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| ANNA AKHMATOVA, c 1922 |
LEGEND ON AN
UNFINISHED PORTRAIT
There's nothing to be sad about.
Sadness is a crime, a prison.
A strange impression, I have risen
From the grey canvas like a sheet.
Up-flying arms, with a bad break,
Tormented smile — I and the sitter
Had to become thus through the bitter
Hours of profligate give and take.
He willed it that it should be so,
With words that were sinister and dead.
Fear drove into my cheeks the red,
And into my cheeks it piled the snow.
No sin in him. I was his fee.
He went, and arranged other limbs,
And other draperies. Void of dreams,
I lie in mortal lethargy.
Evening
1912
Translated by
DM THOMAS
'Anna Akhmatova' was born Anna Gorenko at Bolshoy Fontan, near the Ukrainian city of Odessa, on 23 June 1889. The Gorenko family moved to the town of Tsarkoye-Selo, outside what was then the city of St Petersburg, when she was eleven months old. The town was to retain a central position in her memories and become a recurring symbol in her work for the remainder of her life.
Akhmatova began writing poetry as a child, publishing her first verses as a teenager, none of which are known to have survived. She deliberately chose to publish under the pseudonym 'Akhmatova,' the surname of her Tatar grandmother, because her nobleman father did not want his respectable name tarnished by having it associated with anything as disreputable as poetry.
Akhmatova soon established herself as one of the most exciting of the new young Russian poets, giving readings that attracted the attention of her competitors, including her future husband the 'Acmeist' Nikolai Gumilev and his friends Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky. Her marriage to Gumilev was not a happy one –– she allegedly told friends that she was never sure she loved him –– and they divorced in 1918 after producing a son named Lev, who was born in 1912. Gumilev was arrested in 1921, accused of engaging in 'counter-revolutionary activities' and summarily executed by the Bolsheviks shortly afterwards.
Akhmatova's life was severely affected by her brief unhappy marriage to Gumilev. The 1920s were the era of 'guilt by association' and after her husband's arrest her activities were closely monitored by Soviet authorities, who banned her from publishing or giving any public readings of her poetry until 1940. (It was rumoured that Stalin personally ordered this ban because he felt jealous of a standing ovation the poet had received after giving an especially moving reading of her work in Leningrad.) Her son Lev was arrested, released and re-arrested by the regime several times, serving lengthy sentences in prisons and labour camps until he was finally freed for good during the 1956 amnesty that followed Stalin's death. Her third husband, Nikolai Punin, was not so fortunate. He died in a Siberian gulag in 1953, his case apparently forgotten by everyone except his wife.
Because she was banned from publishing and giving readings of her work, and was afraid to write it down lest it should find its way into the hands of the Cheka (tyrannical forerunner of the KGB), Akhmatova and her friends adopted the practice of committing her unpublished poems to memory to ensure they would survive. They were often recited, quietly, among themselves at private parties and other informal gatherings –– a way of being 'heard' and 'read' that allowed her to deceive a regime determined to crush her spirit without actually going to the trouble of arresting and murdering her as it had done with Gumilev and her close friend Osip Mandelstam.
Despite the ban on her work, Akhmatova was still one of the most popular and beloved poets in Russia, important enough for Stalin to have her evacuated (along with the similarly hounded composer Dmitri Shostakovich) from St Petersburg, now renamed Leningrad, to the distant eastern province of Tashkent during the long destructive siege of that city by the Nazis. She returned to a devastated Leningrad in 1944 and remained there, except for yearly visits to her dacha in Komarovo and a single state-approved trip to the West to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, until her death on 5 March 1966. Her reputation had been partially restored by this time and much of her work –– although not her two acknowledged masterpieces Requiem and Poem Without A Hero –– gradually began to be republished, helping to establish her reputation, both in the USSR and abroad, as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.
Use the links below to read more translated poetry by ANNA AKHMATOVA and a post about the poet's journals, edited by her friend LYDIA CHUKOVSKAYA, that were published by Northwestern University Press in 2002.
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/akhmatova/akhmatova_ind.html
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/978-0-8101-1940-6/Default.aspx
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