Anna Akhmatova: Scripts, Not Scriptures

Abstract

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10. The Diasporic Canon of Russian Poetry: The Case of the Paris Note

“…Akhmatova's 'passive resistance' (which maps onto what Aleksandr Zholkovskii characterises as her exercise of 'power through weakness', a strategy available as a result of her gender) proved less self-destructive than the active opposition of Mandel′shtam. 103 As Zholkovskii observes, it is 'precisely as a "survivor dissident" that she has been so representative of and, therefore, acceptable to the Soviet (now post-) intelligentsia '. 104 This view, he suggests elsewhere, conforms to a broader liberal approach to non-conformist classic authors that sees them either as innocent victims of the regime or penetrating critics of it (and sometimes both) who, despite being forced into certain compromises, did not espouse its ideology.…”

“…Negative reaction partly reflected hostility to the translations of Richard and Elizabeth McKane, which looked on a text-by-text basis more problematic than versions of the same poems as produced by the likes of Brown and Merwin who, for good or ill, had arguably created a single consistent style for Mandel′shtam. 103 Previously the proportion of late, difficult poems to familiar, earlier poems had remained relatively small in anthologies, whereas there was now a larger body of texts whose tone was hard to judge, whose moral resilience no longer looked absolute. The imperfect state of the texts, reflecting the absence of reliable Russian 100 Heaney's appraisal of Mandel′shtam's craft is taken up in the editorial of the PN Review, 63, September-October 1988, p. 1.…”