LitLetter 155: Anna Akhmatova's Life and Poetry
This Cruel Age
Pablo Neruda is reputed to have written the saddest poem ever; you can read it here. It is an amazing poem, and the saddest ever? I have thought not, largely because it is about discarded love, and there are sadder things to write about.
Then I discovered this poem, by Anna Akhmatova. This poem is a candidate for the saddest ever poem.
This Cruel Age has Deflected me… by Anna Akhmatova
This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from its course.
strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I’ve missed;
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.
Here in the only city I can claim,
where I could sleepwalk and not lose my way,
how many foreign skylines I can dream,
Not to be witnessed through my tears.
And how many verses I have failed to write!
Their secret chorus stalks me
close behind. One day, perhaps,
they’ll strangle me.
I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I’d rather not recall just now.
And a certain woman
has usurped my place
and bears my rightful name,
leaving a nickname for my use,
with which I’ve done the best I could.
The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
And contemplate the person I am,
I should know at last what envy is.
                   Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward
You see this woman has lost everything she could ever have legitimately hoped for – and can count the losses. Please judge the sadness for yourself.
Born Anna Gorenko in 1889 to a wealthy St Petersburg family, it was Anna’s misfortune to reach a creative zenith synchronous with the awful political and social events in Russia in the 20th century. Her father recommended a pseudonym for a female poetry writer, and she chose Akhmatova to put her name foremost alphabetically in indexes of anthologies. Having published three volumes of poems by 1920 – to great acclaim – she was prohibited from publishing again up to her death in 1966. The Russian revolution of 1917, WW2, the Stalin era, and the formation of the USSR, my God, what a sequence.
Joseph Brodsky writes: ‘For a poet of Akhmatova’s stature this meant being buried alive, with a couple of slabs marking the mound’. And her personal losses were enormous. Her first husband, Nicolai Gumilyov, was executed by the state’s security forces, allegedly on Lenin’s direct orders. Nearly her entire circle of friends and associates were murdered in the next 15 years, her son spent 20 years in a Siberian gulag, and her third husband, Nikolai Punin, also died in prison.
The only way she could maintain a poetic practice was to write poetry and memorise it, destroying all notes. Anna would then quietly recite the poem to a close group of about seven people who would also memorise the poem, and asked regularly to recount the poem by Anna. Needless to say, people were executed for crimes much more trivial than this.
Brodsky goes on: ‘At certain periods of history only poetry is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise could not be retained by the mind. In that sense the whole nation to up the pen name of Akhmatova. Thus explaining her popularity and enabling her to speak for the nation.’
The spare nature of her language, beautifully captured by the translators, Stanley Kunitz (himself a major poet) and Max Hayward, is powerful beyond any words which might superficially be more demonstrative. The nobility and restraint of her lines are repeated elsewhere in her work which is almost classical in its ‘pared-down-ness’.
In our age of individuation and transparency it is perhaps impossible to achieve a complete empathy with the suffering of a witness like Anna Akhmatova. Have we lost the power to feel? The poem here details all the things she knows she has missed, things that were even then commonplace in the United States, say, and those parts of Europe not under the already doomed blanket of the mindless oppression of the USSR. And all the poetry she would have otherwise written, bringing her delicate filters and language to subjects she could discuss without fear of ostracism and death as punishment. Stunning are the last lines here where Anna creates an avatar for herself. Another woman who has usurped her place and taken her rightful name, leaving her with only a nickname, and a fate of being buried in a grave that does not bear her name. This, this simulated parody of her life, this can cause her to know the meaning of envy.
Is it any atonement, any reparation at all, that she will be known historically for what she really was, really wrote? We know her truth now, her values and her integrity, her dignity and her strength.
After her death, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin who was a friend said this: ‘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 [remarkable] figure not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in the 20th century.’