Europa im Schatten des Ersten Weltkriegs. Группа авторов
facing compulsively the murky post-Empire developments. Or, also, his foreseeing the looming national-socialism, intuitively or theoretically, which would be in line with his psychoanalytic discipline.
Since Freud tried to deny any autobiographical connection, let us recall his own sentence from the same text, that in a person “only ego is resistant, but not the unconscious” (whose only endeavor is “to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action”).16 Accordingly, the intersection between the autobiographical and rhetorical strategy of self-reflexivity, the repetitive erasure of Sophie in the displacement from the daughter’s significant part to that of a grandson (as a blind spot) – can make for my claim that the common experience of fright as the turning point in the post-war reality is seen in the repetitive phenomenology of the mirror that takes hold of Freud’s narration. And that the whole authority of Freud in this text is moved to the footnote that describes the child’s fright from his encounter with his own reflection in the mirror (which is not his mother) and his hiding from himself. To hide from the mirror or to enter the mirror – that is how I would formulate the strategic ambiguity of the epistemological and ontological within the witnessing function.
2. The Mirror in Death
At this point, let us reach for “Anna of all the Russias”, as Akhmatova was called,1 not a minority at all, yet herself choosing to be a minority, already when she took her pen name from the Tatarian maternal side of her father (replacing her father’s surname Gorenko with the Tatar name Akhmatova, as relating to her more distant family lore).2 This memorable woman author3 of the same post-Great-War period, after the crash of the Russian Empire, at the onset of Bolshevism, much younger than Freud, was exposed to much tougher circumstances of getting destitute, enduring official scorn, the execution of her recently divorced husband and the father of her son, the lasting and terrible stigmatization, banned publication, close surveillance, persecution, the imprisonment and murders of those closest to her.4 In spite of all that,5 Akhmatova introduces a different view on repetition and repression than the one Freud offers. Likewise, in all her reticence, her quite generous love-life with equally imperiled or persecuted Russian intellectuals6 considerably challenges Freud’s simultaneous speculations on life and death instincts, and (those which he postulated prior to them) of the singularity of ego and plurality of sexual procreation.7 Furthermore, amidst her utterly frightening situation, it is the phenomenology of the (allure of the) mirror that gives Akhmatova a life apart from life so as if to make some other Anna experience the cruelty, against which Anna mirroring art, spirit, and tradition consolidates her witnessing self, repetitively.
Akhmatova’s poems don’t say that we repeat because we repress, but on the contrary – that we repress because we repeat, that we forget because we repeat, that we repress because we can live certain things only in the mode of repetition. Or, also, that we are bound to repress especially the representation that negotiates what was lived before, connecting it to the form of an analogous or identical object. As Freud himself wrote in his text, in some normal people, not neurotics, also there is a perpetual recurrence of the same thing – if it is related to an active behavior, “there is an essential character trait remaining the same, compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences”,8 while the last sentence of the text’s second chapter suggests that “the consideration of these cases and situations – which have a yield of pleasure as the final outcome – should be taken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject matter”.9 And, while the later 20th-century (psychoanalytic yet anti-Freudian) philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, offered such a (cultural) view of repetition10 with a crucial emphasis on difference involved in the repeating acts, Akhmatova wrote out the same, yet her involved understanding of it, already much in advance. In the Bolsheviks’ realm, Akhmatova asks about establishing a difference between each of the repetitions, retrieving the very biography, psychology, and history that were officially erased,11 while introducing a considerable difference also within repression and that what is repressed.12
Her 1917 poem “When in the Throes of Suicide” (“Когда в тоске самоубийства“) decidedly establishes Anna as a crucial witness to the radical changes that Russia started to undergo by the end of the Great War.13 Since the later 20th-century studies in witnessing and testimony14 (developed in the Western hemisphere, and significantly rooted in the Holocaust experience), has extended witnessing function also to prophetic function, it would be easy to identify Akhmatova with her that-time growing conviction that above all she is the resilient “embodiment of her poetic voice”.15 As such, she is also an instrument of bearing witness16 to the structures of violence multiplying all around her, as she stayed in Russia during the war and after the Revolution by her deliberate choice.17 However, I also read Akhmatova as an avant-garde prophetess of the later 20th-century developments in psychoanalysis, according to which the early mirror stage18 remains artistically vital throughout one’s life. And according to which the death drive is entirely rewritten by the elaboration of the approach to the abyss of Das Ding (the [traumatic] Thing; La chose), making out of it partial or transitional objects, and correcting lacks and losses through language and libido that are in tandem in a biological organism.19
“When in the Throes of Suicide” opens into the two-way mirroring field of “our people” threatened by the “German guests” and “our Russian Church deserted by the stern Byzantine spirit”, indeed, both locked up in the – obviously plural – act of the country committing suicide. It is Akhmatova’s singular repetitive “I” that takes upon herself the role of a negotiating medium, as to fend off the soothing, tempting call (“Mne голос был. Он звал утешно, oн говорил“) to Russian people to abandon themselves, “go abroad” (“oставь Россию навсегда“). However, that “Voice” and its repetitive “It,” as talking the Russians into betrayal, comes from within Anna herself, at once speaking to her as a part of her and becoming the new “I” of the “It”, the dialogized “Ich” of the foreigner. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” – that is, “where It was, I shall come into being,” – Freud said (only in 1933),20 yet not confessing it about himself. This poem by Akhmatova delivers two “I”-s as opposing each other. Furthermore, the “Voice”, the “It” turning into “I”, disguises itself as purifying, dignifying, healing in its own right. The poem’s prodigy is that as “It” becomes the “I” of the Voice, the inner voice also rises up to the surface of Anna’s body, becomes external and manageable by Anna’s consciousness so upon that, indifferently, she “simply blocks her ears from the outside” (“Но равнодушно и спокойно руками я замкнула слух”) – “so that the unworthy talk cannot desecrate me, in my grief” (“Чтоб этой речей недостойной не осквернился скорбный дух”). In a few short lines, (as if) Akhmatova translates this seminal dictum by Freud (before he even comes to formulate it) into her own living testimony to the switching power of the conscious over the unconscious. “It” takes courage – to speak the “I”: Anna’s “I” takes courage to speak the “It”.
The subsequent 1917 “Now, Nobody Will Want to Listen to Poems” (“Tеперь никто не cтaнeт слушать песeн”) stages Akhmatova’s departure from her early sumptuous lyricism as her confessed pain of her own mirroring herself in her Poem as her interlocutor and the narratable21 You of her “I”, her own observed physical and spiritual reflection – that begs the Poem “not to shatter Anna’s heart” as the Poem suddenly empties itself in its ruining moves (“Моя последняя, мир больше не чудесен, не разливай мне сердца, не звени”), as the “foretold menacing days have come” (“Предсказанные наступили дни”).
In the next few years, through 1921, as a character in her verses Akhmatova introduces Death as “chalking the doors with crosses”, “calling