Europa im Schatten des Ersten Weltkriegs. Группа авторов
Soon after, Akhmatova’s first poetic fellow, and husband, Nikolay Gumilyov22, is shot dead by the officials of the Soviet secret police. Within a few days, Akhmatova wrote down the poem “Fear Fingers All Things in the Darkness” (“Страх, во тьме перебирая вещи”), merging the grasps of the Pre-Christian and Christian motives with the sheer Acmeist23 craft toward a fullest possible perfection of a ‘poetic cathexis’. That is, Anna’s self-controlled expression of the consternation with the cold-blood murder of the one among the closest to her, to whom however she was not allowed even to refer openly, let alone to name him in her poem, as she herself was under the immediate physical life-threat. Unlike her senior contemporary Freud, who himself chose the authorial-safeguard-exit away from naming his daughter’s Sophie part in his text. That is, Anna’s articulation of the fear on the background of the state mechanisms, that nevertheless in her poem make “a moon-bean point to an ax”, while “an ominous knock is heard behind the wall” – “what is there? a ghost, a thief, or rats?” (“Страх, во тьме перебирая вещи, Лунный луч наводит на топор. За стеною слышен стук зловещий – Что там, крысы, призрак или вор?”).24
The 1922 “I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land” (“Не с теми я кто бросил землю”) – “to its enemies to tear it apart” – is a further consolidating poem that develops the dynamics between “I” and “You”, “We” and “They” – the narrative dynamics through which Akhmatova strives to protect her poems as her lone property from any unwanted sharing with or reference to either the internal enemies or refugees from Russia. Her poetry is her self-protective mirror into which she perpetually enters and freely moves (as a character) within its multiplying imaginative and phenomenological planes. There are those who left and those who stayed in the dead ashes of the Revolution’s fire, and the toughest temptation for those who stayed is the word of the same language that has seduced others into either betrayal or departure. Anna’s lovers and friends were leaving Russia one by one25 – it is from what was most intimate to her that her splitting narration has to defend itself. For better or for worse, “resistant and proud, I am not singing about them, yet I feel forever sorry for their exile lot” (“Но вечно жалок мне изгнанник”), as “‘We’ [Anna and her poems] are made straighter by the surrounding wild.”26
The anti-exile topic makes it further to “Lot’s Wife” (“Лотова жена” 1922–1924) that repetitively merges the figurations of a woman witness and a woman prophet, falling back into this Biblical motive.27 Again, the “Voice” comes out loudly from inside a woman as her restless challenge (“Но громко жене говорила тревога: Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть на красные башни родного Codoma”). Yet, in this poem in inversion, for it is the words of staying and not leaving that the Voice is preaching, the woman’s overt opposition to her man Lot who is set out to leave the native land. The voice talks the woman into throwing her last glance to the life she is departing from. Certainly, the glance and its mirror-reflection set the trap, the wife’s single glance with the “arrow of pain stitching her eyes before she could let a sound out”, her “body flaking into transparent salt”, her “shaking legs as a pillar rooting to the ground”. The woman who at the cost of life chose to stay and bear witness, as well as the witnesses to her subsequent punishment – both those who departed and those who stayed – get inseparable within the mirroring reference to the ecumenical script that however glorifies a woman’s choice if only embodied in Akhmatova’s reprise.
The last poem to which I will refer is from the 1924, “The Muse” (“Муза”), repetitively staging Akhmatova’s respectful bow down to Poetry itself, to its messenger and conveyer, the Muse – “whom no one can command”28. In the generous act of self-denial, hanging by a thread, Anna gives all she cherishes most – just for her to come.
| Когда я ночью жду ее прихода, | When at night I wait for her to come, | |
| Жизнь, кажется, висит на волоске. | life seems to be hanging by a thread. | |
| Что почести, что юность, что свобода | What (are) honors, what youth, what freedom | |
| Пред милой гостьей с дудочкой в руке. | before a lovely guest with a flute in her hand. |
It is the wait and then the encounter between the two, obviously imaginary, dialogized within Akhmatova herself, which opens the poem’s space as to reflect (on) two Infernos 1) the Inferno of the surrounding Soviet terror and 2) the early 14th-century famed representation of Inferno, which Anna calls to her aid. As Anna is “seeing herself as seeing herself”29 in the mirror of her Muse, who with her unveiled face is “staring Anna down”.30 The rescuing land of the poetry past brings Akhmatova to retaking the pen of the Poet of the spaces after the Last Judgement – “I ask: ‘That’s you whom Dante heard dictate the lines of his Inferno?’ She answers: ‘Me.’” (“Ей говорию: Ты лъ Данту диктовала Страниць Ада? Отвечает ‘Я.’”)31
It takes courage to look at the “I” in the mirror in death, and talk the “I” – back.
3. Detour or Shortcut
Understanding violence as a shortcut to death1 – which as such obviously repetitively informs all cultural,2 scholarly, and ideological projects – is the only way of getting enabled to attempt introducing any change. In the discussed Freud’s text, the missing links, lacunas as well as footnotes and additions, introduce difference in the linear content of his narrative, hence exact further, for the purpose of reading, our own inscription