A contemporary of Akhmatova’s, the Leningrad critic Efim Dobin, compared Poem Without a Hero to Velazquez’s famous painting Las Meniñas, in which the artist depicted himself painting his subjects:
The artist is in two worlds at once. Outside the painting. And inside it, next to his creations. In the world that exists in reality. And in the poetic world he has created. The whole painting is a mirror, everything that is depicted in it. Like Velázquez, Akhmatova wrote herself into an ancient drama. She stood next to the heroes in order to have uninterrupted dialogue with them.38
Akhmatova’s tragic experience is woven into the horrible history of twentieth-century Petersburg, the culmination of which was the 900-day siege. Though she was evacuated, the blockade confirmed her theories about the unity of the poet’s and the city’s destinies:
You did not become my grave,
Seditious, disgraced, dear,
You’ve grown pale, emptied, still.
Our separation is illusory:
I am indivisible from you,
My shadow is on your walls.
The suffering of the city is personified in Akhmatova, and the city’s way of the cross includes her torments. When Akhmatova began Poem Without a Hero, she announced, “From 1940, as if from a tower, I look at everything.” It might have seemed to her that the Petersburg of 1913, like Sodom and Gomorrah, deserved to be destroyed. Yet the more scandalously Akhmatova painted prerevolutionary Petersburg, the more terribly stood out the later history of the city:
And the decades pass:
Torture, exiles, and deaths.
I cannot sing in this horror.
But the weakened city and the weakened poet continued to live. To this half-dead city Akhmatova brought her Poem Without a Hero, in which all the elements of the new Petersburg mythos were synthesized. She even brought in Shostakovich’s Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony; a verse about it at one time ended the poem. (In fact, an early subtitle for the poem was “A Tragic Symphony.”)
Poem Without a Hero has in fact two heroes: the author and her city. They maintain a constant dialogue above the heads of listeners and readers. Often Akhmatova intentionally encodes that dialogue, ironically justifying it thus:
I noticed that the more I explain it, the more mysterious and incomprehensible it becomes, that everyone sees that I can not and will not (dare not) explain it completely, and that all my explanations, for all their ornament and inventiveness, merely confuse things—it came from nowhere and went off into nowhere, explaining nothing.39
Akhmatova considered Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman a terrifying, hopeless, gloomy work. Thus, how ambivalent is the epigraph she chose for the final part of Poem Without a Hero, a line from The Bronze Horseman: “I love you, Peter’s creation!” There is no doubt in Akhmatova’s love for Petersburg, but for the reader, Pushkin’s solemn pronouncement is colored by the grim shadow of twentieth-century events described in Akhmatova’s work.
In the Russian cultural sphere The Bronze Horseman and Poem Without a Hero form the two bases of a majestic arch, an imaginary space under which lies the Petersburg mythos. In The Bronze Horseman, the heartbreaking story of Yevgeny and his bride, sacrificed to the fanatical idea of the building tsar, is reminiscent of ancient sacrificial legends: “no significant city can stand if in the erection of its fortifications a live man, or at least, his shadow, is not placed in the wall.”40 In Akhmatova’s work, Petersburg, erected on the bones of numberless, nameless workmen, becomes a victim of the mighty forces of history and thereby expiates its guilt. Having walked to Calvary, Petersburg earned the right to resurrection.
This idea is realized in Poem Without a Hero to magical effect. For all its complexity, confusion, and allusiveness, Poem Without a Hero goes down in a single cathartic, almost joyful gulp.
I felt this clearly when I first read Poem Without a Hero in the spring of 1965. Akhmatova inquired if I had come across a typescript copy circulating in Leningrad and Moscow. I replied that I had read only excerpts in poetry almanacs and journals.
“Well, that means you don’t know the poem,” she noted sadly. “I treated it badly, I see that now, not like a caring mother. I shouldn’t have published it in pieces.” Then she read me a section intended for the final part:
And behind the barbed wire,
Deep in the heart of the taiga,
I don’t know for how many years
