#akhmatova

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova

Annie Oakley's heart target, private collection, Los Angeles, California, 2010 [Photograph: Annie Leibovitz]

[Jim Fagiolo]

* * * *

Truth’s an indefinite article. 

When we live, we live for the last time,                                                           as Akhmatova says, 

One the in a world of a.

[I wrung my hands under my dark veil... “Why are you pale, what makes you reckless?” — Because I have made my loved one drunk with an astringent sadness.]

'Pasternak's fate was relatively fortunate. Both Maiakovskii and the poet Sergei Esenin committed suicide as they felt the bounds of their creative freedom narrowing. The Odessa Jewish writer Isaak Babel practiced what he called "the genre of silence" for several years, but was arrested, accused of espionage and terrorism, and sent to a labor camp, where he died. Osip Mandelstam, unable to publish, attempted an ode to Stalin, but also wrote a lampoon on him, which he recited only to trusted friends; all the same he was arrested, convicted of "counterrevolutionary activites," and died in a Vladivostok transit camp in December 1938. Anna Akhmatova spent countless hours in the queues outside Leningrad's prisons, hoping for news of her imprisoned husband and son and trying to deliver food parcels for them, an experience which she later commemorated in her Requiem, dedicated to the memory of the women with whom she had stood in line. The novelist and dramatist Mikhail Bulgakov at least avoided arrest, but spent the 1930s in a constant and largely vain struggle to have his plays performed. Denied permission to emigrate despite a personal appeal to Stalin, he fell ill and died, not least as a result of the unending physical strain and personal frustration.'

from ‘Requiem’ by Anna Akhmatova