Anna Akhmatova

[Fran]

I'm embarrassed to admit that I've only recently heard of the poet Anna Akhmatova & I have 'The Irish Times' to thank for introducing me to her poetry. I am truly smitten ... the sheer raw emotion of her poetry has me in tears.

[iamobama]

Me too!!

[RonPrice]

I wrote this piece tonight, incorporating as I do Anna Akhmatova and one of her poems. Since this piece is relevant to this thread I'll post it here.-Ron Price, Australia
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1936-1937
So Many Worlds and Yet One

Between 1935 and 1940 Anna Akhmatova(1889-1966), a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon, composed, worked and reworked her long poem Requiem. She did her work in secret; it was a lyrical cycle of lamentation and witness, depicting the suffering of the common people under Soviet terror.1 Stalin's harshest period of mass repression, the so-called Great Purge or Great Terror, was launched in 1936-1937 and involved the execution of over a half-million Soviet citizens accused of treason, terrorism.
My mother and father had just met or were about to meet in the five years 1935-1940; the first Baha’i teaching Plan was planned and launched in 1936-1937. They were a busy two years in history: the years that Hitler consolidated his power and WW2 began.

Akhmatova carried the poem with her as she worked and lived in towns and cities across the Soviet Union. It was conspicuously absent from her collected works, given its explicit condemnation of the purges. The work in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963; the whole work was not published within USSR until 1987. It consists of ten numbered poems that examine a series of emotional states, exploring suffering, despair, devotion, rather than a clear narrative.

Biblical themes such as Christ's crucifixion and the devastation of Mary, Mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, reflect the ravaging of Russia, particularly witnessing the harrowing of women in the 1930s. It represented, to some degree, a rejection of her own earlier romantic work as she took on the public role as chronicler of the Terror. This is a role she holds to this day.-Ron Price with thanks to 1"Akhmatova, Anna" Who's Who in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Worlds apart, a purge in Russia1
and another one in Iran, but who
would know half a world away.
Shoghi Effendi could marry Mary
Maxwell; my mother & father met
at the Otis Elevator Company in the
Golden Horseshoe and the Baha’i
Faith was banned in Germany. A
Baha’i School was opened in the
Antipodes…But who would ever
have known; there were so many
worlds as there are now and yet:2
it’s an organic-unity: one world.3

1 Although the work is recognizable as an epic lament for a particular people in response to specific circumstances of history, Akhmatova couches references to actual times and places in such a way that the work transcends its era and becomes a universal and timeless voice for the victims of persecution anywhere and anytime. See Poetry Criticism, ©2004 Gale Cengage
2 See Glenn Cameron with Wendy Momen, A Basic Baha’i Chronology, George Ronald, Oxford, 1996, pp.247-251.
3 Formalist theories of art take the view that any work of art is an organic unity; that is, it is a self-contained, self-justifying entity. Such is this prose-poem. Cosmologically, the notion of organic unity sees the entirety of creation as the voice of the infinite. In my view an Unknowable Essence. The organic is an expression of the unity. We are no longer separate from the rest of creation, because we contain all of creation. Thus by studying creation, we study ourselves. It all starts from oneness, the infinite, when the universe existed in a state of pure potential. In geometry, it is the point. This oneness is the unity point from which the organic arises. The goal now is to achieve politically what already exists biologically: the socio-political unity of humankind.

Ron Price
13 January 2012

-- Sat Oct 04, 2014 9:15 pm --

It has been nearly 3 years since I posted my above prose-poem. Since noone has responded, I'll keep this thread open with the following:
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TWO POETS MEET IN THE SUMMER OF ‘62:
MY TRAVELLING AND POETIZING HAD JUST BEGUN

Great Russian poets are, in some ways, like martyrs of the church in that vast land. They have thrived on persecution, on attacks, on being silenced. Such treatment has given a type of holy status to their work. Anna Akhmatova(1889-1966), certainly one of the most famous of 20th century Russian poets, was very conscious of this status. In 1962, four years before she died at the age of 76, Robert Frost, the American national poet, visited the Soviet Union and paid a call on her at the dacha, or country house, lent to her for the occasion at the writers' colony near Leningrad. The two distinguished old poets sat side by side in wicker chairs and talked quietly. For more on Frost’s trip to Russia go to this link:

http://eraofcasualfridays.net/2010/06/1 ... mushrooms/

I knew nothing of these poets and little of Russia at the time back in 1962. I was immersed in my small town life in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe at the age of 18: finishing my high school studies, working out the relationship to my libido and girls as well as to the new religion I had joined three years before, a religion which had been in Canada for some 60 years;1 finishing my short and adolescent baseball and hockey careers, having fun in various forms: swimming in the lakes, eating sundaes and milk-shakes with my friends at the local Dairy-Queen, going to the movies at the Roxy theatre in that small town of 5000, playing touch-football in a local park; attending to my part-time jobs and ensconced in a small nuclear-family of three where I have been raised for 18 years between the banks of Lake Ontario and the Niagara escarpment. Famous poets were in another universe to mine.

''And I kept thinking,'' Akhmatova wrote after her meeting with Robert Frost, ''here are you, my dear, a national poet. Every year your books are published. They praise you in all the newspapers and journals; they teach you in the schools; even the President receives you as an honoured guest. All they've done here is slander me! I've had everything: poverty, prison lines, fear, poems remembered only by heart, and burnt poems. And humiliation and grief. You don't know anything about this and you wouldn't be able to understand it if I told you. But now let's sit together, two old people, in wicker chairs. A single end awaits us. And perhaps the real difference is not actually so great?''2-Ron Price’s references include: 1the Baha’i Faith had been in Canada for 64 years in 1962; and 2John Bailey,” The Sheer Necessity for Poetry,” in The New York Times on the Web, 13 May 1990.3

3 John Bayley was in 1990 the Thomas Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. His books include ''Tolstoy and the Novel.'' The piece I have quoted is from his review of THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNA AKHMATOVA, Vols 1 and 2, Zephyr Press, Somerville, Mass., 1990, edited by Roberta Reeder and translated by Judith Hemschemeyer.

We were all from different universes:
me, Frost and Akhmatova back then.
But, perhaps as Anna, said, “the real
differences were actually not great!!”

I wrote my first poem back then and
it was somewhere out on the edge &
periphery of my life—while society
lived on the edge of extinction that
October as the Cuban missile crisis
nearly engulfed us all so silently….
as I watched TV in the smalltown
smugness of childhood surrounded
by salvation’s complacent trinity of
Catholic, Protestant and Jew, while
Akhmatova had been engulfed most
of her life. Her grave is at a Cemetery
near St. Petersburg if you are ever in
Russia as a tourist for a holiday-visit.

Ron Price
14/1/'12 to 5/10/'14.