The Parable of Anna Akhmatova
Who is more powerful, the artist or the dictator?
“Poets are often held in high repute in Russia and often feared by government not because of the power of poetry to move and shape souls, but because, in Russia only great poets dare speak the truth.”
Eric Hoffer
I know that many musicians and other creative spirits feel as if they have little significance or impact in our society. The prevailing metrics of success—money, power, whatever—relegate their work to the fringes and sub-fringes.
As I’ve suggested elsewhere, they don’t even get the respect given, in an earlier era, to a counterculture.
In the past, you might not get rich as a member of the counterculture—but at least you had a voice that was heard by the mainstream, and occasionally received some tokens of appreciation. Mainstream elites were not so isolated and antagonistic as today, and felt they needed a reality check from outside—but not anymore.
Conformity is the safest path now. Sometimes it feels like the only path.
If you want to support my work, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.
Why is this the case?
There are many reasons, but I would focus especially on the technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations.
Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram?
But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.
If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.
That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication.
Yes, there were situations far more dire than our own.
So let me share a story that gives me comfort. It’s almost a parable of the creative life and its hidden power. This particular tale testifies to my belief that artists of vision and courage can even rise above the most brutal dictator.
Alas, this victory of art over tyranny only happens over the long run. But it does happen.
And when it finally occurs, the turnaround takes place so dramatically and resoundingly that we need to reconsider our conventional definitions of power and influence.
I’m referring to the case of Anna Akhmatova.
Akhmatova, was a promising poet in the days before the Soviet Revolution, but her physical presence was just as compelling as her writing. Modigliani made at least twenty paintings of Akhmatova, and she had an affair with the famous poet Osip Mandelstam. Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak proposed marriage to her on multiple occasions.
Even far away at Oxford, philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—whom I considered the most brilliant person in the entire University when I was a student there—allegedly pined away with romantic longings based on his brief encounter with Akhmatova 35 years before.
I don’t think it’s going too far to claim that she could have been a movie actress, given her beauty and allure.
But Akhmatova was crushed under Soviet rule.
Not only was her poetry sharply criticized and censored, but the secret police bugged her apartment, and kept her under surveillance.
She was silenced so completely, that many people simply assumed she was dead.
One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)
But the most painful loss was her son, Lev Gumliev. After the execution of his father, when their child was just nine, Lev got sent to a Soviet labor camps. When he was finally released from captivity, authorities insisted that he fight in the Red Army. Then he was sent off to the prison camps again in 1949.
Akhmatova was desperate to save the life of her son. But what can a poet—even a poet of genius—do in such situations?
“I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad,” she later recalled. She traveled to Kresty Prison every day to hold a futile vigil. She tried constantly to get some word about her son’s status.
Or give him a parcel. Or find someone to beg for his release.
But to no avail.
Here each day she waited with so many other women, often in bitter cold weather—bundled in heavy clothes in front of the closed gates. One day someone in the crowd recognized the poet, who had once been so esteemed and beautiful. She asked Akhmatova whether her poetic gifts were capable of describing this scene of tragedy.
What could be more futile than a poem in the face of Stalinist purges and executions? But Akhmatova told her inquirer: “I can.” And in that horrible and desolate place, “something like a smile” appeared on the other woman’s face.
Akhmatova began working on what would be her greatest work, the long poem called Requiem. But this was a dangerous endeavor.
Publishing a poem of this sort, even overseas, was out of the question. Just putting the words down on paper could lead to her execution—the secret police might search her apartment at any time.
So she burnt the pages she used for rough drafts. The polished version was retained in her memory.
For seventeen months I’ve called you
To come home, I’ve pleaded
—Oh my son, my terror!—groveled
At the hangman’s feet.
So much I can’t say who’s
Man, who’s beast any more, nor even
How long till execution.
(From the translation of Requiem by D.M. Thomas)
This is one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. But the lines that inspire me the most come on the final page, where Anna Akhmatova makes that extraordinary prediction of the destiny for her and this forbidden work.
And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me.
She is literally taunting Stalin and the Soviet secret police here, but with an authority of her own—one only the creative artist possesses. Yet, in some miracle, she triumphed over the dictatorship.
No, Akhmatova herself didn’t live long enough to see it happen. But she did survive Stalin, and her son was released from incarceration. He eventually witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Akhmatova got shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, and finally—the year before her death in 1966—was allowed to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. Her global renown as a voice of courage and integrity was so powerful that even the Soviet authorities were now afraid of the consequences of cracking down on her.
So they did nothing when Requiem was finally published in Germany in 1963. And the long poem even got issued in the USSR in 1987, at a time when the regime was now the pathetic vulnerable party.
But the most remarkable moment of vindication came when they erected a statue of Anna Akhmatova in her native land.
It happened on the 40th anniversary of her death in 2006. By then, even the name of the city had changed—it was no longer Leningrad, but St. Petersburg once more. And Akhmatova was now returning to the scene of her greatest suffering and tragedy, but in towering bronze form atop a granite pillar.
Meeting her poetic demands, they placed her statue facing Kresty Holding Prison, where she had once waited before the closed gates, day after day.
Her visage is strong and defiant, and the inscription reads:
That’s why I pray not for myself
But for all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.
This is more than the triumph of one woman.
Art is more powerful than pundits or politicians, or even the most brutal dictator. It survives the longest. It has an authority that comes from a higher source.
We do well to remember that—especially in times when the creative impulse seems so weak and ineffective.
That weakness is an illusion. Art triumphs in the end. The very hollowness of its opponents ensures that eventual victory. It’s really just a matter of time.
Ted, I am a translator of Akhmatova and of Mandelstam. They did not have an affair, but Akhmatova was close to both Osip (as long as he lived) and to his wife Nadezda, whose books Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned document these years of tyranny and oppression. You don't mention that Akhmatova was forced to write poems in praise of Stalin to try to facilitate her son's release. I don't think that her decades of house arrest and enforced praise really conform to the sense of hidden power in your essay. She outlived the Stalinist regime, survived for some late fame, but I doubt she would say she triumphed in the end. She merely refused to submit, and lived longer than her oppressors.
- “How might American singer-songwriter Iris DeMent and the "Soviet doyen of reverie and suffering" Anna Akhmatova come together? At Bookforum, David Biespiel reminds us that in DeMent's last album, The Trackless Woods, she set to music 18 of Akhmatova’s poems, translated by Lyn Coffin and Babette Deutsch, as a gift to her daughter, Dasha, adopted from Siberia in 2005.” Worth a listen.