Review

Reviewed Work(s): Stikhotvoreniya i poemy by Anna Akhmatova and V. M. Zhirmunsky

Review by: R. D. B. Thomson
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Jul., 1979), pp. 436-439
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4207877
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436 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Dmitriyevna Mendeleyeva must have been beautiful, 'Chto Vy, L(idiya)

K(orneyevna), s takoy spinoy!'. We encounter the essays on literary and
socio-political themes, from Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin to 0 naznachenii
poeta (though how many of us, on this first acquaintance, will realize that
Bad Times is in fact Bezvremenye?). We learn of the plays, and of the
difficulties with their stagings. We learn something about the poetry.
At this point it is germane to ask how much one can reasonably expect
from an 'introduction' to a poet. Surely it is possible to learn more about
his poetry than this book provides. After the Stikhi o Prekrasnoy Dame,
very few poems indeed are treated in any detail (exceptions are Vozmezdiye
and Dvenadtsat'); some cycles are alluded to almost in passing - of both
Snezhnaya maska (p. 65) and Karmen (p. 93) we learn little more than the
names of the women who inspired them, and no individual poem is
named; no attempt is made at a general characterization of the poetry of
Blok's maturity; and a glance at the index will show how many major
poems are not even mentioned.
The volume's other major miscalculation is to underestimate its reader's
desire, once introduced, to proceed to a closer acquaintance with Blok.
When poems - Dr Forsyth provrides excellent prosed translations - are
quoted in the text, reference is made to volume and page number in the
eight-volume Sobraniye sochineniy of i 960-63. Quotations from Blok's
prose - articles, diaries, letters - are not accompanied by this useful
information. There is a selection of suggestions for further reading.
Perversely it includes the first Blokovskiy sbornik, but not the second;
Beketova's Aleksandr Blok: biograficheskiy ocherk, but not her Aleksandr Blok
i yego mat'; Orlov's Istoriya odnoy lyubvi, but not his IstorEya odnoy druzhby
vrazhdy, which is in the same collection and has also clearly been consulted
by Dr Forsyth. No attempt is made to indicate what the books listed con-
tain and how they might be useful. Most damagingly, the text is entirely
without source notes. The experienced reader recognizes the account of
the relationship with Volokhova as based on the memoirs of Verigina and
Volokhova, published in Tartu in I96I. The new reader, wanting to
learn more about the lady, is left high and dry, like the undergraduate at
his mortifying first sherry party, introduced . .. but then left alone to count
and re-count the olives.
London JULIAN GRAFFY

Akhmatova, Anna. Stikho

introduction by A. A. Surkov. Biblioteka poeta, Bol'shaya seriya.
Sovetskiy pisatel', Leningrad, I976. 560 pp. Plates. Variants. Notes.
Index. 2 r. 52 k.

AN extensive selection of Akhmatova's poetry has, after some delays, come

out in the Soviet Union in the distinguished series Biblioteka poeta
(Bol'shaya seriya). It was prepared by a close friend of Akhmatova's, the
late Viktor Zhirmunsky. It is in many ways a monument to the devotion
and thoroughness of Soviet scholarship at its best, but in certain respects it
is still inferior to the two-volume Struve-Filippov Sochinen.ya (second

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 REVIEWS 437

edition, New York, I967-68). However, even if this new Soviet edition
cannot quite live up to its claim (for which Zhirmunsky was not respon-
sible) to be the 'first scholarly edition' of Akhmatova, it is substantially
fuller than any of its predecessors. Out of 655 poems it contains some
sixty-six that were not known to the editors of the American edition. On
the other hand it omits eleven poems and the cycles Rekviem and Slava miru
almost in their entirety.
After the new poems the most valuable feature of this edition is the
magnificent textual apparatus and commentary, largely prepared by
Zhirmunsky. Here the reader will find identified the recipients of many of
Akhmatova's most personal poems, particularly in Belaya staya and
Podorozhnik. Especially helpful are the notes to Prichitan5ye, the Severnyy
elegii and Prolog (though this last has been cut). Some of the datings have
been revised to give rather different meanings. Thus 'Vse dushi milykh na
vysokikh zvyozdakh...' and 'Pyatym deystviyem dramy.. .', both
previously assigned to I 944, are now revealed to date from i92 I with its
different associations. Conversely Tretiy Zachatyevsky is now brou
forward from I9I8 to 1940. There are a few new readings. The most
striking of these concerns 'Kak belyy kamen' v glubine kolodtsa...',
where an examination of the autograph has revealed a completely
different punctuation and meaning for the final stanza. Three misprints
in the American edition: 'lastochkoy' for 'lasochkoy' in 1. 14 of Milomu;
'Ne' for 'No' in 1. 7 of 'Ya videl pole posle grada . . .'; and 'ograda' for
'otrada' in the last line of Posledneye pis'mo may now be authoritatively
corrected. There are several other minor differences, based on a re-
examination of the poet's manuscripts, but none of great significance.
On the debit side one must note certain regrettable tinkerings with what
Akhmatova actually wrote. Religious concepts such as God, the Lord,
Palm Sunday (though the editors are inconsistent over this last one) are
given small letters; only in 'Dal Ty mne molodost' trudnuyu...' do
'Thou' and 'Father' retain their capitals, since the meaning would
otherwise be obscured. Count Vasiliy Komarovsky is stripped of his title
both in the dedication of Otvet and in the notes to it on p. 462; in 'Pered
vesnoy byvayut dni takiye . . .' the dedication to Nadezhda Chulkova has
been relegated to the footnotes. At times the editorial intervention
amounts to censorship. Thus the epigraph from the Bible at the head of
Putyon vseya zemli has been totally omitted, while that to Maysk.y sneg is
given only in the notes. The epigraph from Brodsky at the head of
Poslednyaya roza has similarly been dropped without comment. In Voronez
the dedication to 'O.M.' has been preserved, but the notes do not identify
the bearer of these initials even though Osip Mandel'shtam has himself
been published in the Biblioteka poeta series. Such suppressions become
particularly absurd when they are extended to Gumilyov: thus the dedica-
tion of 'V remeshkakh penal i knigi byli . . .' has been removed, and the
notes tell us merely that the poem commemorates Akhmatova's first
meeting with her 'future husband'. In Utesheniye the epigraph from
Gumilyov has been retained, but the notes do not give any further informa-
tion. Needless to say, 'Strakh, vo t'me perebiraya veshchi.. .', written

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438 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

under the shock of his execution is given no commentary. It is not that

Soviet readers, any more than Western ones, need any reminder of these
well-known figures and their relationships; the main result of such evasions
is to undermine confidence in what is, by and large, still a reputable and
scholarly series.
At times still more drastic alterations have been made for similarly
political or ideological reasons. Thus four lines have been omitted from
both Bezhetsk and 'Pust' golosa organa snova gryanut...', though in
each case they can be restored from the apparatus. There are about three
dozen minor cases in which Akhmatova replaced a word or two with
something more acceptable to the censors and has now been saddled
posthumously with these compromises. It is something, however, that on
is enabled to reconstruct her own text from the 'variants'. Much more
serious is the total omission from the text, the notes and the apparatus of
the first quatrain of 'Kogda v toske samoubiystva. . .' (see 'Mne golos
byl. . .'). In fact the Struve-Filippov edition has unearthed yet another
quatrain (see vol. I, p. 378), subsequently dropped by Akhmatova herself.
The most glaring omission, however, is of the cycle Rekviem, one of
Akhmatova's most celebrated works inside the Soviet Union as outside it.
Only three of the fourteen poems in the cycle, nos 3, 7 (and that without
its title Prigovor) and Io are included here. (Curiously, another poem
from the cycle, 'Uzhe bezumiye krylom . . .', had been passed for publica-
tion only shortly before in the Izbrannoye published in Moscow in I974.)
Included, however, are two other poems which seem closely connected
with the cycle, 'Ya znayu, s mesta ne sdvinut'sya. . .' (I939) and Posle-
sloviye k leningradskomu tsiklu ( 1944) . Similarly only one of the fifteen poems
in Slava miru (I950), Akhmatova's solitary attempt to write orthodox
Soviet poetry has been included. The discussions preceding this editorial
decision must have been piquant in the extreme, and one can only hope
that they have been recorded for the delectation of posterity.
Certain textual problems remain virtually insoluble. From the very
beginning of her career Akhmatova was fond of combining poems from
different periods into thematic 'cycles'. These groupings were in turn often
broken down and re-arranged in different combinations. Thus it is not
easy to discover exactly what poems made up the first publications of her
books, or in what order they were placed. It is impossible to adjudicate
between the merits of these different groupings. The Soviet edition gives
us Akhmatova's first three books in something very close to their original
form where Struve-Filippov had plumped for a roughly chronological
arrangement; while the six Shileyko poems, widely dispersed in the
American edition, have now been collected as a cycle entitled Chornyy son.
Otherwise the differences between the two editions in this respect seem
only minor, especially in view of the provisional nature of many of these
groupings. Similar problems are posed by Poema bez geroya. It is impossible
really to provide a definitive text of this work, since the poet was constantly
revising and expanding it (and often enough returning to earlier versions)
right up to the end of her life, and no doubt the process would have
continued had she lived longer. As it is there are several differences between

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 REVIEWS 439

the text given here an

the most marked divergences from the Struve-Filippov text concern the
politically sensitive passages in the second and third parts.
This new Soviet edition is on the whole a fine and scholarly production,
but it is not the first of its kind, and its occasional lapses from academic
objectivity can only make us regret the stridency of its claims. The sooner
Soviet scholars are allowed to observe the normal courtesies in their
dealings with their Western colleagues and, for that matter, with their
own Soviet readers, the better it will be for the study of Russian literature
as a whole.
Toronto R. D. B. THOMSON

Mandelstam, Osip. Poems. Chosen and translated by James Greene, with

Forewords by Nadezhda Mandelstam and Donald Davie. Paul Elek,
London, 1977. 104 pp. Notes. ?4.95.
Mandelstam, Osip. 50 Poems. Translated by Bernard Meares, with an
introductory essay by Joseph Brodsky. Persea Books, New York, 1977.
I 7 pp. Biographical data. Notes. Index. $7.95.
MR GREENE'S highly individual approach to translating Mandel'shtam is
at once the chief merit and the chief disadvantage of his work. His choice
of poems may be thought whimsical in its inclusion of a large number of
the artificial, often precious poems from Mandel'shtam's Symbolist period
together with some of the more tedious Acmeist ones; in its lack of interest
in much of the 19!2I-25 poetry; in its total neglect of whole collections
composed during I930-36; and in its emphasis on the 1937 poetry, albeit
mostly with good cause. The picture of Mandel'shtam which emerges is
therefore distinctly patchy and disconnected - a pity in a poet to whom
consistency of development meant a good deal. Such an impression is
reinforced by Mr Greene's division into poems translated 'straight'
and very well indeed, handsomely meriting the fulsome and somewhat
pretentious praise of Donald Davie's Foreword - and those which he has
completely remodelled and indicated as being 'from' such-and-such a
poem. He has attempted to extract the essence of the piece and transform
it into authentic English poetry; there is no doubt that he succeeds in the
latter task, but the result of this excerpting process tends to be a precis
lacking the distinctive Mandel'shtam voice. Nonetheless, among the
welter of translations from the present decade the splendid, less ambitious
versions of the majority of poems put him well ahead of others in fidelity,
elegance and good sense.
Joseph Brodsky's essay is certain to be an attraction for Bernard
Meares's volume. Whatever the truth of Akhmatova's view of Brodsky as
Mandel'shtam's poetic heir, Brodsky's appreciation of Mandel'shtam and
his ability, after some initial platitudes on poetry 'in general, to articulate
his feelings for another poet suggests a special relationship and make one
wish for a fuller critique. The translations which follow score heavily over
Mr Greene as a truer representation of Mandel'shtam, even though there

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