Cries and Whispers

By R.Z.S.

POEMS OF AKHMATOVA

Selected and translated by STANLEY KUNITZ with MAX HAYWARD

173 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

In the first volume of her magnificent memoir, Hope Against Hope (TIME, Jan. 18, 1971), Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of Poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled her husband's grim joke on the subject of Russian culture in the 1930s. "Poetry is respected only in this country," he said. "There's no place where more people are killed for it."

Mandelstam was to die in one of Stalin's Siberian prison camps at the beginning of World War II. He was one of Russia's finest modern poets, an artist who built his poems from gritty blocks of life. Anna Akhmatova, a close friend of the Mandelstams, shared this politically hazardous aesthetic. When she died in 1966 at the age of 77, she was regarded as Russia's greatest woman poet. It is a distinction that today might be considered sexist, were this issue not overshadowed by the enormous struggle in the Soviet Union for intellectual and artistic liberty.

Born into a comfortable family, Akhmatova was basically unprepared for the life before her. This cruel age has deflected me,/ like a river from its course, she wrote. Yet, as indicated by this Russian-English selection of her poetry, translated and commented on by Stanley Kunitz and Critic Max Hayward, Akhmatova's life probably never would have run smoothly. Although the original music is lost even in the best translation, enough of her emotional tones come through this excellent Englishing to suggest a tough individualist whose highly economical style was due not to reticence but a stubborn belief that she had distilled the truth and the reader could take it or leave it.

There is a mournful formalism about Akhmatova's poetry, a quality that shaped her sentiments in much the way that the laws of nature dictate the beauty of crystals. Her life is reflected in the cold facets of her art. Early poems tell of her unhappy marriage to the Russian poet, Nikolai Gumilyov. A short poem dated 1911 ends: He couldn't stand bawling brats,/ raspberry jam with his tea,/ or womanish hysteria . . . And he was tied to me.

Six years later, the Revolution dwarfed such domestic miseries, Akhmatova's marriage dissolved (Gumilyov was later shot by the Bolsheviks), and she withdrew into a brief marriage to an Assyriologist. Unlike many well-known artists, Akhmatova chose to remain in Russia. I am not one of those who left the land/ to the mercy of its enemies begins an uncompromising poem that goes on to be unnecessarily contemptuous of those who fled.

Joining Russia's "inner immigration" of outcast writers and thinkers, Akhmatova lived during the '20s and '30s by translating and scholarship. Stalin's purges, which saw the jailing of her own 20-year-old son, sent her into a new creative cycle. The poems of this period scarcely disguised her bitterness. Shah of the Shahs,/ blessed in Allah's eyes,/ how well did you feast?/ You hold the world in your hand/ as if it were a cold bright bead . . ./ But what about my boy,/ did you enjoy his taste? Although the poem was titled "Imitation from the Armenian," there is little doubt who the "Shah" was.

The irony of World War II was that it brought many Russians a small degree of freedom. Stalin entreated his "brothers and sisters" to unite in defending the motherland. Pravda even printed one of Akhmatova's heroic war poems. Her dormant fame was reawakened. In 1944 she received a standing ovation after reading her poetry from a Moscow stage. But two years later, with the war won, Stalin was asking. "Who organized this standing ovation?" Akhmatova was proscribed again and her son was rearrested.

Like so many Russian artists, Akhmatova learned to discern fate in the changing cold war weather. The Khrushchev thaw brought renewed official acceptance. Much of her work was republished in Russia. At 75, she traveled to Oxford for an honorary degree, to Italy for a prize and to Paris. where 53 years before Modigliani had sketched her portrait. But fame, as Akhmatova once wrote, "is a trap wherein there is neither happiness nor light." Two years later, when she was buried with full Orthodox rites, her graveside was crowded with the Soviet literary establishment.

Akhmatova's life seems to have been dedicated by history to a task more important than making fine poems. She had a mission, as her friend Nadezhda Mandelstam said, to survive and testify about a cruel age. She embraced the role. In a brief recollection, she tells about the hundreds of hours spent waiting outside Leningrad's prison for word about her son.

"Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

" 'Can you describe this?'

"And I said: 'l can.' "

qed R.Z.S.

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