That quantity denies both biographical and Freudian approaches, for it overshoots the addressees' concreteness and renders them as pretexts for the author's speech. What art and sexuality have in common is that both are sublimations of one's creative energy, and that denies them hierarchy. The nearly idiosyncratic persistence of the early Akhmatova love poems suggests not so much the recurrence of passion as the frequency of prayer. Correspondingly, different though their imagined or real protagonists are, these poems display a considerable stylistic similarity because love as content is in the habit of limiting formal patterns. The same goes for faith. After all, there are only so many adequate manifestations for truly strong sentiments; which, in the end, is what explains rituals.
It is the finite's nostalgia for the infinite that accounts for the recurrence of the love theme in Akhmatova's verse, not the actual entanglements. Love indeed has become for her a language, a code to record time's messages or, at least, to convey their tune; she simply heard them better this way. For what interested this poet most was not her own life but precisely time and the effects of its monotone on the human psyche and on her own diction in particular. If she later resented attempts to reduce her to her early writing, it was not because she disliked the status of the habitually love-sick girclass="underline" it was because heT diction and, with it, the code, subsequently changed a great deal in order to make the monotone of the infinite more audible.
In fact, it was already quite distinct in Anno Domini Л/CAfXX/—her fifth and technically speaking last collection. In some of its poems, that monotone merges with the author's voice to the point that she has to sharpen the concreteness of detail or image in order to save them, and by the same token her own mind, from the inhuman neutrality of the meter. Their fusion, or rather the former's subordination to the latter, came later. In the meantime, she was trying to save her own notions of existence from being overtaken by those supplied to her by prosody: for prosody knows more about time than a human being would like to reckon with.
Close exposure to this knowledge, or more accurately to this memory of time restructured, results in an inordinate mental acceleration that robs insights that come from the actual reality of their novelty, if not of their gTavity. No poet can ever close this gap, but a conscientious one may lower his pitch or muffle his diction so as to downplay his estrangement from real life. This is done sometimes for purely aesthetic purposes: to make one's voice less theatrical, less bel canto-like. More frequently, though, the purpose of this camouflage is, again, to retain sanity, and Akhmatova, a poet of strict meters, was using it precisely to that end. But the more she did so, the more inexorably her voice was approaching the impersonal tonality of time itself, until they merged into something that makes one shudder trying to guess—as in her Northern Elegies —who is hiding behind the pronoun "1."
What happened to pronouns was happening to other parts of speech, which would peter out or loom large in the perspective of time supplied by prosody. Akhmatova was a very concrete poet, but the more concrete the image, the more extemporary it would become because of the accompanying meter. No poem is ever written for its story line's sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obituary. What is called the music of a poem is essentially time restructured in such a way that it brings this poem's content into a linguistically inevitable, memorable focus.
Sound, in other words, is the seat of time in the poem, a background against which its content acquires a stereoscopic quality. The power of Akhmatova's lines comes from her ability to convey the music's impersonal epic sweep, which more than matched their actual content, especially from the twenties on. The effect of her instrumentation upon her themes was akin to that of somebody used to being put against the wall being suddenly put against the horizon.
The above should be kept very much in mind by the foreign reader of Akhmatova, since that horizon vanishes in translations, leaving on the page absorbing but one- dimensional content. On the other hand, the foreign reader may perhaps be consoled by the fact that this poet's native audience also has been forced to deal with her work in a very misrepresented fashion. What translation has in common with censorship is that both operate on the basis of the "what's possible" principle, and it must be noted that linguistic barriers can be as high as those erected by the state. Akhmatova, in any case, is surrounded by both and it's only the former that shows signs of crumbling.
Anno Domini MCMXXl was her last collection: in the forty-four years that followed she had no book of her own. In the postwar period there were, technically speaking, two slim editions of her work, consisting mainly of a few reprinted early lyrics plus genuinely patriotic war poems and doggerel bits extolling the arrival of peace. These last ones were written by her in order to win the release of her son from the labor camps, in which he nonetheless spent eighteen years. These publications in no way can be regarded as her own, for the poems were selected by the editors of the state-run publishing house and their aim was to convince the public (especially those abroad) that Akhmatova was alive, well, and loyal. They totaled some fifty pieces and had nothing in common with her output during those four decades.
For a poet of Akhmatova's stature this meant being buried alive, with a couple of slabs marking the mound. Her going under was a product of several forces, mostly that of history, whose chief element is vulgarity and whose immediate agent is the state. Now, by MCMXXI, which means 1921, the new state could already be at odds with Akhmatova, whose first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed by its security forces, allegedly on the direct order of the state's head, Vladimir Lenin. A spin-off of a didactic, eye-for-eye mentality, the new state could expect from Akhmatova nothing but retaliation, especially given her reputed tendency for an autobiographical touch.
Such was, presumably, the state's logic, furthered by the destruction in tie subsequent decade and a half of her entire circle (including her closest friends, poets Vladimir Narbut and Osip Mandelstam). It culminated in the arrests of her son, Lev Gumilyov, and her third husband, art- historian Nikolai Punin, who soon died in prison. Then came World War II.
Those fifteen years preceding the war were perhaps the darkest in the whole of Russian history; undoubtedly they were so in Akhmatova's own life. It's the material which this period supplied, or more accurately the lives it subtracted, that made her eventually earn the title of the Keening Muse. This period simply replaced the frequency of poems about love with that of poems in memoriam. Death, which she would previously evoke as a solution for this or that emotional tension, became too real for any emotion to matter. From a figure of speech it became a figure that leaves you speechless.
If she proceeded to write, it's because prosody absorbs death, and because she felt guilty that she survived. The pieces that constitute her "Wreath for the Dead" are simply attempts to let those whom she outlived absorb or at least join prosody. It's not that she tried to "immortalize" her dead: most of them were the pride of Russian literature already and thus had immortalized themselves enough. She simply tried to manage the meaninglessness of existence, which suddenly gaped before her because of the destruction of the sources of its meaning, to domesticate the reprehensible infinity by inhabiting it with familiar shadows. Besides, addressing the dead was the only way of preventing speech from slipping into a howl.
The elements of howl, however, are quite audible in other Akhmatova poems of the period and later. They'd appear either in the form of idiosyncratic excessive rhyming or as a non sequitur line interjected in an otherwise coherent narrative. Nevertheless, the poems dealing directly with somcone's death are free of anything of this sort, as though the author doesn't want to offend her addressees with her emotional extremes. This refusal to exploit the ultimate opportunity to impose herself upon them echoes, of course, the practice of her lyric poetry. But by continuing to address the dead as though they were alive, by not adjusting her diction to "the occasion," she also refuses the opportunity to exploit the dead as those ideal, absolute interlocutors that every poet seeks and finds either in the dead or among angels.