Poem without a Hero (A. Akhmatova)

The second issue of the almanac “Vozdushnye puti”, published in New York (1961).

“Poem without a Hero”. Cover from the Einaudi edition (1966).

Title:
Poėma bez geroia [Poem without a Hero]

Author: Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

Years of writing: December 26, 1940 – 1965

Year of first publication: 1960

Publisher: R. N. Grynberg / Vozdushnye puti

Place of edition: New York

Description:
Poėma bez geroia (Poem without a Hero) represents a highpoint of Akhmatovian poetry. The work is divided into three parts, in which pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and Soviet Leningrad alternate and in which the year 1913, just before the First World War, intersects with the present year, 1940, which anticipates the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The author began work on the poem on December 26^th, 1940, after she had finished composing the first nucleus of the Requiem cycle. By 1942 the triptych structure of the poem was already defined; it was perfected during the first year of the war and during the author’s evacuation to Tashkent. Akhmatova made further changes until 1965, also adding theatrical components, although she claimed that by 1962 she had completed her work on the poem (cf. Riccio 1996: 9). The rewrites, expansions, and refinements of the text, with prose captions, notes, dedications, and epigraphs reinforce the perception of a fragmentary complexity that also finds resonance in stylistic deviations, allusions, and omissions that make reading an act of interpretation (cf. Timenchik 1989: 5-9). Many commentators regard the poem as an ‘open’, ‘polyvalent’ work that is ‘in progress’ (cf. Tsiv’ian 1989: 123-29). Despite studies conducted over half a century, not all agree on the possibility of identifying a definitive, canonical version of the text (cf. Kraineva 2009; Riccio 1996: 14-15).
The publication of Poem without a Hero was complicated and postponed several times due to Soviet censorship and the self-censorship that Akhmatova imposed on herself for a long time. As in the case of the Requiem cycle, the poem circulated only in restricted circles; in her memoirs Lidiia Chukovskaia speaks of a ‘definitive’ version that was given to her by the author in 1953.
In the years 1945-1959 excerpts of the poem were published in journals and in several Soviet anthologies of poetry. Provisional handwritten and typewritten versions of the full text circulated clandestinely from the early 1960s (cf. Naiman 2008: 186-87).
Two of these found their way to publication in the first two issues of the almanac Vozdushnye puti, published in New York, in 1960 (5-42) and 1961 respectively (111-152), in which there also appeared a long afterword to Boris Filippov’s poem (cf. Akhmatova 1961: 167-179).
After she was awarded the Etna-Taormina Prize in December 1964 and an honorary degree from Oxford in May 1965, media interest in Anna Akhmatova grew and several editions and translations of Poem without a Hero were published.  A truncated version of the poem, with only the first part, Nineteen Thirteen, and part of the second chapter was published in the USSR, in the collection Beg vremeni (The Race of Time) in 1965 by Sovetskii pisatel’.
In February 1966, Carlo Riccio’s version of the poem was published in Italy by Einaudi, with the last updates dictated and approved by Anna Akhmatova in meetings with the translator, which took place between April and October 1965; this was the poem’s final revision, allowing us to consider the version of the work published by Einaudi to be definitive (cf. Akhmatova 1966: 21). Nevertheless, the version revised by Akhmatova together with the English translator Amanda Haight, with changes made only up to August 1965 is often taken to be the final version; the subsequent English translation appeared in 1967, in n. 45 of “The Slavonic and East European Review” (474-496).
A different edition of the poem appeared in volume form in 1968, printed in Munich, but edited in Washington by Inter-language Literary Associates. This version of the poem published by Struve and Filippov is a hybrid of Haight’s and Riccio’s editions. Akhmatova called the first volume of this collection, which came out in 1965, an ‘ugliness’, mainly because of how badly Gleb Struve and Boris Fillipov had distributed the texts. The difficulties in determining a canonical text were partly resolved with the publication in the Soviet Union of the almost complete poem (a few verses remained censored), first in 1974, in Izbrannoe (Selected Works), and then in 1976, edited by V.M. Zhirmunskii, in the collection of Akhmatova’s works Stikhotvoreniia i poėmy (Verses and poems), published for the prestigious series Biblioteka poėta.

Marco Sabbatini
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Cecilia Martino

Bibliography

• Akhmatova A., Poėma bez geroia (1965), transl. it. Poema senza eroe e altre poesie, edited by C. Riccio, Einaudi, Torino 1966.
• Akhmatova A., Poėma bez geroia, in Vozdushnye puti, New York, 2 (1961): 111-152, <https://vtoraya-literatura.com/pdf/vozdushnye_puti_2_1961_text.pdf>, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Kraineva N. (ed.), “Ja ne takoi tebia kogda-to znala…”: Anna Akhmatova. Poėma bez geroia. Proza o Poėme. Nabroski baletnogo libretto. Materialy k tvorcheskoi istorii, Izd. Dom “Mir”, Sankt-Peterburg 2009.
• Naiman A., Rasskazy o Anne Akhmatovoi, Zebra-E, Moskva 2008.
• Riccio C., Materiali per una edizione critica di Poėma bez geroja di Anna Achmatova, Giardini, Macerata-Pisa 1996.
• Timenchik R., Zametki o “Poėme bez geroia”, in A. Akhmatova, Poėma bez geroia, edited by R. Timenchik, V. Morderer, Izd.vo MPI, Moskva 1989: 3-25.
• Tsiv’ian T., Poėma bez geroia: Eshche raz o mnogovariantnosti, in S. Dediulin, G. Superfin (eds.), Akhmatovskii sbornik, 1, Institut Slavjanovedeniia, Paris 1989: 123-29.