This has turned into, among other things, a celebration of Anna Akhmatova’s contributions as a poet and person – as a hero. I was sitting around thinking about how under Stalin’s terror (okay, wait a minute. There is a dilemma working with this term that needs to be addressed. To those readers in America, do not use the worst Atrocities (and they were) under this regime to legitimate the cold advance of ruthless Captains of Industry, where three conglomerates control 75% of the world’s wealth now. Do not use this as a mode of legitimizing the military-industrial complex as Eisenhower aptly depicted it ages ago, or the prison-industrial complex as Angela Davis succinctly outlined. The United States now leads the world in NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE of residents we incarcerate, according to the Pew Center. I merely ask readers to heed Cavafy’s warning in “Waiting for the Barbarians.”), volumes of Akhmatova’s work were entrusted to the memory of ten people and summarily burned, to protect as many people as possible.
What poet’s work (of those alive today), in the United States, would you do this for? I am asking you. Fortunately, this has yet to come to bear. Perhaps this is because the superstructure of Empire is such that Literature has been eviscerated of so many of its powers. Perhaps. There is a process of incorporation as Geoffrey Waite outlines in Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. So, with that process ( and this is not a “new” thought though Waite gets much further with it and that’s truly a brilliant book) as Adorno and Horkheimer get at The Culture Industry is alive and well. Hell, we may even have posturing revolutionaries on the White House Lawn! That’s nothing new either. Soul Asylum played there for Chelsea Clinton’s birthday. It’s just when that happened, Grunge was a brand, nothing more. Isn’t History repeating itself?
Poem Without a Hero is a brilliant Triptych, covering 1940-1962 bearing the image of Olga Sudeikina and Vsevolod Knyazev to open the text. I don’t know all the details, but both were famed poets who were part of the Stray Dog Salon (and Sudeikina was a dear friend of Akhmatova’s, an actress, translator, dancer – and, married) and Knyazev fell in love with Sudeikina. This culminated tragically when he shot himself in the head at her flat when he found out she had fallen in love with Aleksander Blok. Shit. This is starting to sound familiar. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayword assert that Poem without a Hero melds this with the revolution and retributions – a parable for the sins of the world is how they put it. They also say she herself was somehow involved in the affair(s). Such is the framing of this text. Sudeikina “appears here as Confusion-Psyche, Columbine, the Goat-Legged Nymph, the Dove, the Petersburg Doll, and as one of Akhmatova’s doubles” according to the Zephyr Press translation by Hemschemeyer.
Love, revolution, the horrors of war, merciless destruction, unimaginable imagination and hope, all characterize the verse and her mind. For her, perhaps the opening lines from Byron (“I want a hero…”) seemed apt for her time and I’d contend even more apt for our own. They had her. Who? Or perhaps we need an anti-hero hero. But, even then, poem without a hero is an historically, emotionally and romantically charged text – and puts any of the contemporary obsession with bad, masturbatory, exploitative memoirs in their proper historical place.
all of this is prefatory. I’ve no intention of writing an exposition (at least currently) on PwH (really, someone should tell the deleuzians and guattarians to go take a hike. The body isn’t without organs. We are so not done with the material relations of production and their followers often reflect the bourgeois (and very alluring) idea that we could be done with History. In a way, there’s a connection between the likes of Hardt and Negri and Francis Fukuyama. Kojeve’s Hegel rises again, incorporated. Give me a break. People are dying, disproportionately nonwhite women and children. Is it a stretch to say this approach then would be both racist and sexist? No. You can’t wave away the second wave with a little magic wand or your ipad or whatever.)
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But there are poems that did not get into the text. Unlike her usual MO, Akhmatova demanded that they be written down . This was both dangerous and also says something about them. I’m not sure what, but I think she really wanted to communicate exactly these words. I thought I’d put them here – and hope this garrulous (forgive me, I live alone) spleen invites the reader to get the book and read it all. And commit it to memory. They appeared in the Soviet version for the first time in 1989. Again, this volume which was well worth the carrying throughout my trip to the Saint Marks Reading at Solas and in my backpack, is published by Zephyr Press. Reeder did a brilliant job of editing and Hemschemeyer’s translation is nuanced…
(10)
The enemy tortured: “Come on, tell!”
But not a word, nor a groan, nor a cry
Did the enemy hear.
And the decades file by,
But not a word, nor a groan, nor a cry
Did the enemy hear.
And the decades file by,
Tortures, exiles, and deaths….I can’t sing
In the midst of this horror.
(11)
Ask my contemporaries –
Convicts, hundred-and-fivers, prisoners –
And we will tell you
How we lived in unconscious fear,
How we raised children for the executioner,
For prison and for the torture chamber.
(12)
Sealing our bluish lips,
Mad Hecubas
And Cassandras from Chukloma,
We roar in silent chorus
(We, crowned with disgrace):
“We are already on the other side of hell”…
What are you muttering midnight?
In any case, Parasha is dead,
The young mistress of the palace.
The gallery is uncompleted-
This wedding embellishment,
Where, prompted by the north wind,
I am writing all this down for you.
Incense streams from all the windows,
Cut off, the favorite lock,
And the oval of the face grows dark.
January 5, 1941
