Anna Akhmatova and the Riddle of Shakespeare

Abstract

In the memoirs of Anna Akhmatova’s contemporaries, statements about her interest in William Shakespeare’s personality and creative work may be regarded as locus communis . This passion was dwelt upon in her Notebooks written between 1958 and 1966. The following fact is worth mentioning here: in 1957, Akhmatova planned to write a book whose second part Marginalia was supposed to include notes about Shakespeare. This article explores the possible reasons for Anna Akhmatova’s interest in the attri­bution of Shakespeare’s heritage. The article refers to evidence from Akhmatova’s contemporaries (V. Rezepter, G. Glyokin, I. Ivanovsky, L. Chukovskaya, V. Muravyov, E. Gerstein) and fragments from her notebooks and poetry ( Poem without a Hero , play Prologue, or A Dream within a Dream and others). Akhmatova took part in the debate over who had written Shakespeare’s works and “William Shakespeare’s” identity. She doubted that the actor and theatrical entrepreneur from Stratford-upon-Avon had really authored numerous plays. Akhmatova was aware of the fact that during Shakespeare’s time, authorship was not of preeminent importance or had the significance attributed to it today. But she did not share the point of view of some of her interlocutors (Rezepter, Muravyov) on the possibility of “art without names”. The need to establish the real author of famous plays and sonnets was dictated by Akhmatova’s desire to clarify some literary and aesthetic issues for herself, i.e. the correlation between the real and the implicit author, the degree of distance between the author’s alter ego in the text and the author themselves, the possibility of discursive play within the chain “author — narrator — character — reader”, the mechanisms of displacement or “obscuring” of the confessional tone.