Anna The Islander

Clive James again today. What a happy Monday this is shaping up to be:

Akhmatova, to her credit, had always tried to stay aloof from the Revolution. But the Revolution was never likely to pay her the courtesy of staying aloof from her. As early as 1922, her poetry had been correctly identified as politically unhelpful. The ban on publishing new work was relaxed temporarily in 1940, but we need to remember that Akhmatova, as a poet, was never really allowed to function. She earned her living mainly from translation and journeywork in prose. (As a consequence, a threat in 1947 to expel her from the Writers' Union was tantamount to a sentence of death.) Praising Pushkin, as she did in the essay that mentioned his "lyrical wealth," was as close as she was allowed to get to saying something subversive. It was permissible to value a poet's specifically poetic gifts as long as the poet was accepted as exemplifying—or, in Pushkin's case, heralding—the correct political direction.

Now old Clive is paying occluded tribute to his fuzzy Marxist background with those two opening sentences, whose inversion of direct and indirect objects (x may not do something to y, but y will surely do something to x) is borrowed from Trotsky's famous apothegm that:

You may not be interested in the dialectic. But the dialectic is interested in you.

Quite clever of Clive to use the prosody of the author of Literature and Revolution to vindicate one of the most beguiling artist-victims of revolution.

Incidentally, here's what the founder of the Red Army thought of the "very talented" Akhmatova, whose poetry he lumped into the pre-Revolutionary category of versifying "Islanders," an archipelago of which stationed itself in the Moscow Art Theater:

One reads with dismay most of the poetic collections, especially those of the women. Here, indeed, one cannot take a step without God. The lyric circle of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Radlova, and other real and near-poetesses, is very small. It embraces the poetess herself, an unknown one in a derby or in spurs, and inevitably God, without any special marks. He is a very convenient and portable third person, quite domestic, a friend of the family who fulfills from time to time the duties of a doctor of female ailments. How this individual, no longer young, and burdened with the personal and too often bothersome errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others, can manage in his spare time to direct the destinies of the universe, is simply incomprehensible. For Schkapskaya, who is so organic, so biologic, so gynecologic (Schkapskaya's talent is real), God is something in the nature of a go-between and a midwife; that is, he has the attributes of an all-powerful scandal-monger. And if a subjective note may be permitted here, we willingly concede that if this feminine wide-hipped God is not very imposing, he is far more sympathetic than the incubated chick of mystic philosophy beyond the stars.

Anna Akhmatova, assessed. – By Clive James – Slate Magazine