Poetry from the Stalinist era

SHELLEY WALIA examines two books that focus on Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova.

IN a lecture delivered at Oxford on receiving a doctorate a year before her death in 1966, Anna Akhmatova remarked that she had come from a "land of poetry to a land of non-poetry". What she had in mind was the incapability of the English to quote out of memory. It is rhythm and rhyme that makes us recite out of memory, and the lack of it that characterises the English translation of her poetry by Judith Hemschemeyer. Yet Hemschemeyer, very skilfully, gives the sequence of the poems in her book a kind of rhythm of ideas that makes up for the loss of metre.

No Russian poet, in recent years, has had such a burst of enthusiasm as Anna Akhmatova. After D. M. Thomas' translation of some of Akhmatova's poems into English, and Richard Mckan's expanded edition of her later poems, Hemschemeyer's collection makes available to the English reader her complete poetry.

Akhmatova strongly felt that only a woman must translate her poetry and, certainly, this is a remarkable achievement. Before her, Ann Wilkson and Natasha Gurfinkel had also translated some of the earlier poems. Millions now read Akhmatova in post Cold War Russia and in the West.

A charming and gifted poet - like Yeats - she speaks to the reader directly and deeply in her poetry. It is a unique and wonderful experience to read her poems. Everything in her poetry, like Pasternak's, is vitalistic, all metaphors taken from living beings in nature; nothing is inanimate. The experience behind these poems is the heroic and morally dynamic life spent in the Stalinist era of intolerable conditions. Stalin considered all foreigners to be spies and when Isaiah Berlin visited her in 1945, Stalin was informed of this meeting which provoked him to call her "half nun, half harlot".

Moving from her earlier poems about love, abandonment and parting, she came under the influence of Osip Mandelstam in 1934 and became political in her writings, especially in "Requiem" where she puts across her experience of the concentration camps. This cycle of poems is an important expression of the slow politicisation that she had been going through. Poetry becomes the enactment of all the aspects of her experience - her mind, her voice, her body and her spirit.

While Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva and Pasternak passed away, she went on to write with the aim of politically confronting the challenges of the events in Stalinist Russia. Here is a poet writing in a politically volatile country and attempting to come to terms with her role as a writer, developing like Seamus Heaney in Ireland, "a style from despair". On this would depend how far true emancipation can be achieved and artistic rebellion be allowed to turn into progressive liberal ideology. The only path to affirmation of self is to act, to manifest will, to create new codes by embracing anti-authoritarian gestures in the maelstrom of totalitarianism even if the outcome is bound to be tragic.

Akhmatova disliked Tolstoy but loved Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Though it is quite difficult to talk about her view of life in a few sentences, in her sense of isolation and her doubts about herself and her poetry, she possessed a tragic view of life. She believed in a life of passion and emotional tragic experience that she found missing in Tolstoy. She is a great poet and to read her poetry is a moving experience. Lines like "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" account for the almost universal admiration that Russians and those who read the English translation feel for her. Joseph Brodsky, probably the greatest living Russian poet who was almost "brought up by hand" by her, pays due respect to her when he says: "Akhmatova, with just the tone of her voice or the turn of her head, turned you into homo sapiens". The tones and turns of her poems ceaselessly exercise this humanising effect on every serious reader.

Writings about a poet tend to be either critical or factually biographical, with no bridge between. The more that is written, the more elusive the poet becomes, as critics and biographers build up a variety of unconnected pictures. Dysfunctions, breakdowns, addictions, abuse, rape and other painful subjects often make up the raw material when the subject is a woman. But Anatoly Nayman, in his book Remembering Anna Akhmatova, does not engage in any disgusting voyeuristic "pathography", but provides a valuable account of her life in Komarovo and around Moscow and the analyses of her poems to exhibit a growth in her stature as a poet and the extent to which her craft had developed to match her vision. It is probably the best portrait of Akhmatova that we have, peppered as it is with her scintillating one-liners, opinions expressed in her wry, biting humour, and her laconic witticisms. The book is indispensable for a serious study of her poems. It fixes the image of Anna Akhmatova, bringing the description of her mind, her images, her similes and the unforgettable language of unbelievable vitality to an unrivalled subtlety. The biography is lively and well-researched and has valuable readings that are off the beaten track. It helps to explain her seminal force and testifies to the broad range of her interests, energies and imaginative instincts. It also forms an essential part of criticism on her poetry and an integral component of literature regarding her biography. The author argues that the characteristic spirit of her work arises from her constant openness. He has a poet's eye for imagistic connections with a wide and nimble range of references and he argues interestingly and powerfully in ways that genuinely make a reader think and rethink his or her position.

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova; Judith Hemschemeyer, London; Canongate, œ19.90.

Remembering Akhmatova; Anatoly Nayman, Wendy Rosslyn, Peter Halban, œ18.

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