«...Terrible accursed buzzing». (Riddles Akhmatova one octave)

Abstract

The paper examins the unpublished (within her life) verse by Anna A. Akhmatova (1959). It is one of the late poet’s reflections on the ill-famed Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee Resolution (1946). This document contained pogrom-like criticism of Akhmatova’s and Zoschenko’s literary practice. It had not been denounced up to 1988. Thus, Akhmatova’s key symbol «anathema» and references «Libava (now Liepaja, former Libau)» and «Vladivostok» are commented in historical, social and literary contexts. The analysis proves that a visually small octet possesses immense intertextual and interbiographic links. Its associative field embraces topos from East Prussia and Litva in the European West to the Middle East and the Far East in Asia. As to its chronos, it involves the Middle Ages, with their Inquisition, then Bolshevism as a sort of religious institution, to World War I and the White Exodus (Outcoming, Emigration). Akhmatova had treated them as elements of the total Russian Catastrophie. To them she added the cultural tragedy, from both «the imperial granite» and «the heartless stupidity» of the repressive regime. As a contrast to this chronotopos of oblivion and death Akhmatova creates her own chronotopos, inhabited by the eternally alive artists and friends who win their victory not through violation, but through memory.