Akhmatova herself considered Meyerhold’s work a mainspring for the creation of Poem Without a Hero. She tied its genesis to her impressions of his 1917 production of Lermontov’s drama Masquerade. The play sounded then like a requiem for imperial Petersburg; it was that memorial note that Akhmatova captured in Poem Without a Hero.
Another Meyerhold production that may have played as great a role in the genesis of Poem Without a Hero was his innovative 1935 production in Leningrad of The Queen of Spades. Akhmatova had a complex relationship with this work. She was captivated by Tchaikovsky’s music, and besides, The Queen of Spades was a favorite of Blok and Arthur Lourié, who both considered it central to the Petersburg mythos.35
In a published letter Blok identified Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, Lermontov’s Masquerade, and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades as variations on the same Petersburg theme. For him magical Petersburg was a city of masquerades (carnivals) where “‘Apollonic’ Pushkin fell into the abyss, pushed there by Tchaikovsky—magus and musician.” Akhmatova, who studied Blok’s letters closely, could not have missed this observation. But she was shocked by the liberties taken in Tchaikovsky’s opera, radically transforming its literary source, the Pushkin story.36 Part of what made Meyerhold’s production of the opera so memorable was that the director tried to “re-Pushkinize” the plot, even commissioning a completely new libretto that revealed more sharply the linchpin of Tchaikovsky’s music—guilt and its redemption (this theme was clear in Lermontov’s Masquerade as well).
Meyerhold’s production split the intellectual elite of Leningrad into two camps: one fiercely attacked it taking liberties with Tchaikovsky’s opera, the other—including Shostakovich—considered it a work of genius.37 Meyerhold himself announced that he wanted to convey the “mood of The Bronze Horseman.” He structured the production around the contrast between the twilit urban landscape and Petersburg’s decadent entertainments. Akhmatova later built this contrast into her Poem Without a Hero, endowing it also with veiled reminiscences of and parallels with The Queen of Spades.
Tchaikovsky sensed the possibility of the death of Petersburg, so dear to his heart, and he was horrified and worried by that possibility. His music—particularly Sleeping Beauty, The Queen of Spades, and the Pathétique Symphony—embodies his requiem for the imperial capital. (In conversation with Akhmatova we discussed using the Pathétique for a ballet of Poem Without a Hero.) For Akhmatova, Tchaikovsky’s music represents a core element in the classic Petersburg mythos. Poem Without a Hero is in effect an encyclopedia of that mythos. Its citations—obvious, hidden, and encoded—from works of Petersburg authors make it the quintessential postmodernist text.
It sometimes seems that the poem, unlike anything else in Russian literature, is, as Mandelstam said of the Inferno, “a real quotation orgy.” Akhmatova admits her habitual use of this technique in the first lines of the verse dedication:
… and since I ran out of paper,
I am writing on your draft.
And so another’s word appears.
And like that snowflake on my hand,
Melts trustingly and without rebuke.
The key term is “another’s word,” arising out of Bakhtin’s literary concept of “reported speech.” Bakhtin was particularly interested in the use of “reported speech”—that is, citation—in medieval literature, where “the borders between another’s and one’s own speech were fragile, ambivalent, and frequently intentionally convoluted and confused.” When Bakhtin spoke of citations that were “clearly and reverently emphasized, half-hidden, hidden, half-conscious, unconscious, correct, intentionally distorted, unintentionally distorted, deliberately reinterpreted, and so on” in medieval literature, he could have been describing Poem Without a Hero.
According to Bakhtin, reported speech inevitably becomes not only a constituent part of the work in which it is included but its theme. Something like this occurs in Poem With out a Hero, where the quotations and images from Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Blok, and Mandelstam turn into mirrors in which Akhmatova regards herself, using the past to tell the future—her own and the city’s.
