'The colour of those eyes . . .'

Dear Diary…
Throughout our silence many seasons have come and left. The fresh green and birdsongs gave in to the perceptible autumn. The leaves turned crimson and gradually to lifeless brown. And then the earth crawled inward and braced for snow. The blue sky has changed its shade to gray and was grumbling today. And now, raw cold wind is heavy with snowflakes. Inside here the room is warm and luminous. Pleasure seems to spread over burning logs and crackling fire. I feel the seasons in me. I have to confess this change of weather stirs my restless soul.
Tonight my mood is entangled in Anna Akhmatova's words, "From poetry can arise the prose we need, which will give us back the poetry renewed."
Did you know that she refused to be addressed as poetess and thus remained a poet throughout her life? I caught a glimpse of her personality in Literary Seductions, a book by Frances Wilson. And, as a friend affirmed many a time that she was a "woman of substance", I could not resist but read her Complete Book of Poems. This volume of close to one thousand pages left me with a sense of deep contemplation wandering off in many directions.
I encountered her youthful mind through her writings about Brodiachaia Sobaka (The Stray Dog) where her debut in public recitation began. It was the center where bohemian personalities of St. Petersburg gathered for poetry reading, experiencing pleasure in music and an occasional dance. About this smoke-filled cabaret she reminisced:
Here we're all drunkards and whores, joylessly stuck together!/On the walls, birds and flowers pine for the clouds and air.
Her poems danced through the whims of young desire that wished to sense the sufferings of unreciprocated love infused with brief moments of happiness. In one of her poems she poignantly reflects:
O, I understand: to know, passionately and intensely, is his delight,/That there's nothing that he needs, and nothing I can deny.
And again love for her meant:
A bright flash in frost, drowsy night-scented stock/Yet, sure and secret,it's far from peace and joy. /…It knows how to weep sweetly in the violin's yearning prayer;/And is fearfully divined in a stranger's smile.
Such diction in her earlier publications, The Evening and Rosary, is a testament to her notoriety of being vivacious as she dared to declare openly the conventions considered sensual in nature at that time.
Clearly time was her writings maker. The German-Russian war during World War II diverted her attention to events of the time; and she reflectively announced:  "the shadows of passion and songs vanished from my memory." At that stage her poems, in subtle forms, enacted the morality of optimism for the future. Her writings were carved out of history, and of course, hers were 'confessional' poems grounded in her own experience. Much of her is in her writings. She viewed the art of poem and self a discovery for each other --- the interplay fused as one in reality. Her words could not to be suppressed by threats of death or the disappearance of her fellow writers:…
And you, my dear friends, ones of the last selection,/My life was saved to ever mourn you. Not, like a willow, to cool in lamentation,/But cry your names the whole planet through!... was her conviction; her homage to all those lost to the cruelty of time.
She wrote and recited poems when all that was expressed verbally and in writing was censored, purged or destroyed; and this was true of writers of her time as well. She was both loved and hated in the literary community. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky at one point confessed that he publicly denounced her writings, but in private he would read her poems and weep. Boris M. Eikhenbaum characterized her as "half whore, half nun." He perceived her writings on love and religious piety as contradictory and judged such philosophy to be ideologically harmful. Then there was Osip Mandelstam, her admirer, who remarked that the words of a poet can be 'most disobedient' and truly 'disturbing' to the people and the state. In Akhmatova's case his statement remained true. They all were witness to the distressing period of The Great Purge. However, Stalin could not prosecute her directly because of her celebrated position in the literary world.
In-spite of her popularity, for fifteen years from 1925 through 1940, the Poets Guild in affiliation with the Central Committee expelled her from poetry readings, and her writings were unofficially banned from the press. In the 1940s the moratorium was briefly lifted, but was reinstated again in 1946 and remained till the end of her career. These verses from her famous poem Requiem is a testimony to the un-sayable restraints of working under Stalinist political ideology: Not under foreign skies protection/Or saving wings of alien birth/I was then there – with whole my nation/There, where my nation, alas! was. Even at that stage hers was not a question of ambiguity. She stayed in her oppressed country through personal trials and tribulations, resolutely stating: I'm not one of those who left their land/To the mercy of the enemy./I was deaf to their gross flattery./I won't grant them my songs. Some years after the end of the Stalin era --- after the 1960s --- she eventually was able to publish all her censored works.
It was during the first phase of 'civic death' (the term she designated for the period when her works were prohibited from being published) that her literary work went through a great transformation. She discovered her unique style. Her expressions matured in complexity and became anchored in the convention of focusing on aesthetics of human emotions, delivering in words that summoned vivid images. She delicately balanced words and feelings of sorrow, joy, desire and appreciation. Embedded in this trend are these poignant words that reflect her longing for her first husband, poet Nikolai S. Gumilyev, who was executed:
Through darkness and death to his bed,/And brush his shoulder gently with my wings./And his eyes still laugh into mine, and now it's the sixteenth spring./What will I do? The angel of night speaks with me till the dawn.
Then there was Osip Mandelstam who was quite charmed by her. He was arrested several times and finally died in a transit camp on his way to Siberia. While recalling his absence she says:
Tallest, most suave of us, why Memory, forcing you to appear from the past, /…How we debated! /…Through dark lashes, your eyes, Georgian, looked out, with gentleness, on it all. / Shade, forgive. Blue skies, Flaubert, insomnia, late-blooming lilac flower, bring you, and the magnificence of the year,…/
Being a woman of distinct bearing, and relying on the strength of her art, it was no surprise that she attracted many writers, poets, socialites. But it was the vulnerability in her personal life that gave her the femme fatale libel. She went through the crisis of divorcing Vladimir Shileiko, her second husband, who was a scholar of Assyria and professor at the Archeological Institute. Her third husband Nikolai Punin, a poet and a scholar of Byzantine art, died in the Gulag camps. Her only son Lev Gumilyev, an established historian, was arrested a number of times to keep her 'in check.' These events and her courtship with many renowned personalities served as precursors to her creative writings.
But of all the men in her life, it was Isaiah Berlin who left a deep impact on Anna. The man objected to dying, commenting, "I don't mind death, but I find dying a nuisance" (!). He was vehemently opposed to the totalitarian system and was a formidable writer on the themes of liberty, nationalism, pluralistic affairs of state, and political designs of history. In Leningrad, one November night he and Anna met and reminisced about their Russian childhood, and her works, friends, and the war. Her son Lev joined them briefly. Her meeting with this man from the other side of the political divide was the reason for a bar on her writings from being published for the second time. She was once again ousted from the Union of Soviet Writers, and her son was rearrested.
Afraid for his life and the inevitable consequences, she burned the manuscript of Poem without a Hero in which Isaiah Berlin received her attentive signature as The Guest from the Future. She held the words in memory for safekeeping only to reproduce them many years later. Their meeting was a catalyst for some of her fine poems, and his ideas on liberty and history. The intensity of their fifteen-hour meeting blurred her existential reality; she enclosed a perfect declaration of those moments as such:
And it seemed to me those fires were about me till dawn./And I never learnt –the colour of those eyes./Everything was trembling, singing;/Were you my friend or enemy?/And winter was it, or summer?
You ask, what does it matter to dwell on a personality? Anna allowed poetry to celebrate the durability of life, to remind us again of the incongruities of history, to understand love and pain in many forms. Her words transcend time and space.
And now…the depth of night intervenes, as I stop my thoughts from dwelling on your page. I end by celebrating these words:
You, who was born for poetry's creation,/Do not repeat the sayings of the ancients./Though, maybe, our Poetry, itself,/Is just a single beautiful citation.
(Anna Andreevna Akhmatova eventually received due recognition in her native Russia for her literary contributions. Many of her works were published posthumously, and all were made available to the public in the later part of the 1980s. She was born on June 23, 1889, and died on March 5, 1966, in Domodedovo, near Moscow).