Love, pain & lyricism.

The Word that Causes Death's Defeat, by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Nancy K. Anderson (Yale, 352 pp., $30)

   In the white fields I became a quiet girl,
   With the voice of a bird I cry out for love.

--Akhmatova

EVEN though the greatest lyric poets cannot be translated--imagine trying to translate Keats into Russian, let alone Chinese-Anna Akhmatova should be known at least biographically and thematically to everyone interested in literature, and here scholar Nancy K. Anderson has done a superb job. Akhmatova-I take this somewhat on faith-is one of the great lyric poets of the 20th century, and in the company of Yeats, Eliot, and Borges. Her lyrics are about love, remorse, disappointment, Russian history, and the Orthodox Church, and they attempt to keep vital the Russian culture that existed before the deluge in 1917.

I will attempt, however sketchily, to convey here something of her extraordinary life. Born Anna Gorenko into an upper-class family in 1889, she was precocious emotionally and as a poet. Because publishing poetry under the family name was out of the question, she took the name of a supposed maternal ancestor, Khan Akhmat, a Tartar chieftain assassinated in 1448. She soon became a sensation in the literary world of St. Petersburg, still recognizable as Dostoyevsky's city. She read her work in the Stray Dog cafe, a haunt of poets, novelists, painters, and musicians. She was austerely beautiful, tall, thin, and elegant with long black hair and a sculptured face of Tartar/Asiatic cast.

Her emotional life was tumultuous. In 1910 she married the symbolist poet Nikolay Gumilyov, apparently worn down by his importunities and his attempted suicide after she informed him she was no longer a virgin (though he himself continued his many involvements). His advice was valuable for her poetry, and she made the most of his long absences on trips abroad--as when Gumilyov left her in Paris in May 1911, where she idyllically did Paris-in-the-spring with the then-unknown painter Amedeo Modigliani. They strolled in the Bois and recited Verlaine, went to the Montmartre cafes and theaters, visited the Louvre. Once, finding him not at home, she threw a bouquet of roses through the open window of his studio. He made some charming line drawings of her posed as a nude model.

Then came the horrors of 20th-century Russian history, to which her poetry responds, often using the bleak but loved/sacred Russian landscape as metaphor expressing emotion. Though Stalin seems to have genuinely liked her poetry, she was often out of favor because of her equally uncontainable friends, including Boris Pasternak. Her worst period politically came after two historic mid-1940s meetings with Isaiah Berlin in her Leningrad apartment. These visits figure in her major long poem, translated here, "Poem Without a Hero": The "guest from the future" appears in mirrors as a lost lover might but does/does not exist:

   It is not for him to be my espoused,
   But what we together will bring about
   Will trouble the Twentieth Century ...
   But not the first lilacs of the spring,
   Nor love's sweet prayers, nor yet a
      ring--
   It's doom he'll come bearing me that
      night.

   And:

   He will come to me in the Fountain
   Palace [her apartment building] ...
   But it's not the first branch of lilac,
   Not a ring, not the sweetness of
      prayers--
   It is death that he bears.

Isaiah Berlin, fluent in Russian and attached to the British Embassy, first looked her up in her Leningrad apartment in the fall of 1945, this short afternoon visit interrupted by Randolph Churchill, possibly drunk, yelling for Berlin from the courtyard below. Despite this untoward incident, Berlin visited her again in January 1946: They talked and talked into the small hours of the morning about literature in several languages, passionate and luminous conversation. Berlin did not know what he was walking into that night in Leningrad, and never did, judging by his 1980 account (reprinted in the 1998 collection The Proper Study of Mankind). Akhmatova, parched with cultural thirst, absorbed every detail he could bring her from the outside world about literature and culture. No longer young, she was beautiful now in a different way, her Tartar bone structure--high cheekbones and aristocratic nose--making her look in profile like the face carved on a coin. She was, wrote Berlin, "proud, unhappy ... [speaking] in a calm even voice, at times in words of moving eloquence." In some way, more than symbolic, she thought she was Russia, and in a sense indeed she was, a regal unrowned empress, exiled in Russia from her Russia, a portrait of the young Akhmatova by Modigliani on her wall. That night Berlin was an ambassador from civilization. Nancy Anderson instructs us that the noun "poetry" in Russian is feminine, and so "Poem Without a Hero" must be referred to as "she," or perhaps "Akhmatova." Berlin must be the absent lover-like image in the mirror, the one who did not arrive. There are no hints in Berlin's account that he sensed that this to-her-epochal evening-morning encounter might have developed in a romantic direction, but the atmosphere had plenty of voltage.

The Guest from the Future instead arrived as Stalin. The NKVD had noticed the Randolph Churchill buffoonery, and reported it to Stalin. He commented, "This means our nun is receiving foreign spies." She was expelled from the Writers Union, denounced as half-nun, half-harlot; her works could not be published and her rations were cut. To her, the Berlin meeting began the Cold War: "It's doom he came bearing me that night."

Not until Khrushchev's thaw did she emerge again, receiving proper recognition, including an honorary degree at Oxford in 1965. She died on March 5, 1966. The funeral Mass at St. Nicholas Cathedral in Leningrad was attended by artists and other dignitaries from all over Russia.