Poetry and resistance: Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam and the decades of Soviet rule

We will trace the evolution of Akhmatova’s style and persona from the amorous, religiously inflected and sensuous lyrics of her early celebrity in the Silver Age to the seerlike responsibility she took upon herself after the advent of Stalin, the siege of Leningrad and the period of exile in Tashkent. While she never abandoned the acmeist clarity, economy and classicism that were her hallmarks from the beginning, the epic constructions of the mature Akhmatova, especially ‘Poem Without a Hero’, are almost unlimited in their scale and ambition – the “Great Survivor” turning a mirror to the tide of history that eradicated almost the entire generation of her literary contemporaries, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam included. Mandelstam, too, started as an acmeist but by the 1920s was publishing poetry that revelled dangerously in the personal as opposed to following, like so many others, the dictates of the State. His autobiographical, pro-Jewish writings and narrative prose of the 1920s and the notorious ‘Stalin Epigram’ sent him to his death in Siberian exile: we will focus especially on the candid, fearless verse of this final period and assess how ‘his best poetry attests to the survival of art and consciousness … at a time and place when both seemed to have the flimsiest of chances to stay alive’ [Brody]. The emotional and sexual turbulence of Tsvetaeva’s short life (she hanged herself at forty eight) is reflected in a voluminous output characterised, above all, by extreme romantic ardour, recklessness and self-revelation but, as we will see, simultaneously attuned to the dire realities that surrounded her, not least during the immediate aftermath of the Revolution which gave rise to the twin cycles of the Moscow Diaries and the poems of ‘Moscow in the Plague Year’.