St Petersburg полностью

Now a handful of camp dust,

Now a tale from a scary story,

My double goes to be interrogated.

Declaimed by Akhmatova in her hierarchical, solemn manner, slowly and carefully, each word stunned me. The publication of such a text in those years was of course unthinkable.

For me the essence of Akhmatova’s philosophy of history and her ideas on the evolution of the Petersburg mythos are most succinctly expressed in the lines, “Just as the future ripens in the past,/So the past smolders in the future.” This formula came to Akhmatova from her own experiences and therefore has a convincing ring. The role of “history’s lightning rod” almost always falls on the poet. Though historical epochs mirror one another, the terrible predictability is visible only to the poet, whose role is to create all-encompassing historical myths.

Poem Without a Hero brought the creation of a new Petersburg mythos to its culmination, one to which all Russian culture of the preceding 250 years had contributed. Akhmatova’s crucial achievement was the melting down of important elements of previous incarnations of that mythos into a new, indivisible whole. She takes her reader through Petersburg’s entire history: from imperial capital to the city where the poet can only

weep freely

Over the silence of fraternal graves.

Her model in the complex relations between poet and history was Pushkin. She once said, of his verse novel Eugene Qnegin, that its “aerial enormity, like a cloud, stood over me.” In the middle of the twentieth century, Akhmatova became the ethical compass for a new generation of Leningraders. Poem Without a Hero embodied for them the new Petersburg mythos, that “aerial enormity” in whose shadow a new generation of Leningrad intellectuals grew. They were to be the ones to carry the legend of the city and the poet, Petersburg and Akhmatova, around the world.

On February 18, 1964, in Leningrad, in the Dzerzhinsky district court—a grubby room with a spit-covered floor—there began the hearing of Joseph Brodsky, who was already well-known in the city. The twenty-three-year-old Brodsky was charged with “malicious parasitism”—that is, being out of a job—which was a violation of Soviet law. Tall and thin, with red hair and bright cheeks, Brodsky (with a guard next to him) spoke calmly, trying to explain to an ignorant and hostile judge that his work was writing poetry. She and Brodsky had the following exchange, which was written down clandestinely by the sympathetic journalist Frida Vigdorova.

JUDGE:   And who recognized that you are a poet? Who listed you among poets?

BRODSKY:  No one. (Dispassionately.) Who listed me a member of the human race?

JUDGE:   Did you study this?

BRODSKY:  What?

JUDGE:   To be a poet? Did you try to graduate from a school where they prepare … where they teach …

BRODSKY:  I don’t think that it comes from education.

JUDGE:   What then?

BRODSKY:  I think that it’s … (bewildered) … from God.41

This was like something out of Kafka or an absurdist play. The judge sent Brodsky under police escort to a psychiatric hospital to determine his sanity. Things were very tough there: he was forcibly given sulfur injections, which caused the slightest movement to be unbearably painful.

A favorite amusement of the male nurses was to wrap Brodsky in a sheet, dip him in an icy bath, and then toss him, still wrapped in the sheet, alongside a radiator. They called this the “cold-damp envelope.” As it dried, the sheet tore off Brodsky’s skin.42 His roommate committed suicide by slitting his veins with a razor at night, and Brodsky was afraid that he would never leave the hospital alive. His sufferings during that terrible period are reflected in the long philosophical poem “Gorbunov and Gorchakov.”

Forensic psychiatrists found Brodsky sane, and he went back to court. The same judge who committed him asked him, “What good have you done for your homeland?”

Brodsky replied with quiet persistence, “I wrote poetry. That is my work. I am convinced … I believe that what I write will be of service to people, and not only now but for future generations.”43

All Brodsky’s attempts to explain fell on deaf ears. The predetermined sentence read, in part, “Brodsky systematically does not fulfill the duties of a Soviet man in the production of material goods…. He wrote and recited his decadent poems. From the report of the Commission on Work with Young Writers, it is clear that Brodsky is not a poet…. Brodsky is to be sent to remote areas for a term of five years at forced labor.”44