Anna Akhmatova was indisputably one of the most important poets of the last century, a literary artist whose work remains beloved of even casual poetry readers the world over. It also happens that she survived the most turbulent years of Russia's modern history, and that the facts of her social and sexual adventures read like a British gossip column. It is no wonder, then, that sketches of Akhmatova's life have proliferated in several languages since her death in 1966, including one Ukrainian biography from the late 1990s that, like Elaine Feinstein's new effort, is called "Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova." It just goes to show that there may be only so many ways to tell the same story.
Akhmatova's own story bears retelling. Born Anna Gorenko in 1889, she published her earliest poems while still a teenager, adopting the name of a Tatar princess. (The Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky would later call this choice of pseudonym "her first poem.") In 1910, Akhmatova married the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, and though they were divorced eight years later, she would always lament his 1921 execution by Soviet authorities. Their son, Lev Gumilyov, spent nearly 20 years in the labor camps, largely because of his parentage, and Akhmatova herself was prevented from publishing her verse in the Soviet Union until near the end of her life.
This precis has long been familiar to Akhmatova's admirers. The rest is a matter of filling in the details: the obligatory slew of lovers, friendships with the likes of Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and the terrible hardships and humiliations of life under Stalin. In her biography, Feinstein untangles the many threads of Akhmatova's complex existence in tight, rapid-fire prose, matching Akhmatova's often self-referential lyrics to the people and events that seem to have inspired them. The book's simple organization and straightforward style make it easy to read on a bus or in a crowd, and the melodrama of Akhmatova's life makes it a worthwhile escape. For those who may have been waiting patiently in line at the airport, daydreaming about one of Russia's pre-eminent modern poets, here it is: a literary biography for the chronically distracted.
This is, in fact, a serious virtue. Akhmatova has long been available in English translation, and those with a casual interest in knowing more about her life should have recourse to sources written with the general reader in mind. Roberta Reeder accomplished this in 1994 with her "Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet," which synthesizes a vast stock of sources and, as such, can be long and dense in places, though it is scrupulously researched, elegantly written and in nearly every respect superior to Feinstein's book.
And yet Feinstein is to be commended for her extensive conversations with Anatoly Naiman and Yevgeny Rein, two poets who knew Akhmatova well at the end of her career and the beginning of theirs. She also draws extensively from the memoirs of Nikolai Punin, one of Akhmatova's great loves, which were published in English in 1999. But Feinstein is more interested in a fast digest of Akhmatova's life than in delineating the bitterly contested accounts and recollections that inevitably spring up around even minor Russian writers. In the end, she works from a modest set of sources and frequently does little more than state basic facts. As a result, "Anna of All the Russias" provides hardly any authorial insight beyond pop psychology, as when Feinstein tells us that "it may well be the case that [Akhmatova's] promiscuity sprang from the same insecurity that kept her dependent on men who abused her." This may or may not be a valid point -- many of the notables in Akhmatova's social milieu were sexually profligate -- but since Feinstein rarely formulates her own arguments, such offhand suggestions tell us little about Akhmatova's psychology or, more importantly, about her poetry.
Instead, Feinstein merely recycles the clichés of the poet's popular reception, drawing her as a prophetess and the voice of national suffering. Feinstein tells us that, in the face of Russia's entry into World War I, Akhmatova's "Cassandra-like intuition that a whole world was ending in the catastrophe of war was soon to prove true." This biographer is not the first to compare Akhmatova to Troy's doomed prophetess; Mandelstam famously addressed Akhmatova in a poem called "Cassandra," and Reeder and others have remarked a prophetic quality in Akhmatova's work. But if the poet's charge is to create myths, the biographer's is to shed new light on what they mean, a test Feinstein generally fails.
While she does not conceal her heroine's egotism, particularly regarding Akhmatova's neglectful attitude toward her young son, Feinstein does take pains to excuse it, and she is especially reluctant to allow for the possibility that, for all her posturing, Akhmatova's poetry is more about herself than about her countrymen. The notion of artistic self-interest is, of course, conceptually redundant and not particularly shameful, especially when the work itself has such broad social and emotional resonance for its audience. It is therefore incongruous that Feinstein would call Alexander Solzhenitsyn "curmudgeonly" for remarking that Akhmatova's major cycle "Requiem" "represented personal grief rather than the suffering of a whole nation."
Incongruous, but unsurprising, since Feinstein is too quick to see a damaged saint in the poet once described by Andrei Zhdanov, an important ideologue of Socialist Realism, as "half nun, half whore." When the Stalinist Terror forces Akhmatova to memorize her poems rather than commit them to paper and risk their discovery, Feinstein remarks that Akhmatova's "transformation ... into the voice of a whole people's suffering had begun." A critical reader cannot help but bridle at such presumptions. Russians tend to romanticize the lives of their great writers (whereas Americans tend to ignore them), and Feinstein does not cut through this hagiographic impulse so much as perpetuate it.
Along the way, she makes several unfortunate, if minor, factual errors, most of them concerning writers other than Akhmatova and generally spun to heighten the drama of otherwise trivial details. Feinstein tells us, for example, that Anna Bunina, the aunt of Akhmatova's grandfather, was "the first woman Russian poet," though others, such as Yekaterina Urusova, preceded Bunina by decades. And when Feinstein tells us that Boris Pasternak faced special scrutiny in 1958 not only for winning the Nobel Prize, but for being "the first Slav writer" to do so, one might feel some annoyance at Henryk Sienkiewicz and Wladyslaw Reymont (both Poles), to say nothing of Ivan Bunin (a Russian), for diminishing her point. In the absence of an original perspective on Akhmatova's life and work, one at least hopes for the trivia to be accurate.
What is really troublesome about this biography, however, is not what Feinstein does to Akhmatova's life, but what she does to her poems. The book is riddled with Akhmatova's verse in Feinstein's own anemic renderings, which provide nary an inkling of the grace and inventiveness of the original, as we see in these lines, which refer to Isaiah Berlin's 1945 meeting with Akhmatova: "As if on the edge of a cloud / I remember all you said / And because of my words to you / Night became brighter than day." This is a shame, since an unsuspecting reader could easily come away from this book thinking the life of the poet more engaging than the poems themselves. Then again, Feinstein's telling of Akhmatova's life is less a tragedy than a soap opera, and the last thing we would want is for a stunning poem to spoil our voyeuristic pleasure.
Benjamin Paloff is a poetry editor at Boston Review. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.
Akhmatova's own story bears retelling. Born Anna Gorenko in 1889, she published her earliest poems while still a teenager, adopting the name of a Tatar princess. (The Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky would later call this choice of pseudonym "her first poem.") In 1910, Akhmatova married the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, and though they were divorced eight years later, she would always lament his 1921 execution by Soviet authorities. Their son, Lev Gumilyov, spent nearly 20 years in the labor camps, largely because of his parentage, and Akhmatova herself was prevented from publishing her verse in the Soviet Union until near the end of her life.
This precis has long been familiar to Akhmatova's admirers. The rest is a matter of filling in the details: the obligatory slew of lovers, friendships with the likes of Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and the terrible hardships and humiliations of life under Stalin. In her biography, Feinstein untangles the many threads of Akhmatova's complex existence in tight, rapid-fire prose, matching Akhmatova's often self-referential lyrics to the people and events that seem to have inspired them. The book's simple organization and straightforward style make it easy to read on a bus or in a crowd, and the melodrama of Akhmatova's life makes it a worthwhile escape. For those who may have been waiting patiently in line at the airport, daydreaming about one of Russia's pre-eminent modern poets, here it is: a literary biography for the chronically distracted.
This is, in fact, a serious virtue. Akhmatova has long been available in English translation, and those with a casual interest in knowing more about her life should have recourse to sources written with the general reader in mind. Roberta Reeder accomplished this in 1994 with her "Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet," which synthesizes a vast stock of sources and, as such, can be long and dense in places, though it is scrupulously researched, elegantly written and in nearly every respect superior to Feinstein's book.
And yet Feinstein is to be commended for her extensive conversations with Anatoly Naiman and Yevgeny Rein, two poets who knew Akhmatova well at the end of her career and the beginning of theirs. She also draws extensively from the memoirs of Nikolai Punin, one of Akhmatova's great loves, which were published in English in 1999. But Feinstein is more interested in a fast digest of Akhmatova's life than in delineating the bitterly contested accounts and recollections that inevitably spring up around even minor Russian writers. In the end, she works from a modest set of sources and frequently does little more than state basic facts. As a result, "Anna of All the Russias" provides hardly any authorial insight beyond pop psychology, as when Feinstein tells us that "it may well be the case that [Akhmatova's] promiscuity sprang from the same insecurity that kept her dependent on men who abused her." This may or may not be a valid point -- many of the notables in Akhmatova's social milieu were sexually profligate -- but since Feinstein rarely formulates her own arguments, such offhand suggestions tell us little about Akhmatova's psychology or, more importantly, about her poetry.
 Anna Akhmatova Museum Feinstein likens Anna Akhmatova, shown here in 1922, to Cassandra, the ill-fated prophetess of Troy. |  |
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While she does not conceal her heroine's egotism, particularly regarding Akhmatova's neglectful attitude toward her young son, Feinstein does take pains to excuse it, and she is especially reluctant to allow for the possibility that, for all her posturing, Akhmatova's poetry is more about herself than about her countrymen. The notion of artistic self-interest is, of course, conceptually redundant and not particularly shameful, especially when the work itself has such broad social and emotional resonance for its audience. It is therefore incongruous that Feinstein would call Alexander Solzhenitsyn "curmudgeonly" for remarking that Akhmatova's major cycle "Requiem" "represented personal grief rather than the suffering of a whole nation."
Incongruous, but unsurprising, since Feinstein is too quick to see a damaged saint in the poet once described by Andrei Zhdanov, an important ideologue of Socialist Realism, as "half nun, half whore." When the Stalinist Terror forces Akhmatova to memorize her poems rather than commit them to paper and risk their discovery, Feinstein remarks that Akhmatova's "transformation ... into the voice of a whole people's suffering had begun." A critical reader cannot help but bridle at such presumptions. Russians tend to romanticize the lives of their great writers (whereas Americans tend to ignore them), and Feinstein does not cut through this hagiographic impulse so much as perpetuate it.
Along the way, she makes several unfortunate, if minor, factual errors, most of them concerning writers other than Akhmatova and generally spun to heighten the drama of otherwise trivial details. Feinstein tells us, for example, that Anna Bunina, the aunt of Akhmatova's grandfather, was "the first woman Russian poet," though others, such as Yekaterina Urusova, preceded Bunina by decades. And when Feinstein tells us that Boris Pasternak faced special scrutiny in 1958 not only for winning the Nobel Prize, but for being "the first Slav writer" to do so, one might feel some annoyance at Henryk Sienkiewicz and Wladyslaw Reymont (both Poles), to say nothing of Ivan Bunin (a Russian), for diminishing her point. In the absence of an original perspective on Akhmatova's life and work, one at least hopes for the trivia to be accurate.
What is really troublesome about this biography, however, is not what Feinstein does to Akhmatova's life, but what she does to her poems. The book is riddled with Akhmatova's verse in Feinstein's own anemic renderings, which provide nary an inkling of the grace and inventiveness of the original, as we see in these lines, which refer to Isaiah Berlin's 1945 meeting with Akhmatova: "As if on the edge of a cloud / I remember all you said / And because of my words to you / Night became brighter than day." This is a shame, since an unsuspecting reader could easily come away from this book thinking the life of the poet more engaging than the poems themselves. Then again, Feinstein's telling of Akhmatova's life is less a tragedy than a soap opera, and the last thing we would want is for a stunning poem to spoil our voyeuristic pleasure.
Benjamin Paloff is a poetry editor at Boston Review. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.