Apart from the general sacred aspects of the said entity, its uniqueness in the case of Akhmatova was further secured by her actual physical beauty. She looked positively stunning. Five feet eleven, dark-haired, fair-skinned, with pale gray-green eyes like those of snow leopards, slim and incredibly lithe, she was for half a century sketched, painted, cast, carved, and photographed by a multitude of artists starting with Amedeo Modigliani. As for the poems dedicated to her, they'd make more volumes than her own collected works.
All this goes to show that the visible part of that self was quite breathtaking; as for the hidden one being a perfect match, there is testimony to it in her writing, which blends both.
This blend's chief characteristics are nobility and restraint. Akhmatova is the poet of strict meters, exact rhymes, and short sentences. Her syntax is simple and free of subordinate clauses whose gnomic convolutions are responsible for most of Russian literature; in fact, in its simplicity, her syntax resembles English. From the very threshold of her career to its very end she was always perfectly clear and coherent. Among her contemporaries, she is a Jane Austen. In any case, if her sayings were dark, it wasn't due to her grammar.
In an era marked by so much technical experimentation in poetry, she was blatantly non-avant-garde. If anything, her means were visually similar to what prompted that wave of innovations in Russian poetry, as everywhere else, at the tum of the century: to the Symbolists' quatrains, ubiquitous as grass. Yet this visual resemblance was maintained by Akhmatova deliberately: through it she sought not the simplification of her task but a worsening of the odds. She simply wanted to play the game straight, without bending or inventing the rules. In short, she wanted her verse to maintain appearances.
Nothing reveals a poet's weaknesses like classical verse, and that's why it's so universally dodged. To make a couple of lines sound unpredictable without producing a comic effect or echoing someone else is an extremely perplexing affair. This echo aspect of strict meters is most nagging, and no amount of oversaturating the line with concrete physical detail sets one free. Akhmatova sounds so independent because from the outset she knew how to exploit the enemy.
She did it by a collage-like diversification of the content. Often within just one stanza she'd cover a variety of seemingly unrelated things. When a person talks in the same breath about the gravity of her emotion, gooseberry blossoms, and puUing the left-hand glove onto her right hand— that compromises the breath—which is, in the poem, its meter—to the degree that one forgets about its pedigree. The echo, in other words, gets subordinated to the discrepancy of objects and in effect provides them with a common denominator; it ceases to be a form and becomes a norm of locution.
Sooner or later this always happens to the echo as well as to the diversity of things themselves—in Russian verse it was done by Akhmatova; more exactly, by that self which bore her name. One can't help thinking that while its inner part hears what, by means of rhyme, the language itself suggests about the proximity of those disparate objects, the outer one literally sees that proximity from the vantage point of her actual height. She simply couples what has been already joined: in the language and in the circumstances of her life, if not, as they say, in heaven.
Hence the nobility of her diction, for she doesn't lay claim to her discoveries. Her rhymes are not assertive, the meter is not insistent. Sometimes shed drop a syllable or two in a stanza's last or penultimate line in order to create the effect of a choked throat, or that of unwitting awkwardness caused by emotional tension. But that would be as far as she'd go, for she felt very much at home within the confines of classical verse, thereby suggesting that her raptures and revelations don't require an extraordinary formal treatment, that they are not any greater than those of her predecessors who used these meters before.
This, of course, wasn't exactly true. No one absorbs the past as thoroughly as a poet, if only out of fear of inventing the already invented. (This is why, by the way, a poet is so often regarded as being "ahead of his time," which keeps itself busy rehashing cliches.) So no matter what a poet may plan to say, at the moment of speech he always knows that he inherits the subject. The great literature of the past humbles one not only through its quality but through its topical precedence as well. The reason why a good poet speaks of his own grief with restraint is that, as regards grief, he is a Wandering Jew. In this sense, Akhmatova was very much a product of the Petersburg tradition in Russian poetry, the founders of which, in their own tum, had behind them European classicism as well as its Roman and Greek origins. In addition, they, too, were aristocrats.
If Akhmatova was reticent, it was at least partly because she was carrying the heritage of her predecessors into the art of this century. This obviously was but an homage to them, since it was precisely that heritage which made her this century's poet. She simply regarded herself, with her raptures and revelations, as a postscript to their message, to what they recorded about their lives. The lives were tragic, and so was the message. If the postscript looks dark, it's because the message was absorbed fully. If she never screams or showers her head with ashes, it's because they didn't.
Such were the cue and the key with which she started. Her first collections were tremendously successful with both the critics and the public. In general, the response to a poet's work should be considered last, for it is a poet's last consideration. However, Akhmatova's success was in this respect remarkable if one takes into account its timing, especially in the case of her second and third volumes: 1914 (the outbreak of World War I) and 1917 (the October Revolution in Russia). On the other hand, perhaps it was precisely this deafening background thunder of world events that rendered the private tremolo of this young poet all the more discernible and vital. In that sense again, the beginning of this poetic career contained a prophecy of the course it came to run for half a century. What increases the sense of prophecy is that for a Russian ear at the time the thunder of world events was compounded by the incessant and quite meaningless mumbling of the Symbolists. Eventualy these two noises shrunk and merged into the threatening incoherent drone of the new era against which Akhmatova was destined to speak for the rest of her life.
Those early collections (Evening, Rosary, and White Flock) dealt mostly with the sentiment which is de rigueur for early collections; with that of love. The poems in those books had a diary-like intimacy and immediacy; they'd describe no more than one actual or psychological event and were short—sixteen to twenty lines at best. As such they could be committed to memory in a flash, as indeed they were—and still are—by generations and generations of Russians.
Still, it was neither their compactness nor their subject matter that made one's memory desire to appropriate them; those features were quite familiar to an experienced reader. The news came in the form of a sensibility which manifested itself in the author's treatment of her theme. Betrayed, tormented by either jealousy or guilt, the wounded heroine of these poems speaks more frequently in self- reproach than in anger, forgives more eloquently than accuses, prays rather than screams. She displays all the emotional subtlety and psychological complexity of nineteenth-century Russian prose and all the dignity that the poetry of the same century taught her. Apart from these, there is also a great deal of irony and detachment which are strictly her own and products of her metaphysics rather than shortcuts to resignation.
Needless to say, for her readership those qualities seem to come in both handy and timely. More than any other art, poetry is a fonn of sentimental education, and the lines that Akhmatova readers learned by heart were to temper their hearts against the new era's onslaught of vulgarity. The comprehension of the metaphysics of personal drama betters one's chances of weathering the drama of history. This is why, and not because of the epigrammatic beauty of her lines only, the public clung to them so unwittingly. It was an instinctive reaction; the instinct being that of self-preservation, for the stampede of history was getting more and more audible.