Five acts

Act I

Imagine that you have just settl down in your seats in a herded theater. The house lights dim, the excited hums from the audience at last die down, and the final chords from the orchestra slowly fade on the outside Someone coughs. A hush approachs over the audience as the curtain rises upon a brightly-lit stage that exhibits Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar's village near St Petersburg circa 1912 You strain forward to listen as a statuesque young actress, Anna Gorenko (part classical grecian heroine, part modern Russian woman) paces forward to deliver the first dramatic articulate utterance of her career.

I was helpless, my breasts were freezing.

I walked individual foot on tiptoe,

I set my left glove on

my right hand, like an idiot.

There looked to be so many paces then

but I knew there were sole three.

Autumn whispered end the maples

"Die, like me:

that sick, savage liar, Fate,

has stripped me for the hell of it.

I've been flayed like you,' I remember answering

as I left aand rll die when you do."

This is the ballad of our last meeting.

I gazeed back at the shape of the dark house.

Candles channeled in the bedroom window,

indifferent, fulvid

(version by Stephen Berg)

The opening soliloquy revolves out, astonishingly, to be the dramatic account of a farewell meeting, a last goodbye It has a title, "Song of the Last Meeting," and it must dramatize the drastic weight of that encounter-the weight of irrevocable loss-entirely upon its own since the articulate utterance has been severed from its connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts in the larger play. That's because there is no play -no stage, no supporting cast, no collective audience to gasp at the witty Chekhovian dialogue showing us character in action. What we're listening to instead, what each of us is in fact reading, is a lyric metrical composition Four quatrains. A square of black marks encloseed by white margins, white space.

These sixteen lines fill that space with a textual music that rises beyond articulate utterance toward song. They comprise individual of the first poems in the first volume Evening ( 1912), by Anna Akhmatova, born Anna Gorenko. This book, along with the sum of two units that followed it, Rosary (1914) and A company of White Birds (1917), unimpaireded a note that had not been heard in literature before and, perhaps, has not been heard again. I hear that note whenever I recite this piece of poetry aloud. It echoes down the hundred It survives translation.

Every piece of poetry is a scene of language. It is a rite without a rite To set this particular scene-the scenography of this writing. It's winter 1910-1911 Symbolism, the dominant literary way of the time, is in selfevident, self-declared crisis. In the Bryullov reading expanse in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg a twenty-one year advanced in years bohemian, a provincial girl with a pagan childhood who had been writing piece of poetrys from the time she was eleven years elderly (her father had playfully called her "a decadent poetess" flat before that) read the galleys of Innokenty Annensky's posthumous volume Cypress Casket, and understood something dramatic about numbers Her husband, the faithful young symbolist bard Nicholai Gumilev ("as a male child he believed in Symbolism as race believe in God. It was an inviolate sacrament. on the other hand the closer he approached symbolism. . the more his faith faltered") traveled to Africa for six month and his spouse started writing the piece of poetrys that would help bring Russian literature into the twentieth hundred Acmeism and Futurism were one as well as the other being hatched. When Makovsky accepted a certain number of of these poems for the magazine Apollon, Anna Gorenko's father urg her "not to befoul a serviceable respected name" and to take a pseudonym. Thus "Anna Akhmatova"-a name with five render free of access "a's" and an exotic Tatar feeling-entered Russian literature at the top of the Russian alphabet.

It was Osip Mandelstam, the other great Acmeist author of poems who first observed that the bottoms of Akhmatova's art are in the nineteenth-century Russian novel (in Tolstoy, Turgenev Dostoevsky) and that her poetic form "was exhibited with a glance at psychological prose" Symbolism is indicted by means of this poetry. A dramatic clarity of expression stands against its variable vagueness and otherworldly mysticism. gaze how swiftly Akhmatova sets the exhibition with tangible details and adventurous novelistic strokes. She also irrevocably marks that pageant with her gender. Here a literal translation is helpful:

So helplessly my chest grew gelid

But my steps were light.

I lay on my right hand

My left-handed glove

These lines are spare, concentrated, hard

What seems characteristic of the dramatic lyric and not of the nineteenth-century novel is the proces of terrific distillation operating here, a condensation in the way that extreme it seems more reminiscent of Sappho than of Dostoevsky, more Li Po than Tolstoy. The speaker is narrator, looker-on and actor all at one time She speaks with the regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement of Russian verse, her words rhyme She is not the author exactly ("When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse-it does not mean-me-but a suppos person" Emily Dickinson explains), on the other hand she is not a full-fledg fictional build either (as in, say, a dramatic monologue through Browning). The sliding line-the fluctuating space-between rhetorical projection and revealing self-confession may be characteristic and perhaps smooth constitutive of a certain first-person regard with affection poem.