By Asya Pekurovskaya
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Quest for Glory and Quest for Word: Case of Bro and Case of Bo is a 156,000-word mixed genre manuscript that weaves together autobiography, essay, and literary criticism to explore the lives and legacies of two Russian poets, Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, who were part of Anna Akhmatova’s inner circle during her final years (1889–1966).
Quest for Glory and Quest for Word delves into the intricate dynamics between Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, irreconcilable rivals following Akhmatova’s death. Brodsky’s meteoric rise to fame culminated in his emigration to America in 1972 and a Nobel Prize in 1987, though his journey was marred by personal and professional struggles. Conversely, Bobyshev remained in the shadows for much of his life, only to be later recognized for his enduring literary brilliance, praised by critics as “belonging to the masterpieces of world literature.”
Below is a chapter extract from the book.
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Chapter 3. Akhmatova and her “Orphans”
Dmitry Bo and Joseph Bro entered Anna Akhmatova ’s intimate circle of friends in her final years, along with two other talented poets: Anatoly Najman and Yevgeny Rein. Dmitry Bo described this poetic quartet in several ways: ‘alphabetically: Bobyshev, Brodsky, Najman, Rein; by seniority: Rein, Bobyshev, Najman, Brodsky; and by literary significance in future centuries, let those future centuries rank us’ (Bo, The HomoText). However, without delaying matters, I decided to give my contemporaries a chance to rank the two poets I chose according to their literary significance.
On Akhmatova’s birthday, June 24, 1962,30 Bro sent her one of the best poems of the early period, which included the following lines:
I quote three quatrains of this poem in my translation:
“In the Mars Field before the fading sun
You’ll come alone, an unescorted one
In a blue dress, as changing times again
Only short of us, short of your fans.
You’ll raise aloft your ravishing visage –
Loud laughter as a tribute or presage,
Fuzzy hubbubs on a heated overpass
For a moment it will excite and swiftly pass.
In your cozy room, alas with no books,
No fans and no time at them to look,
You’ll rest your fair temple on your palm
And record for us a slanted psalm.”
These lines, spoken on behalf of the entire poetic quartet, captivated them all,. and at the same time, Bo ‘brought five roses for Anna Andreevna, “a kind of ‘madrigal for a beautiful lady,’ written under the impression of the film The Magnificent Seven.”
‘We’ll also find three more, seven in total,
To aim in the aperture antidote
With printed silver, then to forthwith race
The loaded train in your eternal praise.’
My poem ended with a hint:
‘And hearing the engines’ thunder greeting,
and seeing roses form a heptagon,
Does it oblige you to create a ditty
Commemorating our bandwagon?’31
I hinted that it would be nice to receive a poem from her, not just for myself but for my friends too. She responded, dedicating “The Last Rose” to Bo, “The Non–existent Rose” to Najman, and “The Fifth Rose” to me. She simply didn’t live long enough to give Rein his rose” (I quote from A. Akhmatova, Notebook, p. 160). Admiration for Akhmatova remained intact for Bo.
“What does Akhmatova mean for you personally as a poet?” Ivan Tolstoy asked Dmitry Bo in an extensive interview following the release of his memoir, The HomoText.
D.Bo: “She primarily belonged to the Silver Age, but she fits into both the 20th century and the end of the 20th century. Moreover, she was not the anachronism many imagined her to be. They say, “I put the right-hand glove on my left hand” – that’s all Akhmatova. Nothing of the sort. She evolved from an intimate, perhaps private poetess of the early century into a powerful civic voice…”
Bo’s perspective is well-founded. As a professor at the University of Illinois, he offered a “course on Russian modernism,” primarily based on Akhmatova’s work, covering her role in symbolism, acmeism, futurism, revolution, censorship, war, blockade, and her late period.
“In what sense did you call yourselves her ‘orphans’?” Ivan Tolstoy continued.
D.Bo: “I wrote funeral octaves for Akhmatova: eight eight-liners. In one of them I described her funeral. To express the depth of the loss, I wrote:
‘Then enter Tolya, Zhenya, Dima, Osya
To set the seal, to form a single row:
Articulate Akhmatova orphans’ losses.’”31
“Mourning Octaves” was memorable for Bo in yet another way. In them he found a fundamentally new style, which he described in his memoir. “This topic demanded an epic tone and brief, aphoristic form. I fell in love with terzines. How many lines minimally sustain a stanza? Seven? Not enough. Thirteen? A bad number. So ten: two rhymes for entry, two for exit, plus three male and three female consonances. Graphically, three tercets and one final stanza requiring an aphorism. Almost like a sonnet, only more compact: thesis, antithesis, exit, and final theme turn. Why did no one notice this? Am I not great?”
But pretty soon Bo found the same terzines in the 1904 collection “XIII Sonnets” by the young Mikhail Kuzmin. The demanding poet in Bo made a self-exposure:
“At this point, the publisher should cool my ardor as the inventor of the “Bobyshev” stanza, observing that the first to come across this form was the magician of verse Mikhail Kuzmin.32 Two or three similar ten-lines were found on pages of his notes and published in New Literary Observer. However, this happened ten years after my ‘Russian Terzines’ were fully published in the Parisian magazine Continent” (Bo. Self-Portrait in Faces, pp. 333-334).
It is often repeated in literature that with the death of Akhmatova, the circle of poets disintegrated. This is how I will write, although in fact this commonwealth practically collapsed, and even more dramatically, before Akhmatova’s death. And since this drama was preceded by events that were reflected in poetic creativity, I decided to postpone the drama story until chapter 4.
For the new year of 1965, Bro dedicated a sonnet to Akhmatova, taking her own lines as the epigraph: “It was not for nothing that I got the gray crown…” Let me remind you that after the memorable lines “You’ll rest your fair temple on your palm / And record for us a slanted psalm.”” these opening lines of the 1965 New Year’s sonnet sounded shocking. Here’s the text in my translation:
While throwing a lexicon ashore,
Triumphing slander over suffocation,
Let waves lay siege on, being long or short,
The days of past and future aberrations.
They flip by handfuls amber and, alas,
On autumn days, they roar behind the glass,
Convey in January, dazzlingly blooming,
The crest that knocks at windows. Let it buzz.
Squeezing my heart and looking at your eyes,
Your face betrays in a capricious glory
Gray, silver crown meant to verbalize,
And raise aloft the thorns and laurel!”
The sonnet did not receive any response during Bro’s lifetime, most likely because it was not understood. Yet a response eventually came, albeit with a great delay. Valentina Morderer, a subtle and erudite connoisseur of poetry, published an essay titled “The Incomprehensible in Brodsky, Helping to Understand the Incomprehensible in Khlebnikov.”
Paradoxically, the question of what the poem was about wasn’t even posed by the author. Valentina Morderer’s task was “to establish the kinship of the ‘poetic exercises’ of Bro and Khlebnikov not along semantic lines, i.e., not along the lines of ‘grammatically related words,’ but along the lines of lettered images and sound adjacency.” Expressed also was an additional condition: “I warned that when presenting the texts, I would avoid evaluative rhetoric.”
So what might a claim to understand an incomprehensible text without evaluative rhetoric look like? I quote Valentina Morderer:
“This sonnet is not without a hero. Of course, the main character here is the regal Akhmatova herself, but the supreme actor is the sea. And the primary object of claims in the poetic tournament is Pushkin’s ‘diamond crown’ (inherited from Marina Mnishek). The sea initially offers a series of vegetal substitutions. Instead of thorns and laurels—autumn leaves, then amber, then a dazzling crest of waves. But all this is nothing compared to the gray crown of hair that Akhmatova received in the agony of ‘penal songs.’ ‘Calendar’ and ‘suffocation’ came into the sonnet from Pasternak’s ‘Soul,’ where February and the waves of the flood inundate the ravelin, followed by a complex metaphor with a leafy grate-calendar:
‘The fallen years are knocking like the leaves
In the garden hedges of the calendars.’”
As we can see, Valentina connects the names of Bro and Khlebnikov with the names of Pushkin and Pasternak, leaving the justification of her choice to the reader. I will try to correspond, starting with the “diamond wreath,” the first “object of claims.” For Bro’s metaphor (“gray, silvery crown”), Valentina finds an intertextual pair in Marina Mnishek’s remark, taken from the draft version of Boris Godunov. I quote the text, incidentally crossed out by Pushkin:
“You donned it, oh how lovely! Look back on
When did you deign to go to the palace?
They say like thousand suns you shone.
The beauties whispered…You were like a chalice
For men. Then young Khotkevich fell with you in love
But he eventually took his life.”32
The words belong to the maid preparing Marina Mnishek for the ball, where she is to meet the imposter and future tsar. Accordingly, Akhmatova’s “gray crown” is equated with the “diamond crown” of the adventuress Mnishek. The parallel that Valentina Morderer’s imagination dictates is absent in the text of the sonnet. But it might have been in its subtext. In the line “slander triumphs over suffocation,” Bro might have expressed his reaction to the rumors of his fiancée, Basmanova, involving Bo in a love triangle.”
Furthermore Valentina Morderer’s intuition could suggest a new analogy. The mention of Khodkevich’s suicide could have reminded her of the fate of Vsevolod Kniazev, who also shot himself as he was involved in a love triangle with the dancer Olga Sudeikina, a friend of Akhmatova, as is discussed in chapter 4. It seems that the absurd parallel between the adventuress Marina Mnishek and Anna Akhmatova could have been extracted by Valentina Morderer from the subtext of Bro’s sonnet, despite her ban of evaluative rhetoric.
For the second ‘object of claims,’ Valentina Morderer highlights the second line of Bro’s couplet:
“triumphing slander over suffocation,
permit the sea besiege the calendar”
vis à vis the last two lines of Pasternak’s poem “The soul:”
“The fallen years are knocking like the leaves
In garden hedges of the calendars.”
And Khlebnikov’s line is also linked here. Valentina writes: “I remind you, Velimir said the same: “Iron railings – leaves in the month of autumn…”
But how should we understand this “the same”? Is it right to compare Pasternak’s “garden fence” with Khlebnikov’s “iron railings,” if Pasternak’s “garden fence” is a metaphor for the “chains of a restless soul,” whose struggles are equated with the struggles of “Princess” Tarakanova, another adventuress who pretended to be the daughter of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna and her lover Alexei Razumovsky and was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress:
“You plunged like Princess Tarakanova
When February swamped the ravelin.”
So, I dare to suggest that “the incomprehensible in Bro” did not become more comprehensible as a result of the cross-references to Pushkin and Pasternak. And the reader, who noticed Khlebnikov’s name not being mentioned in Bro’s New Year’s sonnet, is in for a surprise. The “misunderstood” Khlebnikov, who is supposed to clarify the “incomprehensible” Bro, will surface in the context of Bro’s 1981 poem, which I plan to return to in chapter 10. However, with Khlebnikov’s appearance in the narrative, the trace of Pushkin and Pasternak will be lost.
But if we abandon all the taboos declared by Valentina Morderer and try to formulate a few “whys” that have already matured in my head, then the New Year’s greetings of 1965, which Bro addressed to Akhmatova, will not seem at all incomprehensible. Let’s start with the question: why is the New Year’s sonnet alludes not to the future, as etiquette requires, but to the past, moreover, a traumatic past charged with “slander” and “suffocation”? Why, further, does the sonnet’s author write to Akhmatova without identifying himself? And lastly, why is the sonnet dedicated to the new year, 1965?
The answer to the last question is obvious. The new, 1965 year marked the anniversary of the drama that Bro considered the main tragedy of his life. Akhmatova was chosen as the recipient of the message because she was privy to the details of the drama, and Akhmatova’s knowledge of these details explains the lack of necessity to establish the identity of the sonnet’s author. But the reference to “slander” and “suffocation” contains a mysterious duality. It is unclear whether Bro is referring to the consequences of his trauma, which Akhmatova is aware of, or to the trauma tormenting Akhmatova’s soul, which Bro is aware of.
Traumatic for Akhmatova was her last love for Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), meetings with whom took place on November 16-17, 1945, January 5-6, 1946, and finally when Akhmatova was awarded the Doctor of Literature Prize by the University of Oxford in June 1965. Akhmatova dedicated poems to the separation in January 1946, which were later included in the cycle “The Rose Hip Blooms (Burnt Notebook).” I quote from verse four:
“What shall I leave for you as a record?
Leave my shadow as a needless escort?
Dedication to a burning drama,
From which remains no ashes,
What was left was a panorama
New Year’s portrait in scary flashes.”
The poem is dated January 6, 1946, the day of her parting with Berlin, but it was probably written several months later, i.e., after the report of the Secretary of the Central Committee A. A. Zhdanov (1896-1948) about the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” (1946), the consequence of which was an absolute ban on the publication of Akhmatova’s poems. I quote the text:
“Her main theme is erotic love, intertwined with motifs of sorrow, longing, death, mysticism, and doom. The feeling of doom—a sentiment shared by the social consciousness of a dying group—gloomy tones of pre-death hopelessness, mystical experiences mixed with eroticism—such is the spiritual world of Akhmatova. <…> Either a nun or a harlot, or rather both a harlot and a nun, in whom harlotry is mixed with prayer.”33
It is likely that Akhmatova associated this fatal turn of fate with the visit of Sir Berlin, a British subject. However, while in the hospital with a heart attack (1961-1962), Akhmatova, as already mentioned, wrote a new stanza in “Poem without a Hero,” calling Berlin “Guest from the Future,” and while waiting to meet him in June 1965, she dedicated several poems to Berlin, including them in the chapters of the cycle “The Rose Hip is Blooming” (1964). I quote the eleventh chapter: “In a broken mirror:”
“I heard irreparable words
At starry dusk as if
My head was in a whirl backwards
Above a burning cliff.
At portal death was deeply howled,
Black garden hooted like an owl,
The city, mortally destroyed,
Looked older than the ancient Troy.
That hour was bright beyond my grit.
It rang its bell , it seems, to tears.
You brought me from afar a gift.
The gift was wrong. But it appeared
To you like fun and merriment
That fiery evening but it meant
to turn into world famous plot.”
The upcoming visit to Oxford and the associated trauma of twenty years ago could serve as an impetus for memories of the events of early youth described in Georgy Ivanov’s novel “Petersburg Winters” (Paris: Rodnik, 1928; New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1952). In any case, it was they who became central in Akhmatova’s notebook number 9, dated the end of 1964. I quote the text:
“The feeling I had when I read the quote from Petersburg Winters about my performances (‘House of Writers’) in 1921 can only be compared to the last chapter of Kafka’s The Trial, where the protagonist is led to slaughter in front of everyone, and everyone finds it normal. There is not a word of truth in this quote. The poem ‘Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold, / The black wing of death flashed, / Everything is gnawed by the last hungry anguish…’ is portrayed by the author as an example of sellout lyrics and a sign that I had exhausted my creativity. The audience allegedly ‘clapped out of habit.’ No one claps out of habit, or they clap the doors shut as they leave. People still remember those evenings with excitement and write to me about them. But Georgy Ivanov and Otsup were already very busy discrediting my poems at that time. They knew some details of my biography and thought that my place was empty and decided to pass it on to I. Odoevtseva.” (Akhmatova, Notebook, pp. 145-146).
And further: “In the feuilleton ‘Poets,’ Georgy Ivanov stylizes me as Blok’s ‘Stranger’ in a large hat with feathers (1922). This is the height of bad taste. What feathers in 1922? I wore a silk cap then (see photos).” (Akhmatova, Notebook, p. 147).
When Akhmatova’s invective against Georgy Ivanov was examined under a magnifying glass by professional researchers, its authenticity was disputed. “For those who know the fragment from Petersburg Winters, from which the quote is taken,” writes professor Erokhina, “Akhmatova’s accusation of Ivanov intending to ‘discredit’ her poems may seem absurd. The entire mentioned episode is built on the contrast between the genuine greatness of the poet, ‘growing taller with each year,’ and the listeners who expected ‘new gloves’ from her: ‘All the female students of Russia, who gave her the ‘mandate’ to be the ruler of their souls, are deceived [Ivanov, vol. 3, pp. 647–648].”34
According to her colleagues, professor Erokhina continues, “the reasons for the angry philippics towards Petersburg Winters lie in Akhmatova’s biased attitude towards its author (her dislike for Georgy Ivanov is known, for example, from the diaries of P. L. Luknitsky and the notes of L. Chukovskaya), as well as in her desire to control her past” (Erokhina, PUM, p. 42). Professor Erokhina herself thinks otherwise. “Until this time, she was probably convinced that Petersburg Winters could not be seriously recognized as a ‘document of the era.’ Akhmatova’s reaction is not to the text, but to its transition from the discourse of fiction to the discourse of memoirs” (Erokhina, PUM, p. 41)..
Professor Erokhina argues that Georgy Ivanov, a prominent poet of the 20th century, did not take his recollections of the St. Petersburg bohemia of the 1910s-1920s seriously. In a private letter to Vladimir Markov, he admitted: “I will lie for the sake of stylistic beauty, or else I will confuse something,” and in a public statement, he even put forward a theory: “There are memories like dreams. There are dreams like memories. And when you think about the past ‘so recently and so long ago,’ you never know—where memories are, where dreams are.”35 But despite all these warnings, Ivanov’s talented and in-demand book soon lost its status as a novel and began to be perceived as a memoir. And it was this reevaluation that Akhmatova reacted to. Moreover, her invective against Ivanov continues in the tenth notebook.
“Never and nowhere did he tell a word of truth. He remembers nothing personally about me. He was a Kuzmin boy. He knew that I did not recognize him as a poet, never spoke to him. In the 1928 edition he writes (follows? a petrified quote), in the 1952 (Chekhov) edition he removes this quote. He is a cynic—it doesn’t matter to him. In honor of Odoevtseva [Georgy Ivanov’s wife– A.P.], he ‘dethrones’ me” (Akhmatova, Notebook, p. 263).
While Ivanov’s talent acknowledged the imperfection of memory and authorial claims, allowing him to ‘lie for the sake of stylistic beauty,’ Akhmatova’s talent permitted no such doubts, censoring anything that could question this perfection.” In particular, her 800-page diary entries do not contain a word about how her immediate circle evaluated her. This gap was filled by Lada Panova, who unearthed, among other things, two ekphrases from oblivion.36
Looking at Akhmatova’s portrait by Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaya (1914), Mikhail Kuzmin captivates the reader with a mysterious preface:
“As expected, the ‘woman with an umbrella’ attracted the attention of almost everyone. Those who were interested in why the painting depicting a lady sitting at a small table and raising a glass of red wine to the light was called ‘woman with an umbrella’ searched in vain for this object on the canvas. Admiration for the gentle tones of the fabric, the face illuminated from below, and the red starry reflections of light through the wine on a transparent hand, the beauty of the depicted lady and her origin, nationality and character, her relationship to the artist also occupied the idle imagination of the audience. Who is she: a wife, a lover, a random model who wished to remain unrecognized, or a professional model? It was difficult to read in the sensual and somewhat arrogant features of a tall brunette, with a low forehead, covered, moreover, by long bangs.”
In some features, the lady was identified in Kuzmin’s diary entry from June 10, 1910: “The Gumilevs arrived, she is stagy.”
Dating his notes October 24, 1914, Nikolai Punin [Akhmatova’s third husband- A.P.] also points to her affectation: “She is intelligent, .she is magnificent, but unbearable in her posing, and if today she did not grimace, it is perhaps due to my not giving her sufficient reason to do so.”
And finally, the artist herself, Della-Vos-Kardovskaya, records her impression of Akhmatova, whom she accidentally met at Nathan Altman’s exhibition (March 3 and April 17, 1915): “Akhmatova is a wonderfully charming creation, but how many purely feminine traits she has and how vain she is! … [S]he suffers not from a mania of grandeur, but from some constant thought about herself and her success. She always has something to tell me about herself… that ‘Requiem’ has already sold out… “However, all this, of course, is trivial, and while it initially struck me, now, I always expect her to say something about herself.”
The author of the second ekphrasis, Georgy Ivanov, describes Akhmatova while standing before Nathan Altman’s 1914 painting. “Several shades of green. A poisonously cold green. Not even malachite, but copper sulfate. The sharp lines of the drawing drown in these restless green corners and rhombuses. … The color of caustic copper sulfate, the harsh ring of copper—this is the background of Altman’s painting.” The sharp lines of the drawing drown in these restless green corners and rhombuses. … The color of caustic copper sulfate, the harsh ring of copper. — This is the background of Altman’s painting. Against this background, a woman—very thin, tall, and pale. Her collarbones protrude sharply. Black, almost lacquered bangs cover her forehead down to her eyebrows. Swarthy pale cheeks, pale red lips. Thin nostrils show through. Her eyes, circled, look coldly and motionlessly—as if not seeing the surroundings. … [And] all the features of the face, all the lines of the figure—in angles. An angular mouth, an angular curve of the back, angular fingers, angular elbows. Even the rise of the thin, long legs—at an angle. Do such women exist in real life? This is the artist’s invention! No—it is the living Akhmatova.”
And further:“In Tsarskoye Selo, the Gumilevs have a house. Outside, it is just like most of the Tsarskoye Selo mansions… But inside—it is warm, spacious, comfortable…
‘How unlike your Altman portrait you are now!’ She shrugs mockingly.
‘Thank you. I hope I don’t resemble it.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘Of course not. Who would like to see themselves as a green mummy? <…> Two more years. Two or three casual encounters with Akhmatova. She looks less and less like her former self. More and more like a nun. Only the shawl on her shoulders remains the same—dark, with red roses.” (Georgy Ivanov, Petersburg Winters, pp. 57–61).
As we can see, the contemporaneous image of the young Akhmatova does not match the historical image, and Akhmatova blamed Georgy Ivanov for this discrepancy. But what role could Joseph Bro have played in this? Could his 1965 New Year sonnet, coinciding in time with Akhmatova’s philippic against Ivanov, be an expression of sympathy for Akhmatova’s rhetoric? And if so, what were the reasons for Bro’s later radical reassessment of Akhmatova’s poetry?
“Joseph openly told us that he did not particularly like her poetry. Akhmatova, extremely perceptive in matters of people’s attitudes toward her verses (this sometimes put them in a difficult position), saw that his poetry was decisively different from her own, deceptively simple. Joseph retold her words to me: she did not believe that I could like her poetry. Of course, I gallantly objected.” (Ellendea Proffer-Teasley, 2015, p. 23).
Ellendea’s account, referring to her visit to St. Petersburg before Bro’s “exile” from Russia in 1972, appears to correspond with Bro’s admission that, after reading Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the Mountain at the age of 20, he could no longer return to his previous feelings for Akhmatova.’ But does this mean that the heartfelt lines “Resting your temple on your hand, You will write about us at a slant,” written at the age of 22, did not express his true feelings? Most likely by rejecting Akhmatova’s authority in favor of Tsvetaeva, Bro had already taken a step toward accepting new ethical standards. Tsvetaeva legitimized his proud self-belief and, using his own vocabulary, granted him an “ego of monstrous proportions”:
“Who’s made out of stone, who’s molded from clay,
Yet I, like gold medal, twinkle!
My name is Marina, my thing is betrayal,
I’m brittle, like ocean’s wrinkle.
Who’s molded of clay, and made out of flesh
Will rest under stone obelisk.
But I am baptized in the ocean’s mesh
And fly when receiving its kiss.
I shatter, I smash with my glorious will
All hearts, every net made of steel
And (look at my naughty and sensuous curls!)
Don’t make me the salt of the earth.
I’ll break into pieces by each granite grip,
But will resurrect with its ripples. /
So, long live the ravishing lotion –
The jovial foam of the ocean!”
When journalists finally took an interest in Bro, it might have been driven by a desire to learn more about Akhmatova. However, their mention of Akhmatova’s name initially caught Bro off guard. This is evident in his reaction to a question about Akhmatova from John Glad in 1979:
J.Bro: “It’s long and it’s complicated. It’s either miles or nothing at all. For me, it’s extremely difficult because I am completely unable to objectify her, that is, to separate her from my consciousness; let’s say, here is Akhmatova, and I’m talking about her. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but people you encounter become part of your consciousness, and people you meet, no matter how harsh it sounds, you sort of ‘absorb’ into yourself,37 they become part of you. Looking at her, it became clear (as some German writer said, I think) why Russia was periodically ruled by empresses. She had grandeur, if you will, imperial grandeur” (Ibid). Looking at her, it became clear (as some German writer I think said) why Russia was ruled from time to time by empresses.”
Two years later, D.M. Thomas repeated John Glad’s question:
D.M.T.: “I’d like to ask you about a poet whom you knew personally and who had a great influence on you — about Akhmatova. What image of her personality has stayed with you?”
However, Bro is still puzzled:
J.Bro: “Let me think. I don’t know where to start.”
Perhaps recalling the 1979 interview, the journalist comes to the rescue: D.M.T.: “Was she that majestic, even unapproachable lady, as they say about her?”
J.Bro: “Well, yes, of course, she was. But unapproachable — maybe that’s too exaggerated. Although no, perhaps she was unapproachable… Looking at her, you immediately understand how Russia could have been ruled by an empress. She was exactly like that” (D.M. Thomas, Quatro magazine, December 1981. Translated by Igor Parschikov).
Perhaps frustrated by his inability to articulate his feelings about Akhmatova to satisfy the journalists’ persistent questions, Bro writes an essay titled “The Keening Muse” (1982), focusing on her love lyrics: “The constant birth of new and new loves in Akhmatova’s poems is not a reflection of lived passions; it is the longing of the finite for the infinite. Love became her language, her code for communicating with time, at least for tuning into its wave. The language of love was closest to her. She did not live her own life but lived through time, through the impact of time on the souls of people and on her voice—the voice of Anna Akhmatova.”
To shield himself from the journalists’ ongoing questions about Akhmatova, Bro included his essay in his memoir Less than One (1986), adding new nuances: “Akhmatova’s love poems were, naturally, first and foremost, just poems. Among other things, they had the remarkable quality of novels, allowing the reader to wonderfully kill time by following the development of its various twists and trials. Some people did just that, and based on these poems, they nourished their imagination with ‘romantic relationships’ of the author with Alexander Blok—a poet of that period—as well as with Her Imperial Majesty’s very own person” (Less than One, pp. 44–45).
But the release of his memoir did not relieve Bro from questions about Akhmatova. “Akhmatova,” he said in an interview with David Montenegro, “helped me develop my capacity for love to the limit.”38 Behind this persistent desire to reduce Akhmatova’s legacy to the theme of her early poems about love, there could be a hint of derogatory assessments of V. Pertsov (1898-1980), the mouthpiece of totalitarian power. In the article “On Literary Disagreements,” published on October 27, 1925 in the newspaper “Life of Art,” Pertsov wrote the following: “All the refined quality of Akhmatova’s poetry,” wrote the author of the article, “is the result of long, meticulous, painstaking adaptation of the theme of love and romance to the capricious demands of the socially deprived part of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Such social eunuchs <…> eagerly handle Akhmatova’s ‘Prayer Beads,’ surrounding the poetess with sectarian adoration.”39
It seems that as Bro’s sense of his own uniqueness solidified, he increasingly renounced the influences of the poets who shaped him. Gradually, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and even Auden lost their status as ideal models, and Bro began to feel equal to them, and at times even superior. This shift could follow the model of mimetic desire developed by Girard, where distance plays a special role. As long as the spiritual distance between the ideal model and the subject is significant (Girard calls this external mediation), the subject is ready to admire the chosen model. Yet as the spiritual distance (“internal mediation,” according to Girard) decreased, the model becomes the subject’s rival and even enemy.40
The release of Bro’s memoir coincided with the publication of Emma Gerstein’s recollections, which triggered an outburst of anger in Bro. Without delving into details, it should be noted that in her narrative, Bro could read a veiled criticism of his attempts to reduce Akhmatova’s legacy to the erotic theme. What might have been notably painful for Bro was that, in her criticism, Gerstein invoked Mandelstam.’s authority. “Osip Emilie–vich asserted that Akhmatova had already been unofficially recognized as a classic. I came to him to talk about her poetry, and among his words, of approval there was still a remark about her early poems’ ‘mannerism,’ but he added, ‘everyone wrote like that back then.’ After his usual mumbling, Mandelstam spoke with disapproval: ‘autoeroticism.'”
The term ‘autoeroticism’ served as a silent reference to the derogatory assessments of Akhmatova’s poetry by her powerful persecutors. “Looking up and to the side, he spoke not of the love motives of her lyrics, but of her descriptions of nature. He compared Akhmatova’s poems to the landscapes of Russian classics, but not Turgenev or Chekhov… He muttered as if leafing through volumes of literature until he found the only definition that could be compared to Akhmatova’s landscapes: ‘Aksakov’s steppe.’”
However, although with the word “autoeroticism,” Mandelstam designated and placed a taboo on all attempts to reduce Akhmatova’s poetry to “love lyrics,” Bro violated this taboo twice. He first expressed loyalty (in a 1965 New Year’s poem) to “slander,” reminding Akhmatova of the trauma of her youth. However, further, in “The Keening Muse,” he reduced all of Akhmatova’s poetry to love lyrics, thereby tacitly approving the assessments of the totalitarian rulers who blocked her air for creativity.
What stance did Dmitry Bo adopt as a witness to the transformations accompanying Bro’s rise to fame? In his memoir (The HomoText), Bo describes a meeting in Pskov with Osip Mandelstam’s wife, who shared Akhmatova’s hostile assessment of Georgy Ivanov’s book Petersburg Winters. In an attempt to justify Akhmatova’s position, Nadezhda Mandelstam did not hesitate to deny talent of the unquestionably talented poet Ivanov.
Bo accompanies his story with an admission of his borrowing “free poetic expression” and “willful artistry” from Ivanov, thereby cancelling the assessment initiated by Akhmatova and professing Ivanov as an illustrious poet. Bo further reports that Nadezhda Mandelstam “reacted skeptically to my enthusiasm and, as a test, suggested that I recite some of Ivanov’s poetry by heart. I recited ‘The Enamel Cross in the Buttonhole.'”
“More,” she requested.
To my surprise, I found myself reciting from memory again and again—fifteen poems, or perhaps even more. ‘Read the first one again.’ I recited ‘The Cross’ again. ‘Georgies remain Georgies even if they start writing a little better’” (Bo. Self-Portrait in Faces, pp. 191-192).
With regard to Akhmatova’s reputation as an erotic poet, Bo firmly aligned with Mandelstam, who had told Emma Gerstein about the similarity between Akhmatova’s landscapes and those of Aksakov. Furthermore, he embraced the ‘slow gaze at the subject, revealing its hidden essence,’ a technique Aksakov had pioneered and which Valery Shubinsky later noted in Bro (Valery Shubinsky. “Dmitry Bovyshev. Rendezvous with Words.” (Moscow: NLO, Poetry of the Russian Diaspora, 2003).
What Shubinsky might not have known that, having listened to Mandelstam, Bo decided to see Aksakov’s landscapes with his own eyes. Bearing in mind the location of the Aksakov estate in Ufa, Bo went there at the first opportunity with a volume of The Years of Bagrov’s Grandson.” Well?
“The most impressive sight was the steep slope to the Belaya River, overgrown with shrubs and tall poplars (a word I borrow from Aksakov’s descriptions), and above all—a boundless blue sky” (Bobyshev. Self-Portrait in Faces, p. 123).
And then follows an admission: “I spent hours savoring Aksakov’s texts and wandering through the thickets and groves descending to the river, bringing the text to life. ‘The cheerful singing of birds came from all sides, but all the voices were covered by the whistles, rolls, and clicks of nightingales. <…> And I set myself the ultimate goal of hearing this to my heart’s content. I didn’t remember if I had ever heard a nightingale before, and if I didn’t remember, then probably not. I wandered for a long time, listening to the moist silence of the thickets. A chiffchaff would warble, a robin or a chaffinch would trill, and I would be on alert—was this the nightingale? Finally, it began to get dark, and I heard the first full-bodied trial—Tin-vini-tuk! And immediately the acoustics of the forest opened up, as if an experienced tuner had touched the keys in a concert hall. But not a tuner, a master: ‘tju-it-tju-it, nul-nul-nul-nul, kly-kly-kly-kly, pju-pju, tsi-fi, tsi-fi, fju-iu-iu-iu, to-to-go-go-tu’—this is how Turgenev recorded the sounds” (Bo. Self-Portrait in Faces, pp. 123-124).
Footnotes:
- By that time, Akhmatova had practically recovered from her third heart attack and, while in the hospital, wrote a new stanza for “Poem without a Hero,” about which later. Anna Akhmatova. Notebooks. 1958-1966. Moscow-Turin, Giulio Einaudi editore, 1996, p. 126. Further references to this volume will be given in parentheses, indicating the name (“Akhmatova”), the title (“Notebook”), and the page number.
- Dmitrij Bobyshev. HomoText in Three Books. (California: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, 2014). Further references to these volumes will be given in parentheses, indicating the author’s name, volume title, and page number.
- “The Magician of Verse” Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936) was destined in the near future to occupy a special place in a unique plot, which is discussed in Chapter 4.
- A.A. Zhdanov. ABOUT MAGAZINES. “STAR” and “LENINGRAD”. FROM THE DECISION of the Central Committee of the VKG1(b) of August 14, 1946.
- I. V. Erokhina. THE PROBLEM OF UNRELIABLE MEMOIRS: THE CASE OF AKHMATOVA, ON THE 130TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF ANNA AKHMATOVA (Tula: Tula State University, Series 2. Humanities. 2019. V. 21. No. 3. Hereinafter – Erokhin, PNM and page number.
- Georgy Ivanov. Collected Works in three volumes, vol. 3 (Moscow: Publishing House Soglasie, 1994), p. 118). Next: “Ivanov”, “PZ” and page number.
- Lada Panova. “Ekphrasis with Consequences (Mikhail Kuzmin, Georgy Ivanov, Anna Akhmatova).” The publication combines two articles: “Portrait with Consequences” by Mikhail Kuzmin: a Rebus with a Key // Russian Literature, 2010. No. 4. Pp. 218–234; “Ekphrasis with Consequences” (Kuzmin, G. Ivanov, Akhmatova) // From Kibirov to Pushkin. To the 60th anniversary of Nikolai Aleseevich Bogomolov / Comp. O. A. Lekkmanov, A. V. Lavrov. M.: NLO, 2010. pp. 373–392.
- The verb “to absorb” is defined in Ushakov’s 4-volume dictionary as “to suck in (air or water), to draw in.” And although Bro uses it in a figurative sense, its literal meaning does not disappear, which is especially striking when reused in describing his perception of Auden.
- Montenegro, David, An Interview with Joseph Brodsky (Partisan Review, 1987, 54,4), pp. 538–39.
- Akhmatova Pro et Contra. Anthology. Sankt Petersburg, 2001, pp. 695–696.
- “We speak of external mediation when the distance is sufficient to eliminate any contact between the two spheres of possibilities of which the mediator and the subject occupy the respective centers. We shall speak of internal mediation when the same distance is sufficiently reduced to allow these two spheres to penetrate each other profoundly” (Girard, DDN, p. 9).
(Note: All poetry translations in the above article are by the author (Asya Pekurovskaya) unless indicated otherwise.)
To read Part-1 (Chapter-6 of the subject book), click here
About the Author
Asya Pekurovskaya was born in Leningrad, Russia, and after marrying a storyteller and earning a Master’s degree in literature from Leningrad University, she emigrated to America. She completed a doctoral program in literature at Stanford University and has also participated in a post-doctoral seminar in philosophy at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
