Tale without a Hero and Twenty-Two Poems by Anna Axmatova [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9783112318379, 9783112307212

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Tale Without a Hero and Twenty-Two by Anna Axmatova

Poems

DUTCH STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Tale without a Hero and Twenty-Two Poems Anna Axmatova

Essays by JEANNE VAN DER E N G - L I E D M E I E R KEES V E R H E U L With unpublished poems by Anna Axmatova

1973

M O U T O N • THE H A G U E PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-88218

Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent

I. Public Themes

Table of contents

I. Public Themes KEES VERHEUL

1. Public Themes in the Poetry of Anna Axmatova . . 2. Twenty-Two Poems by

ANNA AXMATOVA

9 47

II. IIo3Ma 6e3 repon JEANNE VAN DER ENG-LIEDMEIER

3. Poèma bez geroja 4. First Redaction of Poèma bez geroja. Prose Texts . .

63 115

KEES VERHEUL

5. Some Marginal Observations on the First Version of Poèma bez geroja

135

KEES VERHEUL

1. Public Themes in the Poetry of Anna Axmatova

Some of the lines of development of the poetry of Axmatova can be brought to light, when we examine a group of poems from various periods of her poetic career that are closely related in their theme: the poet's reactions to outward events and circumstances that had a direct and invariably tragic impact on her personal fate. For many readers both in and outside Russia Axmatova still is primarily the author of a very personal and sophisticated kind of love-poetry, which reached its highest points in her collections of verse from the nineteen-tens and twenties. Those who have written on Axmatova's poetry in recent years have usually insisted that Axmatova as a public figure and a poet should not be invariably associated with the author and the heroine of her early 'intimate' verse.1 There are many sides to the creative personality of the 'later Axmatova', all of which may be said to have developed organically from elements which are already to be found in her earlier work, albeit often in such 'embryonic' forms that the contemporary critics hardly paid any attention to them. In the present study we shall be concerned with Axmatova as a 'civic' 1 Thus, for instance, A. Sinjavskij in his characterisation of the 'later' Axmatova, "Raskovannyj golos" in Novyj Mir, No. 6, (1964), pp. 174-176; cf. also A . I . Pavlovskij, Anna Axmatova, ocerk tvorcestva (Leningrad, 1966).

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poet, a poet reacting with sorrow, anger and indignation to the great events of her time. Although in this case, too, we can, as we hope to demonstrate, clearly indicate a connection between the work of the 'later' and the 'earlier' Axmatova, it is especially in her poetry from the later thirties and the forties that her 'public' voice achieves its greatest intensity as the medium for a unique and unforgettable witness-report from one of the most horrifying periods in modern history. The theme of the poet's direct reactions to the events and circumstances of the outside world comprises four groups of poems: those connected with the First World War, those evoked by the revolution and the civil war in Russia, those reflecting the Stalinist terror in the thirties and the forties, and the patriotic lyrics written during the Second World War. The poems from Ogonek, 1950, No. 14, and Leningradskij AVmanax, 1954, No. 9 — her first to be published after Zdanov's speech and the notorious Party Decree of 1946 — form a special case and are to be included in this thematic section of Axmatova's poems only with very great reservations, as they were evidently written on some kind of command from 'above' with the special purpose of relieving the fate of the poet's son. As they fall generally far below the standard set by Axmatova's other verse, as they give the impression of having been consciously written at the lowest possible level of craftsmanship, as they are often simply modelled on the canons of vulgar adulation of the time, and as they have, moreover, been written with a specifically non-poetic purpose, they should in our opinion be set apart from the rest of Axmatova's poetry in any fair critical appraisal of her work. In our present essay we shall attempt to give a general characterisation of some important aspects of Axmatova's 'public' verse from the various above-mentioned periods. Firstly we shall be concerned with a definition of the essentially 'personal' nature of Axmatova's expression of her 'public' themes, which comes to the foreground in the peculiar role played by the 'lyrical I' in her relation to the outside world of public circumstances. Next we shall try to describe a number of stylistical elements — the poet's choice of certain principles of syntactical arrangement and a

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vocabulary with various 'colourings', her use of metaphor — which seem to characterise the 'civic' poetry of Axmatova as a part of the total unity of her œuvre. In a third section we intend to discuss somewhat more closely two aspects of the imagery of Axmatova's public verse which give us a more general insight into the context in which the author's experience of the historical calamities of her time and nation is transformed by her into a meaningful and coherent poetical vision of war, violence and persecution.

A. T H E I A N D T H E O U T S I D E W O R L D

One of the elements that many of the 'civic' poems from widely different periods of Axmatova's career have in common, an element that may, moreover, be considered as basic for her treatment of public themes, is the central presence in them of a first person singular. In most cases the 'I' with its implicit background of personal suffering and loss forms the focus in which the public theme is made meaningful. In this group of poems, as in others, there is a complex interrelation between Axmatova's life and work in so far as many facts from her personal biography are not explicitly stated, but referred to as given data; they are not mentioned, but understood. In the civic poems this peculiar device of referring to pieces of information from the author's private circumstances has the function of linking the 'I' of the poems to the public events with which they are concerned. The importance of details from the personal background of the 'I', the role of this 'I' as such in these poems varies and grows, and acquires its greatest significance in Axmatova's poems that reflect the reign of terror in the thirties and forties in Russia, but already in the poems from the First World War there is a tendency towards the formation of a particular 'lyrical heroine', an 'I' with a few constant biographical traits that are directly related to certain elements in the life of the author. This heroine differs in many ways from the 'I' of the 'lyrical diary' that was discussed in the early studies of Vinogradov and

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Ejxenbaum; she has constant features of her own and lacks many of the peculiarities of the other. The great events of the twentieth century in Russia usually involved personal loss and tragedy for Axmatova. Thus it was in the First World War, in the years of revolution and civil war, in the period of arrests and purges in the thirties, in the post-war repressions. In various ways these losses and tragedies play a central part in the lyrics that reflect these periods, especially in those of them that are built around the figure of a lyrical 'I'. In this respect it is significant that the poems that are directly concerned with the events of the Second World War in Russia, which, as it seems, did not bring Axmatova any such immediate personal tragedy, are mostly not centred around the first person singular. They are put either in the rhetorical 'we'-form, or in the descriptive third person. The lyrics from this period that are united by the presence of a particular lyrical 'I' — for instance Luna v zenite and the small cycle S samoleta — do not reflect the war as such, but rather its main consequence for Axmatova's personal life, her evacuation in Central Asia. Artistically they are remarkably weaker than both the first-person poems from the thirties and the later forties, and the poems about the war in which no reference is made to facts from the personal life of the author. 3 A particular case is formed by the poem Pervyj daVnobojnyj v Leningrade, in which the complex final syntactic period about the sinister sound of imminent mechanical destruction unexpectedly ends on a personal note that is absent from the rest of the poem, and that puts the poem at its very end in a completely new perspective : 2

V.V. Vinogradov: O poezii Anny Axmatovoj, stilisticeskie nabroski (Leningrad 1925), B. Ejxenbaum: Anna Axmatova, Opyt analiza (Petrograd, 1923). 3 An exception we find in the two poems in memory of Valja Smimov, the boy who was one of Axmatova's neighbours in the Fontanny] Dom and to whom she used to talk in one of the most difficult and solitary periods of her life, the years immediately preceding the Second World War. Another kind of exception is formed by the powerful rhetorical poem A vy, moi druz'ja poslednego prizyva, in which the 'I' is in no way directly related to the person of the author and is, in the energy and scope of her actions, at the furthest remove from the 'I' of the early intimate verse.

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I ne xotel smjatennyj slux Poverit' — po tomu, Kak rassirjalsja on i ros, Kak ravnodusno gibel' nes Rebenku moemu.

This is in itself already a well-known device in Axmatova's early poetry, 4 but what is noteworthy here is that in this case there is no parallel in the biography of the author for a circumstance connected with the poetic 'I'. In itself this is, of course, no exceptional occurrence, since biographical circumstances are not to be identified with literary motifs. But in the case of Axmatova the relationship between the author's biography and the poetry is exceptionally close, and the above-mentioned poem forms a rare instance in which something connected with the lyrical ' I ' has no counterpart in the biography of the poet. A tendency to de-individualisation which is present from the very beginning in Axmatova's poetry here finds its logical conclusion. It is also significant that this instance should occur in one of her civic poems from the second war, as these poems are generally among the most 'anonymous' she has written. Already in Axmatova's early civic poems the main features of the relationship between the lyrical subject and the circumstances of her nation that will be typical of the poet's later treatment of public themes are unmistakably present. As has been indicated, what is most essential here, is the presence of a first person singular, in whose words allusions are made to certain circumstances of her life — circumstances that are directly transferred from the life of the poet, and that serve to connect the fate of the heroine directly with that of her nation. Thus in the cradle-song KolybeVnaja from about 1915 the singing voice addresses her son, and mentions his father, of whom it is stated indirectly that he is away at the war: Doletajut redko vesti K nasemu kryl'cu, Podarili belyj krestik Tvoemu otcu. 4

Cf. e.g. V. V. Vinogradov, op. cit., p. 130 and B. Ejxenbaum, op. cit., p. 125.

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Bylo gore, budet gore, Gorju net konca, Da xranit svjatoj Egorij Tvoego otca. It has been pointed out by the editors of Axmatova's Works, that this poem is biographically directly connected with Axmatova's husband Nikolaj Stepanovic Gumilev through the allusion of the cross of St. George which Gumilev was awarded twice, 5 and through him also indirectly with their son. How closely the meaning of a poem in Axmatova's work may depend on some historical and private facts that are present in the text only in the form of very slight allusions, is shown by the case of a poem from the civil war: Dlja togo 1' tebja nosila Ja kogda-to na rukax, Dlja togo 1' sijala sila V golubyx tvoix glazax! Vyros strojnyj i vysokij, Pesni pel, maderu pil, K Anatolii dalekoj Minonosec svoj vodil. Na Malaxovom Kurgane Oficera rasstreljali. Bez nedeli dvadcat' let On gljadel na Bozij svet. Without some outside historical and biographical information the relation between the various motifs of this poem is hardly at all understandable. The feminine 'I' addresses a second person, whom she has once carried in her arms; she is heard reacting to some unspecified disillusionment or disaster: dlja togo V ...6 5

Anna Axmatova, Works I, 2nd ed. (New York, 1967), p. 39. This use of the demonstrative pronoun pointing into a semantic vacuum is a constant and typical feature of Axmatova's poetry — cf. Vinogradov, op. cit., p. 140. In the poems under examination in this essay it is sometimes used to refer to events, too horrible or dangerous to mention, and has a suggestiveness that is inversely proportionate to its specificness. Cf. the end of the poem Esli by vse, kto pomosci dusevnoj: Tak, cto daze ¿to mne ne trudno. A slightly different case is formed by the use of demonstrative pronouns that 6

THEMES IN THE POETRY OF AXMATOVA

15

The connection between the various motifs of the poem becomes clear only when we know that Malaxov Kurgan is a place in the Crimea where in the civil war a mass-execution of white officers was carried out by the bolsheviks, and that Axmatova's younger brother, presumably a naval officer, was — as it turned out later, falsely — reported to have been killed on that occasion. 7 Thus the relationship between the 'I' and ' y ° u ' ¡ n the first quatrain appears to be that of brother and sister, and the 'you' of the first quatrain appears to be one and the same person as the figures evoked in the following ones. And the loose biographical motifs — age and naval past — acquire the function of evoking a 'real' person from outside the poem. Both the personal and the more generalising manner in which public themes are treated by Axmatova from the beginning can be seen when we compare two of her poems treating a similar subject, that of the shock and the sudden change in reality brought about by the outbreak of the First World War. 8 This theme is treated in a first-person narrative form in the poem Tot avgust, kak zeltoe plamja from 1915 and in a more generalised 'rhetorical' manner in Pamjati 19 ijulja 1914 from a year later. Both poems treat the outbreak of the war in retrospect. The former poem, spoken by the lyrical heroine, begins in a way that misleadingly suggests that we have to do with another

need no further specification, because the circumstances to which they refer are only too easily stirred up in the consciousness of the contemporary Russian reader. Thus in the poem Kakaja est'. Zelaju vam druguju: K o mne uze polzli takie noci I ja takie slysala zvonki ... 7

This false report of her brother's death is probably also reflected in the little folkloric lyric Ne byvat' tebe v zivyx— cf. the note on this poem in Works I, p. 398 — and in the lines from Nam vstreci net, my v raznyx stanax: ... Gde brat ponik v krovavyx ranax Prinjavsi angel'skij venec ... 8

Almost fifty years later Axmatova remembered this event in stiongly reminiscent of the poems to be discussed: ... Na etot s Peterburgom okazalos' vecnym. My vernulis' ne v Peterburg, iz XIX veka srazu popali v XX, vse stalo inym, nacinaja s oblika I, p. 45.

words that are raz rasstavanie a v Petrogrud, goroda. Works

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instance of the first-person narrative love-lyrics that form the majority in Axmatova's first books of verse: Tot avgust, kak zeltoe plamja, Probivseesja skvoz' dym, Tot avgust podnjalsja nad nami, Kak ognennyj serafim. The first words contain an indication of time that is at the same time precise and meaningless — precise for the 'I' and the ' y ° u ' of the poem, meaningless for the reader, who is deceived into feeling that he has been let into a secret — as in the well-known instance from Vecer : Ja sosla s uma, o mal'cik strannyj, V sredu, v tri casa! In the case of Tot avgust, kak zeltoe plamja we only SEEM to have to do with this kind of 'aesthetic deceit' before we realise the public theme of the poem, and the time indication acquires precision for the reader as well. The particular nature of the theme is revealed when the content of the first person plural in the narrative centre of the first stanza is revealed in the second as 'soldier and maiden'; only towards the end of the poem does it appear — almost casually — that the soldier is the T ' s brother. These elements, the suspended uncertainty as to the identity of the protagonists and their relation to each other, connects this poem, except for its theme and 'objective' references, again very closely with the style of Axmatova's early love lyrics. The parallel poem, Pamjati 19 ijulja 1914, is much more generalised and rhetorical; it is less directly narrative, although the motifs of time and reminiscence form its thematic core, especially in the final stanza. It is based on direct statement rather than allusion. Its time is not skillfully implied, but put forward in the title in the form of a public historical date. Its 'I' is an unspecified figure, and not a liriceskij geroj with an independent life of his own that is reflected inside the poem in the form of hints and allusions. Its 'we' is not limited to some specific people that are unknown to the reader; it extends to the author's generation and includes the reader among them. This use of the inclusive 'we'-

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form in her poems on generalised, public themes, is closely connected with the development of Axmatova's rhetorical style, of which we shall come to speak further on in this essay. It is to be sharply distinguished from such limiting uses of the first person plural as we found, for instance, in Tot avgust, kak zeltoe plamja. We also encounter it in some of Axmatova's most well-known poems from the time of the civil war: Vse rasxisceno, predano, prodano from 1921 and Ne s temija, kto brosil zemlju from 1922. In Axmatova's poetry from the Second World War it forms the rhetorical base of two of her most 'impersonal' pieces, her most frequently cited poems from that period, Kljatva and Muzestvo. The lyrical 'I' with its special function in 'public' poetry forms a central element in the emotional and artistic conception of Requiem, Axmatova's greatest attempt to connect the disasters of her private life with the suffering of countless others. It is characteristic of Requiem as a poetic whole, that it is almost constantly centred around the figure of a lyrical 'I' who appears in various guises, and whose special relation to the fate of others forms one of the main themes of the cycle. The 'I' in Requiem is mainly an anonymous figure, a prototype of the general fate of the women that were bereft of husbands and sons during the mass-arrests of the thirties. The only thing that is brought to the foreground as distinguishing the 'I' from her fellow-sufferers is the poetic gift which enables her to leave artistic evidence of the horrors through which she went as one of many. This relationship between the 'I' and the others is first established in the short scene in prose that serves as a preface to the poems. As to the poetical pieces themselves, those that serve in the symmetrical pattern to open and close the cycle — the Dedication and Introduction and the two Epilogues —• are especially concerned with an exploration of the significance of the relationship between the 'I' and the women whose fate she has shared. The Dedication starts with a passage containing a general statement that ends in the personal form of 'we': My ne znaem my povsjudu te ze, Slysim lis' kljucej postylyj skrezet Da sagi tjazelye soldat,

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'We' in Requiem has a meaning that is different from the applications of the first person of the plural which we encountered in the preceding pages. It is neither limited to figures that are in some direct way connected with the lyrical heroine, nor is it rhetorically inclusive. It refers to a specific group of people with a generally known existence outside Requiem. At the end of the Dedication this 'we' is split up into its constituents, 'I' and 'they', whose relation is indicated: Gdt teper' nevol'nye podrugi Dvux moix osatanelyx let? The theme of the community of suffering between the women waiting outside the prisons of Leningrad, and the meaning of this sense of community for Axmatova as a poet is most profoundly developed in the second Epilogue, the concluding piece of Requiem. In it the artistic function of the speaker of the central part of Requiem is revealed: she is not to be understood as a mere literary reflection of the person of the author, but as the composite figure of her fellow-sufferers: Dlja nix sotkala ja sirokij pokrov Iz bednyx, u nix ze podslusannyx slov. This leads to a particular conception of the voice of the author, which becomes, in an extended metaphor, the expression of a whole suffering nation: ... moj izmucennyj rot Kotorym kricit stomill'onnyj narod. The 'I' of the second Epilogue, which is primarily the 'I' in her role of the poet, becomes through this conception of the significance of her poetic talent a central public figure with the traditional symbol for that role: the statue. In her choice of a location for her posthumous monument the poet discards those places that had become regularly connected with the 'intimate' figure of her previous lyrical heroine. Thus the identification of personal disaster with the suffering of others leads Axmatova to a new realisation of the lyrical 'I', and to a new conception of her poetry. The meaning of the experience

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of the fellowship of suffering becomes apparent in memory — the starting-point of the second Epilogue is "the hour of reminiscence", and the lasting community between the fellow-sufferers is based on mutual memory: O nix vspominaju vsegda i vezde and: Pust' tak ze oni pominajut menja. In the second Epilogue from Requiem the meaning of the poet's statue, and hence that of her poetry itself, is understood to be that of a 'reminder'. The poems of Requiem serve to preserve in time the anguish that the author shared with the women of her nation and epoch As we have seen in our examination of the second Epilogue, the 'I' of the central body of Requiem, the poems numbered from one to ten, is to be taken as a generalised composite figure rather than a reflection of the person of the author herself. Most of these poems were doubtlessly written under the direct influence of personal circumstances, mainly that of the arrest of her son. In most of them a female lyrical 'I' addresses a second person, who has been arrested and is away in prison and who is in several poems explicitly identified as her son. 9 However, this son is nowhere individualised by allusions to any circumstances of his life apart from the motifs of arrest and imprisonment that play a central role in these poems. In Requiem the de-individualising tendency in Axmatova's work, of which we have spoken, is especially apparent in the way in which a particularly tragic event from her private life is poetically generalised and dramatised by the poet through various stylistic means. The 'you' of the poems from Requiem ultimately becomes the persecuted beloved son as such, just as the 'I' is, finally, the depersonalised figure of the suffering mother. Significantly the cycle ends with a third-person descriptive lyric on the religious prototype of suffering and maternal grief, expressed in the figures of Mary and Christ. A particular case of a lyric, the original personal application of 9

Thus in the poems 2, 5, 6 and 9.

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which has become irrecognisable by its inclusion into the cycle of Requiem is formed by its first numbered poem Uvodili tebja na rassvete. From Axmatova's prose-fragment about Mandel'stam we learn that this poem originally referred to the arrest of N. N. Punin, the art-historian with whom Axmatova lived in the Fontannyj Dom in the late twenties and the thirties. Through its inclusion into Requiem, in which the relationship between the first and the second person is in other poems explicitly stated as that of mother and son, this particular reference is lost, and the 'you' of Uvodili tebja na rassvete, about whose person no other details are mentioned than his arrest, automatically becomes identified with the figure of the son. Those individual poems from the thirties and the forties in which Axmatova's grief and indignation at the atrocities and injustices of the Stalin regime find a direct expression are also in most cases centred around the fate of a lyrical 'I'. In these poems this 'I', whose tragic fate reflects the repression and persecution of a whole generation, is in various ways more or less closely connected with the fate of the author herself. Sometimes the poem is thematically based on direct references to circumstances in the public fate of the poet, as, for instance, *Ne liroju vljublennogo,10 which describes the poet's utter social isolation after the Party Decree of 1946, and the poem *Vy menja, kak ubitogo zverja, which speaks of the consequences of that isolation for her reputation in the foreign press. In other poems the fate of the 'I' is brought into some sort of relation with similar circumstances in the lives of others, friends and colleagues of the poet. The poem * Vse usli, i nikto ne vernulsja forms the most straightforward presentation of all the trials that were inflicted upon Axmatova herself by the police regime of the Stalin years: RazJucili s edinstvennym synom, V kazematax pytali druzej, Okruzili nevidimym tynom Krepko slazennoj slezki svoej. 10

When the title of a poem, cited in this essay, is preceded by an asterisk, this means that the full text of this lyric is published elsewheie in the present volume. In other cases the text will be found in Works, op. tit., vol. I or II.

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Nagradili menja nemotoju, Na ves' mir okajanno kljanja, Opoili menja klevetoju, Okormili otravoj menja. The direct and unveiled references are here, of course, to the arrest of the poet's son, to Axmatova's complete social isolation and, in the second quoted stanza, to the Party Decree of 1946. Significantly, however, the tortures inflicted upon her 'friends' are directly connected with the horrors that befell the 'I'. In the previous stanza from this poem the bloodiest year, 1937, is mentioned in terms that include the 'I', as in Requiem, among all the women whose lives were profoundly affected by the atrocities inflicted upon their men: ... Ctob s sidelkami tridcat' sed'mogo Myla ja okrovavlennyj pol. In the figure of the lyrical 'I' from these poems one of the elements that is often brought to the foreground and that especially serves to connect her fate with that of a whole class of people is her poetic vocation. References to the poetic gift of the lyrical 'I' are already to be found in such early civic poems as Molitva from 1915 and Ne s temija, kto brosil zemlju from 1922. We have seen that it was an essential motif in the Preface and the second Epilogue to Requiem. But poetry as an occupation has a special meaning in the poems with which we are concerned now. In these poems from the thirties and the forties poetry forms a fatal cause and an object of persecution. Because he cannot escape the task of raising his voice against cruelty and injustice, the poet is par excellence the victim in a repressive society, a property which the 'I' shares with others of her trade, both from the present and from the historical past. The political repression of poetry is one of the motifs from *Vse usli, i nikto ne vernulsja: Oskvernili precistoe slovo, Rastoptali svjascennyj glagol ... And the realisation of the task of the poet and the fatality of his persecution is the final motif in the poem *Zacem vy otravili vodu from 1936:

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Net, bez palaca i plaxi Poetu na zemle ne byt': Nam pominaFnye rubaxi, Nam so svecoj idti i vyt'.

It is to be noted that the poetic situation of the first stanza of this poem, the lyrical 'I' indignantly addressing her persecutors, has changed here into an affirmation of the speaker's task as a member of a particularly doomed class. In the poem *Kakaja est'. ¿elaju vam druguju the tragic fatality of her vocation, which connects the 'I' with other persecuted poets, is expressed in the form of an allusion to the fate of another poet of Axmatova's time, nation and sex, whose violent death was the result of various forms of political cruelty: Kak toj drugoj stradalice, Marine, Piidetsja nine napit'sja pustotoj. 11

In the initial image of this same stanza: Sedoj venec dostalsja mne nedarom

there is an intentional ambiguity in the word venec, which serves here not only as an image of the T ' s hair that has turned grey by suffering, but also points to her poetic fame, based on that suffering. In connection with the motif of the public persecution of poets one poem from 1936 is particularly significant. The lyric Dante, which forms a description of this poet's exile and his refusal to beg forgiveness from the masters of his beloved but treacherous city, shows a curious relationship with the poem from the same year on the fate of the author and her colleagues, *Zacem vy otravili vodu, which was discussed in the above. Thus the final images of the latter poem: Nam pominal'nye rubaxi, Nam so svecoj idti i vyt' 11 An earlier poem Nevidimka, dvojnik, peresmesnik from 1940 is especially devoted to an evocation of the sufferings of Cvetaeva after her return to her fatherland and to an impressive generalization of this poet's cruel experience into a grandiose vision of the national tragedy of Stalinist Russia.

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are paralleled and clarified by the following lines from Dante: No bosoj, v rubaxe pokajannoj, So svecoj zazzennoj ne prosel Po svoej Florencii zelannoj ... The poem Dante, verbally connected in this way with a poem that directly reflects the public fate of the author, forms a characteristic instance of the tendency in Axmatova's poetry away from the 'lyrical hero' to lyrical masks and portraits. There are in the poet's work several poems that would at a superficial reading seem to be mere poetical third-person portraits of well-known historical or literary figures. When we compare these poems, however, with other, first-person verse from a similar period, it appears that we have in most cases to do with 'lyrical' portraits, that is to say portraits in which some essential traits of the persons described are intimately related to elements from the author's life that have been differently, and more directly transformed into motifs connected with the figure of the lyrical 'I' in other poems. Thus the Biblical poem Lotova zena, for instance, is to be connected with the first-person lyrics in which the central theme is that of a painful confrontation with the past. The Decembrist poets already used the device of obliquely referring to forbidden political matters through the quasi-historical description of figures from the Bible or from classical antiquity and stressing such motifs in the biography of these figures that could easily be applied by the reader to the odious present. In a similar way Axmatova twice used the historical portrait with a double system of references, those to the figures described, and those that point by an implied comparison to the fate of the author and people that suffered a fate similar to hers. These poems, in which no clue is given to the existence of the second level of meaning, appear on the surface much more 'innocent' than those in which circumstances from the life of the author and her friends are more directly alluded to in the first-person form, and they have been regularly published in the Soviet editions of Axmatova's works. We have seen how closely the poem Dante is even textually related to *Zacem vj> otravili vodu. Another example of such a

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historical portrait with implied allusions to the present is afforded by the poem Kleopatra, which gives a description of the classical figure of the woman who, rather than give in to the humiliating will of a tyrant, destroys herself. It is to be compared, for instance, to Podrazanie Armjanskomu, in which the humiliated 'I' addresses the cruel despot of her times in more straightforward terms of proud defiance. In Kleopatra, moreover, the motif of the arrest of the children, which plays a much more secondary role in Shakespeare's version of the story, 12 and which links the poem directly to Requiem and other lyrics from that time, is brought forward with great emphasis : A zavtra detej zakujut ... Thus the poet's identification with persons from a historical and literary 13 past through elements in their biography that are paralleled by circumstances of her own finds expression in these 'lyrical portraits', which may be seen as an instance of a tendency toward 'individualization' of the outside world, a tendency that forms the contrastive parallel to the 'de-individualization' of which we have spoken in the above. This same tendency is apparent in cases in which the identification has not been carried to its extreme of the third-person portrait, but where the relation of the lyrical 'I' to a historical or literary figure forms a more incidental factor within the text. A case in point is that of the poem *Mne kazetsja, s mesta ne sdvinut'sja. Here the author projects her fate into that of the bojarynja Moro12

In Puskin's poetic story of Cleopatra, from which the second epigraph to Axmatova's poem is taken, there is no mention whatsoever of the queen's children. In fact Puskin's story takes place at a different period in Cleopatra's career, and reveals radically different sides of the queen's character from those that serve as the base of Axmatova's poem. Through the poet's amazing economy of means a motif, that of the erotic sinfulness and dissipation of the past, for which the present disasters are seen as forming a retribution — a motif which is at the heart of the later Poèma bez geroja and which is present in Requiem in the poem Pokazat' by tebe, nasmesnice — is added in the form of a quotation from, and hence an implied reference to a poem from Puskin, in which Cleopatra is described in her past role of the cruel queen of love. 13 The figure of Cleopatra in Axmatova's poem is a reflection of the literary figure from Shakespeare's tragedy and Puskin's poem rather than the historical queen of Egypt, as appears from the two epigraphs that introduce the poem.

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zova, the leader of the Old-believers who was banished from Moscow and who broke out into fierce abuse of the regime by which she was persecuted as she was taken away from the city. Again, as in the case of Kleopatra, the figure of Morozova, with whose fate the author explicitly identifies her own across the barriers of time, is not so much the historical person as her reflection in art: the famous painting by Surikov in the Trefjakovskaja Galereja. The figure of Morozova reappears in a poem from 1962, Poslednjaja roza, in which a short list of historical and literary women figures is given, who in their tragic biographies all exemplify some element or other from the fate of the poet herself. The poet's identification with Morozova in *Mne kazetsja, s mesta ne sdvinufsja is significant in that it forms an identification with a figure from the Russian national past. From very early in her career the theme of the national heritage forms an important element in Axmatova's verse, as is shown, for instance, by such poems on old Russian towns as Pustyx nebes prozracnoe steklo — on Novgorod — from 1914, and Bezeck from 1921. In her civic verse of the thirties and forties the national calamity of the Stalinist oppression is related by the poet to familiar events from Russian history. Thus in Requiem, for instance, the fate of the women witnessing the arrest of sons and husbands in the thirties is compared to that of the wives and mothers of the streVcy in the seventeenth century, witnessing the execution of their beloved men. And in the poem *Streleckaja luna. Zamoskvorec'e. Noc\ a portrait is drawn of the present inhabitant of the Kremlin by a combination of the traits of several despots from the Russian past: Borisa dikij strax i vsex Ivanov zloby I samozvanca spes' vzamen narodnyx prav. Most of Axmatova's poems from the thirties and the forties that speak of the lyrical T ' s sufferings and persecutions contain some form or other of address, that is to say that in them the 'I' turns to another person or to a group of people. For an understanding of the situation of the lyrical 'I', as it is presented in these poems, it is essential to examine somewhat more closely the roles played by these second persons.

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Often the 'I' directly addresses her persecutors. Apart from one case — that of Podrazanie Armjanskomu, in which she directly addresses the one who is chiefly responsible for the suffering inflicted upon her — these persecutors are usually presented as an unspecified group of people in the second person of the plural. Sometimes they are pictured as actually committing cruelties against the 'I', as in the poems *Zacem vy otravili vodu and *Vy menja, kak ubitogo zverja. In other cases, however, this group is not so much that of her active persecutors as that of the 'onlookers', those who implicitly support the oppressors and who by their adapted and comfortable lives only stress the profound isolation of the poet: Poka vy mirno otdyxali v Soci, Ko mne uze polzli takie noci, I ja takie slysala zvonki.

Especially after the Postanovlenie of 1946 this feeling of unbearable isolation, not only from the authorities and their various accomplices, but from the whole outside world, this absolute rift between the 'others' and 'I', 1 4 must have been for Axmatova a terrifying experience. It is perhaps most clearly reflected in the poem *Ne liroju vljublennogo, in which the situation of the 'I' is expressed by a traditional image of the outcast from society, that of the leper, who in this poem addresses herself to those 'untainted' citizens who stare at her and abuse her in a mixture of cheap curiosity and revulsion: Uspeete naaxat'sja, I voja, i kljanja.

B. FOLKLORE AND RHETORIC

The development of Axmatova's treatment of public themes is closely connected with two more general stylistic aspects of her poetry : that of a use of the folkloristic 'mask' and that of a perCf. the beginning of the poem Vrugie uvodjat ljubimyx.

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sonal application of rhetorical elements from the 'classical' verse of the early nineteenth century. 1 5 Thus we find in the KolybeVnaja from 1915 a folkloristic expression for tragic circumstances that may, as we have seen, be connected with events from the author's personal life. That we have to with stylization and 'mask' appears most obviously f r o m the popular form of the name Georgij in the last stanza. The poem as a whole is conceived as the stylization of a genre from popular poetry that has often been used for literary purposes, that of the cradle-song. In it we find, moreover, some fairy-tale motifs. Another characteristic element of Axmatova's folkloric style, which has already been described both by Ejxenbaum and Mandel'stam: that of the parallelism of heterogeneous motifs — a form that is also typical of a great number of castuskas — plays the main part in the emotional structure of the last two stanzas of this poem, which were cited in the above. The first two lines contain a statement of general intent, followed by an intensely personal motif in the second half of the stanza. The two halves are not syntactically connected, and the particular pathos of this f o r m arises from the mutual semantic penetration that takes place through the mere smeznost', the juxtaposition of the two semantically 'asymmetrical' halves. On the same principle of semantic arrangement by juxtaposition a short poem f r o m the civil war, Ne byvat' tebe v zivyx, is based: N e byvat' tebe v zivyx, So snegu ne vstat'. Dvadcat' vosem' stykovyx, Ognestrel'nyx pjat'. Gor'kuju obnovusku Drugu sila ja. Ljubit, Ijubit krovusku Russkaja zemlja. 15 About the folkloristic element in Axmatova's eailier poetry cf. e.g. B. Ejxenbaum, Anna Axmatova, op. cit., pp. 77, 111, 128, and O. MandeFstam, Collected Works, vol. II (New York, 1966), p. 138. The appearance of a rhetorical, neo-classicist "manner" in the poetry of Axmatova was discussed, for instance, by Ejxenbaum in Anna Axmatova, op. cit., pp. 82, 104-105, 119, and by V. Zirmunskij in an article on Belaja staja which was partly reprinted in his book Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928), pp. 322-326.

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In this poem the two-line motifs have even less direct syntactic and semantic coherence, especially in those lines where the element that determines the inner coherence of the separate motif-sentence, the verbal predicate, is also missing. In the second quatrain the two rhyming diminutives — obnovuska and krovuska — add another folkloric touch to the stylistic ring of this castuska-like poem. Stylistic elements from folklore appear again in Requiem. In the central poems of this cycle the suffering of the 'I' is in various ways dramatized and de-personalized. One of the ways in which personal suffering is made to acquire a more general meaning against the background of the national tragedy of the Ezovscina is, for instance, through its 'masked' expression in the folk-song of the poem Tixo Vetsja tixij Don. The stanzas of this poems consist of two lines that each contain one complete and syntactically independent sentence. The connecting element is here present in the repeated use of some words, word-forms or constructions that form a sort of chain. The emotional poignancy of this poem is especially caused by the 'asymmetrical' disposition of some of its motifs at the end. The figure of the suffering woman is in various ways 'objectified' by the popular form of the poem, by the fact that she is presented as seen by the moon, and, lastly, in the third couplet, by the third-person description: £ta zenscina bol'na, £ta zenscina odna. The next stanza, however, begins with two parallel statements that cannot but be related by the reader to the personal fate of the author: Muz v mogile, syn v tjur'me, and it ends with an unexpected first-person address that is unprepared by the whole grammatical structure of the preceding lines: Pomolites' obo mne. Among Axmatova's civic poems from her first books of verse there is a remarkably large number of those in which the rhetoricising manner, based on a stylistic return to the first decades of

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the nineteenth century, determines the tone. The earliest example is probably that of the poem Molitva from 1915: Daj mne gor'kie gody neduga, Zadyxan'ja, bessonnicu, zar, Otymi i rebenka, i druga, I tainstvennyj pesennyj dar. Tak moljus' za Tvoej liturgiej Posle stol'kix tomitel'nyx dnej, Ctoby tuca nad temnoj Rossiej Stalo oblakom v slave lucej.

Here most of the characteristic features of Axmatova's rhetorical manner are already present : the frequent use of abstract, generalizing and sometimes somewhat archaic nouns: nedug, zadyxan'ja; the use of such slavonisms as otymi; the use of 'ornamental' epithets such as gor'kie gody; the use of images that are based on a metaphorical cliché which is taken seriously and resuscitated, 16 as the purely rhetorical cloud hanging over Russia in the seventh line of the poem, which is suddenly transformed into an actual, poetically visible cloud in the eighth. Another important element in Molitva that is typical of Axmatova's rhetorical manner is its syntactic periodisation. The various motifs of the poem are brought into a strong mutual syntactic coherence and divided over the stanzas in a clear 'architectonic' balance of explicit relationships. These various features, applied to themes of public import, achieve their fullest and most outspokenly rhetorical development in a number of poems from the years of the civil war. Such poems from 1917-1922 as Kogda v toske samoubijstva; Cem xuze ètot vek predsestvujuscix ? Razve; Vse rasxisceno, predano, prodano ; Ne s temi ja, kto brosil zemlju give us a chance of examining in their simplest and most undiluted form those rhetorical elements in Axmatova's style that, in more unobtrusive forms and in greater harmony with other stylistic features, play an important part also in her later poetry. The imagery of these heavily rhetorical civic poems abounds with a number of metaphoric expressions that have been common16

Cf. V. V. Vinogradov, op. cit., p. 103.

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place since classical antiquity, and that are in these poems from the civil war not even 'resuscitated' like the 'cloud' from Molitva. The straightforward use of such metaphorical cliché's as Ja krov' ot ruk tvoix otmoju, Iz serdca vynu cernyj styd or: On k samoj cernoj prikosnulsja jazve or: Cernoj smerti mel'kalo krylo, Vse golodnoj toskoju izglodano is motivated by the outspokenly rhetorical mode of expression of the poems in which they occur. Closely related to her choice of metaphor in these poems is Axmatova's use of the grand dramatic gesture: No ravnodusno i spokojno Rukami ja zamknula slux.17 In Axmatova's later poetry on public themes many of the rhetorical elements which we encounter in the above-mentioned poems occur in one way or another, although they are rarely present in such outspoken and undiluted forms as in these works. Generally speaking, the use of rhetorical elements is in Axmatova's later work much more complex in its relation to the other stylistic and semantic aspects of a balanced unity that is stylistically far less easily classifiable. An example of an outspokenly rhetorical civic poem from the thirties with a clear syntactic coherence is to be found in *Zacem vy otravili vodu, which also shows some other rhetorical features, such as the use of inversion (moj smesali xleb) and the ornamental epithet (gor'koj gibel'ju). The three-stanza form is based on the sequence of question, answer (both repeated in symmetrical parallelism at the beginning of the distich of each stanza: Zacem 17 The relationship of Axmatova's poetic forms to those of drama, and the importance in this connection of her use of certain gestures has already been discussed, for instance, by E. Dobin in Poèzija Anny Axmatovoj (Leningrad, 1968), pp. 67-75.

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... Zacem ... Zato, cto ... Zato, cto ...) and, in the final stanza, rhetorical exclamation: Net, bez palaca i plaxi etc. Probably the most frankly rhetorical piece among Axmatova's later work is the famous and much-cited Muzestvo from 1942. It is a poem that is meant to have a direct rhetorical impact on the hearer or reader: My znaem, cto nyne lezit na vesax I cto soversaetsja nyne. Cas muzestva probil na nasix casax, I muzestvo nas ne pokinet. Ne strasno pod puljami mertvymi lec', Ne gor'ko ostat'sja bez krova, — I my soxranim tebja, russkaja rec', Velikoe russkoe slovo. Svobodnym i cistym tebja pronesem, I vnukam dadim, i ot plena spasem Naveki! Syntactically it is primarily based on a series of two-by-two repetitions of words and constructions. But the rhetorical force of this simple and straightforward, and at the same time unobtrusively original poem, is determined not only by such archaic and solemn words as nyne and soversaetsja, but more importantly by a series of rhetorical commonplaces with some unexpected twists. In Muzestvo we find the following common rhetorical figures of speech: lezat' na vesax; cas ... probil; ostat'sja bez krova. The particular, refreshed and personal rhetoricism of Muzestvo arises, however, not from the use of these immemorial rhetorical expressions as such, but from the unusual context into which they are placed. Thus the trite expression cas probil comes to new life in combination with its abstract modifier muzestva and the adjunct na nasix casax. Similarly at the end of the poem a form of expression that is commonly used for such concepts as 'national freedom' or 'our sacred traditions' is, by a slight rhetorical shift, applied to the more personal and unexpected 'Russian speech', which lends a sudden precision and freshness of meaning to the hackneyed phrase with which it is connected. Not only in Muzestvo, but more generally in Axmatova's later poetry the rhetorical element is often present in the form of

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commonplace metaphors and figures of speech that are poetically revived by their context in ways similar to that which we encountered in the early civic poem Molitva. To take an example from Requiem, in the Introduction to the cycle the image of Russia suffering under the terror of the Ezovscina at first seems to be presented in a purely traditional allegorical form: I bezvinnaja korcilas' Rus' Pod krovavymi sapogami But it is suddenly changed into a vivid reality by the addition of a concrete detail from the horrible present in the final line of the poem: I pod sinami cernyx marus'. One rhetorical metaphor, that of a wing as an animal representation of an abstract reality, occurs with particular frequency in Axmatova's work. In Vse rasxisceno, predano, prodano we have already encountered 'the wing of black death'. In one poem from Requiem this allegorical image is applied to 'insanity', and poetically brought to life through a development in which, with an etymological repetition of the verbal root of krylo, the wing actually 'covers' the soul: Uze bezumie krylom Dusi zakrylo polovinu. Even greater poetic concreteness is acquired by this allegorical figure in an instance from the poem *Ne liroju vljublennogo: Ja pod krylom u gibeli Vse tridcat' let zila. Here the wing becomes a metaphoric reality through the verb zila and through the image of the 'I' living under the 'wing of downfall', and an emotional reality through the sense of security and protection, conveyed by the expression 'under the wing', which is in sharp paradoxical contrast to the downfall which the wing allegorically represents. The relative frequency of the allegorical figure of wings gives us an insight into the basic unity of Axmatova's metaphorical

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thinking. The rhetorical use of the wing as a symbol for abstract realities — in the cases which we examined always of an ominous and tragic nature — is to be connected with the characteristic recurrence of bird-symbols in her more 'intimate' verse. 18 An important metaphorical element is thus transferred into a completely different stylistic context providing it with a new function, one of the signs of a profound unity and economy of means beneath the stylistic variety of expression that seems characteristic of Axmatova's work. 19 Often the rhetorical elements in Axmatova's later poetry have a complex function in a unique stylistical pattern. Thus in the poem *Vy menja, kak ubitogo zverja, for instance, we find in the first stanza a sharp stylistic tension between the 'low' xixikaja and the solemn word inozemcy, this tension prepares for the merciless irony of the epithet poctennyx in the fifth line and that of the semi-quotation of the journalistic cliché's from the foreign press in the sixth and the seventh. The poem ends with an original twist given to one such cliché, that of 'my last (i.e. twelfth) hour has struck' : No moj probil trinadcatyj cas. The 'thirteenth' hour here means in the first place: the hour after the last — a reference to the emigré view of Axmatova as a poetical remnant of the past, the great poet from before the revolution, whose talent inevitably withered under the Soviet regime, a view at which the poet took particular offense — and, on a less ironical level of meaning : the fatal hour of ill-luck and doom. A completely different use of the stylistic possibilities of rhetorical expression is at the base of the semantic structure of *Vse usli, i nikto ne vernulsja. The rhetorical conception of this poem 18

Cf. V. V. Vinogradov's analysis of various groups of metaphors in Axmatova's early work in "O simvolike Anny Axmatovoj", Literaturnaja mysl' (Petrograd, 1922), pp. 91-138. 19 Analysing Axmatova's metaphorical style Vinogradov spoke already in his article from 1922 of prinadleznost' ee k takomu tipu jazykovogo soznanija, kotoryj xarakterizuetsja tjagoteniem k simvolike nemnogix semanticeskix rjadov, no zato i intensivnym hpol'zovaniem ix. — "O simvolike Anny Axmatovoj", p. 137.

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is already apparent from the use of such exclusively 'literary' words as obet and tscetno. But, more importantly, as in the classicist rhetorical style, the meaning of the words is constantly shifted from the semantic level of abstraction to that of concreteness and the other way round. The relationships between these levels are complex and manifold ; sometimes they are of a metonymical kind, as in the case of 'poetry', which is variously indicated as pesnja, slovo and glagol (the latter two preceded by a 'lofty' religious epithet: precistoe and svjascennyj); sometimes, too, the tragic events of the author's life are mentioned in concrete and straightforward terms : Razlucili s edinstvennym synom, V kazematax pytali druzej. Often the change from abstraction to concreteness is brought about by the use of a verb that normally takes a concrete object or adjunct, followed by an abstract noun, as in the lines Oskvernili precistoe slovo, Rastoptali svjascennyj glagol, or in Nagradili menja nemotoju, Na ves' mir okajanno kljanja, Opoili menja klevetoju ... This poem, which by its organic 'rhetorical' combination of the levels of personal concreteness and generalizing abstraction forms at the same time the most direct statement of Axmatova's personal suffering under the terror of the thirties and the forties and perhaps its most generally valid lyrical expression, contains in its final stanza one of the most impressive examples of the use of a 'dead' metaphorical cliché which is brought to a new poetic life. The worn-our metaphorical expression in I do samogo kraja dovedsi, which is in itself no more than a neutral figure of speech, acquires through the addition of the next line Pocemu-to ostavili tam

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a sudden sense of physical reality, and is thus poetically transformed from a mere rhetorical phrase into an unforgettable expression of immense fear and solitude.

C. NATURE AND HISTORY

In the imagery of Axmatova's civic verse there are some striking elements that deserve special notice, because they provide us with an insight into some essential aspects of the 'context' in which Axmatova as a poet envisages the tragic and catastrophical events of her time. Among the images that play an important part in the poetic structure of civic lyrics both from the earlier and from the later phases of Axmatova's career, those taken from the world of nature are to be mentioned in the first place. Of course, imagery from nature plays a central part not only in the poems of Axmatova that are concerned with public themes, but form a more general feature of her work. Lev Ozerov in his article Tajny remesla notes that the folkloristic parallelism, which plays such an important role in her earlier verse, is based on the alternation of two lines containing a motif from nature, followed by two lines with a motif from the world of man. 20 Apart from such clear prosodic patterns of parallelism between nature and the world of man much of Axmatova's poetry, especially in her earlier phase, is based on a more complex expression of the relations between natural phenomena and human life. In Axmatova's public poetry, however, the relation between nature and man is of a special kind, mainly because the world of man in this case is not the world of individual fate and consciousness — as in most of her other verse — but that of historical events involving a larger community. There are in Axmatova's exploration of this latter relationship a few constant elements, and also some important shifts in the later phases, which are highly characteristic of Axmatova's poetic conception of historical events and circumstances, and of the growth of her poetic consciousness of them. The parallelism between nature and the human world most 40

Lev Ozerov, Rabota poita (Moskva, 1963), p. 190.

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commonly evolves aiound some form or other of the 'pathetic fallacy', when the outer aspect of nature becomes expressive of the mood set by the historical event. In some of Axmatova's poems from the First World War nature is pictured as Russian nature, which is identified with the suffering Russian state; this patriotic identification of nature and nation is combined with a no less patriotic, and even 'military' interpretation of Christianity. 21 The 'pathetic fallacy' is essentially an animistic form of thinking, and characteristically the religious motif, which is typical of Belaja staja as a whole, occurs in such poems as IjuV 1914, I and II, in particularly apocryphal and even paganised forms. Thus at the end of the second of these poems words which in their Biblical version refer to Christ: Ranjat telo tvoe presvjatoe, Mecut zrebij o rizax tvoix are implicitly made to apply to the Russian land, which is thus identified with the body of Christ. 22 In the first of the two poems IjuV 1914 we find a combination of the following characteristic elements: a natural scene wearing the mask of human tragedy and serving as an expression of divine wrath, and in the final two stanzas a folkloristic, half-Biblical, half-apocryphal prophecy of impending natural disaster. In the second poem the relation between nature and the human suffering caused by the war is somewhat more subtle and complex. 21

The clearest example of the latter phenomenon is to be found in the poem Utesenie from 1914. 22 It would probably be superfluous to point to the ultra-slavophile nature of the use of such motifs and their combination as an expression of a present historical and political reality. There is one poem from the Second World War, Pobeda from January 1942, that shows in its animistic poetisation of Russian nature and in the implicit religious qualification of the Russian land as a divine body a s'riking similarity to the poems from the First World War which we are examining here. There is even a direct textual parallel between the precistoe telo from Pobeda and the 'elo tvoe presvjatoe from IjuV 1914. The fact that Pobeda with its trite patiiotic imagery and with such coarse sound-effects as the obvious alliteration in v groznom groxote is distinctly felt by the reader as falling far below the ordinary level of Axmatova's poetic achievement in other verse of the same period, may be seen as a significant reflection of the poet's creative growth in the second part of her artistic career.

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The first stanza seems simply to be built on the prosodic parallelism between nature and man, noticed by Ozerov; there is, however, a curious internal contrast in the image from nature between the pleasant sweet smell of the juniper-trees flowing from the catastrophically burning woods. This contrast within the parallel is developed in the second stanza, in which the prayer for fertilising rain is, through one of those drastic forms of dramatic irony, typical of animistic gods, answered with death-bringing blood. The poem Tot avgust, kak zeltoe plamja, which is in its beginning again couched in apocalyptical Biblical imagery, is based on the contrast between the city, which has been transformed by the war and the mobilisation into a centre of frightening mechanical activity, and quiet and untouched nature. In the second stanza the thematic contrast between the atmosphere of country and city is briefly expressed: I v gorod pecali i gneva Iz tixoj Karel'skoj zemli ... In a later stanza the contrast between military activity and nature is situated inside the city: I serye puski gremeli Na Troickom gulkom mostu, A lipy esce zeleneli V tainstvennom Letnem sadu. At the end of the poem the narrative fragment of the mobilized soldier taking leave from his sister is suddenly followed by an unexpected image from nature: A veter vostocnyj slavil Kovyli privolzskix stepej. The function of this image seems different from the two preceding ones; it does not stand in contrast to the military activity of the town, but forms a concluding and unifying image of Russian patriotism. In two heavily rhetorical poems from the civil war, Cem xuie dtot vek predsestvujuscixl Razve and Vse rasxisceno, predano, prodano the imagery of nature is allegorically expressive of the

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spiritual significance assigned by the poet to the great historical events taking place at that time. In the former the present is interpreted as a great historical failure and as a final cataclysm expressed in the form of a grandiose image of sunset: Esce na zapade zemnoe solnce svetit, I krovli gorodov v ego lucax blestjat, A zdes' uz belaja doma krestami metit I klicet voronov, i vorony letjat. In this image two consecutive elements are stressed and symmetrically contrasted within the stanza: the magnificence of the last rays of the sun setting in the West as against the horrifying emptiness of death {belaja) already prevailing 'here'. In the second poem the lyrical interpretation of the civil-war years forms almost the exact reverse of that of the first. Starting from a violent picture of death, destruction and chaos in the first three lines, the poet develops in contrast a sense of a deeper and more positive meaning of the events. This meaning is not explicitly defined; it is first presented in the form of a surprised question: Otcego ze nam stalo svetlo ? to which the next two stanzas form alternative attempts at an answer. In the second stanza the sense of unaccountable 'illumination' — which is in the final stanza alternatively expressed in more abstract terms — is conveyed by the symmetrical image of a transfigured day and night world in the rich natural splendour of early summer: Dnem dyxan'jami veet visnevymi Nebyvalyj pod gorodom les, Noc'ju blescet sozvezd'jami novymi Glub' prozracnyx ijul'skix nebes In both poems the images of nature that are used to convey the poet's insight into the ultimate meaning of the catastrophic events that befell her country carry, once more, Biblical overtones. Although there are no specific Biblical references in these poems, we find, next to the general prophetic tone, perhaps a slight reminiscence of the tenth Egyptian plague at the end of the first

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poem, and some echoes of the twenty-first chapter of the A p o calypse in the middle stanza of the second, in which the element of magic transfiguration forms the semantic core of the natural image. The role of the natural imagery in Requiem is important, but much more complex than in the earlier poems. The complexity is directly related to the artistic conception of this cycle, which is based on a constant tension between personal specificness and impersonal generalization, with varying emphasis on one or the other of these elements. Locally this conception manifests itself in an ambiguity of the décor, which is sometimes explicitly that of the city Leningrad, but in other cases it is either left uncertain, or even transferred to other places, such as old Moscow in the first numbered poem, or the country-side in the second. In keeping with the general pattern of Requiem specific references to Leningrad and its river, the Neva, are mainly to be found in those pieces that serve as a 'frame-work' around the central body of the numbered lyrics, in the Preface in prose, in the Dedication, the Introduction, and in the second Epilogue. In the numbered poems, which are in various ways 'dramatised' these references are much rarer. The only direct local reference to Leningrad is to be found here in the name of the Kresty prison in the poem Pokazat' by tebe, nasmesnice. Another, much less direct indication of Leningrad as the décor of the suffering of the 'I' and her son is to be found in the mention of the 'white nights' in the poem Legkie letjat nedeli. Generally speaking, however, the décor of the numbered poems is, contrary to that of their poetical 'frame', either neutral or it is expressly not that of Leningrad. This characteristic shift of décor in Requiem can be observed, for instance, when we examine the various instances of one of those recurring natural images that give the work its poetic coherence, that of the river. In the monumental first lines of the Dedication, in the two grand images of nature sharing human grief that open the cycle, it is the 'great river' as such, a natural symbol without a specific name, which is mentioned. Later on in the same Dedication, when the description gradually becomes more particular, the Neva is mentioned by name in an image of wintry

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gloom that parallels the aspect of the women gathering at the prison-gates of the city. In the stylisation and dramatization of the middle part of Requiem the river that is mentioned by name, in the second poem, in keeping with the folkloristic tone, is the Don. At the end of Requiem, when the general reference is once more to the concrete personal experience of the author, the Neva returns in an image of that river as an accompaniment to the memory of human grief, and it symmetrically closes the cycle. Among other such unifying natural images in Requiem a few tree-symbols deserve to be especially mentioned. Trees play an important role in Axmatova's imagery throughout her career with varying poetic functions in different periods and in different groups of verse. In Requiem the tree-symbol occurs in several poems of the middle section. In Pokazat' by tebe, nasmesnice the image of the poplar outside the prison lends a terrible contrastive prominence to the motif that follows it: Tam tjuremnyj topol' kacaetsja, I ni zvuka — a skol'ko tam Nepovinnyx ziznej koncaetsja ... In the next instance, that of the final stanza of the poem Prigovor, the contrast between the image of trees, implied in the words gorjacij selest leta, and the human suffering of the 'I' has a painful ironic poignancy: U menja segodnja mnogo dela: Nado pamjat' do konca ubit', Nado, ctob dusa okamenela, Nado snova naucit'sja zit', — A ne to... Gorjacij selest leta Slovno prazdnik za moim oknom. Ja davno predcuvstvovala etot Svetlyj den' i opustelyj dom. The motif of the festive stirring of the leaves, which forms such a sharp emotional contrast to the general tone of confusion and despair of the speaking voice in this poem, is introduced by a sudden break of intonation, marked by a syntactic ellipse. In the

THEMES IN THE POETRY OF AXMATOVA

41

second half of the stanza the speaking voice resumes its tone of despair and attempted resignation. The painful dissimilarity between nature and the tragic reality of life is once more brought to the foreground in the contrasting epithets svetlyj and opustelyj of the final line. Finally, the function of the tree-symbol in Uze bezumie krylom is entirely different, more simple and traditional than in the preceding cases. Here the lime-trees sympathetically partake in the emotions aroused by the final parting of mother and son at the latter's deportation. When we compare the various instances of natural imagery in Requiem with each other and with the earlier poems which we examined in the above, it becomes clear that the images taken from nature fulfill in Requiem a wide range of varying poetic functions, from the 'pathetic fallacy' of the majestic opening lines and that of nature as a sympathetic accompaniment to human grief to that of nature as an independent idyllic entity that stands in a sharp ironical contrast to the harsh reality of human suifering. In Requiem the poetic role of nature has many different aspects and has a meaning that goes far beyond that of a lyrical mirror of human affairs. In the poems that form a direct reflection of the persecutions in the thirties and forties and of the poet's tragic fate in those years, the imagery from the idyllic world of nature functions almost exclusively in a tragic, ironical contrast to the unrelieved horror and hopelessness of the human situation. In the first part of the poem PrivoVem paxnet dikij med, for instance, the inhuman cruelty of the reign of terror is expressed in the form of a sharp emotional contrast to pleasant associations from the world of nature. The rhetorical structure of both stanzas is based on a series of associative parallels that set off with a particularly shocking force the brutal contrast of its final member, taken from the world of man: Privol'em paxnet dikij med, Pyl' — solnecnym lucom, Fialkoju — devicij rot, A zoloto — nicem.

42

PUBLIC THEMES

Vodoju paxnet rezeda I jablokom — ljubov', No my uznali navsegda, Cto krov'ju paxnet tol'ko krov'. In the first stanza the dissimilarity between the idyllic associations of nature and the meaninglessness of human affairs is still relatively innocuous and does not really prepare the reader for the much more violent and emphatic shock of the contrast in the second stanza. In the second stanza of the poem *Kakaja est'. 2elaju vam druguju the rich beauty of the nature of Central Asia, the poet's place of evacuation, is emotionally meaningless and even frightening to her, because it brings to her mind her utter moral isolation : Nad Aziej vesennie tumany I jarkie do uzasa tjul'pany Kovrom zatkali mnogo so ten mil'. O cto mne delat' s ètoj cistotoju Prirody? S nevinovnost'ju svjatoju? 0 cto mne delat's ètimi ljud'mi? The terrible contrast between the purity and innocence of the landscape and the poet's despairing realisation of its utter meaninglessness to her seems already adumbrated by the image of the unbearable brightness of the tulips in the surrounding natural scene. The idyllic picture of natural splendour may also be used for the expression of an alternative reality which is opposed to the nightmare world of bureaucratic terror and repression that surrounds the poet. In the poem *Dmgie uvodjat ljubimyx the image of this unimaginable contrasting world of natural peace and beauty is evoked in the following lines : A gde-to, temneja ot znoja, Ogromnyj nebesnyj prostor. 1 polnoe prelesti leto Guljaet na torn beregu ... Ja èto blazennoe gde-to Predstavit' sebe ne mogu.

THEMES IN THE POETRY OF AXMATOVA

43

There are in the imagery of Axmatova's poems that were directly evoked by the repression of the thirties and the forties some aspects that deserve closer attention as they contribute to the unity of these poems as a group within the body of the poet's works. The peculiar nature of this imagery, by which the brutal world of the social and political present, and especially the poet's position within this fearful reality, is given poetic definition, is formed by its 'historical' quality. In many of these poems the images that form the metaphorical frame of reference which is directly applied to the odious present of the mass-arrests of the thirties or the poet's social ostracism in the forties are taken from the life of the medieval, or primitive and so to speak 'archetypal' community with its various instruments of social persecution and isolation. In one poem, *Drugie uvodjat ljubimyx, the horrors of the reign of terror are evoked by images that are directly derived from the present. Also the allusion to K a f k a and Chaplin as the creators of prophetic images of the nightmare world of bureaucratic repression in the following lines: Takoe vydumyval Kafka I Carli izobrazil is to art that is, for once, modern. But, as has been said, in most other cases the imagery of this group of poems is taken from the small medieval community and its means of disposing of social outcasts, as an 'archetypal' metaphorical reference to the reality of persecution on the scale and with the methods of the twentieth century. In the first two lines of the poem *Zacem vy otravili vodu an ancient method of social persecution forms the metaphorical base of the image of the poet's isolation in the present. In the third stanza, which, as we have seen in a previous part of this chapter, is textually closely connected with the plainly 'medieval' poem Dante, the historical nature of the imagery with its ancient ritual of execution and public mourning, is more openly revealed. In other poems, too, the ostracised figure of the poet in her present historical situation — which became extremely acute after

44

PUBLIC THEMES

the Party Decree of 1946 — is evoked in the image of the outcast from the 'archetypal' medieval community. In the final image of *Vse usli, i nikto ne vernulsja the 'I' appears as the village idiot in an empty town: Budu ja gorodskoj sumassedsej Po pritixsim brodit' ploscadjam. In the first two quatrains of *Ne liroju vljublennogo the extent of the poet's social and political isolation from her surroundings is expressed by her metaphorical identification with the historical figure of the leper, who announces his approach by the sound of a rattle. The rattle is used by Axmatova as a symbol of her dangerous and 'infectious' poetry, the bitter voice of her isolation, in metaphorical contrast to what might be expected of her as the author of melodious love poetry: the lyre of the enamoured troubadour. The shockingly forceful and tragic directness of her present poetic inspiration is sharply defined through the great metaphorical tension between the 'rattle' with its ugly sound and its predicate 'sings'. In one case, that of the poem * Vy menja, kak ubitogo zverja, the metaphorical community by which the poet indicates her present surroundings is seen as even more barbarous than that of the Middle Ages, which forms the background of the other poems, and is presented as a primitive tribe in the jungle. The Neanderthal habits of the Soviet and anti-Soviet propaganda of the forties and the early fifties, of which the poet has become a victim, are presented in the image of the poet being put up on a fork as a bait for the foreign press, which is metaphorically pictured as a troop of jackals or as an enemy tribe surrounding the carrion. Sometimes the metaphorical reference in these poems is not, as in the preceding cases, to a generalized background of the ancient 'archetypal' community, but to more specific historical circumstances or figures. Earlier in this essay we have already paid attention to the national old-Russian background of such poems as *Streleckaja luna, Zamoskvorec'e. Noc'. and *Mne kazehja, s mesta ne sdvinut'sja. The specific historical reference is, however, not restricted to old-Russia. Thus in the mysterious final stanza of

THEMES IN THE POETRY OF AXMATOVA

45

the poem *Kakaja est', ¿elaju vam druguju a reference to the Spanish Inquisition is contained in the image of the 'greenish terrible candle' with which the representatives of this historical prototype of all institutions of physical and spiritual terror used to appear at the interrogation of their victims. This historical reference to the Inquisition adds an element of horrifying ambiguity to the mysterious covered figure of the person addressed in the final stanza, who is evidently recognized by the speaker, as appears from the lines I mne ne dolgo mucit'sja zagadkoj, C'ja tam ruka pod beloju percatkoj but the 'riddle' of whose identity is not solved for the reader, who is left to his uncertainty of whether he has to understand the figure in black and white simply as an indication of the presence of death, or whether the poet is faced here in her imagination with the unspeakable prospect of a modern form of destruction of the Inquisition type, in which case the final lines take on a sinister second sense. Sometimes the historical reference which is at the base of the metaphorical structure of a poem is, as in the case of the 'lyrical' portraits, to literary or Biblical figures. The second, rhymeless part of the poem PrivoVem paxnet dikij med is based on two historical illustrations of the impossibility of escaping from the responsibility for and the consequences of the perpetration of physical violence as an instrument of politics. This motif is conveyed through an evocation of the Biblical figure of Pilate and a literary prototype of the political criminal: Lady Macbeth. In the parallel which is drawn between these two figures the motif of the futility of the efforts of removing the traces of guilt serves as the connecting element: I naprasno namestnik Rima Myl ruki pered vsem narodom Pod zlovescie kriki cerni, I sotlandskaja koroleva Naprasno s uzkix ladonej Stirala krasnye bryzgi V dymnom mrake carskogo doma.

46

PUBLIC THEMES

It may be important to notice in connection with this poem that the only factor that links its two parts, so profoundly dissimilar in prosody, imagery and stylistic intonation, is the expressive function of 'blood' as a symbol of political violence and terror. This metonymical use of the word 'blood' forms a traditional rhetorical cliché of the type which we have discussed in the previous part of our essay. In its application by Axmatova to the reality of Russia under the reign of Stalin in the thirties and forties this 'dead' rhetorical figure acquires a memorable and at times almost unbearable new poetic life. We have already encountered it in a concrete and terrifyingly vivid image from the poem * Vse tisli, i nikto ne vernulsja, which pictures the year 1937 as a floor soaked in blood, which is to be cleaned by the poet and the women with a fate similar to hers. And in *Ty naprasno mne pod nogi nieces' the author envisages her life in retrospect as a dark 'road', along which she has 'crept in blood'.

2. Twenty-Two

Poems

by Anna Axmatova

Except for Vse usli, i nikto ne vernulsja1 the following poems of Axmatova are, as far as we know, published here for the first time. Most of them, though not all, belong to what may be called Axmatova's poetry on 'public' themes. They have been arranged by us into what we believe to be a more or less chronological order, which will doubtlessly appear to contain many mistakes when the actual dates of their composition will perhaps one day become firmly established. Some of the poems of this collection are dated in the texts on which our edition is based. Others have been assigned by us to a certain period either because they contain motifs which point to specific historical circumstances (such as the mass-arrests of the late thirties or the author's ostracism in 1946), or because their style reflects the characteristic features of a particular phase in the poet's development: thus the imagery from 1 Vestnik russkogo studenieskogo xristianskogo dvizenija, N. 93, (1969), p. 65. As will be noticed, our version of this poem has a different reading in the sixteenth line: slazennoj instead of slozennoj. A different redaction of the poem Kakaja est', ¿elaju vam druguju will be found in Anna Axmatova; Works, Vol. II (Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1968), pp. 142-143. The poem Iz-pod kakix razvalin govorju was published in a different redaction with the title Nadpis' na knige and the date "January 1959" in the journal Junost' (1968), n. 3

48

PUBLIC THEMES

the Old-Russian past in some of these works has, f o r instance, induced us to assign them to the late thirties, when this forms an especially recurrent stylistical property of Axmatova's œuvre. A s none of the texts of these 'twenty-two poems' are based upon a manuscript by the author, wa can unfortunately not always be certain about their full authenticity. The

sooner possible

mistakes and misreadings will be convincingly brought to light by others, the better. 2

Since the time when the manuscript of this book was sent to the publisher a few of the subsequent poems have been published both in and outside the Soviet Union. For technical reasons we have nevertheless decided to retain them in the present collection. 2

TWENTY-TWO POEMS BY ANNA AXMATOVA

3/iecb fleByniKH npeKpacHefiiiiHe cnopaT 3a necTb AOCTaTbCH b mcchh naJianaM. 3pfiCb npaBeflHbix nuTaiOT no HonaM H rOJIOAOM HeyKpOTHMLIX MopaT. 1924 3aneM b h OTpaBiiJiii Boay H c rpjBbio moh cMemaxtH xjieö? 3aneM nocjieaHioK) CBo6o,n,y Bli npeBpainaeTe b BepTen? 3a t o , hto n He HaApyranacb HaA ropbKoii rn6ejibio ztpyseM, 3a t o , hto a HeMa ocTajiacb IleHajibHOH poAHHe Moeii. HeT, 6e3 najiana h iuiaxH Ilo3Ty Ha 3eMjie He 6biTb; HaM noMHHajibHwe pyöaxn,

HaM co CBeneii h a t h h BWTb. 1936

PUBLIC THEMES H BOT HanepeKop TOMy, HTO CMEPTB ITMAHT B rjia3a, O n a T b n o cjioBy TBoeMy Ä ronocyio "3a"... 3 a TO, HTO6 ÄBEPBIO cTajia AßEPT, 3BOHOK O m i b 3BOHKOM, H t o ö c e p a u e M CTaji y r p i o M w i i 3Bepi> B RPYAH. A AEJIO B TOM, H t o cyacaeHO HaM BceM ysHaTt, MTO 3HaHHT TpeTHH r o a He cnaTb, HTO 3HEHHT yTpOM y3HaßaTb O Tex, KTO B HOHb nOTHÖ. * * *

MHe KaaceTca, c MecTa He CABHHyTbCH n o A TaacecTbK) Bneßbix BeK, A HTO, eCJlH BAPyr OTKHHyTbCfl B KaKofl-To ceMHaOTaTMH BeK. C ayniHCTOK) BeTKoii 6epe30B0Ö n O A TpOHUy B IiepKBH CTOHTb, C ÖOHpblHeiO M0p030B0H CjiaAHMbrä MeAOK noiiHBaTb. A n o c j i e Ha APOBHHX B cyMepica B HaB03H0M CHery TOHyTb — K a K o i i cyMacmeAuiHH CypmcoB M o ä nocjieAHHH onHUieT n y T b ? * * *

QrpejiemcaH JiyHa. 3aM0CKB0penbe. HOHL. Kaie JierKHH AHM JICTHT nacbi CrpacTHOö HEAEJIH. MHe CHHJica CTpaiuHbift COH — HeyacTO B caMOM AeJie HHKTO, HHKTO, HHKTO HE MOACET MHE n o M o n b ? B KpeMJie He HaAO acHTb — npeoöpaxceHeu; n p a B T a M ApeBHeö n p o e r a e m e KHinaT MHKpoöbi — E o p H c a AHKHH CTpax H Bcex HBEHOB 3JI06bI H caM03BaHiia eneeb B3aMeH HapoAHbix npaB.

—

TWENTY-TWO POEMS BY ANNA AXMATOVA YjIOHCHJia CblHOHKa Ky^pHBOrO H n o i n j i a Ha 0 3 e p 0 n o BO/iy, IlecHH n e j i a , 6biJia B e c e j i a a . 3 a n e p n H y j i a BOflw H c j i y m a i o : M H e 3HaKOMi»iH TOJIOC n p n c j i b i m a j i c a , K0JI0K0JIbHbIH 3BOH H 3 - n O f l CI1HHX BOJIH, T a K y Hac 3BOHHJIH B r p a # e K u T e a c e . BOT 6 o n b u i H e 6 b i o T y E r o p a a , A MeHbinne c 6auiHH 6jiar0BemeHCK0H. TOBOpHT OHH rp03HbIM TOJIOCOM: A x , OAHa Tbi y r n j i a OT npncTyna, CTOHa H a r n e r o Tbi He c j i b i m a j i a , H a m e S ropbKoii ra6ejiH He BH^ejia. H o CBeTJia CBena HeracHMaa 3 a T e 6 a y npecTOJia 6 o a c b e r o . HTO ace TM Ha 3eMjie 3 a M e n i K a j i a c b H BeHeu, Ha^eTb He T o p o n H i i i b c a ? PacnycTHJicH TBOH KPHH BO n o j i y H o m n M (|>aTa

n a T T e 6 e coTKaHa.

MTO ac n e n a j i H u i b Tbi 6paTa-BOHHa H c e c T p y - r o j i y S n u y cxHMHHiiy, C B o e r o n e n a j i H i u b pe6eHOHKa... KaK n o c j i e A H e e CJIOBO ycnbiniana, C B e T a a n p e a c o 6 o i i He B3BHAejia, OrjiaHyjiacb, a AOM B o r a e ropHT. 1940.

3 a T a K y i o CKOMopouiHHy, OTKpOBeHHO r o B o p a , M H e 6 cBHHn;oByio r o p o u i H H y OT ceKpeTapa. 1942

—

52

PUBLIC THEMES JI1060 BaM n o f l nojioBHueft IlepeKjiHKHyTbCH c ciiHuueii M Jib npHCHHTbCH KOH-KOMy, K T O OT B a c BO CHE 3ACTOHET,

H o H cjiOBa He npopoHHT flaace flpyry CBoeMy. HIOHb 1 9 4 2 .

Kaicaa ecTb. }ECejiaK> BaM a p y r y i o . I l o j i y H i i i e . B o j i b i u e cnacTbeM He T o p r y i o , K a n uiapJiaTaHbi H OHTOBHKH.3 IlOKa Bbl MHpHO OTflblXajlH B CoHH, K o MHe yace n0Ji3Jin TaKHe HOMH, H a TaKHe cubimajia 3BOHKH... [ H e 3HaTHoii nyTemecTBeHHHiieii B Kpecjie Si Bbicjiymajia K a T o p x H w e necHH, A cnoco6oM y3Hajia HX h h i i m . ] H a f l A3Hefi BeceHHHe TyMaHbi H apKHe £ 0 yxcaca TiojibnaHbi KOBpOM 3aTKajIH MHOTO COTeH MHJTb. O HTO MHe flejiaTb C 3T0H HHCTOTOK) n p a p o f l b l ? C HeBHHOBHOCTbK) CBHTOK)? O HTO MHe flejiaTh C 3THMH J I K W M H ? M H e 3pHTejibHHue0 6biTb He yflaBanocb, H noneMy-To h Bceraa BTopranacb B 3anpeTHefiniHe 30Hbi ecTecTBa. IJejiHTejibmma HeacHoro Heayra, ^yacHX Myacefi BepHeHinaa n o ^ p y r a H m h o t h x HeyTeniHaH BflOBa...

The word oiitobhkh was put here into the text by Axmatova to replace and disguise the original SojiMiieBHKH.

3

TWENTY-TWO POEMS BY ANNA AXMATOVA

53

CeaoH BeHeii aocTajicH MHe HeaapoM, H meKH, onajieHHbie noxcapoM, Y»ce jnoßeii nyraioT CMyrjiOTOH... H o 6jih3htch KOHeu Moeö rop^wHe, KaK t o h , apyroH CTpa^anime, MapHHe, EipHAeTca MHe Hanmrbca nycTOTOH. H TH npHAeuib nofl nepHoii enaHHeio C 3encHOBaTOH cTpauiHOK) CBeneio H He OTKpoemb CBoero jnma... H MHe He flojiro MyHMTbcn 3araflKoii, — Ta m p y x a n o a ôcjtoio nepnaTKoii, H KTO npHCJiaji h o h h o t o npamjieija. TaniKeHT, 2 4 hiohh 1942.

K o r o Koraa-To Ha3biBajiH j h o ^ h 4 LJapeM B HacMeuiKy, E o t o m b caMOM Mene, K t o 6bui y6nT — h Hbe opy^be nbiTKH C o r p e T o TenjioToit Moeft r p y a a . BnycTHJiH CMepTb. C b h a c t c j i h X p h c t o b l i H cnjieTHHiibi CTapyxH, h cojiaaTbi, H npoKypaTop PHMa — Bee npomjia. TaM, r^e Kor^a-To B03Bbimajiacb apKa, r ^ e Mope ÔHJiocb, rfle HepHen yTec, H x BbmHJIH B BHHe, BAOXHyjIH C nblJIbK) acapKOH H c 3anaxoM 6eccMepTHbix p03. PacaBeeT 30Jioto, h HCTjieBaeT CTajib, KpOHIHTCH MpaMOp. K CMepTH BCe TOTOBO. B e e r ò npoHHee Ha 3eMJie nenajib H .gojiroBeHHeìi — uapcTBeHHoe CJIOBO. 1945 4

Kogo kogda-to nazyvali ljudi: The final quatrain has been published as a separate poem. Cf. Anna Axmatova: Works vol. I (2nd éd.), op. cit., p. 285 and the editorial note on p. 410.

PUBLIC THEMES

54 B e e yinjiH, H HHKTO He BepHyjiCH. TOJIBKO, BepHbiH o ô e T y JIIOÔBH, M O H nocjieAHHH, JIHIIIB T H o r j i a H y j i c a , ^ T O Ô YBH^ETB Bee Heôo B KPOBH. floM

ôbiji npoKJiHT h npoKJiaro AeJio,

T m e r a o n e c H a 3 B e H e j i a HexcHeft H r j i a 3 a a no^HHTb He n o c M e j i a ITepe/i CTpauiHoii c y f l b ö o i o MOCH. OcKBepHHJIH npeHHCToe CJIOBO, PACTONTAJIH CBHUICHHWH r j i a r o j i , M T O 6 C CHAEJIKAMH TPHFLIIATB CE^BMORO MbiJia a oKpoBaBJieHHbiH noji. Pa3JiyHHJIH C eAHHCTBeHHHM CblHOM, B Ka3eMaTax nbiTajiH Apy3eß, OKpyaCH^H HeBHflHMblM TbIHOM K p e n i c o c j i a a c e H H O Ì i CJIOKKH C B o e ö . HARPAAHJIH MCHH HCMOTOK», H a B e c b M H p O K a H H H O KJIHH5T, OnoHJiH MeHa KjieBeToio OKOpMHJIH OTpaBOH MeHa. H

AO c a M o r o Kpaa A O B e A i n H ,

IlOHeMy-TO OCTaBHJIH TaM

—

B y a y a ropoACKofi c y M a c m e A i n e n I l o npHTHXHIHM 6pOAHTb njIOIXtaAHM.

3 a MEHA HE ÔYAETE B OTBETE. M o a c e T e , a p y 3 b a , cnoKOHHO cnaTb. I l p a B O CHJibi. TojibKO BauiH A e r a 3 a MeHa Bac 6 y A y T npoKjiHHatb.

TWENTY-TWO POEMS BY ANNA AXMATOVA H e JiHpoio BJiioôJieHHoro

55

5

H a y njieHHTb H a p o a — TpemeTKa npoKaaceHHoro

B MoeS pyxe noeT. YcneeTe HaaxaTbca H BO», H kjihhh; Si Hayny i n a p a x a T b c a

Bcex "cMejibix"

OT MCHH.

Si He HCKajia npiiSbijni

H cjiaBti He acflajia, Si nop, KpbijioM y

raôejia

Bee Tpn/maTb jieT acHJia. * * *

C o m n a H o i i B KaHaBKe Bo3jie Kaôana, C njieHHbiMH Ha JiaBKe rpy30BHKa.

n o A rycTbiM TyMaHOM H a f l MocKBOH-peKOH C ôaTbKoô aTaMaHOB B neTejibKe TyroM. Si GbiJia c o BceMH, C 3THMH H C T e M H ,

A Tenepb ocTajiacb Si caMa c c o 6 o i i . * * *

Bbi MeHH, KaK y 6 n T o r o 3Bepa, H a KpoBaBbiH noflHHMeTe KpioK, H t o 6 xHXHKaa a He Bepa HH03eMUbI ÔpOflHJIH BOKpyr, H nHcanH B noHTeHHbix ra3eTax, HTO MOH flap HecpaBHeHHbiii y r a c , MTO ôbijia s n03T0M B n o s T a x , H o MOH npoÔHJi TpuHa/maTbiii nac. 5

Ne liroju vljublennogo: Only the first quatrain of this poem has been published so far. Cf. Works vol. II, op. cit., p. 139 and the editorial note on p. 390.

56

PUBLIC THEMES flpyrae

YBOFLFLT JHO6HMMX,

Si C S A B H C T B K ) BCJieA HE r j i a a c y , O f l H a Ha CKaMbe n o f l c y f l H M b i x Ä

CKopo nojiBeKa cnacy.

Bonpyr NPEPEKAHBH H AABKA H n p H T o p H b i H 3 a n a x nepHHJi. T a n o e B b i f l y M b i B a j i KaKa H M a p j i H H3o6pa3HJi. M e H H i o T c a J i i m a KOHBOJI, B HHiJjapKTe rnecTOH n p o x y p o p , A r a e - T O , T e M H e a OT 3HOH, OrpoMHbiìi He6ecHbi8 n p o c T o p . H n o j i H o e n p e n e c T H jieTO T y j i a e T Ha T O M 6 e p e r y . . . Ä 3TO ÔJiaaceHHoe r a e - T O I I p e f l C T a B H T b c e 6 e He M o r y . 5 i rJIOXHy OT 3bI1HbIX npOKJIHTHH,

il

BaTHHK CHOCHJia AOTJia...

H e y a c T O a B c e x BHHOBaTeä H a 3TOH n j i a H e T e 6biJia? * * * Bnacy a J l e ô e A b TeuiHTca MOH. .. T b l H a n p a c H O MHe n o a H o r n M e n e m b H BEJIHHBE, H c j i a B y , H BJiacTb,

—

3Haeiub caM, HTO He STHM H3JIEHHUIB I l e c H o n e H H a CBeTJiyio C T p a c T b . P a 3 B e 3THM p a 3 B e e u i b

o6n,ny?

HJIH 30JI0T0M j i e n a T T O C K y ? M o a c e T ö b i T b , A H C ^ A M C A ZUTH B H A Y , H e n p H T p o H y c b a a y j i o M K BHCKy... C M e p T b CTOHT Bee paBHO y n o p o r a

Tbl roHH ee HJIH 30BH; A

3 a H e i o TeMHeeT a o p o r a ,

I l o KOTOpOH IIOJI3Jia A B KpOBH.

—

TWENTY-TWO POEMS BY ANNA AXMATOVA

57

A 3a Heio fleciiTHJieTSH

CicyKH, cpaMa H TOH n y c T O T b i , O KOTopoii Morjia 6bi n p o n e T t a , Ha. 6oiocb, HTO pacnjianembca Tbi. *1TO ac, n p o m a i i ! if acHBy He B nycTbrae: H o n b co MHOH H BcerflauiHHH P y c b . TaK cnacH ace MCHSI OT r o p f l b r a n ! —

B 0CTanbH0M a caMa pa36epycb. *

*

*

H 3 - n o f l KaKiix pa3BajiHH r o B o p i o , H 3 - n o f l Kaicoro x Kpnny o 6 B a j i a , FL B HerameHHoii H3BecTH r o p i o ITofl cBOAaMH 3Ji0B0HH0r0 n o a B a n a .

IlycTb Ha30ByT 6e33Byraojo 3 H M O H , IlycTb BeHHbie HaBeK 3axjionHyT flBepH. H Bce-TaKH ycjibimaT TOJIOC MOH, H Bce-TaKH eMy onaTb noBepaT. *

M3 uepmix

*

*

neceu « C n o B a , ITO6 TE6A OCKOP6HTI>»

AHHeHCKHH I IIpaB,

HTO H e B3HJI M e H H C CO6OII 6

H He Ha3Ban CBoeii n o / i p y r o i i . 5\ CTana necHeii H cyflbSoii, CKB03H0H 6eCCOIIHHUeM H Bbioroii. M E H H 6 b i HE Y3HAJIH B H

H a n p i i r o p c w i o M nojiycTaHKe B TOH MOJioflameiicH, yBbi, H flejiOBHTOH napnacaHKe. 6 Prav, cto ne vzjal menja s soboj: This poem is to be grouped together as a small cycle with Vsem obescan'jam vopreki, the text of which was published in Beg vremeni. Cf. also Works vol. I (2nd ed.), op. cit., p. 323-324. Both poems are biographically connected with the figure of Boris Anrep, who at one time tried to persuade Axmatova to emigrate from Russia together with him.

58

PUBLIC THEMES

Ceeep 3 a n a a KJieBeTaji h c a M ace BepHJi,

H POCKOUJHO npeaaBaji BOCTOK; K ) r MHe B03flyx oneHb cKyno MepHJi, YxMbiJiaacb H3-3a 6 o h k h x c t p o k . H o CToaji, KaK Ha KOJieHax, KJieBep, BjiaacHbiH BeTep n e j i b aceMHyacHbiii p o r . TaK m o h CTaptiH .apyr, m o h BepHbiii CeBep Y T e m a j i mchh, KaK T0jibK0 Mor. B H e x o p o m e n CTbiJia a h c t o m c , 3aflbixajiacb b cMpaae h b kpobh, H e Morjia a 6ojibine b 3tom /joMe... B o t Kor^a acejie3Haa CyoMH MojiBHJia: " T h Bee y3Haeiub KpoMe PaflocTH. A HHHero: jkhbh!"

* * *

Si r a i n y Te 3aBeTHbie cbchh. 7 M o i i OKOHieH BOJime6HbiH Benep. IlajiaHH, caM03BaHiibi, npeATenn, H , yBbi, npoKypopcKHe p e n a , Bee yxoAHT. — M H e CHHUibca Tbi, n p o n j i a c a B u i H H CBoe npe,n K o B i e r o M 3 a aoacAeM, 3a BeTpoM, 3a cHeroM. TeHb TBoa H a s 6eccMepTHbiM 6 p e r o M , FOJIOC TBOÌI H3 Hejip TeMHOTbl. H n o HMeHH KaK HeycTaHHO Bcjiyx 30Beuib MeHa CHOBa: AHHa! r o B o p a u i b MHe, KaK n p e a m e , t h . K 0 M a p 0 B 0 1963 7

Ja gasu te zavetnye sveci: One of the poems which arose at the 'periphery' of Poèma bez geroja. Prosodically it forms one 'extended' stanza of the type upon which the poèma is built. In its theme and verbal expression it appears like a kind of collage of — sometimes almost literal — reminiscences from various parts of the larger work. Its 'narrative' begins where the Peterburgskaja povest' leaves off. The first lines parallel the opening lines of the first chapter: Ja zazgla zavetnye sveci, Ctoby ètot svetilsja vecer

TWENTY-TWO POEMS BY ANNA AXMATOVA HTO BOHHbl, HTO HyMa? KOHeil HM BHfleH CKOpWHJ H x npHroBop IIOHTH npoH3HeceH. H o KaK HaM 6BITB C TeM yXCaCOM, KOTOptlH EMJI 6 e r o M BpeMeHH K o r a a - T o HapeqeH?

II. llodMa Oe3 fepon

JEANNE V A N D E R E N G - L I ED M E I E R

3. Poèma bez Geroja

Anna Axmatova's Poèma bez geroja (1940-1962) has a unique position among her later works.1 Several critics have praised the compelling theme and the original structure in which lyrical, dramatic, novelistic, and even literary critical motifs are interwoven, but all have agreed that it is not easy to grasp its meaning.2 The author herself acknowledges in the work her use of 'mirror writing' and a 'triple false bottom'. She dismissed the criticism of her first audience that the poem was unintelligible to those, who were not familiar with 'certain Petersburg circumstances', refusing to elucidate the more obscure passages.3 A poetic cryptogram such as this represents a challenge to the critic. Since it is impossible to present the reader with a complete decipherment in the limited scope of an article, one aspect in particular — the original, but highly complex narrative structure of the poem — has been examined in order to provide a basis for a discussion of the thematic elements. At the very outset the critic is faced with a textual problem. 1

This is a revised version of an article published in Dutch Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavicists, The Hague 1968. 2 For a survey of the articles on Poèma bez geroja, see bibliography p. 114 3 Anna Axmatova, Socinenija II (New York, 1968), pp. 97, 100.

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ITO3MA BE3 TEPOil

There exist several versions of Poèma bez geroja, as the author, after completing the poem (1942), continued to work on it over a period of twenty years. This article is based on the latest editions 4 in which the poem has reached its maximum of expansion. Poèma bez geroja is a triptych. The three parts differ greatly in length and nature, and, as is carefully noted in the text itself, were written at different times in different places. The first part, Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God, dated 27 December 1940, is by far the most important of the three. It is based on a memory of a tragic event that took place in 1913; the leading characters were friends of the poet — the story is autobiographical in tone. Alongside the drama of the characters, the description of their environment and time emerges as a second important theme. A period that has long since faded into history, the eve of war and revolution in Petersburg, is called to life. The second part, Reska, dated 3-5 January 1941, is a short intermezzo, in which Axmatova cryptically expresses her thoughts on the recently finished first part. Shorter still than Reska is the Epilogue, which was completed eighteen months later, on 18 August 1942. Whereas both preceding parts are situated in Leningrad, with references to the street and house where the author lived in that period, the last part was written in Taskent, where Axmatova spent the war years as an evacuee. In the Epilogue, she addresses Petersburg-Leningrad, which was at the time being threatened by the Germans; her farewell to that city means also a farewell to the past evoked in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God. Strictly speaking, these notes on time and place of writing apply only to the first version. But as the main structure of the poem did not change in the subsequent versions, these data still keep a relative function as an indication of the mutual temporal and local relationships between the three parts. From the above short survey it is evident that the poet consciously aimed at a certain order: the succession of contrasting elements — the heavily dramatic beginning, the light middle and 4 A. Axmatova, Socinettija II (New York, 1968), pp. 93 ff. and J. Rude, Poème sans héros (Paris, 1970), pp. 44 ff.

POÈMA. BEZ GEROJA

65

the dignified end — is reminiscent of a musical composition, a symphony. 5 The three parts are linked by the original rhythm, based on a pattern of anapestic-iambic metre which did not exist before in this form in Russian verse. As V. Zirmunskij writes : Axmatova sozdala v Poème bez geroja svoju osobuju stroficeskuju formu, uze polucivsuju nazvanie 'axmatovskoj strofy'. Preobladanie anapestov, v osobennosti ix reguljarnoe prisutstvie v predudarnoj casti stixa ('anakruze') pridaet vsemu stixu postupatel'noe, 'okrylennoe' ritmiceskoe dvizenie — stremitel'nyj beg — 'vpered, raskinuv ruki', po obraznomu vyrazeniu Pasternaka, zapisannomu Axmatovoj. 6

This metre recurs throughout, with variations in the strophic composition. In the narrative first part there is no regular strophic structure; the second part, however, is composed of regular, clearly separated six-lined stanzas, whereas the Epilogue is uninterrupted from beginning to end. This recurrent rhythmic pattern, which is closely connected with the thematic structure of the three parts, gives the entire triptych an underlying unity. A second connecting factor, which concerns the thematic aspect, is to be found in the deliberate juxtaposition of historic dates. There is a striking similarity between 1940, the year in which the first part emerged, and 1913, the year it refers to, for at both periods Russia stood on the brink of war. It was as if the poet had a sense of foreboding when she evoked the year 1913 in 1940. The two perspectives, though separated in time, are related by the date, New Year's Eve, which may be considered as a symbol of a connection between past, present and future. 7 In the second part 5

See E. Dobin, Poèma bez geroja A. Axmatovoj, p. 72; A. Pavlovskij, Anna Axmatova, p. 166; K. Verheul, The Theme of Time in the Poetry of Anna Axmatova, pp. 218 ff. and the reflections of the poet herself on her work, in this edition, p. 134. 6 V. Zirmunskij, Anna Axmatova i Aleksandr Blok, p. 78. Cf. also K. Cukovskij, Citaja Axmatovu, p. 203 and K. Verheul, o.c., pp. 196 ff. 7 "Axmatovskaja pamjat' pricudlivo perepletaetsja s dogadkami i predcuvstvijami. Tri vremeni sluzat poèticeskomu obrazu, delajut ego trexmernym. Èto netrudno uvidet' v stixax, no vsego oscutimee èto v Poème bez geroja". (L. Ozerov, Portret pisatelja, p. 15). See also the reflections of the poet herself on her work, p. 132: "oscuscenie kanunov, socel'nikov — os', na kotoroj vrascaetsja vesc' ..."

66

n 0 3 M A BE3 rEPOJI

she dissociates herself gradually from the past, the year 1913 cedes to the present and future, and in the Epilogue the Petersburg drama is overshadowed by the calamities of the Second World War. Thus three aspects of time, past, present and future, are closely interwoven and the basic theme of the triptych can be regarded as the poet's relationship to time. 8 It is the aim of the present study to make this clear.

DEVJAT'SOT TRINADCATYJ GOD

The first part of the triptych has a dual character. On the one hand it is presented as a novella, for by the arrangement in sections and the subtitle Peterburgskaja Povest', the author is consciously carrying forward a novelistic tradition: previous Peterburgskie Povesti — from Puskin to Belyj — come to mind. On the other hand, however, the 'stage directions' heading the sections and occurring in the text point in the direction of a play. It consists of four sections, preceded by an introduction, three dedications (to the hero, the heroine and an unnamed friend) and by a foreword. At the end of the fourth section follows an afterword. The plot centres on the eternal triangle. A young poet commits suicide on discovering that his beloved favours his rival. The characters Axmatova introduces here represent historical persons, the young cornet in the dragoons, Vsevolod Knjazev, and the famous actress, Ol'ga Glebova-Sudejkina, and the story is based on fact. 9 The simple subject, however, is woven into a compelling and powerful poem by Axmatova's highly original treatment. Before discussing the complex narrative structure, it may be useful to give a short résumé of the contents. The first section opens in Axmatova's room, at Fontannyj Dom, Leningrad: the date is New Year's Eve, 1940. The author, who 8 Reflections on history, on the 'passage of time' — the poet herself uses this name as a title for a collection of her poems (Beg vremeni, Leningrad, 1966) — occur in many other works of the same period. On the central position of the theme of time in her later poetry, see K. Verheul, o.c., pp. 66 ff. See also V. Frank, "Beg vremeni", Socinenija II, p. 39. 9 For more details on these historical persons, cf. Socinenija II, pp. 379 ff.

POEMA BEZ GEROJA

67

tells the story in the first person, is visited by a number of masked figures instead of the guest she is expecting. In these mysterious shades she recognizes famous artists, friends of her youth; she is carried back to a scene of her past, a fancy-dress ball in a white hall of mirrors. It is still New Year's Eve, but the year is now 1913 and the background Petersburg. At the end of the ball the author is suddenly confronted with the hero, the young cornet in the dragoons. In a vision that follows immediately after his appearance, the author makes an allusion to his suicide. When she finds herself back in 1940, alone in her room, she discovers another apparition. In the subsequent Intermezzo (Intermedija), the author is again in the Petersburg of 1913, the scene has shifted to an artists' cabaret where the party goes after the ball. It is the first time the heroine and hero appear together — she as a dancer in the full glory of her bewitching beauty, he as the rejected lover on whose face the fatal wound is already discernible. The central figure in the second section is the heroine; it is still New Year's Eve 1913. The author, in the heroine's bedroom, addresses her as an intimate friend, reminds her of the great moments in the artistic life of Petersburg and alludes to her love affairs. One of the heroine's lovers, representing the famous poet Blok, is the object of the young poet's jealousy. At the close of the section the author points out to her friend the fate awaiting her. The leading characters do not appear in the third section: a picture is evoked of Petersburg by night, waiting for the impending disaster. An autobiographical memory of a moment of happiness follows; the setting is Carskoe Selo, where Axmatova lived in 1913. The fourth section is set against the background of a house on the Field of Mars. The young poet, standing on guard, shoots himself when he sees his beloved return home accompanied by his rival. The poem ends as it began, with the author alone in her room in 1940. In the afterword she expresses her fear of a new apparition. The events described in the poem do not constitute a coherent narrative, for the usual causal and chronological links are lacking. The four sections are composed of a series of strange dreams which relate to two entirely different New Year's Eves, in the

68

I I 0 3 M A EE3 rEPOfl

Petersburg of 1913 and in the Leningrad of 1940. A connection is only to be found in the identity of place and date and in the dominating role of the author. Indeed, the scenes which often merge into one another and the characters that loom and fade, gain their significance from the commentary of the author, through whose eyes the reader sees. She does not hide behind her characters, but presents the reader with her views as an omniscient author. At the same time she herself plays a part in both the world of 1913 and that of 1940, and this part is at least as important, if not more so, than that of her characters. In this role of "dramatized narrator" 1 0 she is no less obtrusive than an impersonal omniscient author; she is present throughout — she introduces her characters, explains their actions, gives evidence of her sympathy and even intersperses the text with personal remarks without their being clearly linked with the major theme. Her narrative is full of obscure allusions, strange transitions, mystifying contrasts and paradoxes. Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God carries forward the tradition cf Axmatova's earlier lyrical work, which was often based on an event of the past, a memory of a meeting, conversation or visit. In that work, too, the comparatively simple subject of the poem is enhanced by an expressive lyrical accompaniment. With concrete external details she suggests an atmosphere or mood, with contrasting and paradoxical associations she expresses the most diverse feelings and thoughts. Indeed, it has been suggested that there is a certain affinity between this poetry and the Russian psychological novel. 11 Her poems were called "intimnyj dnevnik", 12 they were compared to miniature novellas, 13 or little plays. 14 The comparison is all the more appropriate because Axmatova understood how to 10

Cf. W. C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), pp. 151 ff. Cf. O. Mandel'stam, "Otryvok iz neopublikovannoj stat'i o russkoj liteiature i 'Al'manaxe Muz'" (1916), Sobranie socinenij II (New York, 1966), p. 487: "Axmatova prinesla v russkuju liriku vsju ogromnuju sloznost' i bogatstvo russkogo romana XIX veka". See also E. Dobin, "Poet i rodina", Neva 3 (1967), p. 162. 12 B. Ejxenbaum, Anna Axmatova, Opyt analiza (Petersburg, 1923), p. 29. 13 V. Zirmunskij, "Preodolevsie simvolizm" (1916), reprinted in Voprosy literatury (The Hague, 1962), p. 300. 14 E. Dobin, Poema bez geroja A. Axmatovoj, pp. 63-64. 11

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69

heighten tension by using ambiguities and vague allusions whose full significance was not evident until the final pointe. The stylistic and compositional devices of Axmatova's lyrical poetry have been studied by a number of critics. 15 It may be illuminating here to sum up some of their conclusions which are applicable to the composition of Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God. Characteristic of Axmatova's poetic technique are in the first place the abrupt transitions in intonation and theme: from a melancholy impression of nature, for instance, she will suddenly turn to a dramatic dialogue, a passionate confession or a cool statement. But even when Axmatova restricts herself to a single subject, she does not adhere to one specific mood. Her attitude to one and the same event can vary immensely; it is now passionate, then resigned, sometimes ironical or sceptical, and sometimes full of bitter reproach. Furthermore, these shifts in perspective and tone are often accompanied by shifts in verbal tense 16 — she may suddenly abandon the past tense for the present or future, and vice versa. It seems as if, while writing, she forgets the time that has elapsed since the event described took place, and experiences it all anew, so that past and present merge. An event that initially strikes her as a strange and distant memory seems to unfold again before her eyes and gives rise to emotions and opinions that contrast sharply with her original reactions. A famous example of this is the description of a rendezvous in Vecerom: the poem opens, setting the scene, in the imperfective past tense: "Zvenela muzyka v sadu/ Takim nevyrazimym gorem", proceeds with a number of perfective past tenses recording the indifferent words and gestures of the partner and ends with a series of present tenses leading up to an ironical pointe — the sentimental melody played by the fiddlers now sounds to the heroine as a parody of the happiness she dreamed of: A skorbnyx skripok golosa Pojut za stdjuscimsja dymom: 15

Zirmunskij, "Preodolevsie simvolizm"; Ejxenbaum, o.c.; V. Vinogradov, Poezija A. Axmatovoj (Leningrad, 1925). 16 Cf. Vinogradov, o.c., pp. 107 ff.

n03MA EE3 rEPOil

70 "Blagoslovi ze nebesa — Ty pervyj raz odna s ljubimym."

But not only is the heroine of the 'intimate diary' elusive, everchanging in mood and attitude, the person whom she addresses in the poem is equally elusive and changeable. At times the confidant is a clearly identifiable person, a man or woman friend who is spoken to in the familiar form. Sometimes, too, these confidants are personifications of objects or abstract concepts; then the tree, night or muse with whom she converses are not strangers, they are acting as the heroine's doubles, who express her innermost thoughts. Her attitude even toward them can change abruptly: the person initially addressed familiarly as an intimate friend with 'you' is suddenly referred to as 'he' or 'she' about whom certain information is imparted to the reader. Who the confidant actually is and what part he or she plays in the story is often rather obscure. By her fallacious and contradictory commentary Axmatova leads the reader astray, and only in the final pointe does she reveal the meaning of the previous situations. All these characteristic devices of her poetry, the sudden shifts in theme, tone, perspective, time and the varying confidant, can finally be attributed to one basic attitude — a desire for multiplicity of approach. Accordingly, the complex image that the poet builds of herself in this way is difficult to pin down; it is perhaps more convenient in this context to speak of her wearing different masks. Ejxenbaum writes along similar lines of the heroine of the 'liriceskij roman', as he calls her poetry: "etot (obraz) dvizetsja antitezami, paradoksami, uskol'zaet ot psixologiceskix formulirovok, ostranjaetsja nevjazkoj dusevnyx sostojanij. Obraz delaetsja zagadocnym, bespokojuscim, dvoitsja i mnozitsja." 17 It is this multiplicity of approach — and the related multiplicity of the author's image — that makes Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God such a complicated poem. In view of this it is first of all necessary to investigate the different masks the author wears, to analyse her changing narrative attitudes. Then it will be possible to expose the principal elements of the narrative structure and, finally, to 17

Ejxenbaum, o.c., pp. 129-130.

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71

obtain a clearer insight in the diverse thematic levels of which the poem consists. 18 The poet already plays a dual part at the very beginning of the narrative. This change in role is closely bound up with a change in time perspective. On the one hand Axmatova presents herself as the author in the Leningrad of 1940 — on the New Year's Eve she purports to be writing the poem — on the other hand she appears to be in the Petersburg of 1913, again on New Year's Eve, as a witness to the drama she relives, as it were, in a dream. This shifting time perspective is emphasized in her foreword: Iz goda sorokovogo, Kak s basni, na vse gljazu. Kak budto proscajus' snova S tem, s cem davno prostilas', Kak budto perekiestilas' I pod temnye svody sxozu.

With this metaphor her dual position is precisely indicated: sometimes she surveys from the tower of 1940 the whole panorama of past, present and future as the author of the poem, addressing her words primarily to the reader, but more often she descends into the dark vaults of the year 1913 — a witness addressing her old friends. The main difference between the two leading parts she plays, that of the witness (dramatized narrator) and that of the author of the poem, is easy enough to determine. The two themes pertaining to the former part, the drama of the principal characters and its historical milieu, are indicated in the subtitle The Petersburg Story and the title The Year 1913. It is more difficult, however, to determine the thematic features of the latter part. It could be argued that, in her author's role, she refers to a reality only loosely connected with the Petersburg Story. On closer inspection the subjects she deals with appear to vary so greatly that this role may in turn be divided into two subsidiary roles. In the first place Axmatova objectifies herself as the author of Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj 18

For a methodological exposition of such an approach, see K. Hielscher, A. S. Puskins Versepik, Autoren-ich und Erzahlstruktur (Miinchen, 1966), pp. 7 ff.

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God, telling us of the genesis of the poem, and of her situation while writing. In the second place she makes allusions to her own life, to highly personal experiences, dreams and obsessions. In the short summaries of the contents that preface the sections, these passages are sometimes indicated as 'lyrical digressions' (Iiriceskie otstuplenija). In view of this, Axmatova in this role could be called a 'lyrical heroine'. In veiled terms she says that the 1913 drama led her to express her personal feelings, to throw light on a haunting memory. Of these three roles, the role of the witness is the one to be adopted most frequently; the entire drama of 1913 is recounted from this perspective. But it is not only at the beginning and the end of the poem or in the clearly indicated lyrical digressions that she presents herself as the author or lyrical heroine, as might be expected; the witness's report, too, is interspersed with authorial and personal comments. This has a shock-effect — the illusion of the past she created as a witness is disturbed by these contrasting observations. In the witness's story the events are presented more or less as dramatic scenes. By using the present tense Axmatova creates the illusion that the characters are acting before our eyes; the poem seems a "pereizdanie navek zabytyx minut". 1 9 The role the witness plays in the drama is not always easy to determine; it embodies various contrasting features. In the first place the character of the witness is not constant. Although she is clearly present at the fancy-dress ball, talking with her poet friends, gossiping and airing her views about them, in the following sections which centre on the hero or heroine, she has become part of the scenery, an invisible medium. As is indicated in the scenic directions she lends her voice to her doubles, to the cold, the wind, the silence. Furthermore, the attitude of the witness towards the other characters varies according to the metamorphoses she undergoes. In the first section, when she is present among her friends, there is an alternative use of 'vy' and 'ty': "Vy osiblis': Venecija dozej rjadom", she remarks on seeing the visitors. But later, when she 19

A. Axmatova, "V sorokovom godu", Socinetiija I, p. 260.

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73

addresses one of them alone, she says "Ty kak budto ne znacis'sja v spiskax". There is even a 'my' which includes herself, "Krik petusij nam tol'ko snitsja..." From the second section onwards, however, the witness fades into the background, ceding her place to the heroine. She declares that she is prepared to act the part of the 'fatal chorus' in her drama. But the most striking feature of the witness's role is not related to the character she assumes or her attitude, but to the time perspective from which she presents the narrative. Although she finds herself in the circle of friends in 1913, she is still the much older woman of 1940. She deliberately avoids a meeting with her former self: S toj, kakoju byla kogda-to V ozereli cernyx agatov, Do doliny Iosafata Snova vstretit'sja ne xocu... Consequently her view of the past is tinged with the memories of all that has happened to her and her country since 1913; on the one hand she speaks the language of a contemporary, relating details known only to insiders, but on the other hand she points to the future awaiting her friends. This double time perspective underlying the witness's presentation may help to explain various compositional and thematic aspects of the narrative. Speaking the language of a contemporary she gives details referring both to every-day life and to artistic events, which are, in her view, typical of the period. For instance, in the first two sections where the scene is laid inside the houses, she stresses special features of certain rooms, and in the last two sections where the scene is laid outside, she cites the names of streets, squares and parks of Petersburg which refer to historic reality. 20 And the artistic life of prewar Petersburg is evoked in the references to the performances of the actress and other celebrities such as 20

K. Cukovskij, one of Axmatova's contemporaries, calls her in his article on Poèma bez geroja a "master istoriceskoj zivopisi" (o.c., pp. 200-3). For the parallel between the treatment of historical themes in other works of this period and in Poèma bez geroja, see Verheul, o.c., pp. 116 fF.

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Mejerhol'd, Stravinskij, Pavlova and Saljapin and especially in the abundant echoes of the poetry of the Silver Age. Blok, Mandel'stam, Majakovskij, Lozinskij, Knjazev and Axmatova herself are represented with epigraphs, quotations and allusions. Characteristic of the period is also the eternal triangle in the form of a masque with the figures of Colombine, Pierrot and Arlequin. By referring now and again to her heroine and hero as Colombine and Pierrot, the witness is alluding to facts from the lives of their biographical prototypes: the actress Ol'ga GlebovaSudejkina often appeared in this role and in his poems Knjazev represents his beloved as Colombine and himself as her Pierrot. 2 1 But the principal characters of Axmatova's narrative should, of course, not be identified with the historical figures of the famous actress and the young poet: they are chosen as characteristic representatives of the artistic élite in prewar Petersburg. The witness views the past not only f r o m a 1913 perspective; looking back from the present too, she frequently displays her knowledge of the outcome of the events she relates. This becomes particularly obvious in her presentation of The Petersburg Story. There is no exciting intrigue or growing dramatic conflict between the principal characters of the narrative, but from the very outset the reader is oriented towards the end. Before the first appearance of the 'kornet s stixami' his suicide is foreshadowed in a vision: the motives for his deed are clear from the moment he is first shown together with the heroine. The characters are not portrayed in a subtle psychological fashion, neither do they develop in a dynamic plot. There is not even a discernible change in their relationship to one another. Therefore, in spite of the fact that they are explicitly called 'hero' and 'heroine', they are not heroes in the conventional sense, they are not the centre of the narrative, but they are reduced to types and shown in relationship to their time. This applies to a still greater extent to the third character of the eternal triangle, who is clearly recognizable as the poet Aleksandr Blok; he is present primarily as a symbol of the period. 2 2 21

2irmunskij, Anna Axmatova i Aleksandr Blok, pp. 74-5. "Celovek-èpoxa" as the author calls him in some later comments. Zirmunskij, Anna Axmatova i Aleksandr Blok, p. 76. 22

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His portrait is almost entirely built up of his poems. Moreover, a great number of allusions to and echoes of his work (especially the poetry written in this period) pervade the entire Petersburg Story. 23 His anticipation of a nearing end is made into a characteristic feature of an entire generation. In this way Axmatova forges a link between two themes of her narrative: the drama of the principal characters and the picture of pre-revolutionary Petersburg. As the hero, so is the city doomed from the very beginning. In her view the young poet's suicide is not a mere incident, it is the prelude to a much greater drama — the downfall of a generation to which also the actress and other famous artists from 1913 belong. In the first section observing the masked poets at the ball, she hints at a coming disaster: "gibel' gde-to zdes' ocevidno..." The second section, in which she describes the heroine as a radiant 'kolombina desjatyx godov', ends with the prophecy 'goroskop tvoj davno gotov',and after a passage dealing with the famous singer Saljapin she makes a mysterious allusion to an impending catastrophe in close connection with the death of the hero (Petruska) and a previous social disaster (Tsuzima): Do smesnogo blizka razvjazka; Iz-za sirmy Petruskina maska, Vkiug kostrov kucerskaja pljaska, Nad dvorcom cerno-zeltyj stjag... Vse uze na mestax kto nado; Pjatym aktom iz Letnego sada Paxnet... Piizrak Cuzimskogo ada Tut ze... P'janyj poet morjak... Whereas in the first two sections the catastrophe is consistently referred to in enigmatic terms, the last two sections relate to the fulfillment of the prophecy. And here a fundamental difference between the two themes becomes apparent. The hero's tragic end can be shown as a historical fact, but the tragic end of pre-revolutionary Petersburg — which takes place in a future outside the 23

For a detailed analysis of the various quotations, references, parallels and echoes from Blok's poetry in Poema bezgeroja, see Zirmunskij, Anna Axmatova i Aleksandr Blok, pp. 72-9.

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narrative — can only be conveyed by means of symbols. Consequently the structure of the passage — the first part of the third section — in which this social disaster is prefigured, differs considerably from the other sections. The witness does not describe events or comment on little dramatic scenes: indeed, all characters are removed from the stage. Only the witness, concealed in the anonymous 'voice of the wind' soliloquizes, evoking a picture of the moonlit city. Throughout this monologue her tone and attitude remain constant; the numerous shifts, so characteristic of her previous presentation of the narrative, are lacking. Furthermore, the distance to the past is increased by a sudden transition from the present tense, which was mostly used in the preceding two sections, to the imperfective past tense. Thus the witness withdraws as it were: it seems as though she is not looking back at the events of one night, but that she is contemplating an entire era, the Silver Age of poetry in the light of the impending catastrophe. This 'silver age' — as she explicitly calls the period in this passage — is not only represented by quotations and echoes of its poets (Blok, Belyj, Lozinskij, Mandel'stam), but there are also references to nineteenth-century authors such as Puskin, Gogol' and especially Dostoevskij. 24 She mentions victims of State power such as Evdokija, the wife of Peter I, and Dostoevskij, who was nearly executed in this city. Behind the Petersburg representing the prewar period arises the capital, symbolic of the tragic history of an entire country. Thus the temporal perspective is extended into a more distant past and, as in the above cited passage in which the defeat of Tsuzima was mentioned, the evocation of former tragedies is linked to the foreshadowing of an ominous future. And the witness — 'partly remembering and partly prophesying', as is said in the prose introduction preceding the monologue — creates the suggestion of a fantastic and doomed city; it seems that this world has already lost touch with reality; it is in the grip of the inevitable end. This nearing evil is personified in

24

For a more detailed examination of the literary reminiscences, referring to the Petersburg theme, see B. Filippov, "Poèma bez geroja"; Socirtenija A. Axmatovoj II, pp. 68 ff.

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the symbolic figure of a slowly approaching shade, which, in the final pointe, is for the first time mentioned by name: 'the real Twentieth Century'. A po nabereznoj legendarnoj Priblizalsja ne kalendarnyj — Nastojascij Dvadcatyj Vek. The announcement of the downfall of an entire historical milieu is followed, in the fourth section, by the death of the hero. The fatal end of the affair, which was from the very outset hinted at obscurely, is made explicit. As in the previous section, the scene is laid in the streets of the city during the cold December night. Another link between the two themes is made clear in the first lines, where the verb 'styl' which previously occurred as an attribute of the city, is used in connection with the hero. Here, however, it is used in the perfective past tense, 'zastyl', to indicate a recent, completed action and is directly followed by the present tense: Kto zastyl u pomerksix okon, Na c'em serdce 'palevyj lokon', U kogo pred glazami t'ma? In representing the hero's suicide in the form of a dramatic scene the witness returns to her previous narrative style. She chiefly employs the present tense and frequently changes her tone, attitude and confidant. Speaking now with 'the voice of silence' she finds herself again close to the principal characters, addressing them and commenting on their deeds. In her evocation of the external aspects of Petersburg, echoes from Blok and Puskin's Mednyj Vsadnik emphasize the theme of the doomed city in which man is at the mercy of fate. In the last lines the time perspective is again shifted: the witness, using the imperfective past tense, places herself at a greater distance, looking, as it were, at the hero's death as a historical fact and pointing to the tragic fate awaiting him as a representative of his generation. She suggests that his death was inevitable, she mentions places where many Russian soldiers were killed in the First World War. The threshold of the actress's house 25

On the parallel between this shade and the symbolic figure of the Avenger in Blok's Sagi Komandora, see Veiheul, o.c., p. 192.

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where he commits his suicide becomes, in this view, the threshold of his eventual future: On ne znal na kakom poroge On stoit i kakoj dorogi Pered nim otkroetsja vid...

This allusion receives its full significance when compared with the image of the ominous shade of the 'real Twentieth Century' at the end of the Petersburg-monologue in the previous section. In this way the witness expresses her view of the past, sometimes as a contemporary of the Petersburg drama, stressing characteristic historic details, and often f r o m a later perspective, alluding to the nearing end. Moreover, these two temporal points of departure, 1940 and 1913, are often extended: back to the nineteenth century and earlier and, in an allusion to the Second World War, 2 6 even forwards to a future beyond the narrative. By alternately separating and telescoping the various time perspectives, by viewing the past from near and from afar and by pointing from the past to the future, she suggests an indissoluble connection between former centuries, the year 1913 and the subsequent course of events. Or, to quote her own words: Kak v prosedsem grjaduscee zreet, Tak v grjaduscem prosloe tleet.

Closely linked with these shifting time perspectives are the various emotional and moral judgements, concealed in the witness's comments and observations. She is by no means an impartial narrator. The past she evokes is the milieu of her youth, a world that is at once familiar and strange, that both attracts and repels her: rapture and repulsion, compassion and bewilderment go together. This complex attitude is particularly evident in the portrayal of the principal characters. The young cornet arouses the witness's pity: on his first appearance she portrays him as the naive poet, conspicuous among the merry-makers as the only one who does not wear a mask. She 26

Cf. the prose introduction preceding the fourth section: "Dom, postroennyj v nacale XIX veka brat'jami Adamini. V nego budet prjamoe popadanie aviabomby v 1942 godu" (Socinenija II, p. 119).

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compares him to Ivanuska, a Russian fairy-tale hero, outwardly simple but with a pure and loyal heart. She opposes his desperately serious passion to the lighthearted play of the actress and her friends. He places himself at their mercy, makes no secret of his feelings when in the vicinity of the actress. "Skcl'ko goreci v kazdom slove, skol'ko mraka v tvoej ljubovi", the witness remarks. In a subsequent scene he watches his beloved accept Blok's roses, his face deathly pale and with tears in his eyes. In her description of his suicide Axmatova emphasizes his romantic pride. In dying he seeks to possess the woman he could not possess in life. His parting words are: Ty, Golubka, solnce, sestra! Ja ostavlju tebja zivoju, No ty budes' moej vdovoju, A teper' ... Proscat'sja pora! The witness then calls him a 'silly boy' (glupyj mal'cik) and his death 'pointless' (bessmyslennaja smert'). She sums up her judgement as follows at the end of the fourth section: Skol'ko gibelej slo k poetu, Glupyj mal'cik: on vybral etu —, Pervyx on ne sterpel obid. On ne znal, na kakom poroge On stoit i kakoj dorogi Pered nim otkroetsja vid... In the three last lines the witness refers, as we have demonstrated in the above, to the future of the generation which he represents. In the portrayal of the young cornet we also find some reminiscences of another poet, Axmatova's intimate friend, Mandel'stam, such as the date of the dedication 27 and the hero's exclamation 'Ja k smerti gotov' suggest. She heard those words spoken by Mandel'stam during one of their last encounters before his arrest. 28 27 "Anna Axmatova's Poema bez Geroja" (ed.) A. Haight, The Slavonic and East European Review XLV (1967), p. 486, note 20. 28 Socinenija II, p. 179: "My sli po Precistenke (fevraF 1934 g.), o cem govorili — ne pomnju. Svernuli na Gogolevskij bul'var, i Osip skazal: 'Ja k smerti gotov'. Vot uze 28 let ja vspominaju etu minutu, kogda proezzaju mimo etogo mesta".

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We might conclude from this that as a victim of his milieu and his time the 'kornet s stixami' is to be compared with the innumerable writers and artists who perished during the Stalin era. The somewhat ironical pity she showed at first cedes to awe as she alludes to this tragic fate. Initially, the witness's attitude towards the other characters seems ambivalent. The actress is described as a witch and a Bacchante on her first appearance; later she is called 'belokuroe cudo' and likened to Botticelli's Spring. In the prose introduction preceding the second section some portraits of the heroine acting in various roles are mentioned; among them there is one where the actress is not clearly visible: perhaps it is Colombine, perhaps Donna Anna (from Blok's Sagi Komandora, as is explicitly stated). This seems an allusion to a double image of the actress as a temptress and a victim. Ambiguous, too, is the question: Zolotogo veka viden'e Ili cernoe prestuplen'e V groznom xaose davnix dnej ? As the word 'davnij' suggests, the witness is looking back at the past from a distance and she asks a question which applies to the actress and her friends alike. The key to the question lies in the disclosure of the kind of life she leads. The witness stresses her falseness, her desire to please and to seduce. When she is called 'Peterburgskaja kukla, akterka', the word 'akterka' is used in a double sense: the actress playing a part in life as well as at the scene appears, in this view, to be the antithesis of her innocent victim, the hero, who is not wearing a mask. In the final scene, when she betrays his love, her escort is equated with the devil and the pointless death of the young cornet is openly attributed to her: On mgnoven'e poslednee tratit, Ctoby slavit' tebja. Gljadi: Ne v prokljatyx Mazurskix bolotax, Ne na sinix Karpatskix vysotax... On — na tvoj porog: Poperek Da prostit tebja Bog!

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A certain ambivalence is discernible in the characterization of the masked poets in the first section, too. At first a most unfavourable light is thrown upon their behaviour — the witness calls them 'krasnobai i lzeproroki' and their conversation 'besstydna'. She reproaches them for their 'davnij grex' and hints several times at the presence of the devil and the imminent day of Judgement: "ne poslednie 1' blizki sroki?" One of them, called 'the prince of darkness', is made into the personification of evil; he is cynical, depraved, full of rancour: Maska eto, cerep, lico li — Vyrazenie zlobnoj boli Cto lis' Goja smel peredat'. Obscij baloven' i nasmesnik — Pered nim samyj smradnyj gresnik —

Voploscennaja blagodat' ... It is he who brings the heroine to the author's house and urges her on in her Bacchantic dance. Another figure, however, called 'Poet' in the prose introduction to the first section, is described with admiration. He is the artist who goes his own, lonely way defying convention and despising fame. Whereas all the shades wear the masks of famous literary characters — Faust, Don Juan, Dorian Gray, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Sancho Panza — he is dressed up coarsely and garishly as a verst-post. The witness emphatically calls him innocent, a judgement which she then extends to all poets; she defends them against a criticism born of conventional morals or political demands: Poetam/Voobsce ne pristali grexi. Propljasat' pred Kovcegom Zaveta Ili sginut' ... D a cto tam: Pro eto Lucse sami skazali stixi.

These two figures, the artist associated with the devil and the Poet, stand out from the other masked shades. Obviously they are meant as opposite poles of evil and innocence. And again, as in the case of the young hero, this innocence on the part of the Poet is connected with a kind of non-conformism, a refusal to submit to convention, to wear 'literary' or other masks, to play a role.

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References to biblical patriarchs, to Abraham listening to Jahwe and to David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, indicate moreover the character of his inspiration. The portrait of Blok, who emerges in the second section as a 'paladin' of the actress, is also full of contradictions. He looms u p as a mysterious figure, 'plot', pocti cto stavsaja duxom', who once again enchants the witness: " N o takie tajatsja cary / V etom strasnom, dymnom lice". He seems at once seducer and victim: he is wearing the mask of a Demon and smiles like Lermontov's heroine Tamara: 'Demon sam s ulybkoj Tamary'. She asks the same question concerning him as concerning the heroine: "Gavriil ili Mefistofel' ?" and answers with some new contrasts. On the one hand he p l a y s ' s mertvym serdcem i mertvym vzorom' a Don Juan who cannot escape retribution, on the other hand he lives in a mystical world, beyond time and space. Until the very end Blok remains an enigmatic and paradoxical figure. 29 But although the witness's view of the various characters is inconsistent and paradoxical, she is by no means ambivalent in her judgement of the milieu and the period as a whole. The ending, which she predicts from the outset, is always indicated as a punishment or revenge, in keeping with the epigraph from Don Juan which precedes the entire poem: "Di rider finirai / Pria dell'aurora". There are frequent echoes of the Don Juan legend throughout the Petersburg Story. A dominant place in this chain of allusions is taken by Blok's poem Sagi Komandora with its dramatic evocation of Don Juan awaiting the slow but inescapable approach of the Avenger. This atmosphere of evil foreboding is intensified by the allusions to the devil and the imminent Judgement-Day. The New Year's Eve of the ball and the cabaret symbolizes the night of sin on which a terrible awakening will follow. In the image of this night a Blokian and a biblical view go together. This perspective of guilt and retribution, which is part of the background in the first sections, prevails in the last two sections. In portraying the doomed world of Petersburg the witness uses 29

In later comments the poet emphasizes this dual view of Blok; he is meant as a symbolic figure representing the Silver Age "vo vsem ego velicii i slabosti" (quoted by Zirmunskij, Anna Axmatova i Aleksandr Blok, p. 76.)

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straight-forward epithets such as 'besnovatyj' and 'bludnyj' The past has lost its fascination for her, the heroes of the drama fill her with horror and pity. The coming retribution is heralded by the suicide. This verdict, which applies to the principal characters and to the Petersburg milieu alike, constitutes the definite link between the two themes. Besides the Petersburg Story, Axmatova treats a number of other subjects in Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God. As stated above, she wears not only the mask of the witness, she appears in other roles too. Sometimes she turns out to be the author referring to her work, sometimes the lyrical heroine intervening to place some personal remarks. In the narrative passages of the poem, there are only few instances of the poet presenting herself explicitly as the author. She does this far more frequently in the 'framework' of the poem; the three dedications, the introduction, the fore- and afterword, and in the short résumés and scenic directions. 'Pisu' she says in the first dedication and 'lezit poèma' in the afterword. In the dedications she speaks of her inspiration in terms of music, dream and sleep; in the scenic directions she calls herself 'avtor', and the leading lady 'geroinja'. But when she suddenly acts as the author in the context of the narrative, the effect of her words is much more striking. She removes her mask of witness, as it were, and makes it clear that all she reports is no more than a dream. This revealing commentary destroys the impression of objectivity and historical veracity that she gave as a witness and contemporary. There is obviously no question of a double time perspective here. As the author she finds herself at Fontannyj Dom, Leningrad, on the New Year's Eve of 1940, the date she professes to be writing the poem. Her theme is limited: she speaks of her situation while working on Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God and she displays the same ambivalence — an alternation of rapture and repulsion — as we observed in the witness's attitude. On the one hand she compares her inspiration to enthralling music, to a 'marche funèbre', on the other hand she wishes to be delivered from it. The present tense she uses in this context clashes with the present tense of the Petersburg Story.

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Thus the past is deprived of its reality and the reader's attention is drawn away from the dramatis personae and directed towards the author and her changing attitude towards the 'music' of the past. And here the transition to the other, much more important role — that of the lyrical heroine — becomes apparent. The borderline between the two attitudes is often blurred — the poet glides almost unnoticeably f r o m one perspective to another. Instances of the two roles overlapping occur frequently in the first two sections. In the opening lines of the poem, when Axmatova is alone in her room, the roles of author and lyrical heroine are not yet separate. Later, when she moves among the phantoms, she breaks the spell of the dream by stressing the fact that she is the only one who is still alive and by referring to the next morning when the dream will be over: Tol'ko kak ze moglo slucit'sja, Cto odna iz nix ja ziva? Zavtra utro menja razbudit, I nikto menja ne osudit, I v lico mne smejat'sja budet Zaokonnaja sineva.

When, a few lines further on, the fancy-dress ball is called a 'strasnyj prazdnik mertvoj listvy', the past is pushed aside, as it were, to make room for a lyrical digression. At the end of the first section she again tries to wake up from the dream by remembering the cock-crowing: Krik petusij nam tol'ko snitsja, Za okoskom Neva dymitsja, Noc' bezdonna i dlitsja, dlitsja — Peterburgskaja certovnja...

And when the phantoms suddenly flee, she introduces a new scene with an authorial observation, comparing her inspiration to music: £to vse naplyvaet ne srazu, Kak odnu muzykal'nuju frazu, Sly§u sopot...

This scene is again followed by a lyrical passage.

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In the second section, again struggling to be delivered from her vision, she speaks of the intoxicating power of the dream: A durmanjasCuju dremotu mne trudnej cem smert' prevozmoc'.

Later she explicitly calls her figures 'shades' and her vision a Dance of Death: Zdes' pod muzyku divnogo metra, Leningradskogo dikogo vetra... Vizu tanec pridvornyx kostej.

Finally she turns to the heroine with the paradoxical question whether she has really existed: Mne otvet' xot' teper': Neuzeli Ty kogda-to zila v samom dele? — I toptala torcy ploscadej Oslepitel'noj nozkoj svoej?

She asks a similar question with reference to Aleksandr Blok, more or less echoing one of his poems: £to on v perepolnennom zale Slal tu cernuju rozu v bokale, Ili vse eto bylo snom ?

She even extends the time perspective to the future by placing a casual remark (parenthetically in the text) about a university corridor she still remembers; she suggests that he will appear in the dreams of contemporary visitors, too: (Cto ugodno mozet slucit'sja, No on budet uprjamo snit'sja Tem, kto nyne pioxodit tam.) By emphasizing the word 'nyne' the perspective of the author situated in 1940 again breaks through the dream of 1913.30 As a result of these curious questions and remarks the figures of the past begin to lose their reality. Furthermore these passages are interspersed with intriguing remarks pointing to a similarity 30

For the parallel between these passages and Axmatova's latest poetry, see Verheul, o.c., pp. 213 if.

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between the author and the heroine. The beautiful temptress becomes a symbolic figure in which the author recognizes herself. In the third and fourth sections the main stress is laid on this parallel between the Petersburg Story and her own life. Especially in the final lines of the poem, when she is no longer under the spell of the dream, she reveals herself as the hidden lyrical heroine of the poem. The theme contained in the 'lyrical digressions' and a number of closely related passages is probably the most elusive of all. The poet deliberately employs secret writing to hint at her own hopes, fears and obsessions. They are 'dreams in a dream', dreams of a special character in a poem which itself is called a dream. The fragmentary scenes referring to this theme do not form a coherent narrative with a beginning and an end, developing in time, and the persons represented in them are not connected with the characters of the principal story. As in her previous roles the author uses the present tense most of the time; now and then, however, she addresses a prospective friend. Indeed, the experiences she refers to cannot be dated exclusively 1913, 1940 or any other date — they point to past, present and future alike. The author links her memory of the past to her expectation of the future. Hence it is not a reality that is bound to limits of space and time that she deals with, but a mysterious inner world. Although the theme of these lyrical passages does not at first sight appear to be clearly related to the Petersburg Story, there are, of course, some links: the identity of place and the figure of the author. Indeed, the local details which are exactly indicated in the lyrical digressions refer to the same Petersburg scene. A second connecting factor is the author who plays a part in both the principal narrative and the lyrical passages. Although she seems preoccupied by the drama in her role of witness, she often emerges suddenly as the author — as we have already observed — to express thoughts and feelings about her own past. Since these allusions to the author's private life refer to the same theme as the lyrical passages, we will examine them together. In the first section the author calls the guest she expected in

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vain on New Year's Eve 1940 'gost' iz buduscego'. This prospective friend is one of the most enigmatic figures in the poem. The role he plays seems, initially, to be one of major importance. In the opening lines the author refers to his invisible presence: "I s toboj, ko mne ne prisedsim / Sorok pervyj vstrecaju god". Later, when she is caught in the spell of the past, she still hopes for his arrival and again employs oxymora to indicate how fully the anticipation of this meeting occupies her thoughts. Zvuk sagov tex, kotoryx netu, P o sijajuscemu parketu, I sigary sinij dymok. I v o vsex zerkalax otrazilsja Celovek, cto ne pojavilsja I proniknut' v tot zal ne mog.

She then calls him 'ne lucse drugix i ne xuze', but he is the only one who is still alive, and therefore he has no access to the dream world, the white hall of mirrors of the fancy dress ball in the pre-revolutionary Petersburg. Referring to his particular situation she calls him 'gost' zazerkal'nyj': the visitor from the future concealed behind the mirrors of the past. As he belongs to an entirely different temporal plane than the shades of 1913, there can be no relationship between him and them other than in the mind of the lyrical heroine. Indeed, by mentioning him in her poem Axmatova suggests a mysterious connection between him and former intimate friends. Moreover, the already quoted lines in which she stresses the indissoluble relationship between past, present and future immediately precede his first 'non-appearance': K a k v prosedsem grjaduscee zreet, Tak v gijaduscem prosloe tleet —• Strasnyj prazdnik mertvoj listvy.

Contrary to what might be expected, however, the role this 'guest from the future' plays is a very limited one; at the end of the first section he is mentioned for the last time. For a better understanding of his role we might compare the passages in the narra31

One may discern here an ironical allusion to the 'gost' iz buduscego' in Majakovskij's Banja.

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tive with the third dedication in which the author addresses his biographical prototype. This dedication differs from the others not only on account of its later date — 1956 — but also in tone. Whereas in the other dedications a meditative mood prevails, her tone is here full of anguish. He is, moreover, not addressed in the second person singular, as the cornet in the dragoons and the actress to whom the other two dedications are addressed, but she speaks of him as a stranger, a 'he'. As is also suggested by the epigraph from Zukovskij's Svetlana, he is a terrifying lover. And as she reveals in the final pointe his love will be fatal to her: "on pogibel' mne prineset". Equally enigmatic are the author's personal reactions when visited by the shades of 1913. At first she is extremely frightened by their appearance. She hints at a mysterious 'past sin' they will accuse her of, but then she overcomes her fear and even attacks them: Ja sama pozeleznej tex... I c'ja ocered' ispugat'sja, Otsatnut'sja, otprjanut', sdat'sja I zamalivat' davnij grex?

But in the following line she again expresses her confusion: "Jasno vse: ne ko mne, tak k komu ze ?" Afterwards — in a passage we already cited in our above discussion of the author's role — she speaks with a sense of relief of the morning when the shades will have left her and nobody will accuse her any longer. Not only the guests from the past frighten her, but also the idea that she might meet her former self: "no mne strasno: vojdu sama ja..." As we have already seen in the above, she emphatically rejects such a possibility. And she declares that she has freed herself from the influence of her former poetical masters: "Ja zabyla vasi uroki, / Krasnobai i lzeproroki..." But then she again expresses her fear that the devil may be concealed among them. This enigmatic fear culminates at the close of the first section when the guests leave her alone with 'the most terrible drama which has not yet been lamented', as she calls the suicide of the young poet. After seeing the vision of his death she is suddenly visited by a new apparition, arising at a distinct place in the

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author's room 'mezdu peckoj i skafom'. This spectre is much more frightening than the previous phantoms. When he beckons her, she breaks off the narrative with a cry of horror: Cto ty manis' menja rukoju ? Za odnu minutu pokoja Ja posmertnyj otdam pokoj. These vague suggestions of fear and guilt assume definite shape in the second section when the author addresses the actress. She acknowledges that she feels personally implicated in the tragic event of 1913. There is more to the relationship between the author and the heroine than mutual experiences: there are oblique references to a shared guilt. These allusions, however, occur only in the poem. In the second dedication, devoted to the actress (the historical woman, Axmatova's old friend), there is no question of a reproach. Speaking to her in a tone of warm friendship the author reminds her of their common youth. But at the very beginning of the second section she apologizes to the actress — this time addressing her portrait which is gradually coming to life — for having forced this fatal role upon her: Ne serdis' na menja, Golubka, Cto kosnus' i etogo kubka: Ne tebja, a sebja kaznju. Vse ravno podxodit rasplata — ... And afterwards she urges her to abandon her role and to return to the portrait: Ty sbezala sjuda s portreta I pustaja rama do sveta Na stene tebja budet zdat' ... (Na scekax tvoix alye pjatna, Sla by ty v polotno obratno, Ved' segodnja takaja noc', Kogda nuzno platit' po scetu

)

From these passages we might conclude that Axmatova is aware of the difference between the actress as a historical woman and the role assigned to her in the drama. As the heroine of the Petersburg Story she becomes the symbolic figure of the beautiful

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temptress and, as the author explicitly states, one of her doubles: Cto ty gljadis' tak smutno i zorko, Peterburgskaja kukla, akterka, Ty odin iz moix dvojnikov. K procim titulam nado i etot Pripisat'. O podruga poetov, Ja naslednica slavy tvoej. Thus the author, identifying herself with the heroine, passes a judgement on her own former self. The ever-present motif of the Don Juan-legend, 'the night of retribution', does not relate only to the characters of the drama and their milieu, but also to the hidden lyrical heroine. A final parallel is suggested in the closing lines of the second section. After the fatal tolling of the bells — the awakening from the dream — the author says to the actress: "Vyxodi ko mne smelo navstrecu — / Goroskop tvoj davno gotov..." The personality of the lyrical heroine and of her double seem to fuse: the author recognizes her own destiny in the dark future awaiting the 'kolombina desjatyx godov'. These guilt- and fear-ridden confessions in the finales of the first two sections contrast sharply with the lyrical digression entitled 'last memory of Carskoe Selo' at the end of the third section. In this passage following abruptly after the gloomy picture of the doomed Petersburg, a moment of happiness from the past is projected into the future. The author wishes she could go 'home' again, to the park of Carskoe Selo and, against the distinct background of this park with its island and statues of muses, she evokes a rendez-vous with her partner. In jubilant, almost ecstatic lines she expresses her hope that they will meet once again in the same place, that he will utter the word that is stronger than death and solve the riddle of her life: Tarn za ostrovom, tam za sadom, Razve my ne vstretimsja vzgljadom Nasix preznix jasnyx ocej ? Razve ty mne ne skazes' snova Pobedivsee smert' slovo I razgadku zizni moej ?

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Past and future merge in a bliss beyond the bounds of time, parallelling the epigraph from Mandel'stam's poem V Peterburge my sojdemsja snova. Another epigraph comes from one of her own previous poems, closely connected with this memory. 32 As the story of the witness, so do the lyrical passages reflect the author's ambivalent attitude towards her past: horror and delight alternate. But once again it is the sensation of horror that ultimately prevails. This becomes evident at the end of the fourth and last section when the author — after a passage dealing with the young poet's suicide — suddenly speaks of a 'charred story' (sozzennaja povest') — a long-forgotten memory of a death that her conscience has now called to mind. By personifying the 'sovest'' into a woman who suddenly emerges as one of her doubles, the author points to her personal guilt. These closing lines would seem to parallel the final part of the first section in which the vision of the young poet's suicide likewise confronts the author with her own obsessions. The allusions to a hidden guilt, made by the masked visitors, the terrifying phantom arising after the vision of the suicide and her identification with the 'guilty' actress, reveal in this context their significance. For the author, the cornet's act of despair apparently carries a symbolic significance. He is not only the representative of a doomed generation, the victim of his milieu and his time, but he also plays a role in the hidden drama of her own life. In this perspective we might read the first lines of the author's dedication to the historical figure, Vsevolod Knjazev, as a cryptic confession that, by means of his story, she will express her own theme; evidently the words 'paper' and 'draft' are used metonymically: ...a tak kak mne bumagi ne xvatilo, ja na tvoem pisu cernovike. I vot cuzoe slovo prostupaet, i, kak togda snezinka na ruke, dovercivo i bez upreka taet. 32

Stixi o Peterburge II (1913). See K. Verheul's analysis of this poem (ox., pp. 10 ff.).

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As in the portrayal of the actress we may here, too, observe a marked difference between the role she gives him in Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God and her view of him as a historical person. Unlike Ol'ga Sudejkina, Knjazev had not been an intimate friend. In Golos pamjati, a poem f r o m 1913, written shortly after his suicide and dedicated to the actress, she devotes only a few lines to his 'white death' — lines which are now quoted as an epigraph: "II' togo ty vidis' u svoix kolen, / K t o dlja beloj smerti tvoj pokinul plen?" But in the Petersburg Story his suicide is called 'the most terrible drama' and represented twice, at the beginning and at the end. In this way his death and the author's closely connected sense of guilt are made into the centre of the entire narrative. The poem moves from an evocation of his death in the first dedication to the confrontation with conscience at the end. Recent critical studies have made it possible to provide the 'charred story' of Axmatova's life with some biographical facts. Both the frightening spectre and the partner of the idyllic meeting in the park of Carskoe Selo seem to refer to the same intimate friend, the critic N. A. Nedobrovo, who died in 1919. 33 As K. Verheul has pointed out, reminiscences of his death, always accompanied by a sense of guilt, are to be found in a great number of poems from the later twenties and thirties : "it seems that Axmatova considered herself in a sense responsible for his death". 3 4 In the 33

As V. ¿irmunskij reveals, Axmatova dedicated the evocation of the idyllic meeting in Carskoe Selo to the memory of N. A. Nedobrovo. In a former version of this lyrical digression she spoke of an 'unforgettable and tender friend' (Socinenija II, p. 376). She highly appreciated his judgement of her poetry; he was the first to draw attention to her 'cruel' power: "Kak on mog ugadat' zestkost' i tverdost' vperedi' — govorila ona cerez mnogo let posle smerti svoego druga. Ved' v to vremja prinjato bylo scitat', cto vse èti stiski — tak sebe sentimenty, slezlivost', kapriz... N o Nedobrovo ponjal moj put', moe buduscee, ugadal i predskazal ego, potomu cto xoroso znal menja' (24-V-1940)". Zirmunskij, Anna Axmatova i Aleksandr Blok, p. 65. 34 Verheul, o.c., pp. 86, 91. A special indication may be found in the poem Odni gljadjatsja v laskovye vzory from 1936, dedicated to the memory of N. A. Nedobrovo. As the same critic suggests : "it would seem that in the second half of the poem...the author evokes a personal reminiscence connected locally with the park of Carskoe Selo and biographically with the man to whose memory she dedicated this lyric" (o.c., p. 90). This poem may be considered as a precursor of the lyrical digressions in Poèma bez geroja as the reminiscence of the past is not only accompanied by a reproach of the poet's

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'mirror' of the Petersburg Story she associates this guilt with the betrayal of love. This haunting memory is contrasted by the author's anticipation of a prospective friend, the mysterious 'guest from the future'. It seems that this poetical figure is connected with an erudite foreigner, an admirer of Axmatova's poetry, who visited her twice in 1945/6. These meetings are, as K. Verheul states, in the poet's view interpreted as forming one of the causes of her official persecution and social isolation during the postwar Stalin period. 35 But these relationships and meetings with historical persons form, of course, only the biographical basis on which Axmatova builds up her poetical myth, the lyrical vision of her life. Both the former intimate friend and the prospective guest are symbolical figures, laden with her sense of an irreparable guilt and her fear of an inescapable punishment. In the afterword she enlarges on this accusation of her conscience. After an ironic conclusion that all is well now that the poem is finished, she suddenly discovers that the ghosts of the past have not been laid — terrifying apparitions will loom up ahead, 'kak vyrvetsja tema'. Like her happiness, so is her remorse projected into the future. She is at the mercy of her conscience, which, as she declared in an earlier poem, takes no heed of time or space. 36 Since, in this final pointe, a personal memory is called 'the theme' the crux of the entire poem is transferred to the private world of the poet. This shift necessitates a re-interpretation of the three masks she hides behind. Her appearance as a witness of the 1913 drama and her appearance in the poem as the author turn out to be less important for a correct interpretation of the thematic structure than her role of lyrical heroine who, in cryptic language, hints that the Petersburg story mirrors her own fate. conscience but also by a feeling of joy and an intense longing to return to the place of meeting, the park of Carskoe Selo. 35 Verheul, o.c., pp. 204, 214. 36 Socinenija II, p. 233: A ja vsju noc' vedu peregovory S neukrotimoj sovest'ju svoej. Ja govorju: "tvoe nesu ja bremja, Tjazeloe, ty znaes', skol'ko let." No dlja nee ne suscestvuet vremja, I dlja nee prostranstva v mire net.

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The end allows the entire story to be interpreted as a veiled lyrical confession. Instead of the guest who failed to come on New Year's Eve, the dead lover evoked by the drama makes his appearance — the past bars the way to the future. The epigraph pointing to the Don Juan motif, the frequent allusions to retribution and doom again reveal in this interpretation their significance. Summing up the interrelationship of the themes of the first part, one might say that Axmatova evoked the past in three forms: as the drama of 1913, as the portrayal of an era, and as a haunting personal memory. (The authorial remarks Axmatova makes on the genesis of the poem have not been included here since this theme does not emerge fully until the second part). In these three thematic strata the little box with the 'triple false bottom' which Axmatova refers to in Reska in her commentary on the first part, is recognizable. The two upper levels, the story of the principal characters and pre-revolutionary Petersburg, are closely related and together form a picture of a doomed generation. Hidden underneath lies the third and most important theme, which touches upon the past of the poet herself. The reader is not admitted to this personal world; a confrontation with her former self appears to be just as impossible as a confrontation with her past lover. She can allude to this only in the 'mirror language' of the historical themes. From the outset Axmatova links the three themes by the changing commentary with which she expresses her complex view, both of her time and her life. Viewing the past from various temporal perspectives, she shows her changing attitude towards this past. The impression of historical veracity evoked on the two surface levels by the detailed portrayal of the year 1913, is destroyed by the comments of the author who, from the point of view of the year 1940, expresses her doubts concerning the reality of her picture. But the underlying lyrical level which is not related to a definite period is unaffected by these authorial questions and doubts. On the contrary, it seems as if only those dreams and obsessions which are not connected with a clearly recognizable historical moment, will resist the change of the past in memory and thus form a lasting image in the author's inner world. In this

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way the importance of the hidden lyrical theme is again underlined. In contrast with this shifting temporal perspective is the remarkable similarity in the author's emotional and moral attitude, both in her treatment of the personal and of the historical past. This attitude seems at first ambivalent: rapture and repulsion go together, but finally the feeling of guilt predominates. This sense of guilt, most strongly expressed on the lyrical level, underlies the entire historical picture and is closely linked with a suggestion of impending retribution. The theme of time, the principal theme of the entire triptych, is thus given a new dimension. The destructive power of time in its objective and social aspects — as history — is contrasted by the conserving power of subjective consciousness. For the author the memory of the past is still alive, though her Petersburg may have ceased to exist and her past friends be dead. This memory is, however, evoked by an 'indomitable' conscience. A solution is not shown — Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God ends on a note of discord.

THE INTERMEZZO: RESKA

The middle part, preceded by three epigraphs and a short introduction, consists of twenty-four six-lined stanzas of which two are indicated but not filled in. The structure is less complex than that of the first part. There is no question of a story with contrasting levels of time. The scene is placed in the present, which according to the date of writing (3-5 January 1941) follows almost immediately on the New Year's Eve evoked in the first part. The scene is again laid in Fontannyj Dom, the poet's house in Leningrad, but the local aspect is not important here since Axmatova appears chiefly as the author commenting on the recently completed Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God. In a sense Reska, then, is also a continuation of the diverse introductions, dedications and the various observations occurring in the first part and dealing with the poem itself. And here, too, it is obviously not always possible to make a clear distinction between the roles of the author and of

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the lyrical heroine; the remarks on the theme of Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God lead imperceptibly to personal confessions — a lyrical undercurrent is not lacking in Reska either. But these confessions do not develop into indépendant lyrical digressions; they are always connected with reflections on her poèma or her poetry in general. The tone is casual and, especially in the beginning, reminiscent of Puskin, whose Domik v Kolomne and Evgenij Onegin are ironically referred to in an epigraph and a note respectively. Like Puskin the poet addresses, as it were, a small circle of like-minded people whom she emphatically calls 'friends'. She may have thought of her first audience in Leningrad to whom she dedicated the work in the introduction preceding the entire triptych. In the opening lines she quotes before them the remarks of an editor who does not approve of her Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God) imagining in the course of the Intermezzo some other negative comments she ironically concludes that her work is a 'failure' — as is also suggested by the title Reska.31 But when, reacting to this criticism, she attempts to give before her friends her own views on this work and on her poetry in general, her tone becomes passionate and the parallel with Puskin is no longer sustained. 38 These remarks develop into a second theme: a reflection on her task as a poet in connection with the tragic events of the present. For this authorial commentary she employs a secret language which is even more difficult to decipher than that of Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God. In order to mask her intentions she resorts to ironic understatement, cryptic allusions or subtle literary-historical associations which alone require an extensive commentary before their meaning is arrived at. Indeed, the interpretation given in this article can be no more than a tentative approach. The exceptional obscurity of Reska can of course largely be 37

"Reska — storona monety na kotoroj oboznacena ee stoimost': peren. kak oboznacenie proigrysa, neudaci, konca". (Slovak sovremennogo russkogo jazyka 12 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1961), p. 1300. 38 As is evident from some later statements, Axmatova considered Puskin's Evgenij Onegin — which is in her view the first Russian poèma — as a dangerous example which she had to avoid (Socinenija II, p. 295). Cf. on this subject: Verheul, o.c., pp. 71, 197 and note 49.

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attributed to the delicate subject-matter. It is not only Axmatova's judgement of the past that deviates from the approved Party line, but also her views on her own time. But in the cryptic language necessitated by the political climate Axmatova also finds an opportunity to display her stylistic devices. In these contrasting or paradoxical transitions and mystifying allusions, her ambivalent attitude towards the past and towards the poem that evokes that past is again expressed. This dualism is already evident in the prose introduction preceding the Intermezzo. She uses here the contrasting expressions 'carnaval or funeral cortege', 'hellish harlequinade' and 'souvenirs forever lost'. Fear of and longing for the colourful procession of memories are interwoven. All that is left now that the era has been buried once more, are trampled flowers — an image that turns up again later and explicitly symbolizes the theme of the first part: I byla dlja menja ta tema, Kak razdavlennaja xrizantema Na polu, kogda grob nesut. Indeed, analogous symbols occur at the very beginning of the triptych where the poet offers her work to the heroine (in the second dedication): "slovno v gline cistoe plamja / il' podsneznik v mogil'nom rvu". In the epigraphs, too, she plays a double game. Her emotional ties with the past are expressed in the words attributed to Mary Queen of Scots: 'My future is in my past', but this statement is counterbalanced by the next, ironical quotation from Puskin about the necessity of forgetting. In the opening lines the interpretation of the poem itself is under discussion. Reacting, as it were, to the negative judgement of the editor who considers the Petersburg Story unintelligible and, furthermore, pointless in the present day, the author hides behind mysterious symbols and paradoxical statements. She suggests first that the theme has been forced upon her and then she emphatically denies this. Initially she makes use of the same romantic and poetical motifs as in the first part; she has another dream, she hears again the music of the past. But now she more directly ascribes the visit

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of the shades to the devil and her tone is ironical: whereas she compares her poem in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God to a tragic 'marche funèbre', a Dance of Death, the music is now termed 'muzykal'nyj jascik' and the dance a 'hellish harlequinade'. The muse whom she finally points out as the chief culprit is likewise associated with the devil, is called 'besnovataja'. She is a powerful sorceress who — disguised as an English lady of the previous century — casts a spell over the author and compells her to write a poem in the romantic style of Byron, Keats and Shelley. But then she contradicts herself vehemently — there is no sound of music, no visitors knock on her door, no devil is driving her on, she is alone in her room, in the Leningrad of 1941. Finally, the bewitching English lady is unmasked, too. She turns out to be a contemporary muse who underlines the originality of her poem. These contrasting attitudes and images are connected with the genesis of Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God, while at the same time they contain the key to Axmatova's own interpretation. The past both attracts and repels the poet. This ambivalence we already observed in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God is most passionately expressed in Reska. It seems as if she feels an inner psychological resistance as soon as it is no longer a matter of a simple, casual act of remembering (pomnit'), but the deliberate recollecting of experiences (vspomnit') — a distinction the author stresses here. Yet she is irresistably drawn to the past, for there lies the essence of her life, as she suggests in the already quoted epigraph 'My future is in my past'. The last lines of a poem from 1924 about Lot's wife who turns into a pillar of salt when she looks back at what lies behind, may indicate once more that the author herself suffered from a similar secret obsession: "Lis' serdce moe nikogda ne zabudet / Otdavsuju zizn' za edinstvennyj mig". 39 39

Cf. also the interesting discussion of earlier poems in which related themes occur in Verheul, o.c., pp. 80 ff. Evidently the subject was in Axmatova's mind long before 1940 and, as we have seen, she was still unable to part with her poem after 1940. The obsessive nature of her work on the poèma is referred to in a letter from 1955 : "...v tecenie 15 let èta poèma neozidanno, kak pripadki kakoj-to neizlecimoj bolezni, vnov' i vnov' nastigala menja (slucalos' èto vsjudu — v koncerte pri muzyke, na ulice, daze vo sne), i ja ne mogia ot nee otorvat'sja, dopolnjaja i ispravljaja povidimomu okoncennuju vesc'." (Socine-

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One symbol of this obsession is the devil who, against her will, enters her home with his troupe of masked shades ; another is the 'bewitching' muse of a romantic century. But behind the colourful picture with which they lure her, the poet discovers another vision, a confrontation with her conscience: Ne otbit'sja ot ruxljadi pestroj. Èto staryj cudit Kaliostro — Sam izjascnejsij satana, Kto nad mertvym so mnoj ne placet, Kto ne znaet cto sovest' znacit I zacem suscestvuet ona.

We are faced here again with the poet's obsessive sense of guilt to which we referred in our discussion of the first part. She cannot resist her passionate longing to look back at the lost paradise of her youth, 'the vision of a golden age', as she calls it, but by giving in to this temptation she is confronted with the horrifying reproaches of her conscience. The conflict between a more romantic view of the past based on aesthetic delight in its art, and a profoundly tragic interpretation which implies a moral judgement of her former life, seems to lie at the root of her ambivalent attitude. This contradiction is indicated by the symbolic figures of demon, muse and conscience who, in a sense, appear as her doubles and play a part in the genesis of the poèma. The Petersburg Story ends with a veiled confession of a personal guilt : it seems that in Reska, where the figure of the muse appears, the author's judgement extends itself more directly to the domain of art. This theme was already touched upon in the first part: we may remember her characterization of Blok and the artistic milieu. Although she emphatically calls poets innocent in view of conventional or political demands, she frequently hints at the demonic side of art. David's dance before the Ark of the Covenant is opposed to the 'bewitching' beauty of the actress's dance. And the masked artists are contrasted by the Poèt who is not wearing a nija II, p. 98). Obviously she has been haunted by the subject of the poem for a considerable part of her life. Poèma bez geroja may be regarded as her final attempt to free herself from the obsession of the past.

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literary mask and w h o listens only to the voice of a prophetic inspiration. In Reska her tone is more bitter, she rejects the 'hellish harlequinade' more openly and in a p o e m in which she appears t o glorify the beauty of the past — poetry, music, dance, painting — she curses its very beauty because it is connected with death and guilt. But it is only in this way that she can free herself from her obsession: her demon finally disappears when she adheres t o her tragic vision. 4 0 Similarly the romantic muse suddenly changes into her own muse when the image of death is presented to her in another allusion to a dead poet, Shelley. This judgement of the past, from the point of view o f her 'indomitable' conscience, seems to be continued in the middle of Reska, this time not in connection with the editor, but with some other imaginary attacks on her work. As K. Verheul suggests : Superficially the accusations to which she reacts with varying attitudes seem to concern only her poetry and especially her work on Poèma bez geroja itself. But from the tense emotionality of her answers it appears that moie deeply personal matters such as those 'hidden' elements which profoundly underly the dramatic impulse of the Peterburgskajapovest' aie also involved. 41 In the first of these stanzas (XV) she is apparently reacting t o those readers who seek to compare her earlier love lyrics with the poèma. In her answer she first refers to a demonic obsession, then suggests that she alone is guilty of all. Probably she is here playing 40

Cf. Axmatova's judgement of Symbolism, quoted by D. Maksimov (Zvezda 12 [1967], pp. 187-191): "Moja poèma...polemicna po otnoseniju k simvolizmu, xotja by k 'Sneznoj Maske' Bloka. U Bloka v 'Sneznoj Maske' raspjatie, a geroj-avtor ostaetsja zit', a u menja v poème — nastojascaja fiziceskaja smert' geroja". Here, too, she stresses her tragic vision of life. As a recent critic, R. Timencik, has pointed out, Axmatova also polemizes to a certain extent with M. Kuzmin, who dealt with the subject of the Petersburg Story in a cycle of poems called Forel' razbivaet led. The critic, making an interesting comparison between the two works, concludes: "Na na3 vzgljad, Poèma v izvestnom smysle predstavljaet spor, ottalkivanie ot sbornika Kuzmina, principiai'no protivopoloznoe po tonu osmyslenie obscix tematiceskix motivov" (Socinenija II, pp. 604-5.) By calling her demon 'Cagliostro' Axmatova may be alluding to Kuzmin, who made Cagliostro the hero of one of his novels: "tudesnaja zizn' Iosifa Bal'zamo, grafa Kaliostro" (1916). 41 o.c., p. 190.

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a double game with the word 'guilty', pointing equally to her being responsible as an author for her work and to a personal guilt underlying this work. The reproaches of her conscience may in this context be associated with the image she has presented of herself in previous works (which are explicitly mentioned). This literary mask 42 is rejected in her poèma. Bes poputal v ukladke ryt'sja... Nu, a kak ze mozet slucit'sja, Cto vo vsem vinovata ja? Ja — tisajsaja, ja — prostaja, 'Podoroznik', 'Belaja staja' ... Opravdat'sja... no kak, druz'ja? In the next stanza (XVI) she apparently derides contemporary critics who will probably accuse her of 'plagiarism'. She may have thought here of her friend MandePstam who had suffered from similar reproaches. 43 Again she seems to play with a dual sense of the word 'guilty': as an author she remains indifferent to these accusations and she accepts the 'failure' of her poem, but at the same time she hints at a private 'confusion' which she will carefully conceal by means of a 'triple false bottom'. Tak i znaj: obvinjat' v plagiate... Razve ja drugix vinovatej ? Vprocem èto mne vse ravno. Ja soglasna na neudaòu I smuscenie svoe ne prjacu... U skatulki z trojnoe dno. In the following stanza (XVII) she confesses to her mirror writing: the reason she gives points to an inner need that she refuses to discuss: No soznajus' cto primenila Simpaticeskie cernila... I zerkal'nym pis'mom pisu, I drugoj mne dorogi netu — 42

Cf. Axmatova's statement in a letter: "Drugie, v osobennosti zensciny, scitali, cto 'Poèma bez geroja' — izmena kakomu-to preznemu 'idealu', i, cto esce xuze, razoblacenie moix davnix stixov 'Cetki', kotorye oni 'tak ljubjat'" (,Socinenija II, p. 98 ff.). 43 Cf. O. Mandel'stam, Sobranie socinenij II (New York, 1966), pp. 574-5.

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nOSMA BE3 TEPOa Cudom ja nabrela na etu I rasstat'sja s nej ne spesu.

Some more specific allusions to the cryptic aspects of the Petersburg Story occur in the very beginning of Reska. The editor who complains of the obscurity of the poem, at the same time indicates the most important elements of its narrative and thematic structure. He mentions the existence of three interwoven themes ("tam tri temy srazu") and the mystifying relationships between the author and the characters ("ne pojmes' kto avtor i kto geroj"). Evidently, by the mouth of her editor, Axmatova points to the hidden lyrical theme referring to the author herself. But she does not give any further explanations. And here again, as in the first part, the author does not show her own face, she hides behind her doubles. Like the characters of the Petersburg Story she seems afraid to recognize herself 'in the mirror of the terrible night': Slovno v zerkale strasnoj noci I besnuetsja i ne xocet Uznavat' sebja celovek, — Thus the 'charred story' suggested by her conscience is not disclosed. Neither in Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God nor in Reska is the secret of her life fully revealed. 44 The second theme Axmatova treats in Reska, is a reflection on art and her task as an artist in the postrevolutionary period. She makes an allusion to the threatened position of herself and her friends in the third epigraph, taken from a poem by Kljuev with the significant title Blasphemers of art — a poem for which he was condemned by the Soviet authorities. 45 In stanza IX she finds an appalling metaphor to suggest her terrible fate as a poet who is condemned to silence: her 'forbidden' poetry is qualified by the adjectives 'half-dead' and 'mute' and by the image of a tragic mask with a convulsively opened but partly buried mouth: 44

Cf. her judgment of Puskin which applies primarily to herself: "Puskin v zrelyj svoj vozrast byl vovse ne sklonen obnazat' 'rany svoej sovesti' pered mirom (na cto, v kakoj-to stepeni, obrecen kazdyj liriceskij poet)...Vot pocemu samopriznanija v ego proizvedenijax tak nezamctny, i obnaruzit' ix mozno lis' v rezul'tate tscatel'nogo analiza" (Socinenija II, pp. 269, 274). 45 Socinenija II, p. 180.

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I so mnoj moja 'Sed'maja' Polumertvaja i nemaja, Rot ee sveden i otkryt, Slovno rot tragiceskoj maski, No on cernoj zamazan kraskoj I suxoju zemlej nabit. In the next stanzas she points to the social catastrophes of her time, culminating in the exclamation that in the midst of such atrocities 'singing' is for her impossible: "I proxodjat desjatilet'ja: Pytki, ssylki i kazni — pet' ja, V ètom uzase ne mogu." She emphatically rejects the possibility that she will ever conform to political demands: 'melt away in writing an official hymn' and thus inherit the fame of a dead poet. She is probably alluding to Majakovskij, to w h o m she had previously been compared. 4 7 But, she continues in the other half of the same stanza, another kind of poetry will be needed in the future. More appropriate than the Shakespearian drama of human passions is the classical tragedy of fate. Evidently she is referring to the impending war of which she was to write soon and — more in general — to the social disasters of her time. References to Rekviem, the cycle of poems devoted to the victims of the Stalin period, are closely connected with this view of her task as a poet, who becomes the voice of a suffering people. 4 8 The prophetic inspiration of such an art was already indicated in the characterisation of the Poet. It seems as if she dissociates herself f r o m the haunting memory of a past guilt a n d is now prepared to write on the fatal events of the present : 46

It would seem that 'Sed'maja' refers to Axmatova's 'seventh' book of poetry forbidden by the censors in 1946. According to other critics, 'Sed'maja' refers to the seventh 'Elegija' (Jeanne Rude, o.c., p. I l l , note 1) or to the Seventh Symphony of Sostakovic (Socinenija II, p. 387). 47 K. Cukovskij, "Axmatova i Majakovskij", Dom iskusstva 1 (1921). 48 Cf. "I esli zazmut moj izmucennyj rot, Kotorym kricit stomiPjonnyj narod..." (Rekwiem) In the version of Poèma bez geroja presented by Jeanne Rude, the poet mentions Rekwiem in the prose section preceding Reska: "V pecnoj trube voet veter, i v ètom voe mozno ugadat' ocen' gluboko i ocen' umelo sprjatannye obryvki 'Rekwiema'." In addition this version contains two new stanzas (X, XI) referring to the Rekwiem-theme (J. Rude, o.c., pp. 102, 110).

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Ja 1' rastaju v kazennom gimne? Ne dari, ne dari, ne dari mne Diademu s mertvogo lba. Skoro mne nuzna budet lira, No Sofokla uze, ne Sekspira. Na poroge stoit — Sud'ba. These allusions to the disastrous present and ominous future are contrasted by some stanzas in which the lasting value of art is stressed. She finds a consolation in the great art of the past •— symbolized by a messenger from El Greco — and in an anticipation of future acknowledgement. She can wait until a reader of 'another time' discovers her poetry when 'this storm has passed over'. It need not be in the near future; indeed, she now sees herself already in the perspective of impending death — as a shade who is flitting away. In the final stanzas the author suggests that she has at last freed herself from the obsession of the past and is now entering a new phase of poetic creation. Apparently she considers her work as a triumph of her art over the most difficult subject she ever treated. The muse, that she introduces here, proudly declares that she has no ancestors49 and she promises her — after twenty years of official disgrace — not only future fame but also future inspiration : A tvoej dvusmyslennoj slave, Dvadcat' let lezavsej v kanave, Ja esce ne tak posluzu. My s toboj esce popiruem, I ja carskim moim poceluem Zluju polnoc' tvoju nagrazu. By this final pointe the theme of Reska is reversed and the title receives an ironical significance. To the dissatisfied editor, cited in the beginning, she opposes a muse radiating a superior certitude. 49

As appears from later comments, Axmatova considered her work as an entire new type of poèma, written against the tradition of the poèma as a genre in Russian literature; she concludes: "Ja ubezdena, cto xorosuju poèmu nel'zja napisat', sleduja zakonu zanra. Skoree vopreki emu..." Socinenija II, p. 295. Cf. also the reflections on her work published in this edition, p. 132. "I tak, esli slova B. ne prosto kompliment, 'Poèma bez geroja' obladaet vsemi kacestvami i svojstvami soversenno novogo i ne imejuscego v istorii literatury precedenta proizvedenija...".

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And here again she resumes the principal theme of the entire triptych, the theme of time. The destructive forces of her age, blaspheming art, are powerless against a future which assures her poetic immortality.

THE EPILOGUE

The Epilogue consists of a sequence of a hundred lines, not divided into stanzas and interrupted only by a 'lyrical digression'. As the dates and places mentioned at the beginning and the end indicate, this part refers to circumstances entirely different from those of the two other parts. In the prose introduction preceding the Epilogue the author states that the scene is laid in Leningrad, 12 June 1942, and at the end she writes 'completed in Taskent, 18 August 1942'. Only seldom does she reveal herself as the author of the Petersburg Story: she is acting mainly as a lyrical heroine who links her personal fate with the tragic historic fate of her country. In elegiac tones she bids farewell to her city and describes her journey to Taskent, her place of evacuation. Strictly personal themes are touched upon only in the beginning, where she expresses her attachment to her home and her city, and more particularly in the lyrical digression which is thematically related to the lyrical passages in Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God. In the course of the Epilogue she gradually expands her perspective from a more personal to a more general point of view, as is evident from her choice of confidant. First she addresses an old maple tree in front of her house, then the city itself and finally her fellow exiles in Russia and abroad; in this connection she also recalls a more terrible form of exile, the concentration camps. In the last lines the author recedes to the background to evoke an image of her country at war. In the first part of the Epilogue the author's farewell to Petersburg-Leningrad is the most important theme; it forms the direct link between this and the two preceding parts of the triptych. Its importance is, moreover, indicated by a special dedication of the Epilogue 'to my city' and in the three epigraphs, referring to the

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historic city of Petersburg. In this way the poet points, from the very beginning, to the connection between the city, symbolizing her own past evoked in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God, and Petersburg-Leningrad, the symbol of the past and present of her people. Moreover, the tragic historic themes touched upon in the three epigraphs — an allusion to Czar Peter and to Puskin's poem about him, to the curse of Peter's wife Evdokija and to the nocturnal executions mentioned in a poem by Annenskij — also occur in the two last sections of the first part. In the poem itself the other face of the city, the Petersburg of 1913 symbolizing the milieu of her youth, again appears. But here the shift in perspective between the Epilogue and the two preceding parts becomes visible: the author views the past from a great distance; she no longer shows an ambivalent attitude towards her youth. The terrifying aspects of Devjafsot Trinadcatyj God and Reska, the background of fear, guilt and retribution have been ousted; the doomed city, symbol of a doomed generation, is now seen only as a beloved city. And the author explicitly declares that she has shaken off the burden of her memories: Vse cto skazano v Pervoj Casti O ljubvi, izmene i strasti, Sbrosil s kryl'ev svobodnyj stix.

This change in perspective towards the past is already indicated in the very first lines of the Epilogue in which the author refers more specifically to her poem. In this passage she dissociates herself even more from the Petersburg Story, calling it a misguided attempt to rouse the distant echoes of the past and disturb the 'impenetrable sleep of things'. Indeed, the scenes of the past that come to her mind on saying farewell to the city have lost their obsessive character. No longer do frightening figures rise from their graves, the dead are silent and the poet remembers them with tears. Almost imperceptibly these memories of the past are related to the image of contemporary Leningrad. She mentions the cruel aspects of the war, the fires and bombardments, only in the prose introduction preceding the Epilogue, but in the poem itself she stresses the silent beauty of the threatened city which she has left

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against her will. But, in spite of this separation, her image is forever associated with that of the city. The same word 'shade' (ten') she uses in Reska to indicate her poetic immortality recurs in this passage to suggest her poetic presence in Petersburg-Leningrad. Just as the mirror of the poem, so will the mirror of the city preserve her shade: Razlucenie nase mnimo: Ja s toboju nerazlucima, Ten' moja na stenax tvoix, Otrazen'e moe v kanalax, Zvuk sagov v Ermitaznyx zalax, Gde so mnoju moj drug brodil, I na starom Volkovom Pole, Gde mogu ja rydat' na vole Nad bezmolv'em bratskix mogil. It seems, in this way, as if city and lyrical heroine are for ever united: her subjective memory has become part of the all-embracing history of the city and the country. In the second part of the Epilogue in which the poet describes her journey to Asia she directly addresses all her exiled friends in Russia and abroad; she evokes the icy river Kama, connected with a place of deportation of Mandel'stam, and the 'funeral route' leading to the concentration camps where many of her intimate friends and her son had been interned; in this image the perspective of her own death is also included: I otkrylas' mne ta doroga, Po kotoroj uslo tak mnogo, Po kotoroj syna vezli, I byl dolog put' pogrebal'nyj Sred' torzestvennoj i xrustal'noj Tisiny Sibirskoj zemli. By these allusions to her friends suffering in camps or living in exile the author emphasizes the link between her personal fate and the fate of her generation. The calamities, caused by two wars and a revolution, form, in this view, a chain of catastrophes revealing the character of the 'real Twentieth Century', the retribution announced in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God.

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She also refers to the concentration camps in the lyrical digression. This passage, which appears in the first part of the Epilogue, constitutes a rhythmic and thematic break in the monologue of the lyrical heroine; the tone, too, suddenly changes and becomes vehement and charged with bitterness. Evoking a nightmarish phantasy of a prisoner standing his trial, the author again, as in the first part, hints in cryptic terms at her most intimate fears and obsessions. She seems to hear the voice of her double speaking to her from a camp and reproaching her for the fact that she is suffering in her place, 'paying off' her debt: Za tebja ja zaplatila Cistoganom, Rovno desjat' let xodila Pod naganom, Ni nalevo, ni napravo Ne gljadela, A za mnoj xudaja slava Selestela. The words 'zaplatit" and 'slava' recall a passage in the third section of the Petersburg Story. The author, addressing the heroine, uses here the same words: she points to a coming punishment when it will be necessary 'to pay off the debt' (zaplatit' po scetu) and designates herself as the heiress to the actress's 'fame' (ja naslednica slavy tvoej). Thus the punishment predicted for her double, the actress, is made visible in the fate of another double, imprisoned on account of an old 'reputation' and an old guilt. But, as K. Verheul has pointed out, there exists still another link between this lyrical digression and the first part. This vision of trial and imprisonment seems to be related to the fateful 'guest from the future' evoked in the first lyrical digression of Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God. The 'ten years' of suffering in a camp, mentioned in this context, probably refer to the ten years of official disgrace in the postwar Stalin period which were, in the poet's eyes, the consequence of her meeting with a foreigner. 50 It would seem that she in this way has intensified and dramatized those years of persecution and social isolation. 50

Verheul, o.c., p. 215.

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The closing lines of the Epilogue centre on the historic fate of the country. An image of Russia retreating to the East appears together with the contrasting image of 'young Russia' coming to her rescue. In this final passage the sufferings of the lyrical heroine merge with the universal suffering of her people.

CONCLUSION

In Poèma bez geroja Axmatova, using cryptic symbols and mirror writing, expresses her relationship with time. Both the historic drama and the drama of her own life are involved. As her complex view both of her time and of her life is contained in the complex structure of her poem, we will attempt to sum up the most important conclusions resulting from the analysis of the interrelationships between the various narrative and thematic levels of the triptych. It appears, in the first place, that the facts and feelings concerning the poet's private life are concealed in the picture of a historic drama and its background. The two historical themes in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God serve as 'mirrors' in relation to the underlying personal theme, the hidden story of the author herself. Moreover, a second personal theme which already starts in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God is developed in Reska : this theme consists of an authorial commentary on her work pointing to this private drama. Consequently, on all the four thematic levels of Poèma bez geroja,51 the author, hidden or avowed, appears as the central figure. Although she emphatically refuses to represent her former self in her picture of the past, she is in this way — paradoxically — more clearly visible than if she had portrayed herself in a more conventional manner. 51

For the title Poèma bez geroja, compare Mandel'stam's remark in Egipetskaja marka (1928): "Stranno podumat', cto nasa zizn' — èto povest' bez fabuly i geroja, sdelannaja iz pustoty i stekla, iz gorjacego lepeta odnix otstuplenij, iz peterburgskogo influèncnogo breda." (Sobranie socinenij, II, New York, 1966, p. 76). In theme and structure, especially in the function of the lyrical digressions, there exists a degree of affinity between Mandel'stam's Egipetskaja marka — which may also be considered as a 'Peterburgskaja povest' — and Axmatova's poem.

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In the second place we found that the author, by viewing the picture of the past in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God from various temporal perspectives, displays a changing attitude towards this past. The impression of historical veracity, evoked by a detailed portrayal of the 1913 drama and its historical milieu, is destroyed by the comments of the author who, from a much later temporal point of view, expresses her doubts concerning the reality of the picture she has created. But the underlying lyrical level, consisting of fragmentary scenes and associations circling round a haunting memory and a frustrated hope, is not affected by this commentary. On the contrary, it seems as if only those dreams and obsessions which are not connected with a clearly recognizable historical moment will form a lasting element in the author's inner world. In this way the two most extensive thematic levels, the drama and the picture of the milieu, are deprived of their preponderant position and the attention is again focused on the hidden heroine of the Petersburg Story. In the third place we observed in contrast with this shifting temporal perspective, a remarkable conformity in the emotional and moral attitude of the author towards her various themes. This attitude, seemingly ambivalent, alternating between rapture and repulsion, grows into a definite perspective of guilt and retribution at the end of Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God. In the subsequent parts of the triptych this perspective is unfolded against the background of the postrevolutionary period. In this complex view that underlies the entire poèma we may distinguish two main aspects : the portrayal of human relationships and the reflections on art, which come to the fore both on the personal and on the historical thematic levels. An alternation of rapture and repulsion with regard to human relationships is most compellingly expressed in the lyrical passages bearing on the author's most intimate feelings. Her rapture centres on the evocation of love based on complete understanding; her repulsion centres on obsessive images pointing to a deep sense of guilt. This guilt, illustrated in the 'mirror' of the historic drama, consists of the betrayal of love, causing the death of the beloved. In the hidden story of the author's life, in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj

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God, this perspective of guilt predominates, culminating in the appearance of the symbolic figure of her conscience in the final pointe. The coming retribution is 'mirrored' in an ominous prophecy to her double, the actress, and in the sinister perspective of a coming catastrophe from which the entire historical past is viewed. A personal punishment is, moreover, suggested in the image of the guest from the future, whose non-appearance indicated an unfulfilled hope. To this personal retribution the author refers, in a much more tragic key, in the Epilogue, evoking a nightmarish concentration camp scene. As this vision again contains some allusions to the guilt represented in the first part, we may assume that the retribution, for the author, always implies the reproaches of her conscience. As the memory of love, so does her remorse seem to transcend time. But the main perspective of the Epilogue is of a different character: the haunting memory of the past has faded away and the author's sufferings have become part of the sufferings of her city and her country. In the historical picture repulsion prevails as the author stresses the negative aspects of human relationships in order to 'mirror' the guilt connected with her own private past. The false and superficial life the actress and her friends lead is contrasted by the innocence of the young hero. But although the author emphatically expresses a negative judgement of the entire historical milieu, she often displays a dual attitude in her portrayal of the individual characters, representing them as seducer and victim at the same time. The author's repulsion culminates in the portrayal of the fatal consequence of the actress's betrayal of love, the death of the young hero. At the same time the perspective of guilt is here again most fully revealed in the final vision of the inexorable conscience. The retribution, symbolized in the sinister shade of an approaching disaster, extends itself to all the characters of the first part, guilty and innocent. Moreover, the actress and the hero in particular are reminded of their fate. In the case of the young poet the author points to a terrible future in which he, as a representative of a doomed generation, would not have escaped death. This picture is completed in the subsequent parts of the triptych, in

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which the author refers to the social catastrophes of the Stalin period and the war. This interpretation of historic disasters as a punishment is possible as long as the author adheres to the temporal perspective of her characters: from the point of view of the year 1913 she is able to expose the guilty. But the extension in both directions of the temporal points of departure — to the future and to a more distant past — seems to obscure the borderline between guilt and innocence. From a later time perspective the actress as well as the young poet become victims of a disastrous age. And in the evocation of a more distant past, the times of Czar Peter and the nineteenth century, the city of Petersburg becomes a doomed city in which man is ever at the mercy of fate. 52 Rapture and repulsion with regard to art are expressed both in the author's reflections on her poem and in the historical picture. Her inspiration is compared to enthralling music, to an intoxicating dream, but she speaks also of a 'hellish harlequinade', a demonic obsession; she ascribes it to a 'bewitching' muse and considers herself as one possessed. This ambivalent attitude is parallelled in the evocation of the art of the Silver Age. Her delight in its beauty is particularly manifest in the abundant quotations and references to its poetry, music and theatre. Moreover, she stresses the high artistic achievements of the period and points to the immortal fame of the poets she has represented. But nevertheless she calls the artists 'false prophets', hints at the presence of the devil among them and comments on the 'bewitching' beauty of the actress's dance. We are faced here again with the poet's obsessive sense of guilt with regard to her former life, which implies also a judgement of the art of the Silver Age and of her own poetry. To the masked artists she opposes the figure of the Poet who is not wearing a literary mask and who listens only to the voice of a prophetic inspiration. And by the 52

Cf. the judgment of her poem cited by Axmatova in her prose reflections on the poem published in this edition p. 134 "Avtor govorit kak sud'ba (Ananke), podymajas' nado vsem — ljud'mi, vremenem, sobytijami...po prostote sjuzeta, kotoryj mozno pereskazat' v dvuch slovax, (blizko) k 'Med-

nomu Vsadniku'' ".

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power of her poetry — as 'bewitching' as the dance of her double — she curses the beauty of an art which is connected with death and guilt. This contradiction is contained in the contrasting symbols of devil and conscience both of whom play a part in her poèma. But by adhering to her tragic vision of life she frees herself from her demon. The first part moves from an evocation of death to a veiled confession of guilt, and in the second part she designates as her themes a lament for the dead and a confrontation with conscience. Freeing herself from the obsession of the past it seems — as the prediction of her muse in the final pointe of Reska suggests — as if she is entering a new phase of poetic creation. This new phase is connected with her choice of new themes in which she deals with the terrible historic events of the postrevolutionary period, the prisons, the camps and the war. As opposed to the ominous shade and the indomitable conscience in Devjat'sot Trinadcatyj God two other symbols appear: in Reska the Muse and in the Epilogue Petersburg-Leningrad and Russia. These symbols, transcending the limitations and frustrations of the present, point to a future in which the poet, united with her city and her country, will live on through her art. This alters the temporal perspective of the entire triptych. Whereas the poet in the first part is preoccupied by the past, representing herself as the only survivor among the shades of the year 1913, she turns in the second and third parts to a future in which she already imagines herself as a shade, preserved in the mirrors of her poem and her city. As she says in one of her poems: "Ja stala pesnej i sud'boj".

BIBLIOGRAPHY A. Editions of Poèma bez geroja: For the bibliography of the several versions of Poèma bez geroja see: A. Axmatova: Socinenija II, pod redakciej B. Filippova i B. Struve (Washington 1968), pp. 357 ff. One more version can be found in : Jeanne Rude: Anna Axmatova: "Poème sans héros" (Paris 1970).

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B. Articles on Poèma bez geroja: Bickert, E., 1970 Anna Axmatova, silence à plusieurs voix (Paris). Blot, Jean, 1962 "A. Axmatova 'Poème sans héros'", Preuves 133, pp. 3-6. Cukovskij, K., 1964 "Citaja Axmatovu", Moskva 5, pp. 200-203. Dobin, E., 1966 "Poèma bez geroja A. Axmatovoj", Voprosy literatury 9, pp. 74-97. 1968 Poèzija Anny Axmatovoj (L.). Eng-Liedmeier, A.M., van der, 1968 "Anna Axmatova's 'Poèma bez geroja'", Dutch Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavicists (The Hague), pp. 67-97. Èrge, 1963 "Citaja Axmatovu", Vozdusnye puti III (New York), pp. 295-300. Filippov, B., 1961 "Zametki k poème A. Axmatovoj", Vozdusnye putì II (New York), pp. 167-183. 1968 "Poèma bez geroja" in Socinenija A. Axmatovoj II (New York), pp. 53-92. Filippov, B., G. Struve, 1968 "Poèma bez geroja" in Socinenija A. Axmatova II (New York), pp. 357 ff. Frank, V., 1968 "Beg vremeni" in Socinenija A. Axmatovoj II (New York), pp. 39-52. Maksimov, D., 1967 "Axmatova o Bloke", Zvezda 12, pp. 187-191. Ozerov, L., 1963 "Tajny remesla" in Rabota poèta (Moskva), pp. 174-197. 1964 "Portret pisatelja", Literaturnaja Rossija 21:8. Pavlovskij, A., 1966 Anna Axmatova (Leningrad). Riccio, C., 1966 "Prefazione" in A. Axmatova, Poema senza eroe (Torino). Rude, Jeanne, 1970 "Présentation" in A. Axmatova, Poème sans héros, présenté et traduit par J. Rude (Paris). Tauber, E., 1963 "Neukrotimaja sovest'", Grani 53, pp. 80-7. Timencik, R., 1967 "K analizu 'Poèmy bez geroja'", Materialy XXII naucnoj studenceskoj konferencii (Tartu), pp. 121-3. Verheul, K., 1971 The theme of time in the poetry of Anna Axmatova (The Hague), pp. 180 ff. 2irmunskij, V., 1970 "Anna Axmatova i Aleksandr Blok", Russkaja literatura 3, pp. 57-82.

4. Poèma bez Geroja

The text which is published here forms, as far as we know, the first completed redaction of Axmatova's Poèma bez geroja. It is much shorter than the later redactions which have so far been published, and it also shows a great number of textual differences with them. Its publication may, we think, form a valuable contribution to our understanding and appreciation of this work. The fragments in prose contain various considerations by the author about her poèma. The first three are all dated. The subsequent fragments stem from a notebook belonging to the winter of 1960-1961, which Axmatova spent in Moscow. They stand on different pages, where they alternate with such more trivial texts as, for instance, visiting schedules.

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STO CTpaHHoro HpaBa.

O H He acfleT, HTOÖ n o ß a r p a H cjiaßa

noca^HJiH ero B loßHJieiiHbie nbiniHbie Kpecjia, A HeceT no HBeTymeMy BepecKy, rio nyCTbIHHM CBOe TOpXCeCTBO. H H H B HeM He noBHHeH, — H E B STOM H H B apyroM, H HH B TpeTbeM. ri03TaM B o o 6 m e He npucTaJiH rpexn. noiuiacaTb npe^ KoBHeroM 3aBeTa, Bnonbixax

H HH CRHHYTB . . . Jla. HTO TaM¡ lipo JlyHine Hx paccKa3ajiH CTHXH.

STO

"Pepón Ha aBaHcaeHy!" He BOJiHyäTecb, ^bui^e Ha CMeHy HenpeMeHHO BbiHweT ceîmc... MTO>K Bbi Bce yßeraeTe BMecre,

Kpnic:

CJIOBHO KaxcflbiH Hamen n o HeBecTe,

OcTaBjia» c rjia3y Ha rjia3 MeHH B cyMpaice c 3TOH paMoii, PÏ3 KOTOpOH rjta/IHT TOT CaMblH flo

CHX n o p HeonjiaKaHHbiH nac. 3 T O Bce HamibiBaeT He cpa3y.

KaK oflny My3biKanbHyio (J)pa3y C j i b i m y HecKOjibKO CÔHBHHBMX CJIOB. n o c j i e . . . jTecTHHiiw njiocKon CTyneHH,

BcnbiniKH ra3a

H B OT/IAJIEHBH

^CHBIÄ r o j i o c : " Ü K c M e p r a TOTOB".

121

POEMA BEZ GEROJA

II Tbi cjiafloCTpacTHefi, TM TenecHeit )KHBSIX, 6NHCTATEJIBHAA TeHt.

BapaTHHCKHfl.1

P a c n a x H y j i a c b aTJiacHaa m y 6 K a . . . H e c e p f l H C b H a MCHH, r o j i y 6 K a , H e T e 6 n , a c e 6 a Ka3Hio. BHAHIHI»,

TaM, 3a

BLIOROH

KpynnaTOH,

T e a T p a J i b H b i e apannaTa 3 a T e B a i o T o n a x b BO3HK>. K a K n a p a f l H o 3BeHHT n o j i o s b H

H BOJIOHHTCH nOJIOCTb K03bJI. M H M O , TeHH! O H T a M O^HH.

H a CTeHe e r o TOHKHH npo nepHoM xcaamoií OflepjKHMa, He 3Hajia, KaK MHe pa3flejiaTbca c 6ecHOBaTOH. R rpo3HJia eñ 3Be3/iHOH najiaTOH H raajia Ha po/moñ nep^aK,

B TeMHOTy, noA MaHaKeji T e o p r flepacaji,

n 0 3 M A EE3 rEPO-S H o

OHa TBepAHJia y n p s M o :

" ß l He T a a H r j i H H C K a a # a M a

H coBceM He K n a p a ra3iojib. BoBce HeT y Mera poaocjiobhoh, K p O M e COJIHeHHOH H ÔaCHOCJIOBHOH H n p H B e j I MÊHH C a M HKUIb. A

T B o e ä ABycMbicjieHHOH cjraBe,

^BaAuaTb

jieT jiexcaBuieñ

b

KaHaBe,

SI e m e He Taic n o c n y a c y ; M b i c T060H eme

H n

nonHpyeM

noijejiyeM nojiHOHb tbok» H a r p a a c y " .

u a p c K H M MOHM

3jiyio

1941. ÜHBapb (3-5oro

otcm)

JleHHHrpaA OoHTaHHblií flOM IlepenHcaHO b Tamíceme 1 9 AHB.

1942

(HOHbK) bo BpeMH jierKoro 3eMJieTpaceHHa).

POÈMA BEZ GEROJA anHJior ropoay H Apyry T a K n o f l KpoBJieñ O o H T a H H o r o

floMa,

R ^ E BENEPHAA 6 P O A H T HCTOMA,

C (J)OHapeM H CBH3KOÌÌ KJHOHeíí Ä a y K a j i a c b c AAJIBHHM 3XOM HeyMecTHbiM TpeBoaca CMexoM HenpoöyAHyio com. Bemeñ, r ^ e CBH/jeTeJib B e e r ò Ha C B e T e H a 3 a K a T e H Ha p a c c B e T e CMOTPHT B K O M H a T y C T a p t m KJieH H npeflBHfla Harny pa3JiyKy MHE H c c o x m y i o n e p H y i o p y K y , K a K 3 a N O M O M B I O TSMET OH.

A 3eMJia n o f l H o r o ì i r o p e j i a H T a K a a 3Be3,na r j i a ^ e j i a B MOH e m e He 6 p o i i i e H H i > m

jom

H acAajia ycjiOBHoro 3ByKa... 3 T O r/ie-TO T a M y T o G p y n a , 3TO rfle-TO 3aecb, 3a y r j i o M .

T b l , MOÌÌ r p 0 3 H b I H H MOÍÍ nOCJieflHHH C B e T J i b i H c j i y m a T e j i b TCMHHX ó p e ^ H e ñ , y n o B a H b e , n p o m e H b e , necTb! r i p e s o MHOÌÌ T b i r o p H H i b , KaK n j i a M H , H a f l O MHOÌÌ Tbl CTOHHIb, KaK 3HaMH H i i e j i y e u i b M e r a , KaK J i e c T b . I l o j x o a c H MHe p y K y H a TCMH. I l y c T b T e n e p b o c T a H O B H T c a BpeMH H a T 0 6 0 K ) AaHHbix n a c a x . H a c H e c n a c T H e He M H H y e T H K y K y m K a He 3 a K y K y e T B onaJieHHbix H a n r a x j i e c a x . A He c T a B u i H Ì i M o e ì i MOTHJIOH T b i rpaHHTHbiií

ITO3MA EE3 TEPORI rio6jieflHeji, noMepTBeji, 3aTHX. Pa3JiyHCHHe Haine MHHMO, ßl c T060K) Hepa3JiyHHMa, TeHb Moa Ha CTeHax TBOHX, OTpaaceHte Moe B KaHajiax, 3ßyK rnaroB B 3pMHTa»cHbix 3ajiax H Ha ryjiKHX .nyrax MOCTOB, H Ha CTapoM BOJIKOBOM llojie, r ^ e Mory a rniaicaTb Ha BOJie B name HOBBIX TBOHX KpecTOB. MHe Ka3ajiocb, 3a MHOÌÌ t h raajicH, Tbl, HTo TaM yMHpaTb ocTajica B ÔJiecKe uinHJieH B OTÔJiecice boa. He flOîKflajicH »ejiaHHbix BecTHHix, Ha# T060H jiHuib TBOHX npejiecTHHU, Bejibix HoneHeK xopoBOfl. A Becejioe CJIOBO — flOMa HHKOMy Tenepb He 3HaKOMO, Bee B nyacoe rjiajiaT OKHO, KTO B TauiKeHTe, KTO B Hbio-íiopKe H H3rHaHHH B03flyX ropbKHH, K a K oTpaBjieHHoe BHHO.

Bee Bbl MHOÍÍ JIK)6oBaTbCH MOrJIH 6bl, Kor/ia B öpioxe jieTyiefl pbiôbi Ä OT 3JIOH noroHH cnacjracb H Hafl JlafloroH H Haa JiecoM, CJIOBHO Ta oflepacHMaa öecoM, KaK Ha EpoiceH HOHHOH Hecjiacb. A 3a MHOK) TaÖHOH cBepKan H Ha3BaBuiH ce6a — CeflbMan H a HecjibixaHHbiH Miajiacb nnp. npHTBOpHBIHHCb HOTHOH TeTpaAKOH 3HaMeHHTaa jieHHHrpaflKa Bo3Bpamajiacb B poflHoñ 3 npoHHKaio

B caMbie

y3KHe

meJiOHKH,

paciimpaio

HX —

noaBnaioTca HOBbie CTpo. O My3biKe, B CBH3H C "TpnriTnxoM", HanajiH roBopHTb OHeHb paHO, eme B TaniKeHTe (HA3BIBAJRA "KapHaBaji" IIIyMaHa — )K. Cann, HO TaM xapaKTepncTHKH .nauti cpeacTBaMii caMoìi MysbiKii). YcTaHOBJieHHe HM >KC ee TaHiieBajibHoii cymHocTH (o KOTopoH roBopHJi H IlacTepHaK) o6bacHHeT ee AByKpaTHMH yxofl B 6ajieTHoe jiHÔperro. B. M. ^HpMyHCKHH oneHb HHTepecHO roBoproi o nosMe. OH CKa3aJI, HTO 3T0 HCnOJIHeHHe MCHTbl CHMBOJIHCTOB, T.e. 3TO — TO, HTO OHH nponoBe#oBajiH B TeopHH, HO HHKor/ia He ocymecTBJiajm B CBOHX npoH3BeAeHHHX (Marna pHTMa, BOJimeôcTBO, BHACHHA), HTO B HX n03MaX HHHerO 3TOrO HeT. Harne BpeMH KHHO TaK ace BbiTecHHjio H Tpare^Hio H KOMeflHio KaK B PHMe naHTOMHMa. KjiaccnnecKHe np0H3Be/ieHHH rpenecKoii B

APAMATYPRHH

NEPEAE.IBIBAJIHCB

B JIHÖPETTO

AJIH

NAHTOMHMOB

(nepaofl HMnepHH). "riosMa 6e3 repoa" He cjiynaHHaa aHanorna! He TO ace JIH caMoe "PoMeo H flacynberra" (IlpOKO^beBa) H "OTenjio" (XanaTypsma) npeBpameHHbie B öajieTbi. B. IlacTepHaK roBopnji o nosMe, KaK o TaHue (use (Jtiirypbi "pyccKoä"). "C njiaTOHKOM OTCTynaa" — STO jrapHKa — OHa npaneTCH. Bnepefl, pacKHHyB pyKH — STO nosMa. ToBopHJi, KaK Bcer^a, Heo6biHañHo — He noBTopHTb, He 3anoMHHTb, a Bce nojiHO TpeneTHOìi >KH3HH. (14 fleKaópa. 1960. MocKBa).

BOT 3TY B03M05kh0CTB 3BATB rojiocoM HeH3MepHMo .najibine, neM STO FLEJIAIOT npoH3HocHMbie cjioBa >KnpMyHCKHH H HMeeT BBHfly, roBOpa o "IlosMe 6e3 repoa". OTToro CTOJib pa3JiHHHO OTHOHieHHe K nosMe HHTaTejieñ. O AH H cpa3y cjibimaT STO SXO, 3 T 0 T BTopoH mar. flpyrne ero He cjibiuiaT H npocTO iimyT

134

n 0 3 M A BE3 TEPOÄ

KpaMojibT, He HaxoAHT h oÔHacaioTca. Bee s t o a coo6pa3HJia oneHb HeAaBHO H, BO3MOHCHO, STO H cTaHeT M O H M pa3JiyHeHHeM C n03M0ÍÍ.

CeroAHH M . A . 3. .aojiro h no/[po6HO roBopHJi o

"Tpurmixe":

O H a (T.e. no3Ma), n o e r o mhchhio — TparunecKaa Chm(J)ohhh.

My3biKa eñ He HyacHa, noTOMy hto coflepacHTcn b Heñ caMoñ. A b t o p roBOpHT KaK cy^böa (AHaHKe), noflbnvraacb Ha/io BceM —

jnoßbMH, BpeMeHeM, coöhthhmh.

Cjiobo Ilo

aKMeHCTHiecKoe

(J)aHTacTHKe

6jih3ko

C TBepAo k

QqejiaHO oneHb Kpenno.

oiepieHHbiMH

"3a6jiyflHBiiieMyca

npocTOTe CKDxceTa, KOTopbiñ momcho

rpamiuaMH.

TpaMBaio",

— K "MCAHOMy BCaflHHKy". (2 HHBapa 1961. MocKBa)

H yace 3arjiymaa .apyr Apyra flßa opnecTpa h3 Taìraoro Kpyra 3ßyKHrnjiioTb jieôe/jHHyK) ceHb

Ho r,n;e rojioc moh h rae sxo, B neM cnaceHbe h b tom noMexa, Tfle caMa h rae TOUbKo TeHb? — KaK cnacTHCb o t BToporo rnara

no

nepecKasaTb b flByx cnoBax

KEES VERHEUL

5. Some Marginal Observations on the First Version of "Poèma bez Geroja

In many ways Poèma bez geroja is a strangely unique and peculiar work. One of its most striking peculiarities is formed by the fact that it is almost impossible to tie its composition to any definite date or even period, and, stranger still, that the reader remains at a loss to decide what actually is to be considered as its 'real' text. There exist, of course, many works of literature which were written over a long stretch of time, and which only very gradually grew into their definite form in the author's consciousness. In the case of Axmatova's poèma, however, we see that the work already in the early forties existed in all its parts and had every appearance of being a finished whole. Nevertheless it greatly expanded, especially during the later forties and the fifties, so to speak from 'within'. Its main thematic and narrative structure, just as its division into several parts, remained completely intact in spite of all the alterations and additions which were subsequently made, and which finally made the poèma grow into more than twice its original size.1 1 In ray study The Theme of Time in the Poetry of Anna Axmatova (The Hague, 1971), p. 184. I have argued that the 'expansibility' of Poèma bez geroja is d;rectly connected with its prosodie fotm and the basic structural conception of its thematic development.

136

nOSMA EE3 TEPOil

When we compare the numerous different 'publications' 2 of Axmatova's poèma between the early forties and the middle sixties, we are faced with a peculiar critical problem: we cannot simply consider the earlier versions as being preparatory drafts of the ultimate text, because these earlier versions form in themselves coherent and 'finished' works, and because the artistic unity of each of these texts often shows essential differences with the impression which is conveyed by the versions of an earlier or a later period: a thematic emphasis changes, new motifs are introduced, others become more explicit. At the same time it would be pointless to consider the different redactions of Poèma bez geroja as all forming different and independent works of art. For this the similarities even between the first and the last redaction are too great, both in the thematic and narrative structure and in the actual text. If we should not make a special connection between the several versions of the work, our appreciation of the peculiar mechanisms of its expansion would moreover be lost. The existence of a number of considerably different versions of Poèma bez geroja also gives rise to a problem of critical taste. There is no intrinsic reason why a later redaction should necessarily be more beautiful or richer in meaning than an earlier one. While nobody, I think, would want to miss, for instance, the memorable image of the inescapable approach of the Real Twentieth Century, nor the 'lyrical digression' on Carskoe Selo — one of the most unforgettable passages of the work —, which is likewise missing from the 'third chapter' of the first redaction, not everybody will be equally happy with all the later additions: the often rather mannered 'stage directions' in prose, the increasing vagueness and fluidity of the scene, conveyed by such insertions as : Ten' cego-to mel'knula gde-to. 2 In the case of Poèma bez geroja we cannot, of course, speak of publications, in the literal sense of the word, during the author's lifetime. That we are, however, justified in regarding the different versions of the work as more than preparatory drafts, appears already from the fact that the author herself presented typewritten and signed copies of these versions to her friends. These numerous, mutually often greatly differing copies of the poèma were clearly considered as finished works by the author, and may in a 'pre-Gutenbergian' sense be considered as so many publications.

SOME MARGINAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE FIRST VERSION

137

One also wonders whether the greater historical specificness of certain dramatis personae, their semi-identification with concrete figures from the past in the later redactions, is really more satisfactory than their earlier anonymity, which was perhaps purer in effect in giving less occasion for confusing speculations as to Who is Who. Moreover, the semantic coherence especially of Reska seems to have somewhat suffered from the various expansions of the text — through the interpolations the logical-syntactical links between the stanzas have at times almost entirely lost their original clarity. Generally speaking, it is a matter of debate whether the additions to the original poèma really always are enrichments and whether the vmestitel'nost' and bezdonnost'' of the work, about which the author speaks in her prose observations, did not perhaps also contain its principal danger. As a solution to this critical impasse we should, I think, include in our conception of Poèma bez geroja a view of the totality of all its variants and an awareness of the chronological separateness of each of its redactions. We can do this by regarding the work not as the definite closed unity of a given text, but rather as a literary process, a development in the form of a continuous expansion of a certain poetical impulse and the author's consciousness of every potentiality of meaning which it hid for her. When we regard Poèma bez geroja in this way, it is not the ultimate success or failure of any of its lines of development which matters, but rather the intensity of the poet's attempt to come to grips with her material through the years of her preoccupation with the work. A serious and detailed analysis of this artistic process will have to wait until the future, when we shall dispose of a large enough number of separate well-edited redactions of Poèma bez geroja which can be shown to belong to a particular date. 3 It will then be possible to isolate various chronological 'layers' of the development of the text, and to correlate these layers with the particular 3

The texts which were published in Vozdusnye putì, vol. I and II (New York, 1960-1961), evidently form combinations of separate versions of the poèma from the fifties. The texts which we find in various Russian journals and collections from the forties, the fifties and the sixties contain, unfortunately, no more than fragments of different variants.

138

n 0 3 M A EE3 TEPORI

features of Axmatova's other poetry of the same period. In my presentation of what appears to be the first finished redaction of her poèma I shall only try roughly to indicate the most striking differences which appear when we compare it with the later redactions. The part of the 'triptych' which was most strongly affected by the process of expansion was the opening Peterburgskaja povest\ This becomes clear when we realise that of the total number of 354 lines in the first redaction of the poèma 204 belonged to the section containing the narrative of 1913, whereas in the last redaction this part fills 497 lines out of 742, i.e. about two thirds of the full text. In my brief survey of the most striking dissimilarities between the first poèma and its successors I shall therefore mainly concentrate myself upon this part of the work. In the above I have already alluded to the relative historical 'anonymity' of the protagonists of the 1913 narrative in the first version of Poèma bez geroja. It was only in a later stage that Axmatova included within her text some specific hints as to the 'real' figures hidden behind the classical prototypes of the love triangle of the 'harlequinade': Colombina — Sudejkina: Pierrot — Knjazev, and his more successful rival — Blok. In the first redaction these figures retain their purely literary identity, and we do not yet find most of the later suggestions of their more concrete application in the form of, for instance, initials in the Dedications, certain hints dropped in the 'stage directions' in prose and in the poetical text. Thus, for instance, the later dragunskij P'ero is still no more than a dezurnyj P'ero. Similarly the later 'portrait' of Aleksandr Blok, made up of a peculiar collage of motifs from his own poetry, is completely missing in the early version, just as the allusion to the 'fame' of this rival of the above-mentioned Pierrot. 4 4

cf. the line :

I kak vrag ego znamenit. The stanza of which this line forms the culmination is, as will be seen, completely missing from the first redaction of Poèma bez geroja. For the development of the historical image of Blok in the poèma it is interesting to see that in an earlier version of this stanza, belonging to an intermediary redaction, the line in question keeps the rival as yet more anonymous: Kak sopernik ego rumjan.

(cf. Vozdusnye puti, vol. I, op. cit., p. 23)

SOME MARGINAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE FIRST VERSION

139

One of the most characteristic features of Axmatova's poèma, its relative lack of 'drama' and traditional forms of suspense in the narration of a simple story of love and violence, is even more clearly present in the first version than in the later expanded redactions. The dénouement of the 'plot' occupies no more than seventeen lines in the text from the early forties, and it does not even form a 'chapter' by itself. It is only at a much later stage that Axmatova will separate the two parts of the original third chapter and considerably amplify them both. The 'late' episode Cerez ploscadku also serves to add an element of concrete narrative description and dramatic suspense, and to give more prominence to the main characters of the story. The historical aspect of the theme of the New Year story of the opening section of Poèma bez geroja was one of the main starting points for the poet's later expansions of the text. Many concrete details from the everyday life of the period around 1913 were added in the later versions of the work to the poet's literary evocation of the historical scene — a development which significantly parallels the increasing historical specificness of the protagonists of the narrative. The development of a kind of historical 'realism' — a method of poetically rendering the quintessence of the atmosphere of a past epoch by mentioning some common features of its everyday life : the aspect of its streets, its fashions, its gossip — is not only characteristic of the various subsequent texts of Poèma bez geroja; it forms more generally a typical feature of Axmatova's œuvre from the forties as a whole. 5 It will be noticed that one figure, that of the 'guest from the future', who plays such an essential role in the later versions of the first chapter of the New Year story, is completely absent from the first redaction of the poèma. The episode about this figure, which is echoed by the third Dedication from 1956, was only added to the work in or shortly after 1946, the year of the poet's meeting in the 'Fontannyj D o m ' with an Englishman, who became in her imagination a lasting symbol of hope and promise. This meeting seemed strangely foreshadowed in the opening lines of the 5

Cf. e.g. K. Cukovskij: "Citaja Axmatovu", Moskva (1964), n. 5, p. 200-203 and L. Ozerov: Rabota poèta (Moscow, 1953), p. 182.

n 0 3 M A BE3 TEPORI

140

poèma, in which the speaker pictures herself as celebrating the New Year together with somebody who has not come; thus the unexpected encounter with a foreigner in 1946 seemed in the life of the author to fill in the dimension of the future which was left open in the time conception of the work with which she had been preoccupied since the end of 1940. Significantly the connected image in Reska of the stranger from a future century, whose thankfulness will form a reward for the poet's sufferings, is likewise absent from the first version. Elsewhere I have tried to demonstrate how the presentation of the 'guest from the future' in the first chapter of the Peterburgskaja povest\ turning upon a mysterious interplay of alternative planes of reality, is in its vision and stylistical expression closely connected with the characteristic developments of Axmatova's work in the fifties and the sixties.6 I have already observed that the differences between the various redactions of Reska and the Epilogue are fewer than those between the different versions of the first part of Poèma bez geroja. In the second and the third part of the work the later expansions are mainly devoted to the 'public theme' of the reign of terror, the persecutions and the war of the historical present. On one point the first redaction of the Epilogue may perhaps help us to clarify something which remains rather equivocal and uncertain for the reader of its later versions. In the passage beginning with the line : Ty, ne pervyj i ne poslednij it is not easy to decide who is being addressed in the second person by the speaker. Is it the tree, about which she has been speaking in the opening episode? Or is it perhaps the city, as in the subsequent passage? Neither reading seems very satisfactory. The clue appears to be given by the dedication Gorodu i drugu, which is written over the first redaction of the Epilogue. When the relationship with the friend in question came to a brusque end, only the first part of the dedication remained intact:

Moemu

gorodu. Within the text the address to the friend underwent a considerable change, reflecting the change in the author's attitude 6

The Theme of Time in the Poetry cf Anna Axmatovu, op. cit., p. 197.

SOME MARGINAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE FIRST VERSION

141

towards him. This becomes clear when we confront the two versions of the passage in question with their differing lines and their curious exchange cf epithets: Ty, moj groznyj i moj poslednij Svetlyj slusatel' temnyx brednej, Upovan'e, proscen'e, cest'! Predo mnoj ty goris', kak plamja, Nado mnoj ty stois', kak znamja I celues' menja, kak lest'.

Ty, ne pervyj i ne poslednij Temnyj slusatel' svetlyx brednej, Mne kakuju gotovis' mest'? Ty ne vyp'es', tol'ko prigubis' Etu gorec' iz samoj glubi — Eto nasej razluki vest'!

For the development of Axmatova's historical conception of Poèma bez geroja it is significant that the original ending of the work with a "musical" variant of the motif of evacuation was later replaced by the more triumphant image of wartime Russia in the role of the Revenger. Thus the mechanism of guilt and retribution, which is in the opening narrative from 1913 directed against the speaker and her generation, is through a change in the thematic and historical perspective at the end of the work applied to the foreign aggressor and experienced by the 'I', together with the nation of which she feels herself a part, as a liberating force.