Recently I’ve gone back to Akhmatova, specifically to her Requiem, for the first time in several years. I admit to never having been too fond of her glacial late poetry and was struggling to find my way back into the severity of her tender concrete prison-song. I realised that my problem lay not with the words themselves, but with my attempts as a reader to comprehend the connection between these perfectly comprehensible expressions of grief and the perfectly incomprehensible fact of the Terror and its millions of executions and interments. At this point I remembered something that James B wrote (here: http://piercepenniless.tumblr.com/post/23729180487/akhmatova) on Requiem and the questions that it posed for him: what precisely is it that makes poets so threatening; what are the demands that Akhmatova makes of us who live with the Requiem, the rememberers; and what a poem like this tells us about the possibility or otherwise for something called ‘communist literature’. This is a brief response to James and the issue of Akhmatova’s relation to communism.
Requiem is not about claims to justice as much as it is about rejections of shared heritage, when it is only rarely and tenuously that these amount to the same thing. The mother does not throw herself at the prison wall to beat at it, but asks, ‘what is this for?’ What was ‘modernity’ for if this wall exists? [И ненужным привеском болтался/Возле тюрем своих Ленинград. - And like a useless appendage, Leningrad swung from its prisons.] J’s statement that ‘Through it run currents of Russian culture that were supposed to have vanished’ doesn’t go far enough. The idea of a history, whether positive or not, has collapsed to the point where the projected dignity of the pallbearer and the shadows of murdered or co-opted comrades like Mandelstam and Blok run alongside tired allusions of sanctioned Soviet literary heroes like Maiakovskii (his laudatory ‘100,000,000′ resurfaces as Akhmatova’s wailing ‘hundred million strong people’) and Shokholov (a quiet Neva, if not a Don). We only have to read the dates and locations that mark each of the poem’s extant sections to get a sense of the scattering at hand: 1961, 1957, 1940, 1935, 1940, 1939, 1940, 1943 (this year is marked ‘Tashkent’, the fact of exile tossed in as incongruity), again 1940. Or the simple expressions of grief that silently erase the notion of a present [Что случилось, не пойму - What happened, I won’t understand].
The self in Requiem is fragmented, then, ground down far beyond the point where we might speak about its possessing any meaningful ‘desire’. But this is the blankness in which Akhmatova starts to construct the shadow image of a world where people live through one another and not in solitary vigils of mourning. If there is a communism in her writing then it is one in which desire is irrelevant. As the poem frames it, Akhmatova the mother would never have remembered the Terror like this without the question posed in 'Instead of a Preface’ by the woman ‘with bluish lips’: ‘А это вы можете описать?’ - ‘And can you describe this?’ Requiem is not a demand that we speak to the fact of the Terror, but already a response to such a demand from without. Akhmatova’s desire has nothing to do with it, or with the fact that she has anything to do with this blue-lipped women in the first place [Где теперь невольные подруги/Двух моих осатанелых лет? - Where now are my chance friends/Of those two diabolical years?]
Of course, this amounts to saying that solidarity means the dismembering of the self, and such a conclusion shouldn’t be acceptable to us. Akhmatova splits herself over and over across places, years, lines: part II of the Prologue bleeds into part III in a typical act of self-denial.
Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме,
Помолитесь обо мне.
/// Нет, это не я, это кто-то другой страдает.
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me.
/// No, that is not me, but some other who suffers.
The language of solidity arrives only later, in the implacable ‘Sentence’, in the imagery of stone - first as the dread pronouncement of the state, then in a desire for hard emptiness [И упало каменное слово/На мою еще живую грудь... Надо, чтоб душа окаменела - And the stone word fell/On my still-living breast... I must turn my soul to stone] We are left looking for a way to take this stone and at least make a weapon if it, use it for some act of rupture.
But in the final instance, Akhmatova’s stone heart is itself a function of the solidarity of the ‘still-living’. As she re-centres herself, adopting the implacability of the walls around her, she reverses something of that fragmentation and scattering of desire. She is now a part of the world of others: she can be held in their hands, turned over, experienced through the senses, as she can turn them over in her mind, blue lips and all. If there is a communism in Akhmatova, or a move towards a response to the question, ‘can you describe this?’ when the Terror is lurching all around, then it is in the body, the senses, the eyes and gangrenous fingers and hunched backs that at least proclaim, not ‘I am here’, but ‘we are’. And this is the chorus of broken women that she rallies to speak through her in the second part of the Epilogue: women who leave a material mark on the world and on each other, even as their status as human beings is inked, frozen, and blasted away.
Опять поминальный приблизился час.
Я вижу, я слышу, я чувствую вас:
И ту, что едва до окна довели,
И ту, что родимой не топчет земли.
... Хотелось бы всех поименно назвать,
Да отняли список, и негде узнать.
Для них соткала я широкий покров
Из бедных, у них же подслушанных слов.
Once more the day of remembrance draws near,
I see, I hear, I fell you:
The one who they almost had to drag at the end,
And the one who tramples her native land no more.
... I’d like to name them all by name,
But the list is confiscated and is nowhere to be found.
I have woven a wide mantle for them
From their meagre, overheard words.