Anna
Akhmatova discovered a lyre-shaped charm when she was a young child. As a result,
her nanny predicted that little Anna would grow up to be a poet. When she decided to be a poet, Akhmatova’s
father, Andrey, demanded that she
choose a different surname so as not to tarnish the Gorenko family name. Akhmatova herself explains his concern, and
her high-born family ancestry:
No
one in my large family wrote poetry. But the first Russian woman poet, Anna
Bunina, was the aunt of my grandfather Erasm Ivanovich Stogov. The Stogovs were
modest landowners in the Mozhaisk region of the Moscow Province. They were
moved here after the insurrection during the time of Posadnitsa Marfa. In
Novgorod they had been a wealthier and more distinguished family. Khan Akhmat
[was] my ancestor. [...] It was well
known that this Akhmat was a descendant of Genghiz Khan. In the eighteenth
century, one of the Akhmatov Princesses – Praskovia Yegorvna – married the rich
and famous Simbirsk landowner Motovilov. Yegor Motovilov was my
great-grandfather; his daughter, Anna Yegorovna, was my grandmother. She died
when my mother was nine years old, and I was named in her honour.*
So,
for a pen name, she chose the aristocratic name Akhmatova—the name of her
great-grandmother, who had been “one of the Akhmatov princesses.”
She then ventured into the life
of, in her father’s words, a “decadent poetess.”
***
One
spring years ago, I first discovered Akhmatova
when I saw the beautiful Cubist painting, “Portrait of Anna
Akhmatova,” by Russian artist Natan Altman.
Clothed in a long royal blue dress, her legs crossed, Akhmatova bears
her characteristic solemn expression in
the painting. (She never smiles.) Her shoulders
and arms are enveloped in a shawl the color of mustard; her face, with an “aquiline
profile”; her neck and collarbone are pallid, nearly transluscent. She looks regally away
from the observer, unbowed yet weary.
In
the poem “A string of little beads at my neck,” she gives an accurate
self-portrait:
A
string of little beads at my neck,
In
a broad muff I hide my hands,
The
eyes stare vacantly,
They
never shed a tear.
And
the face appears pale,
Against
the lavender silk,
My
straight bangs
Almost
reach my eyebrows.
And
how dissimilar to flight
Is
my halting step,
As
if it were a raft beneath my feet,
Not
these wooden parquet squares.
And
the pale lips are slightly parted,
The
breathing laboured and uneven,
And
over my heart tremble
The
flowers of a non-existent meeting.
***
A
grey-eyed beauty with a wistful solemn expression, Akhmatova was eleven years
old when she began writing poetry. In Anna of All the Russias, biographer
Elaine Feinstein states that by age sixteen, a deep melancholy pervaded Akhmatova’s personality.
She published her first poem—entitled “On his hand there are many shiny
rings”—one year later. Then, at age twenty-one, she married Nikolay Gumilyov,
a fellow poet she knew from
childhood. He had loved her with an
unwavering love. Once she’d decided to accept
Gumilyov’s marriage offer, she wrote in a letter to a friend, “I believe that
it is my fate to be his wife. Whether
or not I love him, I do not know, but it seems to me that I do.”
Eight
years later, in 1918, they divorced. Two
lines from her poem, “Departure,” might describe how Akhmatova felt in the
months that preceded the divorce: “I
cannot say if it is our love,/Or the day, that is ending.”
In
search of love, she wed twice more—to men who did not truly understand or
appreciate her. Or they may have loved
her but not in a way she needed.
“He loved three things, alive” is
the first line of one visionary poem that hints at her predicament:
He
loved three things, alive:
White
peacocks, songs at eve,
And
antique maps of America.
Hated
when children cried,
And
raspberry jam with tea,
And
feminine hysteria.
…And
he had married me.
Of
one lover, she writes, “He talked of the
summer and said,/How absurd—a woman
poet!” Nonetheless, she was sought after as a beauty; and so had several
relationships. To a former lover who had
recently wed someone else, she wrote:
I
won’t beg for your love.
It’s
safely laid aside….
I
won’t be penning jealous
Letters
to your bride.
But
be wise, take my advice:
Give
her my poems to read,
Give
her my photos beside –
Be
kind to the newly-wed!
***
Many
of the poems are self-revealing, yet understated. Akhmatova gives a woman’s perspective in a
time of misogyny in Russia. A wife was
basically a commodity: women were
often reviled and abused.
Incredibly, a Russian proverb was: “The more you beat your wife, the tastier the
soup will be.”
Luckily,
Akhmatova did not witness such brutality as a child. Several poems evoke sentiments from her
sheltered childhood. She was “the wild girl” that jumped into the Black Sea with scant
hesitation. The beautiful poem, At the
Edge of the Sea, draws on this magical time in her life.
In Northern
Elegies, Akhmatova describes her
mother, Inna, with tenderness:
She
had an uncommon name, white hands
And
a kindness that has come down to me:
Though
it has been a useless inheritance
In
this harsh life of mine.
At
the bottom of her well of sorrow is, perhaps, that Akhmatova never actually raised her son, Lev. At her husband Nikolay’s insistence, Lev grew
up with his grandmother and only saw his mother in summer.
Of Lev the child—beloved in absentia—she wrote:
I
know you won’t be able to
Remember
much about me, little one:
I
didn’t hold you, or even scold you,
Or
take you to Communion.
Sadly,
Lev in later years expressed that he did not feel loved. He wrote, “If I were not her son, but the son of an
ordinary woman, I would have been before anything else a blossoming Soviet
professor. . . .” During his lifetime, he was a well-regarded historian of Eurasian subjects, and wrote poetry. Not surprising, however, his relationship with Akhmatova was turbulent; and he
never forgave her.
***
The early poems are simple, brief, ethereal in
nature. They describe real moments and
loves in her life. I think of an
Akhmatova poem, phrase or image long after I’ve read it. The image—of “raspberry jam with tea” or “lavender silk”—floats into my consciousness
and stays with me.
The
later poems are longer, more complex in imagery and ideas/ideology. They are the poems of a mature “poetess”;
they evince masterful
craftsmanship. Akhmatova wrote some of
these later poems in hardship, during a turbulent era in Russia. In the months before the Bolsheviks came into
power, women stood in ‘bread lines’ for hours, daily. In Requiem,
she states that she “stood [in line] for
three hundred hours”; and she refers to herself in an ironic
situation:
They
should have shown you, little teaser,
Little
favourite, friend of all,
Sylvan princess, happy charmer,
What
situation would be yours –
As
three-hundredth in the line
You’d
stand. . . .
Thus,
these later poems transformed Akhmatova into the voice of “a hundred million people.”
That
said, I ‘enjoy’ the shorter poems
more—mostly because they are subtler, seem more personal and heartfelt, are
infused with genuine emotion. These shorter poems reflect a “lyrical
soul”—as Akhmatova’s friend described her; but they also make one reflect on
one’s own life.
Five
original volumes of poetry are the core of
Akhmatova’s oeuvre: Evening (1912), Rosary (1914), White Flock
(1917), Plantain (1921), and Anno
Domini MCMXXI (1922). Each volume flung out into the world, like
a blue frisbee. For this essay, I read Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems Including Requiem, with
poems compiled from each of the Russian poet’s major works; it is
brilliantly translated by British scholar A.S. Kline and an excellent
introduction to Akhmatova.
***
In
an homage to artist Boris Anrep, the love of her life, Akhmatova laments aspects of her life and asks her lover to
forgive her:
The
evening light is broad and yellow
Tender,
the April chill.
You
are many years late,
Yet
I am glad you are here.
Sit
down now, close to me,
And
look with joyful eyes:
Here
it is, the blue notebook,
Filled
with my childhood poems.
Forgive
me that I lived in sorrow,
Rejoiced
too little in the sun.
Forgive,
forgive that I mistook
Too
many others for you.
Feinstein, Elaine. Anna of
All the Russias (2007).
http://www.elainefeinstein.com/Anna-Akhmatova.shtml
*“Biography Of Anna Akhmatova”
(article).
http://www.poemsclub.com/biography-of-anna-akhmatova.html#ixzz2cF759Quk
For
the FREE
ebook of Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems Including Requiem (translated by scholar A.S. Kline), visit
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Russian/Akhmatova.htm
http://self.gutenberg.org/eBooks/WPLBN0002171667-The_Selected_Poems_of_Anna_Akhmatova-by_Akhmatova__Anna.aspx
For
more info:
http://www.poemhunter.com/anna-akhmatova/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/anna-akhmatova
To
view the painting “Portrait of Anna Akhmatova” by Natan Altman, visit
http://www.auburn.edu/~mitrege/russian/art/altman-akhmatova.html
To
view the art Akhmatova inspired, visit
http://artoftherussias.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/akhmatova-in-art/
