This pronouncement may seem far-fetched, and the significance of her almost random meeting with Berlin blown out of proportion. But that is so only at first glance. Close examination suggests that her interpretation is logical and psychologically sound. Though the Cold War would have begun anyway, the vicious campaign against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko noticeably chilled the postwar euphoria, especially among the leftist Western intelligentsia, and hastened the descent to hostility.
When I arrived in the West in 1976, I saw how painfully fresh the Akhmatova-Zoshchenko affair was in the minds of local Russophiles. As one who had borne the brunt of Stalin’s wrath, Akhmatova rightfully could feel that she had played a central role in world events, especially if we accept the view that some outbursts of the aging Stalin were linked to random or irrational causes.34
In these skeptical times the novels of Alexandre Dumas père are read, if at all, only by children, and we tend to forget the roles that chance and individuals play in history. In Poem Without a Hero, Akhmatova tried to challenge historical determinism; in that sense her work is a polemic with and a parallel to Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. But, just as it is in Pushkin’s poem, fate is stronger than the characters in Poem Without a Hero, including the author. All of them, in Akhmatova’s mythology, are inhabitants of a legendary, doomed Atlantis pulled to the bottom of the sea both by the undertow of world history and by a shared sense of guilt.
The theme of general guilt—and even more important, personal guilt—is central to Poem Without a Hero and traditional in Russian literature. Nor was it original to project such guilt onto Petersburg, the new Rome, generally decadent and richly deserving destruction at the hands of twentieth-century barbarians. But the transformation of the theme of sin and guilt into the theme of expiation through suffering, wherein the city and Akhmatova follow the way of the cross of humiliation, torment, and transfiguration—that is both new and essential.
Akhmatova begins by unfolding a rich tapestry of the carnival life of Petersburg in 1913 (here the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on the central place of carnival in culture is evident). During a New Year’s carnival the author is visited by legendary characters of prerevolutionary Petersburg (recognizable among them are Blok, Mayakovsky, and Mikhail Kuzmin), dressed as Don Juan, Faust, Casanova, “Prince of Darkness.” But the action immediately opens out onto the expanses of Petersburg, and Akhmatova deftly weaves the city’s cultural symbols into the panorama. Thus, in the text of the poem, the “inaccessible swan,” the ballerina Anna Pavlova, appears, as does the voice of the great bass Fyodor Chaliapin, which “fills hearts with trembling.” When Akhmatova writes
The denouement is ridiculously close:
Petrouchka’s mask behind the curtains,
Coachmen dancing around bonfires …
she evokes in the reader’s mind scenes from another work that had become a symbol of prerevolutionary Petersburg—the Stravinsky-Fokine-Benois ballet Petrouchka, the first major work built around the theme of nostalgic longing for the capital of the old Russian Empire, a theme developed around the same love triangle that is the basis of Poem Without a Hero (in Stravinsky’s ballet Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin become Petrouchka-Ballerina-Moor).
Yet another character in Akhmatova’s carnival is the leading avant-garde theater director of that era, Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1906 Meyerhold had staged Blok’s symbolist fantasy The Fair Show Booth, which also embodied the ubiquitous Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin triangle. That production became a manifesto of Petersburg modernism. A few years later Meyerhold staged Arthur Schnitzler’s pantomime Columbine’s Scarf, where the same characters whirled in carnival ecstasy. Meyerhold created a touching figure, a blackamoor who was remembered by many in the audience, including Akhmatova. She includes “Meyerhold’s blackamoors” in the action of Poem Without a Hero. As usual, this detail has many meanings. It recalls another Meyerhold production with blackamoors—a Don ]uan, based on Molière’s, which Meyerhold directed at the Alexandrinsky Theater in 1910. Akhmatova uses every chance to remind the reader of the core theme of Poem Without a Hero (which is also the leitmotif of the Don Juan legend): sin and its punishment.
