Anna Akhmatova Research Articles

Jealous Poetess or Pushkinist? Anna Achmatova in the Works of Andrej Bitov

The article examines the presence of Anna Akhmatova, both in person and her texts, in the works of Andrei Bitov. Akhmatova, in this schema, quite literally represents the bridge from post-Stalinist culture to pre-Revolutionary silver Age. The ironic stance adopted toward Akhmatova in Bitov's novel Pushkin House, as well as in the autobiographical note on Bitov's real-life meetings with Akhmatova, is dropped in Bitov's Reminiscences about Pushkin. In this last work, Bitov adopts strategies similar to those employed by Akhmatova in his essays on Pushkin, whom she views not only as her great predecessor in Russian poetry, but also as her “contemporary”.

My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Letters by Anna Lisa s> Crone Jennifer Day (review)

REVIEWS 337 This is a very detailed study of demonological references in Dostoevskii's works, but the focus is soft:just as Bakhtin sees thresholds everywhere and Freudianssee phallic symbols, so Leatherbarrowtends to see the demonic in everydayobjectsand acts. Given all this devilryit is a reliefat the end to learn of Dostoevskii'sown scepticism, when he writes: 'My whole problem is that there is no way I can bring myself to believe in devils myself' (p. I79). The opening chapter examines the role of the demonic in Dostoevskii's early writing, and each of the following chapters is devoted to one of the major novels in turn. In Crime andPunishment, Leatherbarrownotes that, in explainingthe murder to Sonia, Raskol'nikovsubstituteschert for d'iavolperhaps to show his unwillingness to allow conventional religiousovertones into discussionof his crime. Moreover, it is perhapsNapoleon as beshe has in mind, not Sonia's Orthodox d'iavol. In The Idiot the question of apocalypse looms large, and here Leatherbarrowhas some interestingobservationson names the symbolism of horses and birds,and he arguesthat the surnameof NastasiaFiippovna Barashkova(suggesting'lamb'),castsher both as whore (ofBabylon)and lamb (of Christ). The novel TheDevilsyieldsthe most obviousmaterialfor the theme, placing it in a political context. The demonic characteristicsof the arch 'devil' Petr Verkhovenskiiare likened to a puppet bearing the diminutiveof his name the Petrushkaof street theatre. In ne Brothers Karamazov the somewhat heretical ideas of Zosima are discussed and there is a fine analysis of how three sections of the monk's teaching have relevance for each of the brothers in turn, but it comes as a surprisethat after such exegesis Leatherbarrowshould assertthat this section 'The Russian Monk' 'never really belongs. It remains a cuckoo in the nest, a piece of artisticsleightof hand' (p. I76).Even more surprisingis his concluding statement:'In his attempts [...] to use the demonic form of the novel in the service of the Lord, it is perhaps Dostoevsky himselfwho emerges as the true "fatherof the lie" in the Brothers Karamazov' (p. I77).'The devil is in the detail'is an adage that could well be appliedto this study:it is a crowdedbook in a crowded field. Nevertheless, it does offer some real insights. Department ofRussianStudies RicHARD PEACE University ofBristol Crone, Anna Lisa and Day, Jennifer. My Petersburg/Mysel: MentalArchitecture andImaginative Spacein ModemRussianLetters. Slavica, Bloomington, IN, 2004. 385 pp. Notes. Indexes. $29.95 (paperback). IN his book, ThePracticeof Evegyday Life (Berkeley, CA, I984), Michel de Certeau demonstrateshow the tactical use of cultural forms enables individuals to elude and resist the power of social determination. The creation of various counter-hegemonic rituals and stylistic practices makes possible the articulationof a playful element in the deterministicsocial space. In My 338 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 Petersburg/Myself Anna Lisa Crone andJennifer Day explore, in terms similar to de Certeau, Petersburgwriters'identificationof their selfwith urban spaces and their poetic dialogueswith the Petersburgtradition.They discussRussian twentieth-centurypoets and writers,includingAndrey Belyi, Vassili Rozanov, Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam and Joseph Brodsky,who were 'otheredinto or unto urban space' (p. 2). The book investigates the metapoetic function that 'entails the equation by poets of their artisticworks(poems)with Petersburgbuildingsand statues'(p. I7). Crone ancl Day's discussionof Mandel'shtam'svision of the Admiralty,BenedictLifshits's image of the Kazan' cathedral, and Alexander Blok's elegiac identifications with Petersburglandscapesare especiallyrewarding.It is surprisingnot to see any analysis of Andrei Bitov's short stories which stand close to the urban writing of Alexander Kushner and Brodsky. Crone and Day also do not engage with Maria Rubins's excellent comparative study Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ekphrasis InRussian andFrench Poet?y (New York, 2000) that discusses numerous examples of ekphrasis in Russian poetry. Both books explore the construction of self and the interplay between the Russian and European culturaltraditions. Crone's and Day's study comprises four chapters. The first chapter 'Towards a Theory of Identificationwith PetersburgSpace' brings together Fedor Dostoevskii, Akhmatova, Mandel'shtam, Vladimir Maiakovskii and Lifshits.Crone and Day offer close reading of various texts. They provocatively say that 'to present the besieged Petersburgand the Petersburgwriter as stable and indestructible,writers take the unexpected tack of resortingto urban Petersburgidyll and the closely related urban elegy...

The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (review)

Reviewed by: The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948 Robert E. Johnson (bio) Kees Boterbloem. The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948 McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004. xxiv, 600. $55.00 As the archives of the early Soviet era grow more accessible, Andrei Zhdanov, a member of Josef Stalin's inner circle from the early 1930s to his premature death in 1948, becomes a prime candidate for close study. He shares with just one other Stalinist leader (Nikolai Ezhov) the dubious distinction of having the Russian suffix 'shchina' attached to his name. In popular speech this is a pejorative device, used to describe the bad times associated with a prominent person's leadership or policies, as in 'Pugachevshchina' – the bloody Cossack/peasant uprising of the 1770s led by Emilian Pugachev. The 'Zhdanovshchina' was a notorious campaign of the late 1940s that imposed strict conformity on the arts and promoted xenophobic Russian patriotism. Its targets, whom Zhdanov described as 'rootless cosmopolitans,' included such prominent figures as poet Anna Akhmatova and composer Sergei Prokofiev. Zhdanov himself, however, came to prominence much earlier, and played many other roles within the Soviet leadership. Using a wide range of published and archival sources, Kees Boterbloem tries to trace his protagonist's contributions to the industrialization drive of the First Five Plan, the Great Terror of 1937–38, foreign relations, and the defence of Leningrad during the Second World War. [End Page 556] At first glance Zhdanov seems an unlikely candidate for leadership. His middle-class background resembled that of the 'Old Bolsheviks' – most of whom were purged in the 1930s – more than most of his peers. He had an undistinguished record during the years of revolution and civil war, but rose quickly through the ranks of the Communist party, first in the city of Tver' and then in Nizhnii Novgorod, a more important industrial centre. He proved adept at upholding the (constantly shifting) Party line on such matters as industrialization and agriculture and denouncing its critics. By 1925 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist party, and in 1929 he had his first solo audience with Stalin. Early in 1934 he was elevated to Moscow, and in December he succeeded the assassinated Sergei Kirov as head of the Leningrad Party organization. From this point onward Zhdanov took part in almost every major development in domestic and foreign policy. He co-signed decrees, served on numerous drafting commissions, helped to orchestrate the monstrous purges of 1937–38, and delivered countless formulaic speeches setting forth Stalinist policies. Unfortunately the surviving records make it almost impossible to determine what his own specific contributions to any of these may have been. Even the Zhdanovshchina itself may have been the work of others. Other scholars (W. Hahn) have surmised that Zhdanov tried to cushion the impact of the campaign that bears his name. Kees Boterbloem rejects this hypothesis, but the evidence for and against remains sketchy. A fuller (and bolder) exposition would have been welcome. Similarly, he could have attempted a more conclusive account of bureaucratic cronyism and patronage – the 'families' of Stalin's entourage and the rivalries between them. The qualities that made Zhdanov a survivor – obsequious subservience and chameleon-like adaptability – would likely not have served him well as an independent leader. At certain points he appeared to be Stalin's chosen heir. But the Leader, especially in the last decades of his life, was constantly shifting favour among his associates, slapping down any who seemed to be showing ambition or independence. Zhdanov died of heart failure in 1948 at age fifty-two, at a moment when his political fortune seemed to be waning. Despite the book's weighty documentation, Boterbloem's Zhdanov remains a two-dimensional figure. The author can track the number and duration of Zhdanov's meetings with Stalin or other leaders, but usually has no record of what was said. At various points he resorts to something resembling old-fashioned Kremlinology, studying the order of signatures on a decree or of speeches at a Party conference to trace Zhdanov's fluctuating fortunes. The book's greatest strength is its documentary base, but its numerous lists...

Anna of all the Russias: the life of Anna Akhmatova

Anna of all the Russias: the life of Anna Akhmatova

St. Petersburg: A Portrait of a Great City by Victor Giroud (review)

758 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 authors'recent research. In all cases they point the way to furtherstudy. By the end even beginners should be able to deconstructthe I95I poster on the cover, composed of a map above indicating the expansion of electrification grids across the Azov and Caspian regions, below it the multi-million-strong population of the USSR stretchingto the horizon, foregroundedby representativesof gender and nationality,directingtheir gaze upwardsto a tower-like Stalin. This fruitfulcollection reveals spatialgames that we can all play. School of Slavonic andEastEuropean Studies LINDSEY HUGHES University College London Giroud, Victor. StPetersburg: A Portrait ofa Great Ci. The BeineckeRare Book and ManuscriptLibrary,Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 200 . I44 PP. Illustrations.Selected bibliography.Indexes. f2I.50 (paperback). THIs book is a catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition with the same title held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, between October 2003 and January 2004. The purpose of the exhibition was to commemorate the tercentenaryof the city of St Petersburg with a display of materials drawn mainly from the library'sand university's collectionswhich illustratethe historyof the city. The book consistsessentially of a wide selection of illustrations,ranging from views of the city, drawings, photographs, postcards, maps, portraits,letters, plans, and theatre programmes to the title pages of books having some connection with St Petersburg. There is also an accompanying explanatorytext. Given the rather random character of the materials which have been acquiredby the libraryover the years,those selectedfor inclusionin thisbook are somewhat disparate. The book is divided into three sections. The first serves to illustrate the city's history during its first century. The second, entitled 'Visitsto St Petersburgduringthe Romantic Period',containsillustrations relating to the city's foreign visitors, beginning with the memoirs of August von Kotzebue who served under Catherine the Great and was sent brieflyto Siberiaat the beginning of the nineteenth century,and ending with letters sent by Giuseppe Verdi during his visit to St Petersburgin I86I-62. The brief third section relates to the city's history during the twentieth century , including materialfrom Belyi's novel Peterburg, from Anna Akhmatova's poem Poemabezgeroia,and, perhaps rather oddly in view of their association with TsarskoeSelo ratherthan the city itself,photographsfrom the Romanov familyalbums.The latterwere originallyin the possessionof Anna Vyrubova, lady-in-waitingand companion to EmpressAlexandra Feodorovna. The text which accompanies the illustrations is generally informative despite the occasional factual error (suchas the statement on page 8 that the city was officially declared capital in I717, incidentally contradicting the statement on page 5 that it was 'decreed' capital ten years after its foundation in 1703). An annoying and confusing problem is the failure to provide proper captions to many of the illustrations, meaning that the exact relationship REVIEWS 759 between text and illustrationis not always clear, or that the necessaryreference to the illustrationis buried in the text. A classicinstance occurs on page 28 which is headed by two titles, the first the title to an illustrationof the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo which is in fact overleaf, and the second the title to the Shubert map of Tsarskoe Selo which appears opposite. Here and elsewherepossible confusion is compounded by the failureto provide an English translation to many of the titles. In fact, to be sure of one's way through this book one needs some command of several European languages, including Russian. It is obviously not a book meant for the masses. That said, the editor and his team should be congratulatedon the superb qualityof many of the printswhich both bring the city to life and successfully convey something of its unique atmosphere.For that reason alone this book is well worth adding to one's personal library. School of Geography, EarthandEnvironmental Sciences DENIS J. B. SHAW University ofBirmingham Bogucka, Maria.Baltic Commerce andUrban Society, I500-I700: Gdansk/Danzig and its Polish Context. Variorum Collected Studies Series: Studies in EastCentral Europe. Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington,VT, 2003. x + 3I2 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. C57.50? THE work of Maria Bogucka, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw,has influencedsocial and economic historiansof the Balticsfor many decades, especially before the fall of Communism, when she was...

The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), one of twentieth-century Russia's greatest poets, was viewed as a dangerous element by post-Revolution authorities. One of the few unrepentant poets to survive the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Stalinist purges, she set for herself the artistic task of preserving the memory of pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage and of those who had been silenced. This book presents Nancy K. Anderson's superb translations of three of Akhmatova's most important poems: Requiem, a commemoration of the victims of Stalin's Terror; The Way of All the Earth, a work to which the poet returned repeatedly over the last quarter-century of her life and which combines Old Russian motifs with the modernist search for a lost past; and Poem Without a Hero, widely admired as the poet's magnum opus. Each poem is accompanied by extensive commentary. The complex and allusive Poem Without a Hero is also provided with an extensive critical commentary that draws on the poet's manuscripts and private notebooks. Anderson offers relevant facts about the poet's life and an overview of the political and cultural forces that shaped her work. The resulting volume enables English-language readers to gain a deeper level of understanding of Akhmatova's poems and how and why they were created.

“Going Home to Russia”? Irish Writers and Russian Literature

The poet Josef Brodski once wrote: ‘I’m talking to you but it isn’t my fault if you can’t hear me.’ However, Brodski and other Russian writers, thinkers and artists, continue to be heard across gulfs of language, space and time. Indeed, the above line from Brodski forms the epigraph of ‘Travel Poem’, originally written in Polish by Anna Czeckanowicz. And just as Czeckanowicz picks up on Brodski’s ‘high talk’ (as Yeats might call it), so too do Irish writers (past and present) listen in, and dialogue with, Russian counterparts and exemplars. Some Irish writers go further and actually claim to identify with Russian writers, and/or to identify conditions of life in Ireland with their perception of life in Russia. Paul Durcan, for example, entitled a whole collection of poems Going Home to Russia. Russia feels like ‘home’ to Durcan partly because he is one example of the many Irish writers who have listened in very closely to Russian writing, and who have identified with aspects of what they find in Russian culture. Another example is the poet Medbh McGuckian who has looked to earlier Russian literature for examples of women artists who ‘dedicated their lives to their craft’, who ‘never disgraced the art’, who created timeless works in the face of conflict and suffering: she refers particularly to Anna Akhmatova and, especially, Marina Tsvetaeva. Contemplating and dialoguing with her international sisters in art, McGuckian finds a means of communicating matters and feelings that are ‘closer to home’, culturally and politically (including the politics of gender). Ireland’s most famous poet Seamus Heaney has repeatedly engaged with Russian writings: especially those of Anton Chekhov and Osip Mandelstam. The former is recalled in the poem ‘Chekhov on Sakhalin’, a work taut with tension between an artist’s ‘right to the luxury of practising his art’, and the residual ‘guilt’ which an artist may feel and only possibly discharge by giving ‘witness’, at least, to the chains and flogging of the downtrodden. On the other hand, Mandelstam, for Heaney, is a model of artistic integrity, freedom and courage, a bearer of the sacred, singing word, compared by the Irish poet to an on-the-run priest in Penal days. In this conference paper, I will outline some of the impact and influence that Russian writers have had on Irish writers (who write either in English or in Irish). I will point to some of the lessons and tactics that Irish writers have learnt and adopted from their Russian counterparts: including Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s debt to Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s to Maxim Gorki, Máirtín Ó Direáin’s to Aleksandr Blok, and Padraic Ó Conaire’s to Lev Tolstoi, etc.

Resistance Fantasies, and: Horses and the Human Soul, and: Dog Angel (review)

Reviewed by: Resistance Fantasies, and: Horses and the Human Soul, and: Dog Angel Christine Stewart-Nuñez (bio) Diane Thiel, Resistance Fantasies, Story Line Press Judith Barrington, Horses and the Human Soul, Story Line Press Jesse Lee Kercheval, Dog Angel, University of Pittsburgh Press Graceful, intelligent, accessible, the poems in Resistance Fantasies move across centuries – stopping in on Catherine the Great in the 1700s, Greek women in 1803, and a family in Odessa in 1943, just to name a few – and geographies, including Russia, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Miami Beach. They explore myth and personal story, legends and contemporary public issues. They allude to or speak many tongues: Greek, German, and Spanish among them. Yet as diverse as this collection is, the poems in Resistance Fantasies resonate thematically with struggles that in many cases manifest as resistance to conventional ways of thinking and being. This rich content combined with Thiel's skillful use of form makes Resistance Fantasies a strong collection. In the opening poem, "Black Sea Acrostic," the first letters of each line spell out "Potemkin Village," suggesting appearance is not reality and illusions have consequences. Indeed, in most of this section's poems, Thiel portrays women who resist appearances or conventions, especially the ways myths typically construct them. In doing so, Thiel joins Eavan Boland, Alicia Ostriker, Rita Dove, and many other contemporary poets in retelling myths from modern (often feminist) perspectives. The speakers, whether they have modern voices or become mythological personas, reclaim and/or invent aspects of their stories that resonate with contemporary readers. For the speaker of "Daphne (A Photograph, 1930)" it is her flight from Apollo: I know, in that moment caught, how she was fleeing – her face eternally still, her body taut, training every tendril of her being, holding her in place – the raised knot of her face eternally still, her body taught by years of silence, that straight upper lip holding her in place – the raised knot of an old laurel tree, the tightening grip . . . (1–8). [End Page 188] Daphne's attempt to resist Apollo reflects the speaker's own struggle, and while the details may be elusive, we know it entailed years of silence, a past haunting the present, and the need to be free. By focusing on this nearly universal conflict, Thiel makes the poem personal. Yet she does this not only through the content of the piece, but the form as well. Thiel chose the pantoum, at once weaving the two women's stories together and reflecting the repetitive nature of our struggles with the past. Often Thiel invokes the context of the myth, but departs from the conventional narratives by writing or rewriting details. In "Medea in Colchis" readers see a modern Medea – an omniscient Medea – who defends her choice to kill her sons with the control of Sylvia Plath: "to tuck everything in place // before you go to the bottom" (12–13). This Medea gives readers a sense of her inner life. She refuses the criticism applied to her and compels readers to identify with her: "I am the darkness that lives inside // every one of you . . ." (36–37). And this is where Thiel makes ancient myth so necessary for our contemporary consideration; indeed, she asks "Do I remind you how hard it is to create, // how easy to destroy?" (45–46). Mythological women are not the only ones whose stories of resistance are told. Legends, songs, and historical figures play a part too. In "Catacombs (Under Odessa, 1943)" a baby is born with "her hand in a fierce, tiny fist / declaring her will to exist" (13–14). "Sevenlings for Akhmatova" (a two-part poem with seven lines in each) references the resistance of the Russian poet: It comes in threes – the red letter, the midnight warning in disguise, the knock that shakes the shutters. (1–3) . . . When they took him away, they emptied the drawers of his poetry. But I carried his words always on me, smuggled volumes out – by memory. (11–14). Anna Akhmatova's work was popular in Russia but unofficially banned, and her family members and associates were often jailed; some were executed. Keeping the silenced poetry was for her, then, an act...

The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism

Isaiah Berlin's response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Born a Russian subject in Riga in 1909, he spoke Russian as a child and witnessed both revolutions in St. Petersburg in 1917, emigrating to the West in 1921. He first returned to Russia in 1945, when he met the writers Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. These formative encounters helped shape his later work, especially his defense of political freedom and his studies of pre-Soviet Russian thinkers. Never before collected, Berlin's writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalin's manipulative 'artificial dialectic'; portraits of Osip Mandeli??shtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more. This collection includes essays that have never been published before, as well as works that are not widely known because they were published under pseudonyms to protect relatives living in Russia. The contents of this book were discussed at a seminar in Oxford in 2003, held under the auspices of the Brookings Institution. Berlin's editor, Henry Hardy, had prepared the essays for collective publication and here recounts their history. In his foreword, Brookings president Strobe Talbott, an expert on the Soviet Union, relates the essays to Berlin's other work. The Soviet Mind will assume its rightful place among Berlin's works and will prove invaluable for policymakers, students, and those interested in Russian politics, past, present and future.

The Myth of the Khazars and Intellectual Antisemitism in Russia, 1970s-1990s by Victor Shnirelman (review)

REVIEWS 779 of the state's coercive forces that counts for most and not simply organized collective resistance (civil society) but the possibilities for armed resistance that is crucial. But such criticismsare simply illustrativeof the multiplicityof potentially significantfactorsrelevant to the complexity of social explanation andthe difficulty,therefore,of achievingsatisfactoryexplanations,particularly when based on few cases, however well chosen. Though Sharman may not have succeeded fully in the general theory of Communist systemsand their impact on the way people within them defend their interests, to which aspired, importantly Sharman does succeed in opening new avenues of thought through drawingtogether ideas of totalitarianismwith socialmovement theories.Sharmanalsosucceedsindemonstrating the importanceof the questionof how the governmentsof Communistsystems 'stay in power without the consent of the governed'. In short, this is a highly rewardingbook to read. School ofPolitics(SPIRE) R. H. T. O'KANE Keele University Shnirelman,Victor. TheMythoftheKhazars andIntellectual Antisemitism inRussia, I970s-I99Os. The Vital Sassoon International Center for the Study of AntisemitismandThe HebrewUniversityofJerusalem,Jerusalem, 2002. 200 pp. Index. Bibliography.Map. Illustrations.$15.00 (paperback). On avisitto Moscow in I992, I askedthe dealerwho soldbookson the railings outside the Lenin Libraryif he had any works by Gumilev. 'Sorry, no,' he replied. 'It'sa shame too, since he was such an interestingpoet.' It is doubtful today that anyone would confuse Lev Gumilev with his father,the poet, early victim of Bolshevism, and husband of Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev. The works of Lev Nikolaevich crowd the shelves of Russian bookstores, and he has become the saint of the so-called Neo-Eurasianists.Gumilev is famous for his theory of the 'scientific theory of ethnogenesis', which sees ethnos (ethnicity) as a primordial, natural phenomenon, to which every human belongs. He establisheda hierarchyof sub-ethnos, ethnos, and super-ethnos, the latter being a group who come into being simultaneouslyin a particular region, and demonstratesa historicalunity.A super-ethnoscan be threatened and destroyedby a 'chimera',a groupof alien interloperswho arenot adapted to their new natural environment, and must exploit it like parasites or a cancer. Russianhistorycan be interpretedthroughthe interactionof the Slavs and surrounding ethnic groups. The inter-ethnic relationship that has attracted the most attention, because of its presumed long-term impact, is between the Rus' and the Khazars, a strugglebetween a Slavic super-ethnos and aJewish chimera. The Khazarswere one of the many nomadicpeoples who lived on thelower Volga and who, in the eighth to ninth centuries, created a prosperous state that withstood Arab incursionsinto the region. In the mid-tenth century the Khazars were defeated by the Rus' under the leadership of Grand Prince Sviatoslav.With theirimperiumon the wane, the Khazarsdisappearedin the courseof the twelfthcentury.The most strikingfeatureof the Khazarswas the 780 SEER, 83, 4, 2005 conversion of their elite ruling class to Judaism apparentlyin its rabbinic form by the end of the eighth century. Most of Khazar historyis contested, but they are an enduringpresence. A fabled correspondence between the Khazar ruler,Joseph, and a prominent Jewish official in Muslim Spain, Hisdai ibn Shaprut, has been the focus of scholarly debate for centuries. The discovery of a letter in the Cambridge Genizah collection from a group of KhazarianJews provided the firstwritten appearance of the city's name Kiev. The famous Primagy Chronicle account of Prince Vladimir's choice of a higher religion featured Khazars as the spokesmenforJudaism. ArthurKoestler created a sensation and produced a best-seller, TheThirteenth Tribe, by recyclingthe nineteenth-centurytheorythat the dispersed Khazars were the foundation settlement of PolishJewry. The Khazars, who even boast a well-maintained website, remain a topic of fascination for specialistsand 'buffs'alike. As Victor Shnirelman reveals, in this wide-rangingand well-documented study,the Khazar legend has proven a rich source of anti-Semitictropes,up to the presentday. Since much of the historyof the Khazarsremainsobscure,archaeologywas early on called upon to elucidate the Khazar past. This led to disputes as to whether or not settlement and burial sites were Khazar-specific.Nor could these investigationsresolve questions of the Khazar relationshipwith neighbours and tributaries. Was there a Khazar imperium providing peace, prosperity and security for their subjects, or was Khazaria a rapacious, parasitic state whose levies bled white the Slavs and whose benefits accrued only to its 'Kike' leadership? Shnirelman traces the on...

Settling Accounts with Russia's Silver Age: Nabokov Writes Akhmatova

Vladimir Nabokov's poems contain references to several prominent poets of Russia's Silver Age, among them Bunin, Blok, Gumilev, and Pasternak.1 Anna Akhmatova, in contrast, does not figure directly in any of his independent poems, but instead is the apparent target of some Russian verse lines (presented via Nabokov's sometimes idiosyncratic transliteration) that appear in his English-language novel Pnin. These brief passages turn out to signal more than a casual parody. Nabokov's mocking attitude toward Akhmatova, and in all likelihood toward some of the women poets who imitated either her manner or her lifestyle, hints at a broader rejection of figures from the early decades of the twentieth century. While he continued to admire some of the poets to whom he had felt close from the start of his career, he turned away from others, including writers who had at one time strongly influenced him. In some instances they represented aspects of his youthful writing that he wanted to leave behind; in others, he found distasteful their inability to separate their daily lives from their literary endeavors. Thus Pnin, while primarily dealing with other topics, provides a window into Nabokov's ultimate assessment of both the poetics and the poets of the Silver Age. Nabokov began writing Pnin in 1953 and published the completed novel in 1957, just two years after the initial appearance of Lolita. By this time his renown as a prose writer far surpassed that which he had enjoyed as a poet. Nabokov's first forays into literature, however, had been through verse: from the late 1910s through the mid-1920s he had written hundreds of poems. After 1925, the year in which he wrote his first novel, Mary (Mashen'ka), he composed far fewer poems. The ensuing poetry, however, was

Boris Anrep

British awareness of Russia and of its cultural heritage was greatly increased in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the next. Many of the leading lights in English literary and artistic circles register in their correspondence and diaries and, indeed, at times also in their creative work their encounters with Russian culture and with many of its contemporary exponents who visited England during these years. This article is devoted to the impact made by the artist Boris Anrep, famed above all for his mosaics in the National Gallery. The first part of the study charts Anrep’s biography in some detail and the impact he made on the Bloomsbury and Garsington sets in particular. The second part examines the relationship between Anrep and the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and the corpus of poems inspired by Anrep. In the extensive final section, the real-life encounters between Anrep and Aldous Huxley at Garsington form a prelude to a detailed analysis of Huxley’s first novel Crome Yellow, in which Anrep provided the prototype for the painter Gombauld.

Anna Akhmatova’s “An Old Portrait” and the Ballets Russes

The unspecified visual art referent in Akhmatova’s enigmatic poem, “An Old Portrait” (Staryi portret, 1910), dedicated to the painter Aleksandra Ekster, has long inspired critical speculation. scholars (superfin and Timenchik, Rosslyn, Rubins) have proposed numerous readings, but none has entirely resolved the poem’s mysteries. I will argue that the ballets Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cléopâtre, performed in the first Paris season of the Ballets Russes, provide hitherto unexplored subtexts for the spare but dramatic poem. Considered within the context of the ballets, the poem’s characters and details take on more specific and meaningful contours. By analyzing these ballets’ respective libretti, costume designs and stage sets, it becomes possible to detect in the poem references to the Gobelins portrait depicting the deadly enchantress in Le Pavillon d’Armide, the poisoning of Amoun at the conclusion of Cléopâtre, and Vaclav Nijinsky’s performances as Armida’s servant in Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cleopatra’s slave in Cléopâtre. The poem also demonstrates Akhmatova’s early fascination with portraiture, especially the complex relationship between artist and sitter. In this sense, “An Old Portrait” anticipates the poet’s eventual cultivation of her own image in portraits painted by her contemporaries.

The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory. By Anna Akhmatova. Trans, and commentator, Nancy K. Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xiv, 326 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $30.00, hard bound.

The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory. By Anna Akhmatova. Trans, and commentator, Nancy K. Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xiv, 326 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $30.00, hard bound.

Moscow memoirs: memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and literary Russia under Stalin

Moscow memoirs: memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and literary Russia under Stalin

Alexander Pushkin's Little Tragedies: The Poetics of Brevity by Svetlana s> Evdokimova (review)

REVIEWS I 2 I Framingthe translationis a brief introductionand an extended afterword, which is a scholarlystudyofjust under one hundredpages. The introduction provides useful context on Russia's cultural and political landscape in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Karamzin's place in it, and the publicationhistoryof hisLetters. The referencein its subtitleto the 'creationof a readership'seems misplaced, however. Not only are issues of reading and readershipstouched only in passing, Kahn seems content with well-known generalizations about Russia's lack of a public sphere in comparison to the rest of Europe. The afterword, entitled 'Nikolai Karamzin's discourses of Enlightenment', is likewise contradictory. While demonstrating Kahn's erudition regardingeighteenth-centuryliterary,culturaland intellectual life, it also tends to reifysuch abstractconstructionsas Enlightenment,and public and private. Both contain minor factual slips not Catherine II but her husband Peter III emancipated the nobility from mandatory state service duringhisbriefreignfromDecember I76I toJune I762 (p. 9);PeterI died in 1725, not 1724 (p. 546). This admirabletranslationof Karamzin'sLetters ofa RussiaTraveller will be of interest to teachers, students and scholars. Excerpts could be usefully integrated into courses on Russian and European history, especially as the extensive annotations provide the necessary background information and context. Similarly, it provides rich material for scholars working in diverse disciplines, especially the cultural, intellectual and literary history of eighteenth -century Europe, the Enlightenment, and the history of travel writing; these areasare explicitlyaddressedin Kahn's studyof Karamzin's'Discourses of Enlightenment'.Despite some shortcomings,thisis an impressiveworkthat deservesa wide readership. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies SUSAN MORRISSEY University College London Evdokimova, Svetlana (ed.). Alexander Pushkin's LittleTragedies: ThePoeticsof Brevity. Winsconsin Center for PushkinStudies. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2003. ix + 396 pp. Notes. Appendices. Select bibliography.Index. /22.50 (paperback). ISOLATED at Boldino by the cholera quarantine, on the point of marriageto Natalia Goncharova, Pushkin, at this crucial turning point in his life, confronted not only the ultimate questions of human destiny death, love, rebellion,conformity but also his own identity,his culturalinheritanceand his place as a poet in Russian society. The fourLittleTragedies, part of the fruit of thatextraordinaryBoldino autumnof I830, werewrittenin a barefortnight between 23 October and 6 November. Perhapson account of the haste with which they were written,perhapsbecause he was writingat that moment in a kind of shorthand for himself, the LittleTragedies by their very brevity, their 'breathtaking conciseness' (Akhmatova, p. 43), their 'verbal compression' (Emerson,p. 266) in otherwordsby theirrefusalto spellout the issuesthey are concerned with have not alwaysreceived the kind of criticalattention given to Pushkin's other major works. It was in order to remedy what the I22 SEER, 83, I, 2005 editor of the volume describes as this 'glaring lacuna in Western criticism' (p. 28) that a small conference on the Little Tragedies was held at Yale in October I998. The present volume is based on the papers given on that occasion; it is supplemented by James E. Falen's translations of the plays (pp. 305-64), as well as translationsby Janet Tucker of Anna Akhmatova's 'Pushkin's StoneGuest'(pp. 41-57), and by Angela Livingstone of Marina Tsvetaeva's 'Artin the Lightof Conscience' (pp. 58-66). This splendid volume represents as thorough an 'unpacking' of the Little Tragedies as one might hope for. Seven contributions shed light on the texts from a wide variety of contexts, including Pushkin'sown inner dynamic as a writerand his emergentphilosophy of life, the literaryand culturalinfluences on him, as well as the events and the leading ideas of the times in which he lived. In another four contributions the texts are illumined by setting them against future works literary in the cases of Suzanne Fusso's comparison with Dostoevskii'sA RawYouth (pp. 229-42) and of Sofya Khagi's fascinating account of the influence of Pushkin on the oeuvre of Albert Camus (pp. 243-62), operatic in the case of Caryl Emerson's thorough study of the opera settingsof the tragedies(pp. 265-89), and cinematographicin the case of Stephanie Sandler's of the film versions (pp. 290-30I); while Vladimir Markovich surveys the history of Russian and Soviet criticism of the plays (pp. 69-Ios) in an important summarizing article marred by a somewhat unsatisfactorytranslation. Svetlana Evdokimova,the editor...

Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's myth of a national poet

Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia's cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and polemical responses to Pushkin abound, but Russians retain a deep investment in Pushkin's image. Commemorating Pushkin argues that the emotional complexity of Russia's relationship with Pushkin has informed both large-scale cultural institutions and the writings of talented individuals. It assesses twentieth-century museums, anniversary rituals, and films that keep the poet alive. It shows how Pushkin's self-fashioning was exemplary for Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bitov, and Andrei Sinyavsky. And it goes beyond well-known figures to give names and histories to poets, novelists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and museum workers who have sustained Russia's myth of a national poet.

Anna Akhmatova: Requiem

Journal Article Anna Akhmatova: Requiem Get access Literary Imagination, Volume 6, Issue 3, Fall 2004, Pages 358–365, https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/6.3.358 Published: 01 October 2004

Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. This volume presents for the first time in English a collection of essays published in the Russian emigre press after Tsvetaeva left Moscow in 1922. Based on diaries she kept from 1917 to 1920, Earthly Signs describes the broad social, economic, and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Events and individuals are seen through the lens of her personal experience-that of a destitute young woman of upper-class background with two small children (one of whom died of starvation), a missing husband, and no means of support other than her poetry. These autobiographical writings, rich sources of information on Tsvetaeva and her literary contemporaries, are also significant for the insights they provide into the sources and methodology of her difficult poetic language. In addition, they supply a unique eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by a gifted and outspoken poet.

A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva by Alyssa W. s> Dinega (review)

I I0 SEER, 8i I, I 2003 imprecation let alone constitute an obvious improvement on Garnett's 'You are a regular Vavila'. Snatches of verse and song quoted in the stories are never explained even when easilyidentifiable,such as the lines fromGremin's aria on p. 237. References to Captain Kopeikin and Midshipman Dyrka on p. I42 are also passed over without editorial glossing. 'Special trios of huntsmen'aresubstitutedforGarnett's'retrievers'on p. 309 to unenlightening effect, and does it matter whether the village elder is 'chopping up the front steps'as opposed to 'theroof' on p. 305?Is 'spaciousness'an improvementon 'space'(p. 293) or on 'wideview' (p. 296)?Is itpossible forthe peasant girlsto be described as 'dragginga pail of water' (p. 293) ratherthan 'draggingup a pail of water'as in Garnett? Foranyone interestedinproblemsof translation,it is instructiveto compare Garnettwith McVay at a keymoment towardsthe end of 'The Student'at the point where the central figure describes a link between past and present in terms of a metaphorical chain. Does the comparative reader prefer the one translator's 'this' chain to the other's 'that' chain, the word 'trembled' to 'quivered', and does the word 'whereupon' and the triple use of the past participle 'had', as opposed to its single use, convince that the one version is better than the other? What the comparison may simply serve to confirm is that literarytranslationis notjust a difficultbusinessbut a subtleart. School ofArts NICK WORRALL Middlesex University Dinega, Alyssa W. A RussianPsyche. The PoeticMind of Marina Tsvetaeva. Universityof Wisconsin Press,Madison, WI, 200I. XVii + 285 pp. Notes. Index. 1i6.95: $I9.95 (paperback). A RUSSIAN PSYCHE, the revised version of Alyssa W. Dinega's doctoral dissertation 'Exorcising the Beloved: Problems of Gender and Selfhood in Marina Tsvetaeva's Myths of Poetic Genius' (University of WisconsinMadison , I998), examines the 'intrinsic significance' of Tsvetaeva's gender 'withinthe world of her poetry' (p. 6). Dinega contends that Tsvetaevalacked the integration of self that her male colleagues enjoyed and consequently 'sought wholeness through active, cocreative poetic dialogue with various other poets' (p. 228). Dinega thus analyses Tsvetaeva's encounters with Aleksandr Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nikolai Gronskii, and Anatolii Shteiger, always in terms of the mythical relationshipbetween poet and inspirationalmuse. The first chapter, which concentrates on the tribute cycles to Blok and Akhmatova, charts Tsvetaeva's attempt to contain the threatening creative power of both poets by casting them in the roles of lovers/muses. Ultimately, however, her distant poet-rivals are ill-qualified for these roles, and so Tsvetaeva conjured up her own imaginary muse, the rider of 'Na krasnom kone'who demandsthe sacrificeof worldlyrelationshipsto thepoetic impulse. Dinega's analysis of thispoemais significantbecause it provides a persuasive corrective to existing interpretationsof this work as a rape fantasy, notably David Bethea'sJoseph Brodsky andtheCreation ofExile(Princeton,NJ, I994) and Catherine Ciepiela's TheSameSolitude(unpublished). In the next chapter, REVIEWS I I I which is noteworthy for its detailed reading of the 'Provoda' cycle, Dinega analyses the tension between sexual and poetic impulses in Tsvetaeva's relationship with Pasternak.Applying the myth of Psyche's renunciation of her physical desirefor Eros, Dinega maintainsthat Tsvetaeva similarlychose the solitudeofpoetic greatnessovermutualsexualgratificationwith Pasternak. The principalthesisof the thirdchapteris thatRilke'sdeath causedTsvetaeva to posit the transcendentalas the poet's true home, a space where the conflict between physical, human existence and metaphysical, poetic drives could finally be overcome. In line with existing interpretations of 'Novogodnee', Dinega suggests that death took on the significance of poetic rebirth for Tsvetaeva. The studycloseswith an examination of Tsvetaeva'srelationships with her poet-disciples Gronskii and Shteiger respectively. According to Dinega, through the course of these relationshipsTsvetaeva came to realize that her uncompromising devotion to poetry had caused her to ill-treat all those close to her, including her own children. Dinega concludes that 'Tsvetaeva was never able to accomplish a true meeting with any human beloved' and 'could not settle fully into the humble pleasuresof family or the mutualityof genuine intimacy'(p. 2 29). Leaving the question of whether the 'humble pleasures of family' were an appropriategoal for Tsvetaeva as a moot point, this assessmentof her poetics appears unduly bleak. As Olga Hasty has...