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Anna Akhmatova: In Memoriam
Author(s): Wladimir Weidle

Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 11-22
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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Anna Akhmatova:
In Memoriam*
By Wladimir Weidle
I REMEMBER her bent over Blok's coffin in the church of

Smolensk cemetery bidding her last farewell.
Prinesli my Smolenskoi Zastupnitse
Prinesli Presviatoi Bogoroditse
Na rukakh vo grobe serebrianom ...
We have brought [him] to Our Lady of Smolensk

We have brought [him] to the most holy mother of God,
Carried on our shoulders in a silver casket ...
Many years have passed, and Akhmatova too is dead and

buried. "There is no one left." It is we who are saying this, we
her contemporaries, almost to the year. We know, of course, that
such a statement requires qualifications, but we must leave this
task to others. Her words contain enough truth for us that future
generations will forgive us and will understand our feelings.
Every time one of our poets dies we share his death, and when
we are gone it will be as though we had died with him.
Much time will pass until there will come another period for
Russian poetry of a significance comparable with the one sig-
naled by Blok's funeral and more definitively even by the work
of Akhmatova. Although she survived Blok by forty-five years
she was only nine years younger than he. Her poetry was clearly
defined from the very start, but even through her last decades it
contained much that was new, unexpected and significant. Yet
her voice as it was heard in her first book of verse, published in
'Translated from the Russian by D. von Mohrenschildt and Erika Renon.
The original article appeared in Vestnik Russkogo Studencheskogo Khristiians-
kogo Dvizheniia. Paris, 1966. No. 80. Pp. 38-45. [Ed.].
11
12 The Russian Review
1912, remained the same throughout

to it then were aware of its pervading uniqueness. It was her
voice and only hers. The timbre, the intonation, the intimate
conversational quality were unprecedented in Russian poetry.
It was a feminine voice and the themes of her poems were largely
feminine, even girlish. Their lyricism was so immediate, so per-
sonal that many a line could have been extracted from letters or
diaries. Those who felt this were not mistaken; they were amazed
and delighted precisely by the contrast between this intimacy of
tone and the severe cast of the poetic diction which did not allow
for any excess of emotions or any verbosity whatsoever. In the
late twenties Andre Levinson very rashly (it is true it was for
French readers, but why mislead them?) compared Anna Akh-
matova with Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, a poet who, though
not a stranger to her art, was constantly sitting with her long
flowing hair in front of a mirror, writing by candlelight her love
letter, as it were, to Onegin--a very long letter to a very operatic
Onegin. Akhmatova from the very beginning avoided confes-
sions, incantations, and explicit soul-searching. Her lyrical poems
were dramatic but precisely because she worked without the
use of "expositions." She wrote only the last act and avoided all
melodrama. It is rather Christina Rosetti of whom she reminds
us from a distance. There is no resemblance at all between her
and the other two famous Russian poetesses who preceded her.
The poetry of Carolina Pavlova was masculine and most of the
time rather bookish, and Zinaida Gippius invariably referred to
herself in her poetry as to a man, stamping out the poetess with-
in herself in order to become a poet (and a very remarkable
one). Akhmatova, however, who became one of the very best
Russian poets, remained essentially a woman and a poetess.
"Became" is not altogether the appropriate word: from the be-
ginning her voice was her very own; she did not have to strive
very hard for finding her own way, for being herself. In her first
volume of verse there is a poem, "Evening Room," in which one
finds Annensky's chrysanthemums and dahlias combined with
Anna Akhmatova: In Memoriam 13
Kuzmin's spinets, sachets and Sevre statuettes. (K

way, wrote the introduction to Akhmatova's first b
did not take much from either him or even Annensky: the
chrysanthemums and sachets were soon discarded if they could
not be transformed. In the same volume appears "<The Grey-
Eyed King," a story that normally would grow into a romantic,
possibly Scandinavian, ballad of two hundred lines at least; she
condensed it with great mastery into seven couplets. Another
poem, "The Fisherman," is of such precision in outline, every
word placed with such perfect marksmanship, that it could have
served Gumilev as a manifesto for the school of Akmeism. Ak-
meism was actually more closely akin to Akhmatova's personal
gift than to his, even though she was by no means responsible for
its slightly ridiculous name.
One of her earliest poems (written in 1909) begins in an

amazingly plain, straightforward and (no doubt deliberately)
prosaic" way:
Podushka uzhe goriacha
S obeikh storon.....
The pillow is already hot

On both sides. ...
In 1911 she wrote the famous lines:

la na pravuiu ruku nadela
Perchatku s levoi ruki
[In all my anguish] I was drawing

My left-hand glove upon my right.
These are examples of the dramatic quality of Alkmatova's lyr-

ics. It is not so much the words in themselves which are im-
pressive but he meaning that lies behind them and which is
rendered with the greatest possible succinctness and precision.
She attains the most highly condensed lyricism by using thor-
oughly commonplace words, but words inseparably connected
with the sound and intonation of the verse line. Take for in-
stance "The Funeral":
Ia mesta ishchu dlia mogily.

Ne znaesh Ii, gde svetlei?
I am looking for a gravesite.

Do you know where there is more light?
Or the last line in the same poem:

I u nog goluboi priboi.
And at my feet a blue wave.
In the Russian original repetition of sounds dictated (perhaps

subconsciously) the choice of words which, however, retain
their primary and actual meaning.
Thus already in her first book of verse we distinctly notice the

two characteristics of her approach to poetry whose combination
and inter-relationship accounts for the gradual evolvement of
her lyrical style. A striking illustration is the following quatrain
which became famous immediately upon publication of her
second book of poetry in 1913.
Zvenela muzyka v sadu
Takim nevyrazimym gorem.
Svezho i ostro pakhli morem
Na blude ustritsy vo ldu.
The strain of music in the garden
Was full of of such inexpressible grief.
A fresh and pungent smell of the sea
Came from oysters on a dish of ice.1
The last two lines, although less dramatic, are as directly de-
scriptive of a real situation as the previously quoted lines about
the pillow and the glove. The first two lines live by the music,
the lyrical intonation of the Russian words for "music" and for
"inexpressible," a word which, by the way, was substituted for
the original "insufferable." The last two lines attracted more
attention than did the first two lines and were considered as
exemplifying the poetics of Akmeism whose patron, although he
did not always follow its precepts, was Gumilev. But for Akhma-
1Dimitri Obolensky (Ed.), The Penguin Book of Russian Verse. Harmonds-
worth, Penguin Books, 1962, p. 315.
tova all four lines formed an organic whole, were ch

and could not in fact be separated. Moreover, she was too au-
thentic a poet to be concerned with specific "means" as such, or
with the reactions of others. She was imitated, of course, but this
did not interest her. Actually, her disciples produced better
poems than those of Gumilev. This may be of importance for
literary historians but it did not really matter to Akhmatova who
was not concerned with literary leadership and who valued
those poets most who were least like herself.
She was indeed a poet from childhood to the end of her days,
in a vital way, having a full stake in life, i.e., standing in it and
not above it, or if "above" then only in a certain sense but never
isolating herself from life. Blok lived this way even more so, but
not all the Russian poets did, not even some of the important
ones. It would be wrong to assume, however, that she regarded
everything in life merely as the raw material for creating "sono-
rous singing verses as Bryusov somewhat vulgarly put it. Such
an attitude toward life and poetry would satisfy only a very
insignificant poet. Akhmatova did not look at life as at something
instrumental for producing poetry. She conceived of life, and
not only of her own life, as infused by poetry and inseparable
from it. The poems in her first two books, "Evening"" ("Vecher")
and "Rosary" ("Chetki"), may not as yet indicate this, but her
subsequent poems do. Her dramatic and incisive lyricism not
only allowed her to go beyond the limits of her own self but
actually required it and demanded that she live in and for others:
"We have aged one hundred years, and this

Happened within a single year."
It was not Akhmatova who started the war and she did not go
to war, but in "The White Flock" ("Belaia staiad) published in
1916, we get the impact of the beginning of the war. Two other
war poems, equally worth mentioning, which were published in
1914, are not about herself:
Ne byvat' tebe v zhyvykh

So segu ne vstat,
Dvadtsat' vosem' shtykovykh,
Ognestrelrnykh piat'.
Gorkuiu obnovushku
Drugu shila ia.
Lubit, lubit krovushku
Russkaia zemlia.
Not for you to be among the living

Or to rise from the snow,
Twenty-eight bayonet stabs driven,
Five bullet holes.
Friend, I stitched with bitter hand

Your last soldier's frock.
Russia, my beloved land
Loves the taste of blood.2
And the following poem, as perfect as the first above, is not

about her son:
Dia togo 1' tebia nosila
Ia kagda-to na rukakh,
Dio togo 1' soa sila
V golubykh tvoikh glozakhl
Vyros stroinyi i vysokii,
Pesni pei, maderu pil,
K Anatolii dalekoi
Minonosets svoi vtodil.
Na Malakhovom Kurgane
Ofitsera rasstreliali.
Bez nedeli dvotsat' let
On gliadel na Bozhii svet.
Was it for this that I carried

You in my arms long ago,
Was it for this that strength and courage
Set your blue eyes aglow!
2This was dated 1914 but it appears that it was not published before "Anno
Domini." There is no reference to it in the 1st volume of Akhmatova's Collected
Works, edited by Gleb Struve and Boris Filipof, and it may have been dated
incorrectly. The words "lubit, lubit krovushku Russkaia zemlia" would point
to a later date. In the Berlin edition of 'Anno Domini" (Petersburg, 1923)
no date is given. The following poem is dated 1918.
You grew up so tall and slender,

You sang, drank Madeira wine,
Then took your torpedo boat yonder
To the far Anatolian shoreline.
On the mount of Malakhov

Shots cut this officer's life off.
Not even twenty years were his
To see God's world with all its bliss.
To expatiate about these poems is superfluous. It is their ap-

propriateness to the subject matter which accounts for their per-
fection. Still, how melodious and ethereal the line "Anatolii
dalekoi" followed a little further on by a slant rhyme which goes
straight to the heart. And how precise the choice of "Madeira,"
how poignant for those who remember that it was indeed Ma-
deira for which the Russian naval officers had a special liking.
So we have here the music of words as well as the things them-
selves, the iced oysters and the wrong-handed glove, but on a
larger scale, the poet's scope has widened and now includes
more than her personal life. As of July 20, 1914, Akhmatova,
once and for all, made everything that happened in Russia part
of her own life.
Eshche na zapade zemnoe solntse svetit,

I krovli gorodov v ego luchakh blestiat,
A zdes' uzh belaia doma krestami metit
I klichet voronov, i vorony letiat.
While in the West the setting sun caresses

The city roofs and trims them with bright pall,
Our death-tinged houses here are marked with crosses
And ravens fly, and ravens heed the call.
I met Anna Akhmatova two years after these lines were writ-
ten and I visited her rather frequently in 1923 and during the
first part of the following year. She had accepted the crosses,
the ravens, the famine, the terror, the fate of Blok, the fate of
Gumilev, the mockery of holy things and the all-pervasive hypoc-
risy. She accepted all of this as one accepts suffering and death,
but she did not give in to anything. Her judgment about what
had happened and what was happening was always implied;

there was no need to talk about it.
Before my departure from Russia, Anna Andreevna asked me
to find out whether the Russian gymnasium in Paris would ac-
cept her son if she should decide to send him to Paris. I did not
make the inquiries because I did not believe in this enterprise,
and I was afraid to write to her about it, for fear of endangering
her. She herself had no intention of leaving. Her mind was made
up and no one could change it, although many tried. Her friends
one after the other had left or were getting ready to leave. Some
of them were planning to cross the frontier clandestinely and
offered to smuggle her out too. The same offer came from several
of those who were already abroad. She told me about this with
a smile. I personally never tried to persuade her to leave, and
this not only because of shyness. I would not have suggested it
even if I had been older in years and a closer friend of hers. I
felt that she would stay on, and that it was necessary for her to
do so. I would not have been able to explain the reason at the
time, although I vaguely felt it. It was her poetry that required
her staying. Her yet unborn poems could only be born by direct
contact with the lives of others, with all the lives in the land
which she chose to call Russia to the end.
She was almost thirty-five years old at that time. She was fre-
quently ailing and very thin, the color of her face had a some-
what earthlike tone, her hands were emaciated and dry, with
very long and bent fingers, reminiscent of the claws of a large
bird. She lived in poverty and wore very simple clothes. Once
she showed me a coin she was keeping. She had received it
from a humble old woman who had passed her on the street and
had taken her for a beggar. But the old woman must have been
nearly blind, for the bearing and gait of Akhmatova were those
of a queen. Not only her face, which was beautiful without being
pretty, but also her whole appearance was extraordinary and un-
forgettable. She knew this, of course, very well-and there were
many who could have told it to her, if she herself had not bee
aware of it. Occasionally, therefore, in the company of people

who were more or less strangers to her she showed a certain af-
fectation. But how infinitely straightforward, kind and percep-
tive she was when she entertained me, an admirer of her and of
course of her poetry who, nevertheless had no claim on her. She
used to serve me homemade cookies and a cup of coffee when
nobody else was around, except, as often was the case, for her
beloved Olechka Glebova-Sudeikina.
She would read her poetry when her guests asked her to do
so. Once at my request she read "At the Very Sea," ("U samogo
moria"). It always seemed to me that in this poem the movement
and the melody conveyed something that was most typical of
Akhmatova. She never talked in my presence about herself or
about any of those who were most painfully close to her, such as
Gumilev. But I am glad to say that she confided one thing to
me-not about her life in the usual meaning of the word but
about her writing of poetry-which is interesting in itself and
was important for her, whose life at its most meaningful was the
life of a poet.
She told me that she never used pen and paper when she com-
posed poetry. She worked for a long time on each line, but she
wrote the poem down only in its final form, after she had recited
it to her friends, sometimes even a week or two later, after having
read it in public. Also, according to her own words, she did not
generally like to write and hated writing letters. She did not like
to hold a pen in her hand: the physical process of writing
seemed painful to her. She always refused to write anything but
poetry. On the occasion of the celebration for Sologub she asked
me to compose a brief salutation which she read on the stage o
the Alexandrinsky Theater, dressed in a rather formal full-lengt
gown of white silk which may even have had a train (if there
was no train it was easy to imagine one). And to think of her
stringing together impersonal sentences on behalf of the Writers
Union was indeed not easy. Her handwriting was very pains-
taking and somewhat awkward, as is the case with people who
are not used to writing. I am moved

fully she penned the two inscripti
she gave me. The first was already
the second she grew tired and just
How telling and typical of her is

her poems within for a long time
sorrow without committing them to
she must have listened to the inn
tenderly and incorruptably did sh
long life into her grave.
She stayed on in Russia forty-tw

who left will never know how sh
years. Without a doubt, only part of
period has come down to us. But th
she did think about us who had left
place, for instance when she wrot
one about Lot's wife. We know th
and we understand even better now
her for having held out.
In later years her handwriting b

actually obliged to become a "liter
monplace sense, of course, but wi
Pushkin in a way any Pushki scho
translations, not always of her ow
from languages with which she w
jected to attacks by ignorant or even
officials. Zhdanov, who had been h
was showered with high official p
her death. She had to remain silen
was done in and when Tsvetaeva ha
to her lot to write despicable hack v
of her son. A great many things wer
not held out who could have written:
Magdalina bilas i rydala,

Uchenik lubimyi kamenel,
A tuda, gde molcha Mat' stoiala,
Tak nikto vzglianut' i ne posmel.
Magdalene flung herself down with a sob,

The beloved disciple turned to stone,
And no one dared to look at the spot
Where the silent Mother stood alone.
Who could have written "A vy moi druz'ia poslednego

prizyva .. ." ("And you my friends, of the last conscription . . ." )
or: "Postuchi kulachkom ia otkroiu . . ." ("Knock with your little
fist, I will open.. ..). Who could have faced "Veter voiny"
("The wind of war"'-) as a poet, and not as so many who merely
claimed to be poets? Who else could have expressed the great
sorrow the way she did in "Requiem"? Who could have led her
tragic life, borne her suffering without standing apart from the
equally bitter suffering of others? "During the terrible years of
Ezhov's terror I spent seventeen months standing in line before
a prison door," she wrote. And this gives her the right to say
that during all these years she was indeed, "where my unfortu-
nate people were." Therefore all of us have erected a monument
to her, that is, all of us who, having lost Russia, managed to re-
main human, either within or outside Russia. And this monu-
ment was erected not just anywhere but at the very place she
describes in the following poem:
A zdes' gde stoadia ia trista chasov,
I gde dia menia ne otkryli zasov.
Zatem chto i v smerti blazhennoi boius',

Zabyt' gromykhanie chernykh marus',
Zabyt' kak postylaia khlopala dyer'

I vyla starushka, kak rannenyi zver',
I pust' s nepodvizhnykh i bronzovykh vek

Kak slezy struitsia podtaiavshii sneg.
I golub' turemnyi pust' gulit vdali,

I tikho idut po Neve korabli.
Three hundred hours I waited here to see

And no one unbolted the door for me.
To my last blessed hour I shall not forget

'Black Marucia's" wheels and their thundering threat.
Or the slam of the door whose bang never ceased

And the old woman's howl of a; wounded beast.
And let from the bronze brow, stolid and clear

The winter snow thaw in a trickle of tears.
Let the dove of this prison coo distantly,

And the ships on the Neva move silently.
I did not see Anna Andreevna again. When she visited Paris I
was elsewhere. I am deeply sorry about this, even ashamed of it.
As ashamed as I was in St. Petersburg where her brown leather
album, a plain book of medium size, not the kind poets use but
rather more like a schoolgirl's verse album, lay on my table for
two months. I could not bring myself to write anything in it, and
so I returned it without an entry.
I can see her now, sometimes dressed in gray, emaciated, re-

ceiving alms from an old woman; at other times tall all in white
under the lights of sparkling crystal chandeliers. And when I see
her in white I can somehow discern a wreath around her head.
Not a wedding crown, or a crown of tsars . . ., A wreath of lau-
rels? No; something more transparent and light, almost, one
might say, a martyr's crown.

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Anna Akhmatova: In Memoriam

Author(s): Wladimir Weidle

I REMEMBER her bent over Blok's coffin in the church of

We have brought [him] to Our Lady of Smolensk

Many years have passed, and Akhmatova too is dead and

1912, remained the same throughout

Kuzmin's spinets, sachets and Sevre statuettes. (K

One of her earliest poems (written in 1909) begins in an

The pillow is already hot

In 1911 she wrote the famous lines:

[In all my anguish] I was drawing

These are examples of the dramatic quality of Alkmatova's lyr-

Ia mesta ishchu dlia mogily.

I am looking for a gravesite.

Or the last line in the same poem:

And at my feet a blue wave.

In the Russian original repetition of sounds dictated (perhaps

Thus already in her first book of verse we distinctly notice the

tova all four lines formed an organic whole, were ch

"We have aged one hundred years, and this

Ne byvat' tebe v zhyvykh

Not for you to be among the living

Friend, I stitched with bitter hand

And the following poem, as perfect as the first above, is not

Was it for this that I carried

You grew up so tall and slender,

On the mount of Malakhov

To expatiate about these poems is superfluous. It is their ap-

Eshche na zapade zemnoe solntse svetit,

While in the West the setting sun caresses

had happened and what was happening was always implied;

aware of it. Occasionally, therefore, in the company of people

are not used to writing. I am moved

How telling and typical of her is

She stayed on in Russia forty-tw

In later years her handwriting b

Magdalina bilas i rydala,

Magdalene flung herself down with a sob,

Who could have written "A vy moi druz'ia poslednego

Zatem chto i v smerti blazhennoi boius',

Zabyt' kak postylaia khlopala dyer'

I pust' s nepodvizhnykh i bronzovykh vek

I golub' turemnyi pust' gulit vdali,

Three hundred hours I waited here to see

To my last blessed hour I shall not forget

Or the slam of the door whose bang never ceased

And let from the bronze brow, stolid and clear

Let the dove of this prison coo distantly,

I can see her now, sometimes dressed in gray, emaciated, re-

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