and masterful execution of form, in its finesse and sentient approach to her subject and its underlying surroundings, the product of Bella Akhmadulina's pen bears the unmistakable signature of a woman. What is more, she grounds its tradition, particularly in The Secret, in the oeuvre and biography of the two great women poets of Russia—the ebullient Marina Tsvetaeva, known for her staccato, unusual rhythms and her elliptical imagery,⁹ and the deceptively quiet, private Anna Akhmatova. This analysis will strive to unveil many of the connections.

At this writing Bella Akhmadulina stands out among a constellation of fine women peers. Chief among them are the Moscow-born dissident poet Natal'ia Gorbanevskaia (b. 1936), who currently resides in Paris, and whose themes of love and pain find expression in poems on prison and on urban topics; Rimma Kazakova (b. 1932, Sebastopol), whose topics center on nature, love of her country, and the role of women in love and in motherhood; the engaging miniaturist Inna Lisnianskaia (b. 1924, Baku), whose aphoristic and sententious pieces with unexpected turns include poems of parting and love gone sour, of homelessness and hopelessness as well as poems on biblical and religious themes; Novella Matveeva (b. 1934), whose symbolism embraces childhood, memories, and Russian nature and is often set to music which she sings; and the lyric poet Iunna Morits (b. Kiev, 1937), whose poetry has been compared to Pasternak's.¹⁰

Ultimately, to find the key to the secret of Akhmadulina's poetic craft, so attuned to the Russian literary heritage and that of the world, is to follow her poetic speaker through the successive poems in the collection The Secret as she examines events and phenomena in nature. For greater fidelity to Akhmadulina's artistic vision the treatment of themes in Chapters 4 through 9 observes their succession in the collection. The reader of this book will follow the speaker's scrutiny of and interaction with nature as she deliberates with the intention of composing verse in the town of Tarusa in the Kaluga Region and then moves to Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, and back again to Moscow and on to the writers' colony of Peredelkino, all the while savoring the beauty of the imagery, language, form, and sound that inform this remarkable poetry while delighting in the revelations made alongside the secretive speaker.

Notes

1. Comparatively little has been written on Akhmadulina and her verse and little has been translated into English. On the poetry of her early years, see Evgenii Evtushenko's introduction to Bella Akhmadulina, Fever and Other New Poems, trans. G. Dutton and Igor Mizhakoff-Koriakin (New York: Morrow, 1969). For revealing statements, see Chad Heap and Matt Steinglass, “An Interview with Bella Akhmadulina,” The Harvard Advocate, May 1988. Sam Driver has translated Oznob as The Chills in ARDIS: Anthology of Recent Russian Literature, ed. Carl Proffer and Ellendea Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975). See the introduction by F. D. Reeve in his selected translations of poems and prose, including the autobiographical piece “Grandmother” (“Babushka”) in Bella Akhmadulina, The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose, edited, translated, and introduced by F. D. Reeve (New York: Henry Holt, 1990). Also see Christine Rydel, “The Metapoetical World of Bella Akhmadulina,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 1 (1971). Of further interest is Nancy Condee, “Axmadulina's Poemy: Poems of Transformations and Origins,” Slavic and East European Journal 29, no. 2 (1985). For an exhaustive list of Akhmadulina's publications prior to 1978, see Russkie sovetskie pisateli. Poety. Bibliograficheskii ukazatel', 15 vols. (Moscow: Kniga, 1978), 2:118-32. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

   At the first mention of a poem's title in English, the transliterated version of the Russian is furnished in parentheses for easy identification. To distinguish in English between actual titles of poems and first lines used as titles, I capitalize all meaningful words in the former but capitalize the first word only in the latter.

2. I translate “taina” as “secret” because that is the meaning contained in the collection's opening poem. The other meaning of the word, “mystery,” which is favored by Bella Akhmadulina and which, coincidentally, aligns it with Keats, figures less prominently in the collection. See Bella Akhmadulina, Taina. Novye stikhi (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1983).

3. Bella Akhmadulina, Sad. Novye stikhi (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1987).

4. Evgenii Evtushenko (b. 1933) is well known for the exclamatory style of his poetry on topical issues and for his flamboyant readings. Recently his interests have turned to prose and film. Bulat Okudzhava (b. 1924), a bard famous for his contemplative verse and his singing of it, has more recently turned to prose. Robert Rozhdestvenskii (b. 1932) writes in the tradition of declamatory poetry on a wide variety of themes that balance love and civic topics with travel in the broadest sense. Andrei Voznesenskii (b. 1933) crafts declamatory poetry that explores numerous striking devices and themes. For excellent entries on Russian literature, see Victor Terras, ed., Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

5. Bella Akhmadulina, Struna. Stikhi (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1962). Anna Akhmatova was an outstanding circumspect lyric poet of filigreed short pieces with hidden and dramatic depths on unhappy love, the search for solace in religious observance, and on poetry and poetic craft, among other themes. Long persecuted by Soviet officials—her husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921), was shot, her son, Lev Gumilev (1912-92), spent fourteen years in Soviet hard labor prison camps, and she was not published for many years—Akhmatova continues to be a predominant and growing influence in Russian letters. See Sam Driver, Anna Akhmatova (New York: Twayne, 1972), 16-37.

6. Comprising with Akhmatova the duo of great Russian women poets, Marina Tsvetaeva was a poet innovative in content and form whose verse rings with intensity. Her emotionally charged, brilliant elliptical verse is offset by her equally arresting prose. Born in Moscow in 1892, she emigrated to Germany in 1922, then lived in Czechoslovakia and France where she endured much hardship. She returned with her son to the Soviet Union in 1939 in the wake of her husband Sergei Efron and daughter Ariadna, but their reunion was brief. Sergei was executed, and Ariadna was interned in a hard labor prison camp. Evacuated from Moscow to the town of Elabuga during the war, she committed suicide. For many years Tsvetaeva's work was suppressed in the Soviet Union. See Jane A. Taubman, A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary (Columbus, Oh.: Slavica, 1989), 262.

7. Osip Mandel'shtam (1891-1938) is a giant of Russian literature whose ideationally and referentially compressed poetry finds some elaboration in his luminous autobiographical and other prose. His free, uncompromising spirit and peripatetic lifestyle incurred official disfavor, but it was for his anti-Stalin poems that he was imprisoned and sent to a Siberian hard labor prison camp where he died. A good deal of his later poetry was preserved only in the memory of his valiant wife, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam (1899-1980). Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) is one of Russia's finest lyric poets. Upon conferral of the Nobel Prize in Literature on his novel Dr. Zhivago he was officially disowned. One could easily replace the title My Sister—Life in this quotation below with The Secret and every word would be applicable to Akhmadulina's The Secret: “Rather than being a sampling of poems collected under one cover, MSL [My Sister—Life] is indeed an idiosyncratic and highly conscious poetic narrative which recalls the formal structure of a novel at the same time that it celebrates the linguistic freedom and the metaphorical inventiveness of lyric prose.” See Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, Boris Pasternak's “My Sister—Life”: The Illusion of Narrative (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), 11. On Pasternak, see Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, vol. 1, 1890-1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

8. I use the word “cycle” in the Russian way to mean a group of related poems formally united by the poet through a title and numbering. In English this is called a sequence. I use “sequence” to denote a succession of thematically related poems in a collection that are not united formally by the author.

9. See Three Russian Women Poets: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Bella Akhmadulina, trans. Mary Maddock (New York: Crossing Press, 1983), 42.

10. For a broad discussion of women in Russian literature, both as heroines and authors, see Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Of further interest is Women Writers in Russian Modernism: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Temira Pachmuss (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).