Intervention
Remembering Russian Poet Bella Akhmadulina

News flashed the other day the death of Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina at the age of seventy-three. Growing up in Moscow, I remember her name cropping up among the poets who occupied the grey zone between the permitted and the impermissible: she could publish some of her poetry, the other, her muse’s contraband, she could voice at public recitals and enjoy its circulation in literary samizdat. That’s how most Russian intelligentsia lived then—in two worlds at the same time—call it schizophrenia or split personality, or double-think. A true poet, she embodied her age, and the decades after Stalin’s death were nothing if not the age age of poetry.

Because of the richness of inflection and infinite melodic variability of the language, Russian poetry is blessed with extraordinary expressive force and a mighty mnemonic potential. This comes in handy if you happen to live under a repressive ideocracy like the Soviet Union, since verses can be easily memorized and leave little material evidence. Indeed, there was no better time to realize Russian poetry's mnemonic and etherial potential than in the post-Stalin Soviet Union where the absence of independent publishing coexisted with burgeoning youth culture and a minimal—and for that reason infinitely titillating—lifting of the skirt of Soviet censorship. For us, who belonged the post-WWII generation, shaped by the de-Stalinization campaign and cold war, known euphemistically as “peaceful coexistence,” this toying with the ideological hemline excited our imagination and set our minds on fire! Grim and sclerotic as the Soviet empire was in its decline, it became a Garden of Eden for poetry—and a purgatory, not to say a minor inferno, for the poets themselves. Some, like Brodsky, were exiled or jailed, others went through torments of hell in trying to combine the imperative of remaining true to their calling with the relentless and crushing pressure to conform. That was the cup that Akhmadulina, twenty and otherworldly beautiful in 1956, drank to the dregs.

In the sixties, I was too much of a snob to take seriously the poetry of my older contemporaries. Joseph Brodsky was the sole exception, but then, he never published in Soviet press, had gone through a crucible of a trial, incarceration in a mental hospital, and exile up north. The first poem of his I remember was his Elegy to John Donne, a verse as extra-territorial as it was extra-temporal—just one metaphysical poet to another. And then, the word had it that Anna Akhmatova herself had bestowed the mantle of the Silver Age Heir Apparent on Brodsky’s shoulders. She knew a thing or two about poets and their legends, and her sardonic remark about Brodsly’s persecutors—“Oh what a biography they are creating for Joseph!”—hit the mark.

For me and my friends, then, Akhmadulina could not meet the high standard. Her poetry was permitted. What we yearned for was "stolen air" (Osip Mandelstam). True, she had a front seat in “the little orchestra of Hope, conducted by Love,” as the chansonier Bulat Okudzhava described the true poets of the post-war generation, who had lost faith in communism but not hope and love. Still, for me and my Bohemian milieu, the world of poetry was dominated, not by orchestras, not even chamber orchestras (like those of Rudolph Barshai and Andrei Volkonsky), but by the great solo players of the Silver Age. Tsveateva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak (grudgingly, Mayakovsky). Each had an oversize and fulfilled destiny and each was wrapped in a personal myth capable of enchanting their “grandchildren’s” generation. And that was who we were. Just think, joked my friends and I: Akhmadulina shared only two syllables with the regal Anna Akhmatova. Two syllables simply did not cut it.

But then, not long before my emigration from Russia, I had the occasion to change my mind. The transformation occurred in a Moscow theater while I was watching a hybrid feature film documentary with what for me was an unlikely title: Sport, Sport, Sport (1970). What moved me to the quick was a poem that Akhmadulina herself recited in her tightly wound girlish contralto. It was a voice-over of the final segment of the film. Directed by the celebrated Elem Klimov, with the original score by Alfred Shnitke, a star-studded cast, and containing the first ever in Russia tiny clip of the Beatles, the film was all the rage in Moscow when it was released into theaters in the spring of 1971.

The film’s final segment with Akhmadulina’s voice-over consisted of a two-minute slow motion close-up of the great Ethiopian runner, Abebe Bikela, shot, no doubt, during one of his interminable marathons. The clip itself was decelerated in such a way as to make Bikela’s strides coincide rhythmically with the iambic pentameter of Akhmadulina blank verse, resounding as it did over a faintly audible organ continuo of Alfred Schnitke’s score. As Akhmaduline's voice receded, Schnitke's organ gained force, cresting over the film's finale. Seldom had any three celestial bodies been in a better alignment!

“Behold a man who has commenced his run,” Akhmadulina’s voice was resonating with our shared subliminal and not so subliminal desire to defy the boundaries of our constricted Soviet space,

way back, when dawn broke over

the whole universe; can’t calculate how many centuries

he has been running far and yon. Toward a blessed

and important goal. What triumph drives him on

to keep transcending space? …”

Вот человек, который начал бег

давно, когда светало во вселенной,

не вычислить, какой по счёту век

бежит он вверх и вдаль. К благословенной

и важной цели. Что за торжество

манит его превозмогать пространство?

I was overjoyed when I found this clip on Youtube.

Copyright © 2010 gfreidin@stanford.edu

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