Sunday Pages: "Requiem"

A poem by Anna Akhmatova

Akhmat Khan bin Küchük, a descendent of Genghis, was the Khan of the Great Horde in the fifteenth century. His Khanate made its capital at Sarai, a city on the lower Volga. At the Grand Stand at the Ugra River, his men retreated rather than fight the army of Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow, who had audaciously withheld his tribute to the Horde. Akhmat’s defeat at Ugra ended, once and for all, the “Tatar yoke” over Russia.

According to family legend, Akhmat Khan was a distant ancestor of Inna Erazmovna Stogova, mother of the poet Anna Andreevna Gorenko—who, in her late teens, borrowed the name of the long-dead Khan as her nom de plume. Thus was born Anna Akhmatova.

The poet Joseph Brodsky wrote the “the five open A’s of Anna Akhmatova had a hypnotic effect and put this name’s carrier firmly on top of the alphabet of Russian poetry. In a sense, it was her first successful line; memorable in its acoustic inevitability, with its Ah sponsored less by sentiment than by history. This tells you a lot about the intuition and quality of the ear of this seventeen-year-old girl who soon after publication began to sign her letters and legal papers as Anna Akhmatova. In its suggestion of identity derived from the fusion of sound and time, the choice of the pseudonym turned out to be prophetic…”

Akhmatova was not put to the sword in her tent, like her ancestral Khan. But she was renounced by the powers that be in Moscow, even as she established herself as one of her country’s finest poets. Her biography at the Poetry Foundation beautifully describes her genius, her uniqueness, and her tragedy:

Although she lived a long life, it was darkened disproportionately by calamitous moments. Isaiah Berlin, who visited Akhmatova in her Leningrad apartment in November 1945 while serving in Russia as first secretary of the British embassy, aptly described her as a “tragic queen,” according to György Dalos. Berlin’s assessment has echoed through generations of readers who understand Akhmatova—her person, poetry, and, more nebulously, her poetic persona—as the iconic representation of noble beauty and catastrophic predicament.

Let’s start with the noble beauty. She was six feet tall, with broad shoulders, and she did not slouch. Her neck was long, her features angular, her face strikingly distinctive, her eyes mesmerizing, her bearing regal. I would say that she looked like a Modigliani, but it’s more accurate to say that a Modigliani looked like her. She met Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910, while on her honeymoon. She was 20. The great painter was five years older (and a full foot shorter).

Her (first) husband, Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, pegged the artist as a “drunken monster,” which wasn’t far off. “Modi,” as his friends called him, wound up being an alcoholic, and a drug addict, and a serial philanderer, and an abusive lover, and a deadbeat dad to his four children, and a consumptive who died of tuberculosis at 35. He was always broke, to the point where he would paint portraits for food. (How shocked Modi would have been, had he known that his 1917 painting Nu couché would, in 2015, sell for a whopping $170.4 million! It was worth every penny.)

But when Anna knew him, Modi was not yet consumed by his inner demons or his Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The poet and the artist were smitten with each other. She returned to Paris a year later, this time without her husband, and stayed for a few weeks. We don’t really know what happened between them—despite the emotional vulnerability in her poetry, she was not the type to kiss and tell—but we do know they were inseparable, and that he produced a series of sketches of her in the nude. She was, in his mind, the apotheosis of the female form.

Many years later, she would write, of the voluminous letters he subsequently sent her, all of which are lost, “I remember a few sentences from his letters. Here is one of them: ‘Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise.’”

A hantise is one who haunts; the first four words mean “you are inside me.” In English Modi might have said: You’re an obsession, you’re my obsession. Given that the women in his paintings—and there are a lot of them—all take on some aspect of Akhmatova’s form, we can see quite clearly that this was the case.

Modigliani’s sketch of Anna Akhmatova

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Akhmatova was just as powerful an artistic force as Modigliani, if not more so. Her poetry is breathtakingly good. She wrote this in Paris 1911:

When you’re drunk it’s so much fun —
An early fall has strung
The elms with yellow flags.
We’ve strayed into the land of deceit
And bitterly we repent.
Why then are do we smile
These strange and frozen smiles?
We wanted screaming anguish
Instead of quiet contentment…
I won’t abandon you, my friend,
So dissolute and mild.

“Lot’s Wife,” translated here by Stanley Kunitz, was written in 1924:

And the just man trailed God’s shining agent,
Over a black mountain, in his giant track,
While a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

At the red towers of your native Sodom,
The square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
At the empty windows set in the tall house
Where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
Stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
And her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
Too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
Who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Almost immediately, Akhmatova was accepted into the ranks of the great poets and artists of her era. She was born in Odesa and died in Moscow, and also lived in Kyiv and Tashkent, but spent much of her life in what was once, and what is now, called St. Petersburg. She hung out at a bohemian café, where she gave readings of her poetry and hung out with her creative friends and chain-smoked. She was an essential part of the literary scene in pre-revolution Russia. She was married to not one, not two, but three poets.

Unlike the stereotypical Dickensonian poetess—lonely, heartbroken, wan, suicidal—Akhmatova was charming and sociable and fun, and maintained friendships that lasted a lifetime. One of her old friends, the memoirist Nadezhda Mandelshtam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelshtam, wrote, “Hordes of women and battalions of men of the most widely differing ages can testify to her great gift for friendship, to a love of mischief which never deserted her even in her declining years, to the way in which, sitting at a table with vodka and zakuski, she could be so funny that everybody fell off their chairs from laughter.”

The early days of the Bolshevik era comprised a high point for Russian art and literature. The Communist government was busy putting down counterinsurgencies and had little energy for cracking down on subversive art. This was the time of Kazimir Malevich and the Russian avant-garde.

It was, alas, short-lived. Stalin quickly consolidated power. The Leningrad café was shut down. Many of her artist friends, reading the authoritarian writing on the wall, fled the country. Anna refused to leave. This decision cost her dearly. Citing an early analysis of her poems by an early-Soviet Jordan Peterson that described Akhmatova as “part nun, part whore,” her work was formally banned in 1926, and would remain so for the next 14 years.

That year, her life took a turn from quiet contentment to screaming anguish. Unable to make ends meet from her poetry, as she had always done, she lived in poverty. Her son, Lev, was in and out of jail—for the crime of being the son of Gumilev, her first husband, who’d been wrongly arrested and executed by the secret police in 1921; Lev himself had done nothing wrong. Anna spent her days, many of them, outside the prison in Leningrad, waiting at the high brick wall for word of his sentencing. This was during the Great Purge—the Yezhovshchina, named for the head of the secret police who wound up being purged himself—of 1936-38.

What Akhmatova experienced then was the worst and most soul-destroying form of tyranny: petty, lazy, banal, stupid, destructive, ignorant, evil—the kind of abject horror we are hoping to avoid an American reprise of, here in the Trump Redux. It changed her, it drained her, but it did not break her. Even when, against all artistic impulse, she submitted a few poems ostensibly supporting the Communist regime, in the hope that doing so would prompt Lev’s release from prison (it didn’t; Stalin could tell her heart wasn’t in it), she did not waver, did not break.

During this terrible period, the secret police was so oppressive that she could not write poetry. Not that she didn’t want to; she dared not put pen to paper, because if the Stalinist goons inspecting her flat found any lines scribbled down, it might make things worse for Lev and for her.

So here’s what Anna Akhmatova did: she composed poems in short bursts. She wrote down a few lines, memorized them, had some trusted friends memorize them, and then she threw the pages into the fire.

Let me say that again: she wrote down a few lines, memorized them, had some trusted friends memorize them, and then she threw the pages into the fire.

The result was a long, fractured poem called “Requiem.” It took years to write, and it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987—21 years after her death. The elegy begins with a few unforgettable lines of prose that she titles “Instead of a Preface.” Here, she tells of being suddenly recognized as a poet by one of the other devastated women waiting outside the city jail during the Great Purge:

Instead of a Preface

In the terrible days of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months waiting in line
outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, her lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she snapped out of the stupor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

That one vignette, told in just seven sentences, communicates so much about living in tyranny. What victims of oppression want is for their stories to be heard. And what the poet, the writer, the filmmaker, the artist, must do—their civic and their human duty—is give voice to the voiceless.

As the poet Zbigniew Herbert writes in “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito”:

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

“Requiem” is Anna Akhmatova giving testimony. There are many parts of the poem, and I’m not going to share all of them. But below is a smattering.

(Note: I found a number of translations of the poem. Some show fidelity to the original Russian without much regard for poetic sentiment, others force rhymes because some sections of “Requiem” rhyme. So I tracked down the Russian text, ran it through Google Translate to get the literal translation, put all of the variations in a blender, and came up with my own version. I hope this does the work justice. But as someone once wrote—maybe it was Tom Stoppard; I can’t recall—poetry is what gets lost in translation.)

Here, she sets the scene:

Prologue

It was a time when only the dead
Could smile, relieved to be at peace;
When the soul of Leningrad hung, limp
As a tattered flag, outside its prison;
When regiments of the condemned,
Made mad with torment, were herded
In the railway yards, shrinking away
From the locomotive whistle’s farewell;
When stars of death stood over us;
And when Russia—guiltless, beloved—writhed
Under the weight of the Black Marias,
And the march of bloodstained boots.

“Black Marias” are police vans, used to round people up in mass arrests—like ICE uses now. In Russia at the time they were also known as “Black Ravens.”

Throughout Akhmatova’s work, the suffering of the mother is a major theme—for obvious reasons. The Streltsy she cites in this section refers to a failed military coup by Peter the Great’s special forces, known as the Streltsy, in the 17th century:

I.

At dawn they came to take you away.
I walked behind, as in a funeral procession.
In the dark room children cried,
A flickering candle lit up the Mother of God.
Your lips were cold as the ikon’s kiss,
As the sweat on your brow—I will not forget.
Like the wives of the Moscow Streltsy,
I’ll stand and howl beneath the Kremlin towers.

When Jesus tells Mary not to cry for Him, is that to ease her suffering, or is it a prohibition on expressing emotion? Akhmatova shows the scene of His death, focusing on His mother:

Crucifixion

Do not weep for me, Mother,
For I am in my grave.

I.

A choir of angels acclaimed the hour,
And the heavens was melted in fire.
“Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?
Mother, do not weep for me. . . .”

II.

Mary Magdalene wailed and cried.
His dearest disciple sat stone-faced.
But where His mother stood in silence,
Not one of them dared to look.

And then, half a dozen sections later, we come to the powerful final lines:

Epilogue

I.

Because I’ve found out how faces fall,
How terror seeps from closed eyelids,
How suffering is written on the cheek,
Hard and chiseled as cuneiform,
How glossy black hair or blonde both
Turn overnight to tarnished silver,
How those who submit no longer smile,
And how fear can be detected under laughter,
My prayers are not for myself alone,
But include all who stood vigil with me,
In bitter March cold and July’s scorching heat,
Under the blinding red wall.

II.

The funeral hour comes—another year.
It’s you that I see, that I feel, that I hear:

The one who we helped bring to the window,
The one who won’t tread on the earth below,

The one who would toss her beautiful mane
And say, “This is like coming home again.”

I’d like to call out each individual name,
But the list was taken away when they came.

From the poverty of words you spoke aloud
That I overheard, I have fashioned a shroud:

I will always remember them, always see,
Whatever new misfortune is put upon me,

And if my poor mouth is sewed shut at the seam—
My mouth, through which a hundred million scream—

May they remember me in the same way,
On the eve of my memorial day.

And if, years from now, leaders of my country
Decide to erect a monument to me,

To this triumph, I’d give consent—
But only if I got to choose where it went.

Not at my birthplace by the sea—
That place means nothing now to me.

Nor in the royal garden, where stood my tree,
Where the inconsolable shadow follows me,

But here, where I stood three hundred hours,
Waiting in line by the prison towers.

Then, even in blessed death, I won’t forget
The rumble of the Black Marias; still yet

Will recall the awful slamming of the door,
The old woman howling like a wounded boar.

From the bronze cast of my eyes, let flow
Like teardrops, the melting snow,

And let the dove sing from inside the jail,
As down the Neva, ships softly sail.

(The Neva is a river that runs through St. Petersburg to the Gulf of Finland.)

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Stalin rightly saw that poetry was dangerous. It was a threat to his power. Great works of art, whether paintings or poetry or music or movies, only magnify the shit-awful artlessness of the tyrant’s regime. The strongman wants his people to be always in, as Akhmatova put it, “the stupor common to us all.” Despots seek to kill the spirit; great works of art inspire.

After Stalin died, there was a thaw in government censorship and literary repression. Akhmatova was allowed to reissue some of her work. Her standing as a major Russian poet was established. Her living situation improved. She was allowed to travel outside the country. “Requiem” was published in Munich. If it was not a return to the halcyon days of the 1910s, it was a major improvement from the horrors of the Great Purge.

In an excellent summation of her work at Book Beat, I came across this excerpt from “The Sheer Necessity of Poetry,” a review of Roberta Reeder’s 1990 edition of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, written by the New York Times critic John Bailey:

In 1962, four years before Akhmatova died at the age of 76, Robert Frost visited the Soviet Union and paid a call on her at the dacha lent her for the occasion at the writers’ colony near Leningrad. The two distinguished old poets sat side by side in wicker chairs and talked quietly. “And I kept thinking,” Akhmatova wrote afterward, “here are you, my dear, a national poet. Every year your books are published. . . . They praise you in all the newspapers and journals, they teach you in the schools, the President receives you as an honored guest. And all they’ve done is slander me! . . . I’ve had everything—poverty, prison lines, fear, poems remembered only by heart, and burnt poems. And humiliation and grief. And you don’t know anything about this and wouldn’t be able to understand it if I told you. . . . But now let’s sit together, two old people, in wicker chairs. A single end awaits us. And perhaps the real difference is not actually so great?”

But she knew it was. Great not so much in terms of suffering—bitter and prolonged as that had been—but in terms of the sheer necessity for poetry in such times, for the Russian poet and for his audience. In a happier country it is one of the amenities, not the needs. The culture that is optional and varied in a civilized society was for many in Stalin’s country the only way to stay living and sane.

For this reason the poet must never forget, or allow the new barbarism to blot out the past. Akhmatova saw her poetic role as one of remembering and bearing witness.

Here in the United States, poetry remains an amenity. But it is rapidly becoming a need.

As we make a Grand Stand at our own, New-World Ugra River, let us draw inspiration from Anna Akhmatova’s work; from her insistence on bearing witness and giving testimony; from her refusal to live in exile, or to surrender her soul, or to go quietly, or to allow herself to forget.

Let her spirit live in us, as it lived in Modigliani, like a hantise.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Vanity Fair special correspondent Katherine Eban:

Note: I went live on Substack Friday night, to alert people that the YouTube show was happening, and it wound up being bungled. Sorry about that! I will do better next time.

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Photo credit: Nathan Altman, “Portrait of Anna Akhmatova” (1914).