Scholars consider this complex autobiographical triptych an exceptional achievement. In it, Anna Akhmatova revisits pre–World War I St. Petersburg with the hindsight of several decades and from the perspective of Tashkent and Moscow. The cycle, “the work that would crown her last years” (Reeder 30), was composed between 1940 and 1962 and is “the fulfillment of the Symbolists’ dream” (Zhirmunsky quoted in Hemschemeyer 8). Poem Without a Hero is dense with Russian literary and cultural allusions that make the work obscure to the average reader.
It opens with “In Place of a Forward,” in which Akhmatova writes, during her World War II evacuation from then Leningrad to Tashkent, that the poem came to her unbidden and that it is a memorial act for those whose voices she continues to hear. The opening epigrams are taken from a coat of arms and from 19th-century Russian poet Alexandr Pushkin. The addendum, added four years later, cites Pilate: “What I have written—I have written.” It was Akhmatova’s response to “various false and absurd interpretations” (544), giving rise to the suggestion that she should revise and explain her text.
She then places three dedications, the first two for the central characters of the cycle’s plot contained in part two. These dedicatees are an officer and the actress who rejected his passionate love.
The remaining structure of the work proceeds thus: Part one consists of chapter one, “Across the Landing: Interlude,” chapters two, three, and four and Epilogue; part two contains “The Other Side of the Coin: Intermezzo”; and part three, Epilogue.
Among the quotations in part one is Osip Mandelstam’s “clear voice: ‘I am ready to die’ ” (554). The 24 stanzas of part two include two-and-a-half stanzas of ellipses, a strategy of poets in Russian and Soviet shifting politics. Under the constant danger of censorship and retribution, the silences are allowed to do their work by implication.
Poem Without a Hero is “the weaving together of the lyrical principle and the historico-philosophical principle” (Vilenkin 253). Boris Pasternak observed of the poem that “The words seethe as in a cauldron” (Vilenkin 251).
It is a companion piece to Requiem, another of her great cycles dedicated to Russian historical reality, but far less accessible because of the private world she recalls. She declined to annotate the work because it had been written for those who knew the world about which she spoke. She intended for the poem to “be buried with her and her century; it was not written for eternity, nor even for posterity” (Berlin 51).
In the part three Epilogue she addresses her city and her past to declare,
“We are inseparable, / My shadow is on your walls” (575).
Bibliography
Akhmatova, Anna. The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Expanded edition. Edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997.
Berlin, Isaiah. “Anna Akhmatova: A Memoir.” In The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, 35–55. Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997.
Vilenkin, Vitalii. “On A Poem Without a Hero.” In Anna Akhmatova 1889–1989, edited by Sonia I. Ketchian, 249–265. Oakland, Calif.: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1993.
Categories: Literature, Russian Literature, World Literature
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