St Petersburg полностью

Akhmatova was aware of the historic and cultural significance of her magnum opus. That is why she gave the first part of the poem, “1913,” the subtitle “A Petersburg Tale,” thereby creating a direct parallel with another famous “Petersburg Tale,” Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. In fact, the role of Akhmatova’s poem in forming the latter-day Petersburg mythos is comparable to the impulse given to the birth of that mythos by Pushkin’s poem. In the opinion of Lev Loseff, Poem Without a Hero is a “‘historiosophical’ poem, not so much about the events of history as the mechanism of history, which Akhmatova sees in the cyclical nature of the ages, in the endless repetition, which is what brings it close to Pushkin’s historical vision.”32

Poem Without a Hero lacks a developed narrative. The embryo of a plot can be reduced to the traditional love triangle, Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin, beyond which can be seen the real drama that agitated the artistic circles of the capital in 1913. A young poet and officer, Vsevolod Knyazev, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Rumor tied this suicide, typical of Petersburg’s “prewar, lascivious and threatening” atmosphere, in Akhmatova’s words, to Knyazev’s unrequited love for Akhmatova’s friend, the dancer Olga Glebova-Sudeikina. Knyazev’s lucky rival was said to be the poet Alexander Blok. At her son’s funeral, Knyazev’s mother lashed out at Olga. “God will punish those who made him suffer.”

Knyazev, his poetry, and the tragic story of his love were buried by World War I and the revolution; they seemed destined to oblivion. (The death in 1945 of Olga Glebova-Sudeikina from consumption in Paris also went unnoticed.) But Blok remained popular after the revolution, and his untimely death in August 1921 only added to his mystique and made him one of the most revered poets in the history of Russian literature.

Blok played an exceptionally important part in Akhmatova’s life, both as a poet and as a symbol of his era. In the 1910s Akhmatova started a risky literary game with Blok, hinting in her published poems of her love for an unnamed poet with features—like his famous gray eyes—that made him easily recognizable.

The legend that Akhmatova and Blok had had an affair survived the poet’s death and even the publication of his diaries and notebooks. The average reader did not notice what Akhmatova’s eye caught instantly: “As is clear from Blok’s notebooks, I had no place in his life.”

Angry protestations and ironic puzzlement became part and parcel of Akhmatova’s conversations with acquaintances old and new, including me. In 1965 I would not have dared suggest to her that the obvious source for the legend was Akhmatova’s early—and quite popular—love poems. Be that as it may, the Blok elements in Poem Without a Hero form a crucial layer of the work, a knot of themes, images, allusions, and direct citations all leading to Blok.33

Blok appears as an androgynous hero, a demon with a woman’s smile and a dual image. He is not only Harlequin but also Don Juan “with dead heart and dead gaze.” Akhmatova took the epigraph to the first chapter from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni:

Di rider finirai pria deWaurora.

(You will stop laughing before dawn.)

As usual for Akhmatova, the reference hides a deeper parallel—with the classic Russian interpretation of the Don Juan legend, Pushkin’s Stone Guest (on which Alexander Dargomyzhsky, the spiritual father of the Mighty Five, based his imaginative opera of the same name).

Shortly after World War II Akhmatova wrote a work on The Stone Guest; she later revised and expanded it several times. In this essay she maintained that Pushkin projected his own emotions onto his Don Juan: fear of happiness and eternal fidelity. For her, Pushkin’s Don Juan “truly was transformed during his assignation with Donna Anna and the whole tragedy lies in the fact that at that instant he loved and was happy, and instead of salvation, from which he was just a step away, there came disaster.”

It has practically become a truism that Akhmatova often hints at a correlation between Pushkin’s life and work and her own. She compares Pushkin’s Don Juan with a Petersburg rake and calls his friends “golden youths.” The well-versed reader of turn-of-the-century Russian poetry (Akhmatova’s intended reader) will readily recall “the Petersburg Don Juan” Alexander Blok and his famous 1912 poem “The Commendatore’s Footsteps,” in which the autobiographical hero, called Don Juan, meets the Commendatore, who has come for him, and exclaims,

Maid of Light! Where are you, Donna Anna?

Anna! Anna!—Silence.

These lines are themselves an imitation of the last line of Pushkin’s tragedy (“I perish—it’s over. O Donna Anna!”).