Poem Without A Hero in the Context of Anna Akhmatova’s Notebooks

Abstract

This article analyses the place of the Poem without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova — an unfinished work created over the last 25 years of the poet’s life — in the space of her Notebooks written at the time of her work on the last versions of the Poem between the late 1950s and early 1960s. The material and nature of the Notebooks determines the choice of methodology modern scholars employ to study their context: the space of trans-text entries cannot be limited to life or artistic orientation alone which is substantiated by their textological analysis. In line with this idea, the paper discusses how the spontaneity of the recording, fragmentation and juxtaposition of life, art and literary criticism creates a special context of Akhmatova’s Notebooks , illustrating a high degree of dialogism connected with the type of the poet’s artistic consciousness and, consequently, characteristic of all her later works. The text of the Notebooks can only be completed by life itself, as well as the endless variations of the Poem without a Hero , which is the artistic embodiment of Akhmatova’s biography. The result of this research is reflected in several statements related to the presence of the Poem without a Hero in the Notebooks . Among them are the reflections on innovations and place of the Poem in the historical and literary process and the attempt to dictate the “right” vector of research of the Poem without a Hero associated with the decoding of images, establishing its intertextual and genetic relationships, which eventually becomes another means of “grounding” and prose completion of the Poem without a Hero .