Requiem and Poem without a Hero. Anna Akhmatova
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important as the poem’s fascination with doubles (Sudeikina-Akhmatova; Petersburg-Leningrad; past-future, etc.) is its use as a leitmotif of three, the magic number. Akhmatova hinted at ‘threeness’ being fundamental to her poem when she described it as a ‘box with a triple bottom’. Often we find a major-major-minor pattern in her groups of three: Blok-Sudeikina-Knyazev, as lovers; Blok-Kuzmin-Knyazev, as poets; Knyazev-Sudeikina-mysterious guest, her dedicatees; the three portraits of Sudeikina in theatrical roles: goatlegged nymph-the blunderer-portrait in shadows; cedar-maple-lilac; Goya-Botticelli-El Greco; Chopin-Bach-‘my Seventh’, which may be the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven or of Shostakovich. In each of these cases, the third element is more tragic or more mysterious, like a minor chord in music. The significance of doubles and threes is suggested even in the metre, triptychs bound into pairs by rhyme.
Our constant awareness of echoes and mirror-images is enhanced—to the Russian ear at least—by innumerable echoes of earlier poets, especially Pushkin and Blok himself. The cultural interpenetration is so dense and complete that it is almost as if the poem is being written, not by an individual, but by a line of poets, a tradition. And this, of course, is a deliberate and profound contradiction of Soviet theology, which dismisses the pre-Revolutionary past as worthless.
Images of darkness, play-acting and illusion dominate Part One—phantoms, midnight, candles, dreams, and above all, masks and mirrors. This world of 1913 is glamorous and beautiful, frivolous and touched with corruption and a death which no-one believes in. Akhmatova loves this world, and scorns it. At the poem’s end, after the whole marvellously created shadow world has been exorcised, the terrible truth breaks free: flying east towards Tashkent, Akhmatova sees below her that endless road along which her son, and millions of others, have been driven to the labour camps. Such a tragic moment of revelation and reality exceeds all that art can do; and through her art Akhmatova shares it all with us—agony, recognition, catharsis . . . ‘And that road was long—long—long, amidst the/Solemn and crystal/Stillness/Of Siberia’s earth.’ At this climax, the poem’s predominant major-minor progression is, in the deepest sense, reversed, and we are exalted, as we are at the end of King Lear. We feel the unmistakable presence of moral greatness as well as great art—or rather, the moral greatness is an essential condition of the artistic greatness, of the simplicity and majesty of the style.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s recent memoir, Hope Abandoned, amply and movingly confirms this impression of Akhmatova. The unflinchingly honest strokes of Nadezhda’s pen create a portrait of a woman who, besides her genius, had gifts of life-enriching gaiety and loyalty, and a moral strength which suffering only made stronger. Mandelstam himself foresaw this—almost incredibly—even before the Revolution, when he wrote: ‘I would say that she is now no ordinary woman; of her it can truly be said that she is “dressed poorly, but of grand mien”. The voice of renunciation grows stronger all the time in her verse, and at the moment her poetry bids fair to become a symbol of Russia’s grandeur.’ His prophecy came true, in more terrible circumstances than he imagined or could have imagined.
II
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