Akhmatova, Anna: Title Commentary

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ANNA AKHMATOVA: TITLE COMMENTARY

Poem without a Hero

WENDY ROSSLYN (ESSAY DATE 1992)

SOURCE: Rosslyn, Wendy. "Don Juan Feminised." In Symbolism and after: Essays on Russian Poetry in Honour of Georgette Donchin, edited by Arnold McMillin, pp. 102-21. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Rosslyn suggests that Akhmatova's Poem without a Hero is a reworking of the Don Juan legend with a female protagonist.

Traditionally the Don Juan legend focuses on a man who claims many female victims of his desires, and who is finally brought to justice by supernatural powers, usually in the form of a statue of a male rival. The legend is not at first sight open to re-telling with a female protagonist, but I wish to suggest that this is indeed what is done by Akhmatova in her Poema bez geroia ('Poem without a Hero', 1940-62).

It has become customary to think of Poema bez geroia as a reflection on wrongdoing, conscience, and retribution (in the context of the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath) and these are three concepts which also, of course, lie at the heart of the Don Juan legend: Don Juan's mis-spent life meets with retribution from the Commendatore's statue, and he is dragged down to hell. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to look at Akhmatova's poem in the light of this legend and to suggest that one reading of the poem is as a narrative about 'love, unfaithfulness and passion'¹ and their moral implications. It will also be necessary to consider the gender changes which Akhmatova's re-telling involves. Akhmatova brings the Don Juan legend to mind by incorporating into her poem allusions to several previous tellings of the myth, and does so from the very outset. The title of the poem, 'Poem without a Hero', echoes the opening of Byron's Don Juan (1819-1824), where the narrator asserts:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one:
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don
Juan—
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

(Akhmatova let it be known, perhaps with a touch of braggadocio, that she had read Byron's poem, in English moreover, forty times.)³ The epigraph to the poem as a whole, 'Di rider finirai / Pria dell'aurora', is taken from Da Ponte's libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) and serves to pinpoint the core of the myth as far as the Poema is concerned, namely imminent retribution for frivolity and mockery before the dawn of a new day in which these attitudes have no place. Part 1 of the poem carries an epigraph, 'In my hot youth—when George the Third was king …', also taken from Byron's Don Juan. And in Part 2, 'Reshka', Akhmatova adds a note on the omitted stanzas which calls attention to Byron's Don Juan via a note of Pushkin's. Molière's Dom Juan ou Le Festin de Pierre (1665) is alluded to in the Poema in the reference to 'Meierkhol'd's little arabs' (meierkhol'dovye arapchata), the proscenium servants used by Meierkhol'd in his production of the play staged in Leningrad in 1910.⁴ And Hoffmann's story Don Juan of 1813 has also left echoes in the text.⁵ Pushkin's play based on the Don Juan legend, Kamennyi gost' ('The Stone Guest', 1830), is neither named nor quoted, but lies behind much of Akhmatova's reshaping of the myth in the Poema, as I hope to show. As is well known, Akhmatova was writing her essay on Pushkin's little tragedy at the same time as working on her own poem.⁶ The poem also contains many allusions to Blok's poem 'Shagi Komandora' ('The Commendatore's Footsteps', 1910-12),⁷ which Akhmatova felt to be particularly close to her own work when she was in Tashkent and writing the Poema. ⁸

In the period round about 1913 which the Poema depicts, the Don Juan legend was alive and productive. Not only was Blok writing 'Shagi Komandora'. 1906 saw the 150th anniversary of Mozart's birth, and scenes from Don Giovanni were performed at the Mariinskii Theatre in Petersburg as part of the celebrations. It has also been suggested that the epigraph from Don Giovanni is connected with Akhmatova's contemporary and friend, the composer Artur Lur'e, who picked out these lines from the libretto in his article on Mozart's opera.⁹ Pushkin's text also had a contemporary resonance inasmuch as Dargomyzhskii's Kamennyi gost', the libretto of which was based on Pushkin, was on the Petersburg stage in 1915 at the Teatr muzykal'noi dramy and in 1917 at the Mariinskii, the latter production being by Meierkhol'd.>10> Shaliapin, who, like Meierkhol'd, also figures in the Poema, was to have sung Leporello, but withdrew after irreconcilable differences with Meierkhol'd. Not for nothing, therefore, does Akhmatova dress one of the masked figures who visit the author in 1913 at the beginning of the poem as Don Juan.

Don Juan's character is, of course, analysed and presented in very different ways in the texts alluded to in the Poema, and the details of the plot vary accordingly. However, the protagonist in each is male. When Hoffmann turned the presentation of Don Juan in a new direction, showing him as a man with a god-like nature who strives towards the sublime, pursuing perfect beauty in the form of the ideal woman who will give him paradise on earth, a new emphasis was given to the last of Don Juan's victims, Donna Anna, who thus became the embodiment of female perfection and the potential saviour of Don Juan. This conception of female beauty was followed by Pushkin, and to a still greater degree by Blok. Akhmatova, however, firstly feminises Don Juan, and secondly rejects the idea of the saving power of female beauty.

Akhmatova's poem by no means constitutes a retelling of the legend with the traditional characters and plot; the foundation for her Don Juan scenario is the theme of wrongdoing followed by retribution. The wrongdoing is partly defined as 'sin' to be punished with 'holy revenge' (consonant with the theological interpretations of the legend)>11> and partly as shamelessness. The important passage is the one from the interlude 'Cherez ploshchadku' which, according to the poem, hovered around the lines

No bespechna, priana, besstydna
Maskaradnaia boltovnia …>12>

The passage begins by relating 'the chatter at the masquerade':

'Uveriaiu, eto ne novo …
Vy ditia, sin'or Kazanova …'
'Na Isaak'evskoi rovno v shest'…'
'Kak-nibud' pobredem po mraku,
My otsiuda eshche v "Sobaku".
'Vy otsiuda kuda?'—
'Bog vest'!'
Sancho Pansy i don Kikhoty
I, uvy, sodomskie Loty
Smertonosnyi probuiut sok,
Afrodity voznikli iz peny,
Shevel'nulis' v stekle Eleny,
I bezum'ia blizitsia srok.
I opiat' iz Fontannogo Grota,
Gde liubovnaia stonet dremota,
Cherez prizrachnye vorota
I mokhnatyi i ryzhii kto-to
Kozlonoguiu privolok.
Vsekh nariadnee i vsekh vyshe,
Khot' ne vidit ona i ne slyshit—
Ne klianet, ne molit, ne dyshit,
Golova Madame de Lamballe.
A smirennitsa i krasotka,
Ty, chto koz'iu pliashesh' chechetku,
Snova gulish' tomno i krotko:
'Que me veut mon Prince Carnaval?'

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HAIGHT ON AKHMATOVA'S IMPORTANCE FOR RUSSIAN WOMEN

From the start, Akhmatova was concerned with the necessity of giving voice to the woman's point of view in a culture where women's voices, although beginning to be heard, were few and far between and where women were still suffering from the illusion that to be equal with men, they must be like them. A deeply religious and at the same time passionate woman, with close ties to nature, Akhmatova was forced to examine and reject the false doctrine that placed physical desire so often in opposition to God's purpose. She re-examined and rejected the attitude to her sex which had caused so much suffering over the past century, which had divided women into those who were 'pure' and those who were 'fallen'. When in her poetry she tried to heal this split, she was taunted for years with being 'half nun, half harlot'.

Haight, Amanda. Excerpt from "Instead of a Foreword" in her Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

These stanzas are saturated with allusions to sexual promiscuity. Casanova, who requires no further amplification, is here partnered by a woman whose sexual experience allows her to consider him 'a child'. The righteous Lot is tempted. Aphrodite, the goddess of sensual love, is born; Helen, whose beauty was the cause of violence on a cataclysmic scale, looks at herself in the glass—or to be more precise, since Aphrodite and Helen appear in the plural, modern women begin acting out these roles. The grotto in the garden of the House on the Fontanka (the Sheremet'ev palace, where Akhmatova lived for many years) where love is said to lie sleeping, symbolises, on the contrary, the relationship between the actress Parasha Zhemchugova and her husband Count D. N. Sheremet'ev, whose devotion lasted even beyond her death in 1803, as his many inscriptions to her in the house and garden show. A plaque on a marble pedestal in the garden, for instance, reads:

Je crois son ombre attendrie
Errer autour de ce séjour,
J'approche—mais bientôt cette image chérie
Me rend à ma douleur en fuyant sans retour …>13  >

Akhmatova notes in her essay on Pushkin's Kamennyi gost' that betrayal of the virtuous spouse after his or her death was in Pushkin's view an unforgivable sin (p. 163) and Sheremet'ev is in this respect a shining example of virtue. But in Akhmatova's poem love, as distinct from sex (liubov', as distinct from izmena and strast'), 'sleeps', and a contrast is established between this faithful couple and another—the ryzhii and kozlonogaia, who in the Romanov-Sats ballet Kozlonogie (The Fauns, 1912) participate in a triangle of relationships in a plot which, according to one opinion of the time, put L'Après-midi d'un faune in the shade as far as pornography was concerned.>14> At the end of the passage one of the heroines of the poem, a beautiful woman who is both the Petersburg actress who plays the faun and the author's double, asks languorously and submissively what her partner wants of her. Akhmatova implies that a prime factor in the wrong-doing for which retribution is to be exacted is sexual licence.

However, although the faults of a society in which Don Juan can flourish are far more narrowly identified than, for example, by Byron in his Don Juan, the poem is not merely a puritanical tirade against sexual promiscuity. The fault or sin diagnosed here is self-indulgent behaviour which has no accompanying sense of shame ('No bespechna, priana, besstydna / Maskaradnaia boltovnia …'). The author questions her double about her unfaithfulness, and, as is made apparent by the question which follows immediately after, receives no answer:

Zolotogo l' veka viden'e
Ili chernoe prestuplen'e
V groznom khaose davnikh dnei?
Mne otvet' khot' teper':
neuzheli
Ty kogda-to zhila v samom dele?

The actress, who plays the faun and is to be contrasted to Zhemchugova, is unable to say whether her behaviour is innocent or criminal because her conscience is atrophied. Satan is similarly defined as one 'who does not know what conscience means and why it exists', and it is lack of conscience which is the prime ground for condemnation in the poem.>15>

A second allegation made against the culture of 1913 is its predilection for assuming masks and playing roles; these signs of a shallow sophistication lead to a diminished sense of the integrity and uniqueness of the self:

I vse shepchut svoim dianam
Tverdo vyuchennyi urok …

and thus again to an inactive conscience. The contrast between play and conscience is established in Part 2 of the poem, 'Reshka', where the carnival atmosphere of 1913 does not survive the catastrophes brought by the True Twentieth Century (which for Akhmatova began in 1914), but religious anthems do:

Karnaval'noi polnoch'iu rimskoi
I ne pakhnet. Napev Kheruvimskoi
U zakrytykh dverei drozhit …

Akhmatova makes the same diagnosis as Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, who wrote that 'the legacy of the pre-revolutionary years was self-indulgence, loss of criteria, an incessant craving for happiness'.>16>

As in the legend, Akhmatova shows in her poem the retribution which this wrong-doing calls down upon itself. And she associates it with an almost apocalyptic event which will happen before dawn:

Zvuk orkestra, kak s togo sveta,
(Ten' chego-to mel'knula gde-to),
Ne predchuvstviem li rassveta
Po riadam probezhal oznob?

and

Ved' segodnia takaia noch',
Kogda nuzhno platit' po schetu …

Retribution will be brought about by a quasi-human power which is hardly susceptible to description in advance, but which is variously envisaged as gost' zazerkal'nyi and kto-to (Part 1, Chapter 1) or ten' (Part 1, Chapter 3). All these denote some humanoid phenomenon not unlike the statue in the legend. Akhmatova also shows the decisive moment which symbolises that wrong-doing as a crisis point in the interrelationships of three people, two of whom are rivals for the favours of the third.

However, having incorporated the Don Juan legend into her text, Akhmatova re-formulates it very radically. Firstly, the attributes which traditionally belong to Don Juan are not only given to the rival figure in this triangle, but are distributed more widely. The passage just quoted suggests, in fact, that sexual licence is a rather general mode of behaviour, the loose morality of the times against which the actress's infidelity to her admirer, the cornet of dragoons, must be seen. One hypostasis of Don Juan is the cornet's rival:

Na stene ego tverdyi profil'.
Gavriil ili Mefistofel'
Tvoi, krasavitsa, paladin?
Demon sam s ulybkoi Tamary,
No takie taiatsia chary
V etom strashnom dymnom litse:
Plot', pochti chto stavshaia dukhom,
I antichnyi lokon nad ukhom—
Vse—tainstvenno v prishletse.
Eto on v perepolnennom zale
Slal tu chernuiu rozu v bokale
Ili vse eto bylo snom?
S mertvym serdtsem i s mertvym vzorom
On li vstretilsia s Komandorom,
V tot probravshis' prokliatyi dom?

Like Pushkin's Don Guan, this figure hovers on the boundary between utter damnation and salvation and it is unclear whether at heart he is Gabriel or Mephistopheles. Much in this passage suggests that the prototype is Blok, who reads himself into the Don Juan role in his 'Shagi Komandora'. Indeed, Anna Lisa Crone argues that Akhmatova resorts to the Don Juan theme as an allegory for the events in Blok's life.>17> But Blok was for Akhmatova 'a monument to the beginning of the century', and elsewhere she said, 'Blok turned up in my poem "Triptych" [ie the three-part Poema ] as an epoch-person '.>18> There is thus no need to restrict the identification of Don Juan exclusively to Blok, especially since when Akhmatova asks whether the cornet's rival is to be identified with Don Juan, she concludes with a question mark and provides no answer.

We therefore have grounds for considering other possible hypostases of Don Juan, and one of these is, I suggest, the author of the poem, who 'descends under the dark vaults', prepares supper for a guest, senses that her end is at hand,>19> and seems to see a mysterious and horrifying visitor who emerges from the grave, through the gravestone, knocks at the door, comes in, and beckons her, apparently to the place whence he has come. All this happens, moreover, at the moment when the author is challenging the supernatural powers (God, or fate) with a denial of their control over her, like the over-confident Don Juan:

Smerti net—eto vsem izvestno,
Povtoriat' eto stalo presno,
A chto est'—pust' rasskazhut mne.
Kto stuchitsia?
Ved' vsekh vpustili.
Eto gost' zazerkal'nyi? Ili
To, chto vdrug mel'knulo v okne …
Shutki l' mesiatsa molodogo,
Ili vpravdu tam kto-to snova
Mezhdu pechkoi i shkafom stoit?
Bleden lob, i glaza otkryty …
Znachit, khrupki mogil'nye plity,
Znachit, miagche voska granit …
Vzdor, vzdor, vzdor! Ot takogo vzdora
Ia sedoiu sdelaius' skoro
Ili stanu sovsem drugoi.
Chto ty manish' menia rukoiu?!
Za odnu minutu pokoia
Ia posmertnyi otdam pokoi.

In her discussion of Pushkin's Kamennyi gost' Akhmatova sets out the evidence for viewing Don Guan as Pushkin's self-portrait.>20> In this same passage she also observes that Pushkin gradually lost his readers, and the fact that she made the same observation of herself allows us to consider Akhmatova's assertion that Don Guan is Pushkin's self-portrait as an oblique indication that the equivalence of author and Don Juan applies equally to her own poem. We may see a parallel between Pushkin's Don Guan, who is within a hair's breadth of salvation, and the author's awareness of her own sinfulness and her fear and rejection of her past self:

S toi, kakoiu byla kogda-to
V ozherel'e chernykh agatov
Do doliny Iosafata,
Snova vstretit'sia ne khochu …

The author refers ironically in 'Reshka' to her earlier books of poems:

Nu, a kak zhe moglo sluchit'sia,
Chto vo vsem vinovata ia?
Ia—tishaishaia, ia—prostaia,
'Podorozhnik', 'Belaia staia'…
Opravdat'sia … no kak, druz'ia?

And in these books too we find her presenting herself as a Don Juan figure. The most direct statement is made in a poem of 1913, the year evoked in Poema bez geroia. As in the Poema, the setting for Don Juan-like behaviour in this poem is the Stray Dog cabaret in prerevolutionary Petersburg:

Vse my brazhniki zdes', bludnitsy,
Kak neveselo vmeste nam!
Na stenakh tsvety i ptitsy
Tomiatsia po oblakam.

Ty kurish' chernuiu trubku,
Tak stranen dymok nad nei.
Ia nadela uzkuiu iubku,
Chtob kazat'sia eshche stroinei.

Navsegda zabity okoshki.
Chto tam—izmoroz' ili groza?
Na glaza ostorozhnoi koshki
Pokhozhi tvoi glaza.

O, kak serdtse moe toskuet!
Ne smertnogo l' chasa zhdu?

A ta, chto seichas tantsuet,
Nepremenno budet v adu.

The seductive heroine exercises her sexual attraction in a relationship which is cold and calculating on both sides, and foresees that the fate of women like herself (vse my …) who are already spiritually dead is undoubtedly to go to hell. The revelry before the anticipated retribution is a direct reflection of the lines from Don Giovanni, 'Di rider finirai / Pria dell'aurora'. Moreover, the heroine of Akhmatova's early poems, who, fearing the intimacy of loving relationships, consistently subverts them and extricates herself from them, going on from one lover to the next in search of utterly elusive happiness, is also the victim of the psychology of a Don Juan.>21>

In the Poema the author has a double, and the latter, the actress, is also endowed with the characteristics of Don Juan. We see her at her marriage ceremony thinking of a past affair, and we see her scorn the feelings of her devoted admirer the cornet in favour of a rival. She is compared to Botticelli's Spring—which suggests that she is the embodiment of instinctive sexuality—and to a magnet, which attracts lovers inevitably and indiscriminately. She is thus presented as a symbol of sexuality acting almost on an animal level, as the comparison to a faun (kozlonogaia), half-goat and half-human confirms.

It can therefore be argued that in Poema bez geroia Akhmatova shows that the sins of Don Juan are the sins of a whole generation, in which women sin in the same ways and to no less an extent than men. This is to say that when Akhmatova feminises the Don Juan figure she does not allot Don Juan's attributes to women alone, but points out that they are, in potential at least, part of human nature in general, and are thus as often to be found in women as in men. This point had, of course, already been made by Byron, whose Don Juan is the seduced rather than the seducer. The prototype of this female Don Juan is to be found in Pushkin's Kamennyi gost', where Laura, an actress like the Columbine figure, lives for the sensual pleasures of the moment, has no moral principles, and transfers her affections effortlessly from one man to another; Don Karlos describes her way of life:

Ty moloda … i budesh' moloda
Eshche let piat' il' shest'. Vokrug tebia
Eshche let shest' oni tolpit'sia budut,
Tebia laskat', leleiat', i darit',
I serenadami nochnymi teshit',
I za tebia drug druga ubivat'
Na perekrestkakh noch'iu …

The recasting of Don Juan as a woman has radical repercussions on other aspects of the legend, as used in the Poema. Since women are reinterpreted in this way, there can be, and is, no Hoffmannesque female figure of saving virtue in this poem. Nor is any figure the equivalent of the Commendatore, the animated statue, who is the other embodiment of honour and fidelity in the legend.

At this point reference should be made to V. N. Toporov's discussion of the Don Juan legend in the poem, since Toporov discerns both a Donna Anna and a Commendatore in it. He identifies lines 130-60 of Chapter 1 in Part 1 of the poem as the 'carcass' of the legend, and sees this scene as an inverted imitation of the scene of the destruction of Don Juan:

… the criminal rendez-vous is interrupted by the arrival of the man who considers himself the husband … but the death of Don Juan at the hand of the Commendatore is transformed into the death of the man who takes on (even if only in part) the role of the Commendatore, thus turning the woman into his window. But Don Juan remains alive …>22>

It is, however, over narrow to restrict the reworking of the Don Juan legend in the poem to a mere thirty lines—passages reflecting the legend which fall outside this section have been mentioned above—and some other objections must also be made.

To Toporov's qualified assertion that the cornet plays the role of the Commendatore one may firstly point out that there is a real husband in the text, though the cornet would certainly like to supplant him. Secondly, that Akhmatova discarded the variant lines about the cornet which refer to him as 'honour's friend'. Thirdly, that Akhmatova sets up a parallel between the cornet and Evgenii from Pushkin's Mednyi vsadnik. Both hear the ringing of horses' hooves at their moment of crisis:

Veter, polnyi baltiiskoi soli,
Bal metelei na Marsovom Pole,
I nevidimykh zvon kopyt …
I bezmernaia v tom trevoga,
Komu zhit' ostalos' nemnogo
Kto lish' smerti prosit u boga
I kto budet navek zabyt.

Both lose their beloveds. Both are forgotten as soon as they die, except inasmuch as they figure in a poem recounting their fate. The fact that Evgenii is the victim of the animated statue suggests, therefore, that his correlative in Akhmatova's poem, the cornet, is not the equivalent of the Commendatore. Finally, the cornet is not presented as a character so virtuous that he can act as the means of vengeance for supernatural powers of good. The cornet's fidelity to the actress is viewed in the poem as a fault rather than a virtue. It is alleged that it would have been more worthy to weather the blow to his pride constituted by her unfaithfulness, and to live on to devote himself to other goals. This is to say that fidelity to the beloved is not conceived of as a good sufficient in itself—conscience, discrimination and responsibility are also required. In terms of the legend, the cornet fits better into the role of one of the helpless victims of Don Juan, since he is a victim of the actress whom I construe as one of the Don Juan equivalents. Just as Don Juan claims many female victims, their lives wrecked by seduction, she is likewise the cause of the cornet's suicide. Virtue is the property, as I have already suggested, of Zhemchugova, Sheremet'ev and bygone days; in the twentieth century it is characteristic only of The Poet:

I ni v chem ne povinen: ni v etom,
Ni v drugom i ni v tret'em …
Poetam
Voobshche ne pristali grekhi.
Propliasat' pred Kovchegom Zaveta
Ili sginut'!…

Noting Akhmatova's observation that Pushkin's Don Guan is a poet, and bearing in mind the lines about The Poet in the Poema which have just been quoted here, Toporov turns to Akhmatova's poem 'Cherez 23 goda', which echoes these lines, and finds 'a correspondence (in this case no significance other than a formal-referential one should be given to this word) between Donna Anna in the Don Juan tragedy and the author, who bears the same name' (p. 38). He also adduces evidence for Blok's conception of Akhmatova as a Donna Anna figure.

Akhmatova's constant awareness of the associations surrounding her name make this a weighty argument. However, the question here is not what subtexts attach to the name 'Anna' but whether any person in Akhmatova's poem carries out the function played by Donna Anna. Hoffmann considers her to be:

… a divine woman, against whose pure soul the Devil has been powerless. All the machinations of hell could ruin her only on earth […] Suppose Anna had been destined by heaven to make Don Juan recognise the divine nature within him through love (which Satan skilfully used to ruin him) and to rescue him from the despair of his own striving.>23>

Pushkin views his Donna Anna in a similar light, causing Akhmatova to observe in her discussion of Kamennyi gost' that Donna Anna is the instrument of Don Guan's regeneration (p. 100). However, Akhmatova comments in a later revision of this article that while for Don Guan Dona Anna is an angel and his salvation, for Pushkin she is 'a very coquettish, curious and fainthearted woman, and a sanctimonious hypocrite'. Pushkin finds her unfaithfulness to her dead husband unforgivable (p. 163).

Toporov writes that Akhmatova follows Hoffmann in her conception of this figure in Poema bez geroia : 'before Akhmatova only Hoffmann in his Don Juan saw in the image of Anna in the traditional scheme the hypostasis of the potential saviour of Don Juan who comes (albeit too late) to save him with her love' (p. 175). But he does not explain this statement by reference to the poem and it is difficult to discern a female saviour in it. Although Blok's Donna Anna from 'Shagi Komandora' is mentioned in the poem, it is not asserted unequivocally that this is a characterisation of the lady of the house (the author's double) and thus of the author:

Over the bed there are three portraits of the lady of the house in some of her roles. On the right she is the Faun, in the centre Lady Confusion, on the left the portrait is in shadow. Some think it is Columbine, others that it is Donna Anna (from 'Shagi Komandora').>24>

However, if the essence of Donna Anna's function in the legend is to attempt to save Don Juan, and if Don Juan can be identified as the author of the poem, then it can be said that the latter looks for salvation to the poem itself, which does have something in common with Donna Anna, in both her Pushkinesque forms. In its personified form, the 'stoletniaia charovnitsa ', the Poema is certainly coquettish:

Kruzhevnoi roniaet platochek,
Tomno zhmuritsia iz-za strochek
I briullovskim manit plechom.

and it offers the author a kiss, just as Dona Anna kisses Don Guan:

My s toboi eshche popiruem,
I ia tsarskim moim potseluem
Zluiu polnoch' tvoiu nagrazhu.

Moreover, Akhmatova points out in her essay that when his death is at hand, Pushkin's Don Guan turns to Dona Anna, who occupies all his thoughts at this terrible moment (p. 100):

Ia gibnu—koncheno—o Dona Anna!

Similarly, in Chapter 3 of Part 1 of the Poema, when retribution in the form of the True Twentieth Century is approaching, the author too cries out:

A po naberezhnoi legendarnoi
Priblizhalsia ne kalendarnyi—
Nastoiashchii Dvadtsatyi Vek.
A teper' by domoi skoree
Kameronovoi galereei
[…]
Razve my ne vstretimsia vzgliadom
Nashikh prezhnikh iasnykh ochei?
Razve ty mne ne skazhesh' snova
Pobedivshee
smert'
slovo
I razgadku zhizni moei?

The fact that the passage is connected with N. V. Nedobrovo, and that the call is thus to a former love and not a present one, suggests that there is no character in the poem who functions as Donna Anna; but the fact that the appeal is for 'the word which conquers death' suggests that the poem itself is, potentially at least, able to save,>25> though we should not ignore the poem's demonic aspects, as described in 'Reshka'. We may, however, view the poem as a substitute for Donna Anna.

Akhmatova rejects Hoffmann's romantic conception of the saving power of woman, pure in soul and beautiful of face. Her poem illustrates the old truth first symbolised by Helen of Troy that female beauty can be the cause of catastrophe, no less than male Don Juanism, and shows that purity of soul, male or female, is not to be found in the world of the Poema —unless it be in The Poet. She is thus spared the necessity which befalls Hoffmann of making out a special case for Donna Anna's exceptional status to explain why she has fallen victim to Don Juan just like multitudes of purportedly lesser women before her. Hoffmann is obliged to divide Donna Anna into flesh and spirit and assert that hell has power only over the former, heaven avenging this corruption of her body by dragging Don Juan off to hell. In succumbing to Don Juan, Hoffmann argues, she succumbs to a supernatural power—the devil—which she cannot be expected to resist successfully, and though she loves Don Juan she does not hope for earthly happiness. The women in Akhmatova's poem both avoid this flesh-spirit divide and are morally responsible agents in control of their own fates, rather than the ground on which supernatural powers vie for superiority.

It may seem that, if there is no character in the poem who represents Donna Anna or the Commendatore, rather little is left of the Don Juan myth: all that remains is Don Juan himself or, as I interpret the poem, herself. However, just as Donna Anna has a substitute in the personified Poema, the Commendatore also has a substitute.>26> Akhmatova abandons the animated statue motif>27> but retains the function carried out by the traditional statue: punishment of sin in hell. The poem speaks of the retribution which comes to the Don Juan heroine in terms of going through hell:

Ty sprosi u moikh sovremennits:
Katorzhanok, stopiatnits, plennits—
I tebe porasskazhem my,
Kak v bespamiatnom zhili strakhe,
Kak rastili detei dlia plakhi,
Dlia zastenka i dlia tiur'my.

Posinelye stisnuv guby,
Obezumevshie Gekuby
I Kassandry iz Chukhlomy,
Zagremim my bezmolvnym khorom:
(My uvenchannye pozorom)
'Po tu storonu ada my'.

The substitute for the Commendatore is the history of the True Twentieth Century, which in Part 3 of the poem condemns the author (and by extension all the Don Juans in the poem) to lose her home, to see her city destroyed, to be disgraced and to be kept under tight political control. A double of hers perishes in a camp. It is because of the fact that in Akhmatova's reworking of the legend retribution comes in this world, and not in the next, that Don Juan remains alive: in the twentieth century he (or she) has no need to die in order to go through hell, and to pay the price of wrong-doing.

What then remains of the Don Juan legend in the Poema ? The Commendatore and Dona Anna disappear as characters, their functions taken over by powers in the poem which are not of a human order. Don Juan's other victims, never amongst the chief protagonists, are likewise subsidiary characters here. Don Juan is virtually all that remains. But this is a more psychologically complex figure than previous Don Juans.

The 'I' of the Poema is, as I have argued, a Don Juan figure who pays for wrongdoing by being visited by a supernatural presence and who is punished in hell. But this Don Juan remains alive and is regenerated by this harrowing experience, so that the voice of the author looking back on her sinful youth is no longer that of the conscience-less Don Juan. It is no accident that the lines chosen for the epigraph from Byron's Don Juan ('In my hot youth—when George the Third was king') lead on to a passage which asserts the difference in viewpoint made by the passing of time:

' Non ego hoc ferrem calida juventa
Consule Planco ', Horace said, and so
Say I; by which quotation there is meant a
Hint that some six or seven good years ago
(Long ere I dreamt of dating from the Brenta)
I was most ready to return a blow,
And would not brook at all this sort of thing
In my hot youth—when George the Third was
King.

But now at thirty years my hair is gray—
(I wonder what it will be like at forty?
I thought of a peruke the other day—)
My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I
Have squander'd my whole summer while 'twas
May.
And feel no more the spirit to retort; I
Have spent my life, both interest and principal,
And deem not, what I deemed, my soul
invincible …

… No more—no more—Oh! never more, my heart,
Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!
Once all in all, but now a thing apart,
Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse:
The illusion's gone for ever, and thou art
Insensible, I trust, but none the worse,
And in thy stead I've got a deal of judgment,
Though heaven knows how it ever found a lodgment.>28>

There are reminiscences of several of these lines in Poema bez geroia. The money metaphor is echoed in Akhmatova's 'nuzhno platit' po schetu'. 'My blessing or my curse' has its parallel in 'Gavriil ili Mefistofel'. But most important of all is the contrast between heart, the preserve of youth, and the judgment which comes with maturity. This is also the contrast which holds in the Poema between the author's sinful younger self and the judgmental older self who looks back on 1913 from the viewpoint of 1940. To use the imagery of the epigraph from Don Giovanni, dawn brings sobriety after the night before and enables one to see more clearly than during the hours of darkness. Akhmatova's comment that in Kamennyi gost' 'Pushkin punishes himself, young, carefree and sinful as he was' (p. 108) is equally applicable to her stance in her own poem. One result of the identification of Don Juan with the author's 'I' is that we perceive Don Juan presented by him/herself and from the inside: we do not observe him from the outside as we do the character in Pushkin's play, or Byron's narrative poem, in which he is spoken of in the third person; we are thus made privy to the workings of his/her conscience.

If we return to the dramatis personae of the legend, we can perhaps call this older self-critical self the internal Commendatore, for it is the self which punishes the Don-Juanish impulses. As the author says, 'sebia kazniu'.>29> Punishment in the forms inflicted by twentieth-century history is willingly suffered, since the self has already acknowledged its justification and necessity, and has sentenced itself to purgative penance. Just as Akhmatova saw Kamennyi gost' as exposing the wounds of Pushkin's conscience (p. 104), her own poem is the salving of similar wounds. Finally, we should also bear in mind that the author of the Poema is one of those Poets who are described in it as the embodiment of innocence. In this sense the author's personality also embraces an internal Donna Anna: just as Donna Anna is a figure chosen 'by heaven' (in Hoffmann's phrase), Akhmatova likens the Poet to King David, chosen by God.>30> It is precisely because of the complexity of the authorial persona with its three aspects—Don Juan, Commendatore and Donna Anna—that the poem Akhmatova writes is both demonic and potentially a source of salvation.>31> And it is also because of the complexity of her persona that her double in the poem, the Petersburg actress, takes on the very assorted roles of the faun, Lady Confusion, and Columbine or Donna Anna.

The feminisation of the Don Juan image is of course one of the inversions which one would expect to find in a work pervaded by the notion of carnival. Commenting on Poema bez geroia as one of the manifestations of the carnival tradition, not only in respect of its imagery, V. V. Ivanov writes:

… it is impossible not to see in it that archetypal sense which Akhmatova herself attributed to these carnival symbols, when she emphasised in another of her poems that the impression of masquerade arises from the author's distancing in time […] The layering of various strata of carnival, which are directly connected with the atmosphere of the 1910s and arise from the point of view of the 'estranged' author distanced in time, makes the analysis of the role of the masks and of the 'chatter at the masquerade' particularly promising: behind the symbol being deciphered another mask may come to light which it will be possible to read only by contrasting the various time dimensions of the poem.>32>

That mask would seem to be Don Juan.

Poema bez geroia replays the Don Juan legend, but though the essence of the plot is retained, two of the central characters, Donna Anna and the Commendatore, are abandoned, substitutes of a nonhuman order being found for them. Of the original characters, only Don Juan remains, and he is translated into the feminine. But the characterisation of this Don Juan is very complex. He is neither the negative hero of most tellings of the myth, nor Hoffmann's exculpated positive hero. Not only is (s)he corrupted flesh and moral vacuity; (s)he is also moral principle and hence self-condemnation, and thereafter self-punishment too. The traditional characters of the Don Juan myth are internalised and, within one single character,>33> play out a drama in which the unthinking immorality of youth is severely condemned by maturity, which consciously accepts the retribution meted out to it, as a means of purgation and atonement. The author is thus a female Don Juan reformed.>34>

Notes

Poema bez geroia, Part 3
Canto I, stanza I. Byron's observations about regiments of heroes with feet of clay hymned by a duplicitous press apply neatly to Stalin's Soviet Union.
L. K. Chukovskaia records her as saying in 1955: 'I have read the original 40 times—it is a bad, even ugly piece […] Byron was out to shock his readers and deliberately made the piece sound unharmonious. Moreover there are disgusting bedroom scenes in abundance […] The only good thing Byron has in it is one lyric digression.' See Zapiski o Anne Akhmatovoi (Paris, YMCA-Press, 1976-80), Vol. II, pp. 61-2.
See my 'Theatre, theatricality and Akhmatova's Poema bez geroya', Essays in Poetics, Vol. XIII, 1988, No. 1, pp. 100-1.
V. N. Toporov, Akhmatova i Blok, (Berkeley, Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1981), p. 176.
'Kamennyi gost' Pushkina', in Anna Akhmatova, O Pushkine. Stat'i i zametki, compiled by E. G. Gershtein, (Leningrad, 1977), pp. 89-109 and 161-71.
See Toporov, pp. 36-40.
V. V. Ivanov, 'Struktura stikhotvoreniia Bloka "Shagi Komandora"', in Z. G. Mints (ed.), Tezisy I Vsesoiuznoi (III) konferentsii 'Tvorchestvo A. A. Bloka i russkaia kul'tura XX veka' (Tartu, 1975), p. 38.
B. Kats and R. Timenchik, Anna Akhmatova i muzyka. Issledovatel'skie ocherki (Leningrad, 1989), p. 199.
K. Rudnitskii (Rezhisser Meierkhol'd [Moscow, 1969], p. 196) notes the connection between this production of Kamennyi gost' and Meierkhol'd's Maskarad. Both conceive of life as a masquerade. It was possibly after the dress rehearsal of the latter that, Akhmatova says, the Poema first began 'to sound' within her (Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia, Moscow, 1986, Vol. II, p. 221).
Benois' Moscow production of 1915 saw the play as the struggle of the human soul with God and with other souls, which it conquers until at the last it is itself destroyed (see A. Gozenpud, Russkii opernyi teatr mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii 1905-1917, (Leningrad, 1975), p. 346.
Compare Akhmatova's description of Pushkin's Don Guan as combining coldness and cruelty with 'detskaia bespechnost' ('Kamennyi gost' Pushkina', p. 95).
See P. Bezsonov, Praskov'ia Ivanovna, grafinia Sheremet'eva. Eia narodnaia pesnia i rodnoe eia Kuskovo (Biograficheskii ocherk, s portretom) (Moscow, 1872), pp. 80-85.
F. Lopukhov, Shest'desiat let v balete (Moscow, 1966), p. 182. On the ballet in connection with Poema bez geroia, see my 'Akhmatova's Poema bez geroia: ballet and poem' in The Speech of Unknown Eyes: Akhmatova's Readers on her Poetry, edited by Wendy Rosslyn, (Nottingham, Astra Press, 1990), pp. 55-72.
See the monk's description of the hero: 'Razvratnym, bessovestnym, bezbozhnym Don Guanom', reinforced by Leporello's 'Bessovestnyi!' in Scene 1 of Pushkin's Kamennyi gost'.
N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, translated by Max Hayward, (New York, Atheneum, 1974), p. 437.
Anna Lisa Crone, 'Blok as Don Juan in Axmatova's Poema bez geroja', Russian Language Journal, XXXV, Nos. 121-2, 1981, pp. 145-62.
Quoted by Toporov, p. 20.
Compare the lines 'Gibel' gde-to zdes', ochevindo' and 'Ne poslednie l' blizki sroki', the latter identified by Toporov as a quotation from Hoffmann's Don Juan, where it is addressed to Donna Anna (p. 176).
On the autobiographical nature of Pushkin's Kamennyi gost' see also Henry Kucera, 'Puskin and Don Juan', in Morris Halle et al. (comp.), For Roman Jakobson (The Hague, Mouton, 1956), pp. 281-4.
For a discussion of Akhmatova's early poems in this light, see my The Prince, the Fool and the Nunnery: the Religious Theme in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova, (Amersham, Avebury, 1984).
Toporov, p. 37.
Quoted by Toporov, p. 175.
Stage directions to Chapter 2 of Part 1. Italics added.
See 'Nadpis' na poeme "Triptikh"', which refers to, and addresses, Poema bez geroia:
Spasi zh menia, kak ia tebia spasala,
I ne puskai v klokochushchuiu t'mu.
Byron also contemplated a substitute for hell: 'I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest. The Spanish tradition says Hell; but it is probably only an Allegory of the other state.' (Letter to his editor, quoted in Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 81.
On statues in Akhmatova's poetry see my paper 'Remodelling the statues at Tsarskoe Selo: Akhmatova's approach to the poetic tradition', read at the conference entitled 'A Sense of Place: Tsarskoe Selo and its Poets' held at Dartmouth College in October 1989 and to be published in the conference proceedings.
Don Juan, Canto 1, stanzas 212-13, 215. Isaiah Berlin (Personal Impressions [London, Hogarth Press, 1980], pp. 193-4) writes of his visit to Akhmatova in 1945: '… she asked me whether I would like to hear her poetry: but before doing this, she said that she wished to recite two cantos from Byron's Don Juan to me, for they were relevant to what would follow. Even if I had known the poem well, I could not have told which cantos she had chosen, for although she read English, her pronunciation of it made it impossible to understand more than a word or two. She closed her eyes and spoke the lines from memory, with intense emotion […] Then she spoke her own poems from Anno Domini, White Flock, From Six Books […] She then recited the (at that time) still unfinished Poem without a Hero … […] Then she read the Requiem '. It seems unlikely that Akhmatova recited two cantos—rather, two stanzas. If so, these may be the first two quoted here.
Compare Don Guan's 'Polno vam menia kaznit', / Khot' kazn' ia zasluzhil, byt' mozhet' (Kamennyi gost', Scene 4). Don Guan, though less self-critical, is prepared to admit his guilt, a sign of his gradual regeneration.
Pushkin's Don Guan, also a poet, hovers on the threshold of regeneration in this life before damnation overtakes him.
Goethe observed of Don Giovanni: 'Wie kann man sagen, Mozart habe seinen Don Juan komponiert! Komposition—als ob es ein Stück Kuchen oder Biskuit wäre, das man aus Eiern, Mehl and Zucker zusammenrührt!—Eine geistige Schöpfung ist es, das Einzelne wie das Ganze aus einem Geiste und Guss und von dem Hauche eines Lebens durchdrungen, wobei der Produzierende keineswegs versuchte und stückelte und nach Willkür verfuhr, sondern wobei der dämonische Geist seines Genies ihn in der Gewalt hatte, so dass er ausführen musste, was jener gebot.' (Quoted with minor corrections from Egon Wellesz, '"Don Giovanni" and the "dramma giocoso"', The Music Review, Vol. IV, 1943, p. 125). This could also be said of Poema bez geroia. See also T. V. Tsiv'ian, 'Two Hypostases of Poema bez geroia', in The Speech of Unknown Eyes: Akhmatova's Readers on her Poetry, pp. 113-20.
Viach. Vs. Ivanov, 'K semioticheskoi teorii karnavala kak inversii dvoichnykh protivopostavlenii', in Trudy po znakovym sistemam, VIII (Uchenye zapiski Tartu. gos. universiteta, vyp. 411), 1977, 63-4.
In her discussion of Kamennyi gost' Akhmatova writes: 'Pushkin's lyric richness allowed him to avoid the error which he noted in the dramas of Byron, who hands out "one of the constituent parts" of his personality to each of the characters, and thus fractures his creation into "a few shallow and insignificant people"' (p. 109). Akhmatova also avoids this error and, having divided the author's self into various doubles, invites the reader to gather the constituent parts together again to reconstitute the person of the author.
I am grateful to Anatolii Naiman for his observations on an earlier draft of this paper, read at the Akhmatova Centenary Conference in Turin in December 1989.