THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNA AKHMATOVA
Edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer
Somerville, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 1990
Volume 1, 650 pp.; volume 2,871 pp.; $85 for the set.
Anna Akhmatova, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, was by temperament destined to write solely of romantic love and the love of God. But as Napoleon once remarked, in modern times “politics is destiny,” and Akhmatova lived in Russia, where politics-as-destiny was as mighty as a tsunami and as abrupt as a firing squad. She, like tens of millions of other Russian women, was to suffer horribly at the hands of Stalin and the secret police - not because she was a poet, not because she was a person of virtue and heart, but because such was the will of the Kremlin. In one poem she speaks of herself as a river deflected from its true course by the sternness of her era. It is the triumph of her spirit that she not only remained uncrushed but could extend the love she initially felt only for the beloved to all of suffering Russian humanity.
Born Anna Gorenko in 1889, she published her first book of poetry in 1912 at the age of twenty-three. Early on she knew with electrifying certainty that she was a poet. Her father thought this profession would do nothing but disgrace the family name. Her response was to take on the last name of her maternal grandmother, a Tatar. Thus, Anna Akhmatova was born in an act of self-naming, nothing could be more appropriate for a poet whose certainty would only grow more adamant and secure.
Akhmatova was an immediate hit in the art and literary worlds of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, a city feverish with art, bohemian love affairs, and a sense of doom that was to prove all too accurate. She was talented, spirited, and beautiful. Painters of every school from realistic to Cubistic delighted in doing her portrait, and their professional awe of her beauty can be felt in their brush strokes. One line drawing out of the many that Modigliani did of her somehow survived all the chaos and slaughter Russia endured in this century.
But that was all still in the future; the First World War had yet to be stumbled into, and all Europe was blossoming in a time of open minds and open borders - La Belle Époque, the beautiful age. The modern mind was being created by men like Einstein and Picasso, and it is odd to think that relativity and Cubism came before World War I, which is not largely forgotten. Even Russia was modernizing. The czar had ceded some of his absolute power to a parliament; factories and railroads were being built, and Russia had four great poets still in their youth. Akhmatova was one of them.
The previous generation of Russian poets had been dominated by the mystical Symbolists, who saw everything in nature as a reflection, a shadow, a signal from some higher realm of being. That wasn't for Akhmatova. She naturally gravitated toward a small school of poets, the Acmeists, whose goal was to see the world as clearly as Adam had on the first day of creation. To them life was experience, not allegory. Where the Symbolists had favored florid imagery and incantatory rhythm, the Acmeists were clean and clear; their lines were bare, with the ornament of simile used very sparingly. Essentially, Akhmatova would stick
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