During Osip Mandelstam’s internal exile in the Soviet city Voronezh, Anna Akhmatova visited her Acmeist colleague, whose 1934 arrest she had witnessed, and wrote this poem in March 1936. The poem first appeared in the journal Leningrad, with the last four lines deleted.
The town of Voronezh is located 850 kilometers south of Moscow in the extreme west of Russia, near the confluence of the Voronezh and Don rivers not far from Ukraine. At the time of Mandelstam’s sojourn there, the population was approximately 325,000. Mandelstam’s specific “crime” had been writing the dangerous lyric The Stalin Epigram, so to counterbalance the experience of Stalinist repression, Akhmatova invokes the mighty moments of Russian history.
The first of these allusions, “the Peter of Voronezh,” is a reference to a statue of Peter the Great, the reformer czar, who had revolutionized Russian political structures and commanded his courtiers and officers to emulate European customs. His presence in the poem not only casts light on the contrasting (isolationist) practices of Soviet politics and economics, but also carries the promise or hope of renewed reform.
Second, Akhmatova reminds her readers of “the battle of Kulikovo,” which occurred about halfway between Moscow and Voronezh on the banks of the Don, when a unified Russia defeated the Mongol Golden Horde in 1380, putting in motion the end of the “Tatar Yoke” that had already lasted a century and a half. Russia had to be patient for yet another century after Kulikovo Field, and so the hope of reform and freedom made implicit by these references is not untempered by long suffering.
In Mandelstam’s case, the wind that “blows from the slopes” will not bring change soon enough. Mandelstam told Akhmatova during their visit that “Poetry is power” (Mandelstam 170). And both of them believed in the power and their responsibility to record the truth of their circumstances.
When Akhmatova arrived it was winter, the town was frozen, and the wind was a cold one, literally and metaphorically, in spite of the whisper of triumph that it brought. The poem begins in the middle of a sentence, as if this exile were an interruption and not an end. It was a dangerous time, and she had to tread carefully, “timidly.”
In the concluding four lines omitted from the original publication, Mandelstam is “the poet in disgrace,” and so their great pleasure in the visit is presided over by both fear and the poetic muse. It is a time of metaphorical night without any sign of morning. The poets are not so naive as to think sunrise will come suddenly. They know their history.
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.
Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope: A Memoir. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Categories: Literature, Russian Formalism, World Literature
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