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| 安娜·安德烈耶芙娜·阿赫瑪托娃 | |||||
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阿赫玛托娃阿赫瑪托娃（1889 - 1960）
阿赫瑪托娃·安娜·安德烈耶夫娜，蘇聯俄羅斯女詩人。生於敖德薩一個海軍工程師的家庭。曾在彼得堡女子大學學習法律，但她酷愛文學，尤其是詩歌。1910年與詩人古米廖夫結婚，遊歷許多國傢。曾加入阿剋梅派。1912年出版詩集《黃昏》。1914年發表詩集《念珠》，曾引起轟動。二十年代初期出版詩集《車前草》（1921１９２１）和《Anno Domini MCMX XI》（拉丁文，意為耶穌紀元，1922）。她的詩多以短小精緻的形式，襢露復雜的內心矛盾。二十年代中期開始研究普希金的創作技巧。衛國戰爭時期創作過愛國主義詩篇，如《起誓》（1941）、《勝利》（1942-1945）等。戰後繼續寫作抒情詩，1946年受到批判。五十年代後期恢復名譽。晚期的詩歌有《沒有主角的長詩》（1940-1962）和《光陰的飛逝》。
阿赫瑪托娃·安娜·安德烈耶夫娜，蘇聯俄羅斯女詩人。生於敖德薩一個海軍工程師的家庭。曾在彼得堡女子大學學習法律，但她酷愛文學，尤其是詩歌。1910年與詩人古米廖夫結婚，遊歷許多國傢。曾加入阿剋梅派。1912年出版詩集《黃昏》。1914年發表詩集《念珠》，曾引起轟動。二十年代初期出版詩集《車前草》（1921１９２１）和《Anno Domini MCMX XI》（拉丁文，意為耶穌紀元，1922）。她的詩多以短小精緻的形式，襢露復雜的內心矛盾。二十年代中期開始研究普希金的創作技巧。衛國戰爭時期創作過愛國主義詩篇，如《起誓》（1941）、《勝利》（1942-1945）等。戰後繼續寫作抒情詩，1946年受到批判。五十年代後期恢復名譽。晚期的詩歌有《沒有主角的長詩》（1940-1962）和《光陰的飛逝》。她和前夫古米廖夫同是阿剋梅派的傑出代表。出版的作品有長詩《沒有主人公的長詩》、組詩《安魂麯》等。1964年獲意大利國際詩歌奬，1965年獲英國牛津大學名譽博士學位。詩人喜愛中國古典詩歌，曾譯過《離騷》和李商隱的無題詩。
1966年３月這位飽經風霜的女詩人因心肌梗塞病逝，結束了她77年的坎坷歷程。
自述
【阿赫瑪托娃的自述】
我於1889年６月11日（新歷23日）出生在奧德薩附近（大噴泉）。我的父親當時是一名退役的海軍機械工程師。當我還是一歲的小孩子時，便被送到了北方——進了皇村。在那我一直生活到16歲。
有關皇村，我最初的記憶是這樣的：蔥蘢的緑意，衆多公園的潮潤與燦爛，保姆曾帶我去過的牧場，我們曾騎了形形色色小馬的跑馬場，古老的火車站和一些別樣的事物，它們嗣後都被錄入了“皇村頌”中。
每年的夏季，我都是在塞瓦斯托波爾附近——人馬座海灣的岸邊度過的，就是在那裏，我與大海結為了好友。這些年給我留下最為鮮明印象的是古老的赫爾鬆市，我們曾在那兒居住。
我是一個字母一個字母地學習閱讀列夫托爾斯泰作品的。五歲時，聽着女教師給稍大些的孩子們上課，我學會了說法語。
當我寫下第一首詩時，我11歲。對我而言，詩歌的啓蒙並非來自於普希金和萊蒙托夫，而是傑爾查文（“在皇室少年生日那天”）與涅剋拉索夫（“嚴寒，紅色的鼻子”）。這些作品我的媽媽都能夠背誦下來。
我曾就讀於皇村女子中學。起初我的成績非常糟糕，後來變得十分優秀，然而內心卻總是不太情願學習。
1905年我的父母離異，媽媽帶着孩子們搬到了南方。我們全年都生活在葉甫帕托裏亞①。我在傢中學習了中學畢業前一年級的課程，我還常常懷念皇村，並寫下了大量庸俗無聊的詩歌。１９０５年革命的回聲隱約傳到了幾乎與世隔絶的葉甫帕托裏亞。最後一年級的課程我是於基輔完成的，在封杜剋列耶夫中學，１９０７年我從那兒畢業。
我考入了基輔的高級女子學校法律係。暫時不得不學習法學史，比較特別的是還得學拉丁文，我曾經比較滿意，因為當時衹純粹地講授法律課程，後來我對這些課程也變得冷淡了。
1910年（舊歷４月25日）我嫁給了尼古拉·古米廖夫，我們去巴黎度過了蜜月。
在巴黎鮮活的肉體上（左拉如此描寫道）新的街心公園鋪設工作還沒有完全結束（Raspail街心公園)。艾迪遜的朋友維爾涅爾，在“Taverne de Panteon”指着兩張桌子對我說：“這是你們的社會民主人士，那邊是布爾什維剋，而那邊是孟什維剋”。喜歡不斷變換花樣的女人們有的打算穿上那種褲子（jupes-cullottes）,有的打算穿上幾乎覆蓋了雙腿的（jupes-entravees）。詩歌幾乎無人問津，人們之所以購買詩集，僅僅是由於上面的小花飾出自有名或名氣不大的畫傢之手。我當下便已經明白，巴黎的繪畫吞噬了巴黎的詩歌。
回到彼得堡後，我在拉耶夫高級文史學校學習。此間我已經創作了不少詩歌，它們後來被收入我的第一本詩集。
當人們給我看伊納肯基·安年斯基的詩集《柏木首飾匣》校樣後，我曾激動異常，讀着它，忘記了世間的一切。
1910年，象徵主義的危機明顯地暴露出來，剛起步的詩人們已經不再追隨這一流派。其中有些人加入了未來主義，而另外一些人加入了阿剋梅主義。我與詩人第一車間的同道——曼德裏施塔姆、澤恩凱維奇、納爾布特——一起成為了阿剋梅人。
1911年我是在巴黎度過的，在那裏，我成為俄羅斯芭蕾舞成功首演的見證者。1912年，我遊歷了意大利北部（熱納亞、比薩、佛羅倫薩、博洛尼亞、帕多瓦、威尼斯）。意大利的自然風光與建築藝術給我留下了深刻的印象：它如夢如幻，會使你終生難忘。
1912年我的第一本詩集《黃昏》問世。它衹印刷了300册。評論傢們對它比較賞識。
1912年10月１日我惟一的兒子列夫降臨人世。
1914年３月我的第二本詩集《念珠》出版。它的出售大概也就持續了六周。在5月初彼得堡開始沉寂，人們漸漸地逃離這座城市。這次與彼得堡的離別沒料想竟成永遠。我們再回來時。它已不再是彼得堡，而成了彼得格勒。從19世紀我們一下跌入了20世紀，自城市的風貌開始，一切面目全非。我以為，作為一個初寫者愛情詩歌的小册子，理所當然會在世界大事中湮沒無聞的。而時間對它的安排卻並非如此。
每年的夏季我都是在以前的特維爾省度過，它距別熱斯剋市有十五俄裏。這裏並非風光宜人：丘陵上的田地被翻耕成整齊的方塊兒，磨坊，泥塘，幹涸的沼澤，“小門小院”，莊稼，莊稼……《念珠》和《白色雕像》中的許多首詩我就是在那裏完成的。《白色雕像》於1917年9月出版。
對這本書讀者們與評論界是不公平的。為何我這樣認為，因為它較之於《念珠》的反響要小些。並且這本詩集的面世，正處於重大的社會變革階段。交通癱瘓——書甚至連莫斯科都不能運到，它在彼得格勒即被搶購一空。雜志社關門，報社也是如此。因此相對於《念珠》，《白色雕像》一書少了熱鬧的媒體參與。日漸增多的是饑餓與紛爭。多麽可怕，而當時卻把這些狀況都置之度外了。
十月革命以後我在農藝學院的圖書館工作。1921年出版了我的詩集《車前草》，在1922年出版了《Anno Domini》。
大抵在20年代中期，我懷着濃厚的興趣，開始了古老的彼得堡建築藝術和普希金生平與文學創作的研究工作。普希金研究的主要成果有三個：有關他的作品《金雞》、本傑明·鬆斯坦的《阿道夫》以及《石頭客人》。這些文章在當時全部發表了。
與《亞歷山大詩體》、《普希金與涅瓦海濱》、《普希金在1828》相關的工作，我幾乎做了近２０年，很顯然，我想把它們收入專著《普希金之死》中。
自20年代中期我的新詩幾乎停止了刊發，而舊作依然可以重版。
1941年衛國戰爭期間，我被迫睏留列寧格勒。在九月底，封鎖已經開始了，我纔乘飛機到了莫斯科。
1944年５月之前我生活在塔什幹，我急切地搜羅着所有與列寧格勒、前綫相關的消息。如同其他的詩人，我也常常到軍隊醫院去慰問演出，為受傷的戰士們朗讀詩歌。在塔什幹我第一次知道了，什麽是酷熱、樹蔭和水聲。而且我還懂得了，什麽是人類的善良：在塔什幹我曾多次患病，而且都病得不輕。
1944年５月，我乘飛機抵達了春天的莫斯科，它已經完全沉浸於臨近勝利的愉快希望與期盼之中。
那個可怕的幽靈，它封鎖了我的城市，它令我驚懼異常，我把與它的相見寫入了我的散文中。那段時間促使我寫出了《三棵丁香》和《做客死神傢》等隨筆，後者與我在傑裏基前綫朗誦詩歌一事有關。散文對我來說永遠是神秘與充滿誘惑的。我從一開始便洞悉了詩歌的全部，而對散文卻永遠是一無所知。我的最初的試驗得到了大傢的贊揚，而我本人，當然，對此卻並不相信。我把左先科②叫來。他命令我將某些段落刪除，並且說，他同意保留其它的部分。我非常高興。後來，兒子被逮捕，我把它們與其他手稿全部燒毀了。
我很早便對文學翻譯問題感興趣。近些年來我翻譯了許多作品。至今仍在譯着。
1962年我完成了《沒有主人公的敘事詩》，這部長詩我寫了22年。
去年春天，即“但丁年”的前夕，我重新聆聽到了意大利語——我參訪了羅馬和西西裏。1965年春天，我去了莎士比亞的故鄉，看見了大不列顛的天空和大西洋，與老朋友們重聚，並結識了些新朋友，又一次參觀了巴黎。
我沒有停止詩歌的寫作。詩歌的寫作對於我來說，就是我與時間，與我的人民的新生活的聯繫。當我寫下它們，我就活在了那韻律中，這旋律就喧響在我的國傢的英勇的歷史之中。我是幸福的，因為我生活在這個時代，並且目睹了那些發生着的史無前例的事件。
一九六五年。
【註】：
①葉甫帕托裏亞：烏剋蘭剋裏米亞半島城市，臨黑海。有海濱浴場。西面的邁納剋湖有醫療用泥塘，為濱海兒童泥療勝地。
②左先科（1894 - 1958）：蘇聯著名幽默作傢。。
逝世40周年紀念
紀念阿赫瑪托娃逝世40周年
都知道普希金是俄羅斯詩歌的太陽，那麽月亮呢？月亮是美麗的阿赫瑪托娃。
2006年的3月5日，是阿赫瑪托娃逝世40周年紀念日。1966年3月5日那個清晨不屬於月亮，阿赫瑪托娃因心肌梗塞突然告別了人世。
她77歲，活到這個歲數不容易了。生於1889年的阿赫瑪托娃，在她百年冥誕的1989年迎來了一個巨大的榮譽：聯合國教科文組織把這一年定為“阿赫瑪托娃年”，以紀念這位“把人帶進一個美好世界”的“詩歌語言的光輝大師”。
國內有不少版本的阿赫瑪托娃傳記作品，出版較早的是俄羅斯學者阿·帕甫洛夫斯基所著的《安·阿赫瑪托娃傳》；新近出版的是中國學者汪劍釗所著的《阿赫瑪托娃傳》，圖文並茂，在阿赫瑪托娃逝世40周年的時候與讀者見面。
年輕時的阿赫瑪托娃那麽美麗，是典型的俄羅斯美少女。14歲時，在那個聖誕節前夕，她結識了比她大3歲的詩人古米廖夫，古米廖夫瘋狂地愛上了她，並因求婚被她拒絶而試圖自殺過4次。最後，阿赫瑪托娃答應嫁給了他。1910年，阿赫瑪托娃與古米廖夫結婚，不久就迎來了“十月革命”。十月革命勝利後不久的1921年8月，古米廖夫被處决，罪名是不難想象的——“反革命陰謀罪”。阿赫瑪托娃自然受到了牽連。到了1930年代，她的兒子列夫兩次被捕，第1次在1935年，第2次在1938年，原因皆為莫須有，比如第2次被捕僅僅是因為他不承認自己父親有所謂的“歷史問題”。
白銀的月亮凝立如冰，白銀的月亮更是慘淡如水。就在那個令俄羅斯人不堪回首的大清洗時代，兒子的被捕，成就了詩人的最重要的代表作《安魂麯》。汪劍釗在《阿赫瑪托娃傳》自序裏提到的一個細節，瞬間就刻錄在我的大腦裏無法刪除：“當時，為了保存這部作品，詩人不得已像生活在荷馬時代一樣，寫完某些片段，便給自己最可靠的朋友朗誦，然後由後者背誦，在腦子裏‘存盤’，再毀棄手稿。”這就是沒有電腦的時代，被人腦所存盤的《安魂麯》！
那是一個怎樣的時代，那是一個怎樣的環境！那時，是不可能把詩歌當詩歌的，詩歌倒是能成為罪行的證據。《安魂麯》寫於1935年至1941年期間，在很長一段時間裏，《安魂麯》是一部衹在民間地下流傳的作品（直到1987年，纔得以全文發表在《十月》雜志上）。1956年5月，兒子列夫纔被釋放回傢；1957年4月1日，在列寧格勒，阿赫瑪托娃給《安魂麯》寫下非常精短的《代序》：
……我在列寧格勒的探監隊列中度過了十七個月。有一次，有人“認出”了我。當時，一個站在我身後的女人，嘴唇發青，當然她從未聽說過我的名字，她從我們都已習慣了的那種麻木狀態中蘇醒過來，湊近我的耳朵（那裏所有人都是低聲說話的）問道：“您能描寫這兒的情形嗎？”我就說道：“能。”於是，一絲曾經有過的淡淡笑意，從她的臉上掠過。
這個觸發阿赫瑪托娃構思創作《安魂麯》的細節，讓我們看到了俄羅斯人民的堅韌與偉大。一位普通的探監婦女，她並不瞭解阿赫瑪托娃，但她希冀着有人把那一切給寫下來！“這組詩歌不僅是一部關於自己的命運、自己兒子的命運的作品，而且也是一部關於整個民族背負十字架的苦難的作品。在這組詩中，阿赫瑪托娃不僅是列夫·古米廖夫的母親，而且是整個俄羅斯母親的代表”。俄羅斯作傢為什麽有着博大深厚的人道主義傳統？因為有着像黑土層那樣博大深厚的俄羅斯人民的孕育。
記得在“流亡者譯叢”總序中講述了一個小故事：蘇聯作傢格拉寧在參加為著名諷刺作傢左琴科恢復名譽的活動後，到檔案館查找左琴科在幾十年前一次批判會上發言的速記記錄。記錄在册但被人清掉了。誰幹的？不得而知。格拉寧說：“有一回，我自己也不知為什麽嚮一位認識的女速記員講了我多年來四處尋找那一份速記記錄，卻徒勞無益……過了大約兩個月，她打電話請我去。當我趕到時，她沒作任何解釋，遞給我一疊打字機打好的紙。這正是左琴科那個講話的速記記錄。”這就是從當時與會的一位女速記員那裏得到的！速記記錄上貼着一張字條：“對不起，有些地方記了個大概，我當時特別激動，眼淚影響了記錄。”沒有署名。
這是一個讓我每次讀“流亡者譯叢”都感動得熱淚盈眶的細節。一個普通婦女，她可能知道左琴科，也可能不知道左琴科。那個被批判的作傢左琴科，那時是“敵人的走狗”、“流氓”、“資産階級下流作傢”！然而，激動的眼淚裏寫滿了一位普通俄羅斯女性的誠實善良，那是博大深厚的人道主義精神所長年孕育的天性，因此，她把左琴科的講話“存盤”於自己的腦海，從而保存了一份寶貴的歷史見證。
1946年8月14日，當時的蘇共中央，作出了一項關於《星》與《列寧格勒》雜志的著名决議，决議嚴厲批判的作傢就是左琴科和阿赫瑪托娃：“阿赫瑪托娃是與我國人民背道而馳的、內容空洞、缺乏思想性的典型代表。她的詩歌充滿悲觀情緒和頽廢心理，表現出過時的沙竜詩歌的風格，停留在資産階級-貴族階級唯美主義和頽廢主義以及‘為藝術而藝術’這一理論的立場上，不願與本國人民步調一致，對我國的青年教育事業造成危害，因而不能為蘇聯文學界所容忍”。
文學界紅人、嚮來講話“義正詞嚴，高屋建瓴，勢如破竹”的日丹諾夫，在報告中發表了赫赫有名的評價，稱阿赫瑪托娃“不知是修女還是蕩婦，更確切地說，是集淫蕩與禱告於一身的蕩婦兼修女”！這是與判决她兒子一樣的冷漠嚴酷的判决詞，不給他人的尊嚴留一丁點空間，阿赫瑪托娃命中註定要下地獄。隨後的事情就可想而知了：《列寧格勒》雜志被責令停辦，《星》雜志編委會被改組；左琴科與阿赫瑪托娃被開除出蘇聯作協，作品不予刊登。早在1920年代中後期，阿赫瑪托娃曾被一度剝奪了發表作品的權利，她衹好開始研究普希金，用來維持生計，如今又被禁發作品，為了生活，她衹好開始翻譯詩歌。
在人民心中，阿赫瑪托娃是俄羅斯詩歌的月亮；在文藝官眼裏，她卻是“蕩婦兼修女”。然而歷史是很諷刺的，作為“白銀時代”的代表性詩人，阿赫瑪托娃在逝世後迎來了世界的聲譽。美國著名記者索爾茲伯裏這樣評價阿赫瑪托娃們：“詩人清楚他們的使命。那就是講真話。讓俄國人聽到真實情況，不管多麽可怕……一百年後，他們的聲音，他們的勇氣，他們的誠實將使俄國多麽為之驕傲！”
1966年3月5日，阿赫瑪托娃辭別了人世。在俄羅斯廣袤的大地上，靜靜的涅瓦河靜靜地流淌，靜靜的頓河靜靜地流淌……
Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935–40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work (1912–25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate, and remaining in Russia, acting as witness to the atrocities around her. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism.
Primary sources of information about Akhmatova's life are relatively scant, as war, revolution and the totalitarian regime caused much of the written record to be destroyed. For long periods she was in official disfavour and many of those who were close to her died in the aftermath of the revolution.
Early life and family
Akhmatova was born at Bolshoy Fontan, near the Black Sea port of Odessa. Her father, Andrey Antonovich Gorenko, a naval engineer, and her mother, Inna Erazmovna Stogova, were both descended from the Russian nobility. Akhmatova wrote,
"No one in my large family wrote poetry. But the first Russian woman poet, Anna Bunina, was the aunt of my grandfather Erasm Ivanovich Stogov. The Stogovs were modest landowners in the Mozhaisk region of the Moscow Province. They were moved here after the insurrection during the time of Posadnitsa Marfa. In Novgorod they had been a wealthier and more distinguished family. Khan Akhmat, my ancestor, was killed one night in his tent by a Russian killer-for-hire. Karamzin tells us that this marked the end of the Mongol yoke on Russia. [...] It was well known that this Akhmat was a descendant of Genghiz Khan. In the eighteenth century, one of the Akhmatov Princesses – Praskovia Yegorvna – married the rich and famous Simbirsk landowner Motovilov. Yegor Motovilov was my great-grandfather; his daughter, Anna Yegorovna, was my grandmother. She died when my mother was nine years old, and I was named in her honour. Several diamond rings and one emerald were made from her brooch. Though my fingers are thin, still her thimble didn't fit me."
Her family moved north to Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg when she was eleven months old. The family lived in a house on the corner of Shirokaya Street and Bezymyanny Lane; (the building is no longer there today), spending summers from age 7 to 13 in a dacha near Sevastopol. She studied at the Mariinskaya High School, moving to Kiev (1906–10) and finished her schooling there, after her parents separated in 1905. She went on to study law at Kiev University, leaving a year later to study literature in St Petersburg.
Akhmatova started writing poetry at the age of 11, and published in her late teens, inspired by the poets Nikolay Nekrasov, Racine, Pushkin, Baratynsky and the Symbolists; however, none of her juvenilia survives. Her sister Inna also wrote poetry though she did not pursue the practice and married shortly after high school. Akhmatova's father did not want to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name, so she chose to adopt her grandmother's distinctly Tatar surname 'Akhmatova' as a pen name.
Anna Akhmatova with her husband Nikolay Gumilev and son, Lev Gumilev, 1913
She met the young poet, Nikolay Gumilev on Christmas Eve 1903, who encouraged her to write and pursued her intensely, making numerous marriage proposals from 1905. At 17 years old, in his journal Sirius, she published her first poem which could be translated as On his hand are many shiny rings, (1907) signing it ‘Anna G.’ She soon became known in St Petersburg's artistic circles, regularly giving public readings. That year, she wrote unenthusiastically to a friend, “He has loved me for three years now, and I believe that it is my fate to be his wife. Whether or not I love him, I do not know, but it seems to me that I do.” She married Gumilev in Kiev in April 1910; however, none of Akhmatova’s family attended the wedding. The couple honeymooned in Paris, and there she met and befriended the Italian artist Modigliani.
In late 1910, she came together with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky to form the Guild of Poets. It promoted the idea of craft as the key to poetry rather than inspiration or mystery, taking themes of the concrete rather than the more ephemeral world of the Symbolists. Over time, they developed the influential Acmeist anti-symbolist school, concurrent with the growth of Imagism in Europe and America. From the first year of their marriage, Gumilyov began to chafe against its constraints. She wrote that he had "lost his passion" for her and by the end of that year he left on a six month trip to Africa. Akhmatova had "her first taste of fame", becoming renowned, not so much for her beauty, as her intense magnetism and allure, attracting the fascinated attention of a great many men, including the great and the good. She returned to visit Modigliani in Paris, where he created at least 20 paintings of her, including several nudes. She later began an affair with the celebrated Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, whose wife, Nadezhda, declared later, in her autobiography that she came to forgive Akhmatova for it in time. Akhmatova's son, Lev, was born in 1912, and would go on to become a renowned Neo-Eurasianist historian.
Silver Age
Anna Akhmatova in 1914
In 1912, the Guild of Poets published her book of verse Evening (Vecher) – the first of five in nine years. [Notes 1] The small edition of 500 copies quickly sold out and she received around a dozen positive notices in the literary press. She exercised a strong selectivity for the pieces – including only 35 of the 200 poems she had written by the end of 1911. (She noted that Song of the Last Meeting, dated 29 September 1911, was her 200th poem). The book secured her reputation as a new and striking young writer, the poems Grey-eyed king, In the Forest, Over the Water and I don’t need my legs anymore making her famous. She later wrote "These naïve poems by a frivolous girl for some reason were reprinted thirteen times [...] And they came out in several translations. The girl herself (as far as I recall) did not foresee such a fate for them and used to hide the issues of the journals in which they were first published under the sofa cushions".
Her second collection, The Rosary (or Beads – Chetki) appeared in March 1914 and firmly established her as one of the most popular and sought after poets of the day.[Notes 2] Thousands of women composed poems "in honour of Akhmatova", mimicking her style and prompting Akhmatova to exclaim: "I taught our women how to speak, but don't know how to make them silent". Her aristocratic manners and artistic integrity won her the titles "Queen of the Neva" and "Soul of the Silver Age," as the period came to be known in the history of Russian poetry. In Poem Without a Hero, the longest and one of the best known of her works, written many decades later, she would recall this as a blessed time of her life. [Notes 3] She became close friends with Boris Pasternak (who, though married, proposed to her many times) and rumours began to circulate that she was having an affair with influential lyrical poet Alexander Blok. In July 1914, Akhmatova wrote “Frightening times are approaching/ Soon fresh graves will cover the land"; on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia, marking the start of "the dark storm" of world war, civil war, revolution and totalitarian repression for Russia. The Silver Age came to a close.
Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaya, 1914
Akhmatova had a relationship with the mosaic artist and poet Boris Anrep; many of her poems in the period are about him and he in turn created mosaics in which she is featured.[Notes 4][Notes 5] She selected poems for her third collection Belaya Staya (White Flock) in 1917, [Notes 6] a volume which poet and critic Joseph Brodsky later described as writing of personal lyricism tinged with the “note of controlled terror”. She later came to be memorialised by his description of her as "the keening muse". Essayist John Bayley describes her writing at this time as "grim, spare and laconic". In February 1917, the revolution started in Petersburg (then named Petrograd); soldiers fired on marching protestors, and others mutinied. They looked to a past in which the future was "rotting". In a city without electricity or sewage service, with little water or food, they faced starvation and sickness. Her friends died around her and others left in droves for safer havens in Europe and America, including Anrep, who escaped to England. She had the option to leave, and considered it for a time, but chose to stay and was proud of her decision to remain. That summer she wrote:
You are a traitor, and for a green island,
Have betrayed, yes, betrayed your native
Land,
Abandoned all our songs and sacred
Icons,
And the pine tree over a quiet lake. (From Green Island. Trans. Jane Kenyon)
She wrote of her own temptation to leave:
A voice came to me. It called out comfortingly.
It said, "Come here,
Leave your deaf and sinful land,
Leave Russia forever,
I will wash the blood from your hands,
Root out the black shame from your heart,
[...] calmly and indifferently,
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that my sorrowing spint
Would not be stained by those shameful words. (From When in suicidal anguish (Trans. Jane Kenyon)
At the height of Akhmatova's fame, in 1918, she divorced her husband and that same year, though many of her friends considered it a mistake, Akhmatova married prominent Assyriologist and poet Vladimir Shilejko. She later said “I felt so filthy. I thought it would be like a cleansing, like going to a convent, knowing you are going to lose your freedom.” She began affairs with theatre director Mikhail Zimmerman and composer Arthur Lourié, who set many of her poems to music.
The accursed year
In 1921, Akhmatova's former husband Nikolay Gumilyov was prosecuted for his alleged role in a monarchist anti-Bolshevik conspiracy and on 25 August was shot along with 61 others. According to the historian Rayfield, the murder of Gumilev was part of the state response to the Kronstadt Rebellion. The Cheka (secret police) blamed the rebellion on Petrograd's intellectuals, prompting the senior Cheka officer Agranov to forcibly extract the names of 'conspirators', from an imprisoned professor, guaranteeing them amnesty from execution. Agranov's guarantee proved to be meaningless. He sentenced dozens of the named persons to death, including Gumilev. Gorky and others appealed for leniency, but by the time Lenin agreed to several pardons, the condemned had been shot. Within a few days of his death, Akhmatova wrote:
Terror fingers all things in the dark,
Leads moonlight to the axe.
There's an ominous knock behind the
wall:
A ghost, a thief or a rat...
Anna Akhmatova in 1950
The murders had a powerful effect on the Russian intelligentsia, destroying the Acmeist poetry group, and placing a stigma on Akhmatova and her son Lev (by Gumilev). Lev's later arrest in the purges and terrors of the 1930s was based on being his father's son. From a new Marxist perspective, Akhmatova's poetry was deemed to represent an introspective "bourgeois aesthetic", reflecting only trivial "female" preoccupations, not in keeping with these new revolutionary politics of the time. She was roundly attacked by the state, by former supporters and friends, and seen to be an anachronism. During what she termed "The Vegetarian Years", Akhmatova's work was unofficially banned by a party resolution of 1925 and she found it hard to publish, though she didn't stop writing poetry. She made acclaimed translations of works by Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi and pursued academic work on Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. She worked as a critic and essayist, though many critics and readers both within and outside USSR concluded she had died. She had little food and almost no money; her son was denied access to study at academic institutions by dint of his parents' alleged anti-state activities. The impact of the nation-wide repression and purges had a decimating effect on her St Petersburg circle of friends, artists and intellectuals. Her close friend and fellow poet Mandelstam was deported and then sentenced to a Gulag labour camp, where he would die. Akhmatova narrowly escaped arrest, though her son Lev was imprisoned on numerous occasions by the Stalinist regime, accused of counter-revolutionary activity. She would often queue for hours to deliver him food packages and plead on his behalf. She describes standing outside a stone prison:
"One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
" 'Can you describe this?'
"And I said: 'I can.'
"Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face."
Akhmatova wrote that by 1935 every time she went to see someone off at the train station as they went into exile, she'd find herself greeting friends at every step as so many of St Petersburg's intellectual and cultural figures would be leaving on the same train. In her poetry circles Mayakovsky and Esenin committed suicide and Akhmatova's sister poet Marina Tsvetaeva would follow them in 1941, after returning from exile.
Akhmatova married an art scholar and lifelong friend, Nikolai Punin, whom she stayed with until 1935. He too was repeatedly taken into custody and died in the Gulag in 1953.[Notes 7] Her tragic cycle Requiem documents her personal experience of this time; as she writes, "one hundred million voices shout" through her "tortured mouth".
Seventeen months I've pleaded
for you to come home.
Flung myself at the hangman’s feet.
My terror, oh my son.
And I can’t understand.
Now all’s eternal confusion.
Who’s beast, and who’s man?
How long till execution?
(from Requiem. Trans. A.S. Kline, 2005).
From 1939: The thaw
Anna Akhmatova
In 1939, Stalin approved the publication of one volume of poetry, From Six Books, however the collection was withdrawn and pulped after only a few months. In 1993, it was revealed that the authorities had bugged her flat and kept her under constant surveillance, keeping detailed files on her from this time, accruing some 900 pages of "denunciations, reports of phone taps, quotations from writings, confessions of those close to her". Although officially stifled, Akhmatova's work continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden, passed and read in the gulags. Akhmatova's close friend and chronicler Lydia Chukovskaya described how writers working to keep poetic messages alive used various strategies. A small trusted circle would, for example, memorise each others' works and circulate them only by oral means. She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove. The poems were carefully disseminated in this way, however it is likely that many complied in this manner were lost. "It was like a ritual," Chukovskaya wrote. "Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter."
During World War II, Akhmatova witnessed the 900 day Siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg). In 1940, Akhmatova started her Poem without a Hero, finishing a first draft in Tashkent, but working on "The Poem" for twenty years and considering it to be the major work of her life, dedicating it to "the memory of its first audience – my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad during the siege". She was evacuated to Chistopol in spring of 1942 and then to greener, safer Tashkent in Uzbekistan, along with other artists, such as Shostakovitch. During her time away she became seriously ill with typhus (she had suffered from severe bronchitis and tuberculosis as a young woman). On returning to Leningrad in May 1944, she writes of how disturbed she was to find "a terrible ghost that pretended to be my city".
If a gag should blind my tortured mouth,
through which a hundred million people shout,
then let them pray for me, as I do pray
for them
“
”
From Requiem (1940).
Trans. Kunitz and Hayward
She regularly read to soldiers in the military hospitals and on the front line; indeed, her later pieces seem to be the voice of those who had struggled and the many she has outlived. She moved away from romantic themes towards a more diverse, complex and philosophical body of work and some of her more patriotic poems found their way to the front pages of Pravda. She was condemned for a visit by the liberal, western, Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1946, and Official Andrei Zhdanov publicly labelled her "half harlot, half nun", her work "the poetry of an overwrought, upper-class lady", her work the product of "eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference". He banned her poems from publication in the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, accusing her of poisoning the minds of Soviet youth. Her surveillance was increased and she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. Berlin described his visit to her flat: It was very barely furnished—virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away—looted or sold—during the siege.... A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness.
Akhmatova's son Lev was arrested again at the end of 1949 and sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian prison camp. She spent much of the next years trying to ensure his release, to this end, and for the first time, she published overtly propagandist poetry, “In Praise of Peace,” in the magazine Ogoniok, openly supporting Stalin and his regime. Lev remained in the camps until 1956, well after Stalin's death, his final release potentially aided by his mother's concerted efforts. Bayley suggests that her period of pro-Stalinist work may also have saved her own life; notably however, Akhmatova never acknowledged these pieces in her official corpus. Akhmatova's stature among Soviet poets was slowly conceded by party officials, her name no longer cited in only scathing contexts and she was readmitted to Union of Writers in 1951, being fully recognised again following Stalin's death in 1953. With the press still heavily controlled and censored under Nikita Khrushchev, a translation by Akhmatova was praised in a public review in 1955, and her own poems began to re-appear in 1956. In this year Lev was released from the camps, embittered, believing that his mother cared more about her poetry than her son and that she had not worked hard for his release. Akhmatova's status was confirmed by 1958, with the publication of Stikhotvoreniya (Poems) and then Stikhotvoreniya 1909–1960 (Poems: 1909–1960) in 1961. Beg vremeni (The flight of time), collected works 1909–1965, published in 1965, was the most complete volume of her works in her lifetime, though the long damning poem Requiem, condemning the Stalinist purges, was conspicuously absent. Isaiah Berlin predicted at the time that it could never be published in the Soviet Union.
Last year
A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.
“
”
A land not mine 1964 (Trans. Jane Kenyon)
During the last years of her life she continued to live with the Punin family in Leningrad, still translating, researching Pushkin and writing her own poetry. Though still censored, she was concerned to re-construct work that had been destroyed or suppressed during the purges or which had posed a threat to the life of her son in the camps, such as the lost, semi-autobiographical play Enûma Elish. [Notes 8] She worked on her official memoirs, planned novels and worked on her epic Poem without a hero, 20 years in the writing.
Akhmatova was widely honoured in USSR and the West. In 1962 she was visited by Robert Frost; Isaiah Berlin tried to visit her again, but she refused him, worried that her son might be re-arrested due to family association with the ideologically suspect western philosopher. She inspired and advised a large circle of key young Soviet writers. Her dacha in Komarovo was frequented by such poets as Yevgeny Rein and Joseph Brodsky, whom she mentored. Brodsky, arrested in 1963 and interned for social parasitism, would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987) and become Poet Laureate (1991) as an exile in the US. As one of the last remaining major poets of the Silver Age, she was newly acclaimed by the Soviet authorities as a fine and loyal representative of their country and permitted to travel. At the same time, by virtue of works such as Requiem, Akhmatova was being hailed at home and abroad as an unofficial leader of the dissident movement, and reinforcing this image herself. She was becoming representative of both Russias, more popular in the 1960s than she had ever been before the revolution, this reputation only continuing to grow after her death. For her 75th birthday in 1964, new collections of her verse were published.
Anna Ahmatova's grave, St Petersburg
Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when she was allowed to travel to Sicily and England, in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University, accompanied by her life-long friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya. Akhmatova's Requiem in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963, the whole work not published within USSR until 1987. Her long poem The Way of All the Earth or Woman of Kitezh (Kitezhanka) was published in complete form in 1965.
In November 1965, soon after her Oxford visit, Akhmatova suffered a heart attack and was hospitalised. She was moved to a sanatorium in Moscow in the spring of 1966 and died of heart failure on March 5, at the age of 76. Thousands attended the two memorial ceremonies which were held in Moscow and in Leningrad. After being displayed in an open coffin, she was interred at Komarovo Cemetery in St Petersburg.
Isaiah Berlin described the impact of her life, as he saw it:
The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure [...] not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in [the Twentieth] century.
In 1988, to celebrate what would have been Akhmatova's 100th birthday, the University of Harvard held an international conference on her life and work. Today her work may be explored at the Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum in St Petersburg.
Work and theme
Akhmatova joined the Acmeist group of poets in 1910 with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky, working in response to the Symbolist school, concurrent with the growth of Imagism in Europe and America. It promoted the use craft and rigorous poetic form over mysticism or spiritual in-roads to composition, favouring the concrete over the ephemeral. Akhmatova modelled its principles of writing with clarity, simplicity, and disciplined form. Her first collections Evening ( 1912 ) and Rosary ( 1914 ) received wide critical acclaim and made her famous from the start of her career. They contained brief, psychologically taut pieces, acclaimed for their classical diction, telling details, and the skilful use of colour. Evening and her next four books were mostly lyric miniatures on the theme of love, shot through with sadness. Her early poems usually picture a man and a woman involved in the most poignant, ambiguous moment of their relationship, much imitated and later parodied by Nabokov and others. Critic Roberta Reeder notes that the early poems always attracted large numbers of admirers: "For Akhmatova was able to capture and convey the vast range of evolving emotions experienced in a love affair, from the first thrill of meeting, to a deepening love contending with hatred, and eventually to violent destructive passion or total indifference. But [...] her poetry marks a radical break with the erudite, ornate style and the mystical representation of love so typical of poets like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Her lyrics are composed of short fragments of simple speech that do not form a logical coherent pattern. Instead, they reflect the way we actually think, the links between the images are emotional, and simple everyday objects are charged with psychological associations. Like Alexander Pushkin, who was her model in many ways, Akhmatova was intent on conveying worlds of meaning through precise details."
But the point i
That we are all condemned to know
What it means not to sleep for three years,
What it means to find out in the morning
About those who have perished in the night.
“
”
She often complained that the critics "walled her in" to their perception of her work in the early years of romantic passion, despite major changes of theme in the later years of The Terror. This was mainly due to the secret nature of her work after the public and critical effusion over her first volumes. The risks during the purges were very great. Many of her close friends and family were exiled, imprisoned or shot; her son was under constant threat of arrest, she was often under close surveillance. Following artistic repression and public condemnation by the state in the 1920s, many within literary and public circles, at home and abroad, thought she had died. Her readership generally didn't know her later opus, the railing passion of Requiem or Poem without a Hero and her other scathing works, which were shared only with a very trusted few or circulated in secret by word of mouth (samizdat).
Between 1935 and 1940 Akhmatova composed, worked and reworked the long poem Requiem in secret, a lyrical cycle of lamentation and witness, depicting the suffering of the common people under Soviet terror. She carried it with her as she worked and lived in towns and cities across the Soviet Union. It was conspicuously absent from her collected works, given its explicit condemnation of the purges. The work in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963, the whole work not published within USSR until 1987. It consists of ten numbered poems that examine a series of emotional states, exploring suffering, despair, devotion, rather than a clear narrative. Biblical themes such as Christ's crucifixion and the devastation of Mary, Mother of Jesus and Mary Magdelene, reflect the ravaging of Russia, particularly witnessing the harrowing of women in the 1930s. It represented, to some degree, a rejection of her own earlier romantic work as she took on the public role as chronicler of the Terror. This is a role she holds to this day.
Her essays on Pushkin and Poem Without a Hero, her longest work, were only published after her death. This long poem, composed between 1940 and 1965, is often critically regarded as her best work and also one of the finest poems of the twentieth century. It offers a complex analysis of the times she lived though and her relationship with them, including her significant meeting with Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) in 1945. Her talent in composition and translation is evidenced in her fine translations of the works of poets writing in French, English, Italian, Armenian, and Korean.
Honour
1964 Etna-Taormina prize
1965 honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965.
Selected poetry collection
Published by Akhmatova
1912 Vecher/Вечер (Evening).[Notes 1]
1914 Chetki (Rosary or literally Beads)[Notes 2]
1917 Belaya Staya (White flock)[Notes 9]
1921 Podorozhnik (Wayside grass / Plantain). 60 pages, 1000 copies published. [Notes 10]
1921 Anno Domini MCMXXI[Notes 6]
Reed – 2 Volume Selected Poems (1924–1926) was compiled but never published.
Uneven – compiled but never published.
1940 From Six Books (Publication suspended shortly after release, copies pulped).[Notes 11]
1943 Izbrannoe Stikhi (Selections of poetry) Tashkent, government edited.[Notes 12]
Iva not separately published[Notes 13]
Sed’maya kniga (Seventh book) – not separately published;[Notes 13]
1958 Stikhotvoreniya (Poems) (25,000 copies)
1961 Stikhotvoreniya 1909–1960 (Poems: 1909–1960)
1965 Beg vremeni (The flight of time Collected works 1909–1965)[Notes 13]
Later edition
1967 Poems of Akhmatova. Ed. and Trans. Stanley Kunitz, Boston
1976 Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems. D.M. Thomas Penguin Book
1985 Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova – Trans. Jane Kenyon; Eighties Press and Ally Press ISBN 0-915408-30-9
1988 Selected Poems Trans. Richard McKane; Bloodaxe Books Ltd; ISBN 1-85224-063-6
2000 The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova Trans. Judith Hemschemeyer.Ed. Roberta Reeder; Zephyr Press; ISBN 0-939010-27-5
2004 The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory (Annals of Communism). Trans. Nancy Anderson. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10377-8
2006 Selected Poems Trans D. M. Thomas; Penguin Classics; ISBN 0-14-042464-4
2009 Selected Poems Trans. Walter Arndt; Overlook TP; ISBN 0-88233-180-9