Akhmatova in any case heard it quite clearly. The intensely personal lyricism of White Flock is tinged with the note that was destined to become her imprimatur: the note of controlled terror. The mechanism designed to keep in check emotions of a romantic nature proved to be as effective when applied to mortal fears. The latter was increasingly intertwined with the former until they resulted in emotional tautology, and White Flock marks the beginning of this process. With this collection, Russian poetry hit "the real, non-calendar twentieth century" but didn't disintegrate on impact.
Akhmatova, to say the least, seemed better prepared for this encounter than most of her contemporaries. Besides, by the time of the Revolution she was twenty-eight years old: that is, neither young enough to believe in it nor too old to justify it. Furthermore, she was a woman, and it would be equally unseemly for her to extol or condemn the event. Nor did she decide to accept the change of social order as an invitation to loosen her meter and associative chains. For art doesn't imitate life if only for fear of cliches. She remained true to her diction, to its private timbre, to refracting rather than reflecting life through the prism of the individual heart. Except that the choice of detail whose role in a poem previously was to shift attention from an emotionally pregnant issue presently began to be less and less of a solace, overshadowing the issue itself.
She didn't reject the Revolution: a defiant pose wasn't for her either. Using latter-day locution, she internalized it. She simply took it for what it was: a terrible national upheaval which meant a tremendous increase of grief per individual. She understood this not only because her own share went too high but first and foremost through her very craft. The poet is a born democrat not thanks to the pre- cariousness of his position only but because he caters to the entire nation and employs its language. So does tragedy, and hence their affinity. Akhmatova, whose verse always gravitated to the vernacular, to the idiom of folk song, could identify with the people more thoroughly than those who were pushing at the time their literary or other programs: she simply recognized grief.
Moreover, to say that she identified with the people is to introduce a rationalization which never took place because of its inevitable redundancy. She was a part of the whole, and the pseudonym just furthered her class anonymity. In addition, she always disdained the air of superiority present in the word "poet." "I don't understand these big words," she used to say, "poet, billiard." This wasn't humility; this was the result of the sober perspective in which she kept her existence. The very persistence of love as the theme of her poetry indicates her proximity to the average person. If she differed from her public it was in that her ethics weren't subject to historical adjustment.
Other than that, she was like everybody else. Besides, the times themselves didn't allow for great variety. If her poems weren't exactly the vox populi, it's because a nation never speaks with one voice. But neither was her voice that of the creme de la creme, if only because it was totally devoid of the populist nostalgia so peculiar to the Russian intelligentsia. The "we" that she starts to use about this time in self-defense against the impersonality of pain inflicted by history was broadened to this pronoun's linguistic limits not by herself but by the rest of the speakers of this language. Because of the quality of the future, this "we" was there to stay and the authority of its user to grow.
In any case, there is no psychological difference between Akhmatova's "civic" poems of World War I and the revolutionary period, and those written a good thirty years later during World War II. Indeed, without the date underneath them, poems like "Prayer" could be attributed to virtually any moment of Russian history in this century which justifies that particular poem's title. Apart from the sensitivity of her membrane, though, this proves that the quality of history for the last eighty years has somewhat simplified the poet's job. It did so to the degree that a poet would spurn a line containing a prophetic possibility and prefer a plain description of a fact or sensation.
Hence the nominative character of Akhmatova's lines in general and at that period in particular. She knew not only that the emotions and perceptions she dealt with were fairly common but also that time, true to its repetitive nature, would render them universal. She sensed that history, like its objects, has very limited options. What was more important, however, was that those "civic" poems were but fragments borne by her general lyrical current, which made their "we" practically indistinguishable from the more frequent, emotionally charged "I." Because of their overlapping, both pronouns were gaining in verisimilitude.
44 I J О s E p II B R О D s K y
Since the name of the current was "love," the poems about the homeland and the epoch were shot through with almost inappropriate intimacy; similarly, those about sentiment itself were acquiring an epic timbre. The latter meant the current's widening.
Later in her life, Akhmatova always resented attempts by critics and scholars to confine her significance to her love poetry of the teens of this century. She was perfectly right, because the output of the subsequent forty years outweighs her first decade both numerically and qualitatively. Still, one can understand those scholars and critics, since after 1922 until her death in Akhmatova simply couldn't publish a book of her own, and they were forced to deal with what was available. Yet perhaps there was another reason, less obvious or less comprehended by those scholars and critics, that they were drawn to the early Akhmatova.
Throughout one's life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca. Its vocabulary absorbs all the other tongues, and its utterance gratifies a subject, however inanimate it may be. Also, by being thus uttered, a subject acquires an ecclesiastical, almost sacred denomination, echoing both the way we perceive the objects of our passions and the Good Book's suggestion as to what God is. Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry.
Akhmatova's love poems, naturally, were in the first place just poems. Apart from anything else, they had a terrific novelistic quality, and a reader could have had a wonderful time explicating the various tribulations and trials of their heroine. (Some did just that, and on the basis of those poems, the heated public imagination would have their author "romantically involved" with Alexander Blok—the poet of the period—as well as with His Imperial Majesty himself, although she was a far better poet than the former and a good six inches taller than the latter.) Half self- portrait, half mask, their poetic persona would augment an achtal drama with the fatality of theater, thus probing both her own and pain's possible limits. Happier states would be subjected to the same probing. Realism, in short, was employed as the means of transportation to a metaphysical destination. Still, all this would have amounted to animating the genre's tradition were it not for the sheer quantity of poems dealing with the said sentiment.