The host from the future is fascinating for its two sides, back and forth of the same interest. The first side – the place – is made up of four sets of poems by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), four “cycles” published in the USSR in the volume The race of time, in 1965, at a time when the regime was no longer ” carnivore (A word from Akhmatova), and where she had more or less returned to grace. Each poem is very precisely dated, from 1946 to 1963, the order of the collection not necessarily being chronological: they are poems chosen and organized in sets by Akhmatova, therefore with intention. This is what the long biographical introduction tries to unfold – and this is the second side of this book.
Anna Akhmatova, The host from the future. Poems. Trad. from Russian by Sophie Benech. Bilingual edition. Interferences, 80 p., 13 €
It is not a simple preface intended to situate the work and the author. The translator Sophie Benech clears the “paths of creation” there. Because these four cycles (Five, Rosehip blooms, Moscow shamrock and Around midnight) were inspired in Akhmatova by his meeting with a young attaché of the British Embassy, of Russian origin, Isaiah Berlin, stationed in Moscow.
While in Leningrad, this amateur and connoisseur of Russian literature seeks to meet Soviet writers. Introduced by a third party, he landed on November 15, 1945 in the now famous “House on the Fontanka”. A few days earlier – this is not without importance – Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilev, returned from deportation. He was arrested in 1938: from this terror for her was born his famous Requiem (1940), then of course consigned in its drawers, subsequently become the symbol of a terrorized people.
Akhmatova, she never heard of the existence of Isaiah Berlin, some twenty years her junior. November 15 and 17, 1945, and probably around January 6, 1946 (this meeting remained in Akhmatova’s poems as the night of Epiphany, the Day of Kings, also called by Russian orthodoxy “Theophany”), they will spend three sleepless nights together in the long nights of Leningrad. Lightning came from another world, in the loneliness and fear of Leningrad immediately after the war.
« What a dark potion
Served us that night in January?
And what an invisible conflagration we have
Make you lose your mind until dawn? »
They are immediately on one level with each other – the ” miracle of our meeting She writes. The very status of this conflagration, whatever, and Sophie Benech leaves this useless question to its uselessness. But there is no doubt that Akhmatova built a saving, preserving and above all creative love from these nights: “ You weren’t my Aeneas for very long … »
« This door that you opened / I don’t have the strength to close it “. Whether she likes it or not, the separation does its work, and the door closes slowly. Yet she will not cease to continue their nocturnal conversation, as a necessary and invisible inner guide. This will change her fate and that of her poetry, that’s how she understands it.
His poetry? From this date, all the rest of his work, including what has remained in an unfinished state, abounds in allusions to these ” nights clearer than day “. In 1964, in an unpublished fragment, she wrote: “ Who would believe that in the year sixty-four / I’m still drawing from the same bottom? “For twenty years, the theme of the meeting, of the soaring of souls, of separation” black and solid », Will become the expression of the beings who love each other in the Soviet night.
His destiny ? Six months later, in August 1946, she was ostracized from intellectual life, ridiculed, banned from publication. Her ex-husband, Pounin – remarried, but it is with him that she lives in Fontanka -, is arrested, and will not return. A black decade follows with the new arrest of Lev. For her, rightly or wrongly, and probably rightly (given the police paranoia at work in the USSR), her misfortunes stem from the fact that she broke a rule by receiving a foreigner, a diplomat in addition, and therefore a potential spy. . Sophie Benech details the facts, the very material of the four cycles she presents. We are at the heart of what a poet’s work is: it is ” oxygen in its native state », To quote Breton.
Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1922)
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Even beyond her fate and her work, Akhmatova eventually convinced herself that these forbidden encounters also changed the fate of the world and are at the origin of the Cold War. She will tell Lydia Tchoukovskaïa in one of their interviews (translated by Sophie Benech in 2019 and will even write it in the “Third dedication” of the Poem without hero completed in 1962, unclassifiable work that she has been working since 1940:
« I’m tired of being frozen with fear
I prefer to invoke the Chaconne by Bach,
She will enter followed by a man….
He will not become the husband dear to my heart,
But what will it do for both of us
The twentieth century will be turned upside down. »
The “Third dedication” is dated ” Kings Day 1956 “. The summer of 1956 was to give an equally unexpected result to the three sleepless nights. Isaiah Berlin is back on a private trip. In August, he learns of Akhmatova’s presence in Moscow and calls her on the phone to meet her. She refuses to receive it.
« … month of August, how could you send me
Similar message on this terrible anniversary? »
This poem, included in Rosehip blooms, is dated August 14, 1956. It is the anniversary date of the burial of Alexander Blok in 1921. It should also be remembered that Blok died on August 4, the very day after the arrest of Nikolai Goumilev, the 3 – Goumilev was shot on August 21 or 25. All her life Akhmatova linked the month of August with tragic events.
That she was afraid to start the tragic decade again (her son has just been released again) is likely. But that is the outer circumstance. To get closer to inner reality, Sophie Benech analyzes the facts, confronts what both of them said about this conversation, and here again puts us at the heart of the enigma of creation. This phone call, which Akhmatova will call a “ no meeting », Echoes in his work during the decade which remains to him to live, and takes the form of a mystique of separation. All Rosehip blooms is the expression.
« One could not imagine a more absolute separation,
[…] And no one in this world
Was never more apart than us » (1962)
A strange echo of the poems of Emily Dickinson, exactly a century earlier, who also made separation part of her poetic universe:
« We must therefore unite the absence –
You over there – Me – here –
Between us this half-open door
What are the Seas – and Prayer –
And this Blanc Secours –
The despair – » (1862)
It is also not impossible that Akhmatova read poems by Emily Dickinson, in the Russian anthology of American poetry published in Moscow in 1946 – her brother, who emigrated to the United States, could perhaps have procure works in English (the first complete edition of Dickinson’s poems in the United States dates from 1955).
Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova will meet for the last time in 1965, in Oxford. She will give him a magnificent little double-accord quatrain, with which the preface by Sophie Benech ends. Akhmatova is the fourth of the great poets of Soviet Russia, along with Boris Pasternak, Ossip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. It took longer to be heard in the West. In comparison to the flamboyant Marina Tsvetaeva, frontal and warrior, now well known to the French public, the reluctant Akhmatova, haughty and retractile (not erased so far), is perhaps less easy to publicize – The host from the future is a telling way to approach its enigmatic and sumptuous simplicity.
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