Anna Akhmatova and the Engineers of the Human Soul
Cast and Crew
- Anna Akhmatova – Brette Olpin
- Nadezhda Mandelstam – Mya Kahler
- Ensemble roles – Ari Pollack
- Music – Charlie Lynch
- Script by David Simmons
- Direction by David Simmons
- Photography by Hans Adler
- Graphic & web design Wendy Vardaman
Special thanks to Jonny Hunter and Underground Foods and the Arts + Literature Laboratory and UW Profs Andrew Reynolds and David Bethea.
It was Ioseb Jughashvili who said that writers are the engineers of the human soul. You probably know him better by his adopted Russian name – Joseph Stalin.
But what kind of engineers did he want working for him and what kind of souls did he want them to produce? Certainly not those such as Anna Akhmatova, one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Very little of her work was printed after Stalin came to power – mere possession of her poems was enough to risk arrest and a trip to the gulag.
At the height of the Great Terror in the 1930’s, when her son was in prison (for the second time), she – like hundreds of others – stood in line outside the prison in the hope of getting news or a package to those inside. Seventeen months Akhmatova waited. One day a woman in the queue “identified” her. Beside her in the queue was another woman. Her lips blue with the cold, the woman came out of a trance–like state and whispered (everyone whispered) to her – “Can you describe this?” “Yes, I can” Akhmatova said.
The result, written and revised over three decades, was her great poem, Requiem. Written in fragments, memorized and then burned, it was passed orally among a few poets and friends – those who were not (yet) in exile, or dead, or imprisoned. It was at the heart of our work Anna Akhmatova and the Engineers of the Human Soul. Her friend Nadezhda, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam (died in a transit camp in ’38) helped tell her story and narrated the life and times of those who chose to stay and bear witness to this – a society where many spent sleepless nights, fearing the squeal of tires, the slam of the door the of Black Marias, the tramp of boots on the stairs and the knock on the door – where the lack of evidence was proof of guilt, so cunning and devious were these wreckers and saboteurs in covering their tracks.
UW Professor Emeritus of Russian David Bethea spoke after the first performance on the nature of Akhmatova’s poetry and the difficulty of translating Russian verse into English. UW Professor Andrew Reynolds was in Russia for the summer but gave us his thoughts on the importance of poetry in Russian society, an importance that would astonish most Americans. Those thoughts are below:
The place of poetry in Russian/Soviet society
Russian writers have always been very conscious that they are part of a tradition of writing as witness and martyrdom (the original Greek word martyr meaning of course witness). They are prophets and conscience of the nation, a second government, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, and the death of the writer, according to Mandelstam, is the ultimate creative act and imparts meaning to the whole of the writer’s life. The exemplary formulation of what George Steiner termed the “ambivalent tribute of a savage vigilance” was uttered by the exiled Mandelstam to Akhmatova, when she visited him in Voronezh in February 1936:
‘Poetry is power,’ he once said to Akhmatova in Voronezh, and she bowed her head on its slender neck. Banished, sick, penniless and hounded, they still would not give up their power. M. behaved like a man conscious of his power, and this only egged on those who wanted to destroy him. For them power is expressed in guns, agencies of repression, the distribution of everything – including fame – by coupons, the possibility of commissioning their portraits from any artist they chose. But M. stubbornly maintained that if they killed people for poetry, then they must fear and respect it – in other words, that it too was a power in the land.
Therefore, pace Joseph Brodsky’s claim, in Russia at least the poetic and the political have in common rather more than simply a few letters. The dangerous “nightingale fever” (Mandelstam) of its poets is closer to the song of a canary warning of the danger that the level of oxygen needed to the proper functioning of the mind and heart of society is at a dangerously low level. Though it would be naïve to argue that poetry in Russia will ever again be as powerful a counter-voice to the State as it was under Communism or the Tsars, or that the State can be shaken by a few well-chosen words, as some claim for the poems of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, it nonetheless still seems that the ancient tradition in which the State is at least somewhat susceptible to poetic pressure, somewhat vulnerable to the shamanistic promptings of the poet-priest, is alive in modern day Russia. It is true that more natural sources of opposition -–journalism, political, institutions of civil society – have to an extent taken the role formally fulfilled by poets, but various artists and writers still play a major role, even if in recent years the most eloquent counterwords have come from political performance artists like Petr Pavlensky and the Pussy Riot collective, in theater, and in the work of a number of contemporary rock stars and rappers.
In the late Yeltsin and early Putin period, when some seemed to think that Russia was on an inevitable path towards at least something resembling a crude liberal democracy, I sounded some notes of caution. As I wondered whether the special role of Russian literature could be maintained in the changing political and economic circumstances, I made clear my doubts about whether the need to speak truth to power would vanish “in a nation which is full of exceptional human potential but which is also a country that still has to come to terms with its unpredictable past and which is still, as the Soviet formula always reminded us, one sixth of the world’s land surface. Watch this space.” The hope of course was that the writer could stay relevant without having to pay a high price in terms of personal suffering, but that always seemed overoptimistic.
Just as Stalin’s reputation will always be sullied by the outrageously courageous 16-line epigram Mandelstam hurled at him, so too Pushkin, who was said by ill-wishers after his death not to have been engaged in any activity of any worth (curiously echoed, incidentally, by Putin when he dismissed Politkovskaya’s achievements), had the last laugh over his detractors. As Akhmatova wrote (“A word about Pushkin”):
Little by little, the entire era (not without reluctance, of course) came to be called the Pushkin era. All the beauties, ladies-in-waiting, mistresses of the salons, Dames of the Order of St. Catherine, members of the Imperial Court, ministers, aides-de-camp and non-aides-de-camp, gradually came to be called Pushkin’s contemporaries, and were later simply laid to rest in card catalogues and name indices (with garbled birth and death dates) to Pushkin’s works.
He conquered both time and space. People say: the Pushkin era, Pushkin’s Petersburg. And there is no longer any direct bearing on literature; it is something else entirely. On the palace halls where they danced and gossiped about the poet, his portraits now hang and his books are on view, while their pale shadows have been banished from there forever. And their magnificent palaces and residences are described by whether Pushkin was ever there or not. Nobody is interested in anything else. The Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich in his white breeches looks very majestic on the wall in the Pushkin Museum; manuscripts, diaries, and letters are valuable if the magic word “Pushkin” is there. And, the most terrifying thing for them is what they could have heard from the poet:
You will not be answerable for me, You can sleep peacefully.
Strength is power, but your children Will curse you for me.
For Akhmatova, then, the whole epoch is to be found in, and is only justified by, the poems of Pushkin. This may be to overstate the case; but it would certainly suggest that poetry is an essential tool for understanding the Russian enigma, and to the extent that some of the less palatable features of Soviet and Post-Soviet life are increasingly reflected in some Western democracies too, maybe we have something to learn from the Russian poets.
Perhaps the most eloquent and honest statement of the writer’s guilt in the light of conscience are the final two lines of W.H. Auden’s “At the Grave of Henry James”:
…To the vanity of our calling: make intercession For the treason of all clerks.
One may oppose to this Mandelstam’s view that poetry is power, that it does make something happen: the question then is whether it can only make things matter in the twilight of a repressive society, or whether, given art of sufficient power, it can be made to matter elsewhere. In 1928, Mandelstam learnt that 5 clerks were to be executed for economic mismanagement. That Mandelstam was willing to put himself on the line by complaining about the injustice of this sentence is striking enough; what is more striking is that as a final clinching argument that he was right he sent a copy of his latest book of poems to his powerful ally, Bukharin, with the inscription: “Every line here speaks against what you are planning to do.” Such faith in poetry may seem naive, and doubtless without someone like Bukharin there, perhaps Mandelstam’s pleas would have fallen on deaf ears. Nevertheless, the sentence was repealed, and those five lives were saved. And it seems to me that if we aren’t able to find, in our reading and in our teaching, the faith in the power of great art that Mandelstam clearly had, and which Russian literature has always possessed, and which I suspect it will have for years to come, that we perhaps are guilty of a betrayal of clerks, and of a treason of clerks, in all senses of the words.
Andrew Reynolds, Associate Professor of Russian, UW-Madison, August, 2019