Akhmatova · Music Outline Act 1 (approximately 55 minutes) 1. Dialogue and chorus 14. Arietta:...

Don Mager UPO 2441 Johnson C. Smith University Charlotte, North Carolina 28216 704-378-1295 [email protected]

Akhmatova

(An Opera in Three Acts and an Epilogue)

Act 1: The Stray Dog The Stray Dog Cabaret, Petersburg, 1913

Act 2: Requiem (1923-1941) Akhmatova’s apartment, Leningrad

Various residences of the Mandelstams (Moscow, Voronezh) Stalin’s office in the Kremlin The Kresty Prison, Leningrad

Act 3: Poem Without A Hero (1941 and 1946)

Akhmatova’s apartment, Leningrad Meeting of the Leningrad Branch of The Union of Soviet Writers, 4 September 1946

Stalin’s office in the Kremlin

Epilogue: March 5, 1953 Akhmatova’s apartment, Leningrad

Music Outline Act 1 (approximately 55 minutes)

1. Dialogue and chorus 14. Arietta: Akhmatova 2. Parody-Waltz: Mayakovsky 15. Dialogue: Akhmatova and 3. Piano Gavotte Gumilyov 4. Gavotte Variation 16. Duiet: Akhmatova and 5. Dialogue and chorus Mandelstamm 6. Aria: Mayakovsky 17. Sprechstimme Solo: 7. Dialogue and chorus Mandelstam 8. Aria: Akhmatova 9. Dialogue and chorus 10. Aria: Gippius 11. Dialogue and chorus 12. Salome’s dance (short opening section only) 13. Akhmatova and Gumilyov

Don Mager Akhmatova (opera version)

Last edited 2/4/04 4:20 PM of 83

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Act 2 (approximately 50 minutes) 1. Dialogue and arrest: Mandelstams, Akhmatova, Lev Gumilyov with women’s

chorus 2. Phone monologue: Stalin 3. Phone dialogue: Nadezdha and Akhmatova with women’s chorus 4. Arietta: Akhmatova 5. Phone monologue: Stalin with women’s chorus 6. The Letter Recitative and Duet: Nadezdha and Akhmatova with women’s chorus 7. Dialogue, recitative and brief duet: Mandelstams with women’s chorus 8. Dialogue with women’s chorus 9. Aria: Mandelstam 10. Dialogue, recitative: Mandelstams with women’s chorus 11. Arietta: Irina 12. Dialogue: Akhmatova and women in the chorus chorus, with Stalin 13. Dialogue: Akhmatova and Irina 14. Aria: Akhmatova 15. Monologue: Stalin 16. Dialogue: Stalin and Svetlana 17. Radio Monologue: Akhmatova

Act 3 (approximately 30 minutes) Scene 1

1. Dialogue: Akhmatova, Irina, Lydia 2. Poem Aria: Lydia 3. Dialogue: Akhmatova, Irina, Lydia 4. Guilt Monologue: Akhmatova 5. Dance Sequence: Harlequinade group with Akhmatova 6. Chaconne Aria: Akhmatova

Scene 2 (no intermission between scenes) 7. Monologue: Time Keeper 8. Aria: Zhdanov 9. Chaconne reprise: Akhmatova

Epilogue (no intermission between Act 3 and Epilogue)(approximately 6 minutes)

1. Dialogue: Akhmatova, Irina, Lydia 2. Joke Monologue: Akhmatova

Casting and Voice Specifications

Akhmatova is designed for a large cast of mainly student singers. A few roles, however, are large and demand extensive operatic experience. Singer specifications are as follows, but a single singer may double minor roles. Specifications in order of size of part. Possible doublings.



Major roles: Female roles: Anna Andreevna Akhmatova—the central Anna Adreevna Akhmatova (sop)

role with considerable dialogue, several Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (sop) arias and an elaborate duet. She must Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (alto), doubles also age from early 20s to mid-50s. with Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya

Nadezhda Yakovlevna (Nadya) Mandelstam Irina Punina (alto) (Act 2)—dialogue with a major Svetlana Stalina (sop) duet scene Waitress (alto)

Osip Emielevich Mandelstam (Acts 1 and 14 wives and mothers at the Kresty Prison— 2)—dialogue scenes with two arias some of these can be doubled

Joseph Stalin, Secretary General of the Communist Party (Act 2)—dialogue Male roles:

scenes with one solo scena. Joseph Stalin (bass), doubles with Dmitry Roles with one aria: Sergeevich Merzhkovsky Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (ten.), doubles with Andrey

Act 1 and pantomime role in Zhdanov Act 3)—dialogue with one aria. The Time-Keeper (bass)

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (Act 1 and Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov (bar.), pantomime role in Act 3)—dialogue doubles with Officer of the Cheka with one aria. number one

Andrey Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Mikhail Aleseevich Kuzmin (ten), doubles Committee of the Communist Party, with Officer at the Kresty Prison age fifty, a balding, burly well- Osip Emielevich Mandelstamm (ten) dressed official (Act 3)—no Waiter (bar), doubles with Lev dialogue, one aria Nikolaevich Gumilyov) Artur Lourié (possibly a speaking role) Sergey Prokofiev (possibly a speaking role)

Dialogue roles, no arias: Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov (Act 1) Mikhail Aleseevich Kuzmin (Act 1 and pantomime in Act 3)—dialogue with small dance

sequence Waiter (Act 1 and pantomime in Act 3) Waiteress (Act 1 and pantomime in Act 3) Time Keeper, a male who intones dates of separate scenes (Act 2 and Act 3)—short solos. Irina Punina, daughter of Anna Yevgenyevna and Nikolay Punin, and a sort of surrogate

daughter to Akhmatova (Act 2, Act 3 and Epilogue)—several dialogue scenes Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya, Akhmatova’s friend and confidante, age 30 (Act 3 and

Epilogue) Minor dialogue roles: Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (Act 1 and pantomime in Act 3)



Sergey Aleksandrovish Esenin (Act 1, and pantomine in Act 3) Lev Nikolaevich (Lyova) Gumilyov, Akhmatova’s son (Act 2) Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad (Act 2) 16 female chorus members as wives and mothers outside the Kresty Prison, Leningrad (Act 2)—

small separate parts. Officer of The Cheka number one (Act 2) Svetlana Stalina, Stalin’s daughter—in her late teens, almost a young woman (Act 2). Special roles: Olga Afanasevna Glebova-Sudeykina (Acts 1 and 3)—small singing roles with two dance

sequences. Vsevolod Knyazev (Act 1 and Act 3)—non-singing with major dance sequence Nikolay Klyuev (Act 1 and Act 3)—non-singing Artur Sergeevich Lourié (possibley a speaking role)(Act 1 and pantomime in Act 3)—minor

singing role with piano performance. Sergey Prokofiev (possibley a speaking role) (Act 1 and pantomime in Act 3) )—minor singing

role with piano performance. Richard Strauss (Act 1)—non-singing role with major piano performance Officer of The Cheka number two (Act 2)—non-singing role Officer of The Cheka number three (Act 2) )—non-singing role Stalin’s Personal Secretary (non-singing role) 3 Soviet Generals (Act 2)(if needed, one may be sufficient)—non-singing roles A nameless young man dressed as Don Giovanni (Act 3)—non-singing pantomime role Two coat-check attendants at the Stray Dog—non-singing roles The opera is performed with no sets and multi-purpose props. Chairs, small tables, an upright piano, a broken couch and small bed, etc. are stored at the back of the stage. Chorus members carry them on and off as needed, using musical interludes to do so. Costumes, however, should be designed with some degree of attention. The first scene, in particular, should exuberantly reflect period styles along with a few outlandish eccentricities. In later scenes, costumes become increasingly drabber, worn, much less stylish; the harlequinade and dance sequence in Act 3 can use cheap Halloween or old theater costumes; Soviet officials, however, should wear the clean well-fitting, crisply starched uniforms of the period.



ACT 1

The Stray Dog Cabaret, Petersburg, Russia, January 1913

Persons in Act One:

Anna Andreevna Akhmatovai (age 24 in act 1) Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov (Kolya) (age 27 in act 1) Olga Afanasevna Glebova-Sudeykina (age 28 in act 1) Osip Emielevich Mandelstam (age 22 in act 1) Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (age 20 in act 1) Mikhail Aleseevich Kuzmin (age 38 in act 1) Vsevolod Knyazevii (age in his 20s in act 1) Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippiusiii (age 44 in act 1) Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (age 48 in act 1) Sergey Aleksandrovich Esenin (age 18 in act 1) Nikolay Klyueviv (age 26 in act 1) Artur Sergeevich Lourié (age 24 in act 1) Sergey Prokofiev v (age 22 in act 1) Richard Strauss (a non-singing role) (age 49 in act 1) Waiter Waitress The Stray Dogvi is a very popular cabaret where artists and the intelligentsia gather, an avant-garde center. It is in a cellar, made up of a small vestabule to the left and the cabare proper to the right, with outdoor steps leading down into the vestibule. The stage is split into two adjacent rooms. To the left, The Stray Dog cabaret is by far the large of the two. To the right is a cramped dimly lit vestibule with a coat-check counter and rack. Patrons of The Stray Dog arrive intermittently, sometimes in pairs, removing hats, coats and in



some cases galoshes. Attendants behind the counter hang them on the rack. Celebrities are greeted with Maykovsky’s drum and mock-formal announcement. The attendants stay on duty throughout the entire act even when a spot does not light the vestibule. Well-known literary figures and composers are there. Richard Straussvii is visiting from Germany and is quite the celebrity. Olga Sudeykinaviii (Anna's close friend and the most popular cabaret performer of the day) is the performer for the night. Before the lights come up on the interior of The Stray Dog, a very loud single bang on the Turkish drum is heard, another silent pause, light bursts on the scene, then ragtime music. A lone couple is frozen in dance postures then breaks into dance with the music on a small dance floor surrounded by small tables and chairs. Near the dance floor is a small upright piano; the dance music, however, comes from victrola recordings, or perhaps an onstage band. A pair of waiters wipes tables and gossips back and forth. Guests to The Stray Dog has delayed in a vestibule offstage to check coats and remove galoshes, so they enter intermittently or in small groups. Mayakovsky the great poet stands near the door with his famous Turkish drum. Burly like a boxer he wears an outlandish yellow and black striped tunic with silk top hat. As well known persons enter, he bangs the drum and drunkenly announces them. Others come in singly or in small groups interspersed between the celebrities who receive Mayakovsky’s flamboyant announcements. Akhmatova arrives in the vestibule with her friends Kuzmin and Knyazev. They wear stylish overcoats and fur hats, which they remove and give to the coat check attendant. Waitress: (next to the dance floor inside the cabaret proper,

she and the Waiter are liften chairs off tables, wiping the tables and setting up.)

I saw a bit of the old gal’s rehearsal. Waiter:

I heard a striptease. Waitress:

Sudeykina stripping? Don’t you just wish! Waiter:

Well what? Maykovsky: (bangs the drum)



Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius1, with husband in tow. The last of the Symbolists.ix

(She enters with her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Her copper red hair falls down across her slender shoulders, and she has a lorgnette on a chain, wears a black cross on her chest and holds a long elegant cigarette.)x

Waitress:

It’s this German fellow who’s done the music. Something about John the Baptist from the Bible. A shocker all over Europe.

Waiter:

One of her Bible plays? Just as Akhmatova, Kuzmin and Kanyazev are about to enter the cabaret, Gumilyov (her first husband) bursts into the vestibule and stops her. Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: (With gallantry and flourish. He presents himself with an

unflinching “aloof and magisterial pose” acquired with great effort and much practice.xi)

Anna, behold. I meet you in Petersburg as you bid. Mother says you long for the great city. I comply.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: In the dark nights I have waited, have watched.

In the gray dawns I have watched and I have waited. But this is not the place to talk. Here I have nothing to say to you.

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: (Throughout her words, he interjects from time to time the words:)

Unkind. Unfair.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (Regally)

When you search ancient cities, sir, is fairness you’re your archeologists uncover? Do not place such gifts in my hands. I cannot hold what wind scatters.



1 The Russian letter “X” is transliterated into English as “G” or “H.” It is the “chi” sound of Greek, similar to the “x” in Mexico as pronounced in Spanich or a softer version of the gutteral “ch” in German.

(They continue in restrained but urgent pantomime dialogue.)

Waiter:

But I heard she’s dancing. Waitress:

She is. Salome’s dance.

Waiter:

Who’s Salome?

Waitress:

Place is filling up.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky: (bangs the drum and announces)

Mikhail Aleseevich Kuzmin and company, representing Acmeism.xii

After watching the encounter between Akhmatova and Gumilyov, undecided whether to wait for her, or go in, upon Maykovsky announcement, Kuzmin with his lover Vsevolod Knyazevxiii enters the cabaret. There is no ambiguity about their relationship. Kuzmin is small and hyperactive. He is dressed as a dandy with Oscar Wilde’s green carnation in his jacket buttonhole. Knyazev wears his army cadet uniform.)xiv ANNA ANDREEVNA AKHMATOVA: (She thrusts divorce papers at Gumilyov.)

For your hands, these.

(He attempts to force the papers back into her hands.)

You married me. I complied. Now I divorce you. You too will comply.

(Speechless, they stare at one another.)

NIKOLAY NIKOLAEVICH GUMILYOV: (Struggles for words, then in the manner of a solemn address:)

I could speak like Thorvald in Ibsen’s play, but I do not require you to conform.

(They continue in restrained but urgent pantomime



dialogue. Throughout their dialogue, both sung and pantomime, patrons arrive, check their coats and enter the cabaret.)

Mayakovsky: (bangs on the drum)

Sergey Aleksandrovich Esenin and Nikolay Klyuev, our Peasant Poetsxv for the night.

(Esenin and Klyuev enter in full peasant regalia: tarred Morocco or box calf boots, embroidered Russian shirts reaching to their knees, silk cords with tassels for belts, and peasant caps.xvi They are both robust large athletic men, Klyuev is stockier with Eskimo or Mongolian features, Esenin is stunningly handsome, tall and blond.)xvii

Mayakovsky: (bangs on the drum)

Artur Sergeevich Lourié. Musical wizard.

(Like Kuzmin, Lourié is a small man, dandyish in dress, with round wire-rimmed glasses.)xviii

NIKOLAY NIKOLAEVICH GUMILYOV: (pleading with uncharacteristic desperation)

Oh Annushka, are we not comrades in art? All I ask is that we aid each other’s muse.

ANNA ANDREEVNA AKHMATOVA:

Muse! How amusing! And what do you know of my muse? You only search my poems for allusions to yourself.

NIKOLAY NIKOLAEVICH GUMILYOV:

When the reader betrays the poet, is the poet less true?

ANNA ANDREEVNA AKHMATOVA: (She turns in haughty righteousness.)

Take care of those papers. They betray no one. With total composure, she enters the cabaret alone while Gumilyov more upset at himself than at her hurries away. Mayakovsky: (Seeing Akhmatova come in; mock consternation.)



Another Acmeist! May the gods of ancient Egypt spare us this plague.

(he bangs, then announces) Anna Akhmatova.

(to her directly)

But my dear, where is your husband, that dogmatist Gumilyov? (She is dressed in a simple mauve dress :

that reaches to her ankles, a large cameo : (Throughout this broach at her belt, straight black hair to : dialogue, chorus her shoulders with bangs, and a purple : members dancing shawl. She is stunning and people turn, : and those at tables, for a moment even dancers pause.)xix : rhythmically

: whisper in awe.) : Waiter: : Akhmatova! :

Who’s she? : Akhmatova! :

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: : Tonight I arrive in my own voice only. : Akhmatova!

: : Akhmatova! Mayakovsky: (loud and with mocking consternation) :

: Tonight she arrives in her own voice : Akhmatova!

only. : : Akhmatova! Waitress: : :

He doesn’t like her, does he? : : Akhmatova! Waiter: : :

We’re in for a long night. : : Akhmatova! Waitress: : :

Just past Epiphany too, so don’t : look for big tippers. : Akhmatova!



Mayakovsky: (bangs the drum)

Sergey Prokofiev. Pianist extraordinaire and guest.

(Prokofiev enters with Richard Strauss.) Maestro, who is your guest? Can I call out his name?

Prokofiev:

This is a German composer, Herr Richard Strauss. He will play later, I believe.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (joins Kuzmin and Knyazev at their table) Mayakovsky: (three loud bangs)

Parody-Waltz

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, here we have Herr Strauss to play us waltzes—what a hero! Umm-pah-pahh, umm-pah-pahh. How charming and quaint, sir, but I had thought that you died over a decade ago with that senile old tyrant, Emperor Franz Josef. And to look so young! ! Umm-pah-pahh, umm-pah-pahh. Hear the Hero Herr Strauss, the waltz king, is here.

(The crowd loves this sarcastic humor and stamps and laughs with delight. Prokoviev and Strauss sit at the table nearest the small piano whose back faces the dance floor.)

Mayakovsky: (bangs the drum)

Another of these bloody Acmeists. When the revolution comes it will wipe them from the face of the future.

(announces) Osip Emielevich Mandelstam.

(Mandelstam enters and sits at a table by himself. He rarely speaks. A single light on him throughout the scene should emphasize his isolation at a table alone. He is small, nervous, shy, but later in his monologues he displays confidence and self-assurance.)xx



Sudeykina: (While the last announcement is taking place, she has entered from

the back and stands in the center of the dance floor. The ragtime stops, dancers take seats or stand along the outer fringes. Sudeykina is dressed in the exotic veils of Salome for her performance later in the evening.)

The Crowd chants while Maykovsky beats the drum: Sudeykina! Sudeykina! Sudeykina! Sudeykina! Sudeykina! Sudeykina:

Let us begin tonight’s entertainment, mein Herren und Frauen, with a recitation by Sergey Esenin.

The Crowd applauds.

Esenin: (stands up) Merezhkovsky: (leaps to his feet, interrupting with haughty dignity)

I protest. These peasant superstitions constrain the nation from redemption.

Esenin: (shouts back)

Unadulterated bourgeois snobbery, pig. Russia’s peasants are the nation’s salvation.

(Klyuev leaps up pugilistically. Combative the too step towards Mereshkovsky, while Gippius still in her seat holds back by tugging at his jacket.)

Sudeykina: (Stepping between the, with good humor and grace:)

I suspect our salvation, if it comes at all, will come though music. Are we not a musical people?

Lourié: (possibly a speaking role)(jumps up)

A toast to Russian music! The crowd: (lifts glasses in a toast. Esenin, Klyuev and Mereshkovsky

settle back in ther seats) Music! Music! Music!



Lourié: (sits)

Sudeykina:

I call now Sergey Prokofiev to give us something new.

(He steps to the piano, one hand on the top, and graciously bows to Sudeykina.)

Prokofiev: (possibly a speaking role)

Honored Mistress of Ceremonies, I beg your indulgence. I give you something old—not something new.

(turns to the crowd)

I believe some of you were in attendance a few weeks ago when Master Lourié improvised extempore on a Gavotte by Gluck.

(Lourié stands at his table and bows.)

Tonight, I have my own Gavotte.xxi

Piano Gavotte

(He plays the Gavotte. When he finishes, he bows to the crowd who enthusiastically applauds.)

Lourié: (rushes forward, grabs Prokofiev’s hand, slaps his back:)xxii

Excellent, Maestro! Do I have your permission to “improvise extempore” on your little Gavotte? Gavotte Variation

(He gestures sweepingly to the keyboard, where Lourié takes his seat Lourié plays Prokovief’s Gavotte backwards while maintaining the distinct gavotte rhythm and phrasing.)

Lourié: (When he finishes, he bows toward Prokofiev with

sweeping bravura.)

Backward, sir!



The crowd stands in wild applause.

Lourié: (takes several bows.)

Sudeykina: (steps onto the dance floor) Attention! Attention! And that, my friends, is the one and only Artur Lourié! Now Vladimir Mayakovsky—from Moscow!—will read a poem.

The crowd settles back into its seats expectantly.

Aria

Mayakovsky: (steps to the dance floor. Without acknowledging the crowd, he aggressively chants:)xxiii

The clown of tomorrow straddles the gargantuan smokestack of a vast train he rides through the burned out past and smashes a billion china cups

the clown of tomorrow has tricks up his sleeve he calls the future into being he slaughters the children of earth the future is hungry to consume us best I should simply let a bullet mark the period of my sentence

bang bang bangxxiv

Esenin: (jumps up and stamps vulgarly shouting)

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

Kuzmin: (shouts at Esenin from across the room) Bunk and toad turds!



Esenin: Prissy piss spigot! Russia’s peasants . . .

Kuzmin: . . . BASTARDS ALL! . . .

Esenin: . . . peasants have risen up to march into history. Holy Russia’s purest soul!

Kuzmin: Boot sole! As for Mayakovsky’s tirade, I hereby award your poem. Sir,

(bowing across the room to Mayakovsky)

the grand fart prize of the night.

(He scrambles to the table, turns his back toward Mayakovsky, bends forward, and the tuba in the orchestra lets go a grand fart sound.)

(Much hilarity in the crowd.)

Mayakovsky:

Go rot!

Gippius: (to Mayakovsky) As for me, I should much prefer the ship of eternity to the ship of modernity.

Merezhkovsky: That’s right, my dearest, and so indeed should I! Mandelstam: (stands up quietly but speaks with an assurance that catches

the attention of all. The light on him is raised so he is even more isolated and solitary.)



But you fail to understand that the ship of modernity is the ship of eternity.xxv

The Crowd: (taken aback and hushed, the crowd takes a moment fully

to register the oddity of this rare public pronouncement by Mandelstam.)

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (gestures grandly toward Mandelstam, who bows

graciously as she says:) The man knows well whereof he speaks.

(Turns toward Sudeykina in an abrupt change of mood.)

That should be my cue to step forward, I believe. Sudeykina:

Indeed, darling. How lovely you look tonight.

(She embraces her good friend. They kiss on each cheek and then she turns to the crowd:)

I give you Anna Akhmatova!

Aria

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (Standing in the center of the dance floor, she recites her poem with subtle sarcasm.)xxvi

We are all tramps and floozies here,

Together how unhappy we are! On the wall, flowers and birds Continue to pine for clouds. The pipe you puff is black, Above you, an odd drift of smoke. I slipped on a tight skirt, It shows me off just right. The windows are sealed. That sound? Frost? Storm coming on? Like unblinking cat eyes, Peering out are your eyes. O my anxious heart, Is it death or time I wait?2



2 A foreshadowing of the “waiting” signature motif.

(Gesturing towards Sudeykina) But she who dances now will Not fail to be in hell. xxvii

The Crowd: (Baffled by her poem, the audience is not certain whether

she is being cleverly mocking or ominously serious; but out of deep regard for her, gradually they start to applaud one by one, until they build to an enthusiastic ovation.)

Merezhkovsky: But what’s the point? I don’t get it.

(to his wife)

Do you, my dear

Kuzmin: Irrelevant.

Merezhkovsky: What does it mean? (broadly to the audience) Tell us, if you’re so smart.

Kuzmin: (pompously to the entire crowd in the manner of a lecture:)

The acme of Acmeism is to render the truth of an experience, and the acme of an experience, or of an emotion, is the subtle gestures between words. When you hear a poem of Akhmatova, do not seek a sign. Seek a sigh.

Mayakovsky: (solemnly, without irony:)

Rest assured, sir, when I fall down in love, Akhmatova’s poems will be upon my lips. They sear my soul.xxviii

(He walks over to Akhmatova (still on the dance floor) and stoops deeply, taking her fingers and lifting her hand to kiss them.)

These fingers, oh these fingers, my God!xxix

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of 83

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (frowns and turns away as if insulted or mocked; he stands awkwardly alone, humiliated.)

Prokofiev: I’m with you Mayakovsky. She’s incomparable. One day, if

she permits, I shall put music to a little set of her poems—and they will be quite sensational, I assure you.

Gippius: (rises from her table, rests her hand on her husband’s cheek, lights the scented cigarette in its long ivory cigarette holder, and while Mayakovsky sulks back to his drum, she pulls her fur stole around he shoulder, steps to the dance floor and scrutinizes the audience, one table at a time through her lorgnette. After this action brings the room to silence, she says:)

May Archangel Michael slay our devils. May our Revolution bring freedom—peasant and landowner, tiger and lamb together in peace!

A toast!

(she brandishes her cigarette holder)

To the new Russia!

The crowd:

To the new Russia! To the new Russia! Sudeykina:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the incomparable Zinaida Gippius.

Aria Gippius:

And now I have for you a poem—entitled, “The Gate.”xxx

The Gate

Out of the terrible terror of my soul’s Error, I’ve made the long descent. Dark closes in on me and the whole Slab sits—except a thin crescent.



At once unannounced, before me a gate Rears up like a forest of black claws And beyond its silence the paradise waits— Silent beneath its stern silent laws. A sightless sky presses its sepulchral Slab while my wax tears jell in the cold. Darknesses darker than darkness fall And the earth retches up its mold With sloughs, with leeches, with slugs. They cling inside the breathless air And writhe in its fathomless dregs. Silence, stillness, stone – everywhere! Everywhere immeasurable time’s elapse! Even then I hear one sound yet. Not sob. Not whimper. Not rattle. Not breath’s last rasp.

In its cage my heart, O, still, my Lord, throbs!

Sudeykina: (steps forward and embraces Gippius:)

Do we not have poets in Russia! The Crowd applauds. Sudeykina:

I now ask your kind indulgence. Herr Strauss will you assist me.

The Crowd chants:

Sudeykina! Sudeykina! Sudeykina!

(Waiters wipe the melted snow from the floor with their towels, as Strauss takes the piano.)

Sudeykina: (raises her hands for attention:)

Friends, this is Richard Strauss from Germany. The dance that I will now perform comes from his opera Salome. Maestro, shall we?

Strauss plays a piano version of the Dance of the Seven Vails as Sudeykina performs only the first section of the dance to a rapt audience.



While Sudeykina dances and Strauss plays, the crowd at The Stray Dog freezes in tableau. As she removes the first veil, she seductively dances over to Akhmatova, Kuzmin and Knyazev’s table and wraps the vail over Knyazev’s head; he is mesmerized. Kuzmin jumps up in a jealous huff and rushes out, knocking a chair onto the dance floor as he exits. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (stands up, isolated by a spot light, speaking more to herself

than anyone else)

What is going on here? Some things are not fit for public display. Someone will pay dearly for this night.

(as Sudeykina continues to dance, Akhmatova unpretentiously but with dignity, exits to the vestibule to claim her coat.)

The music becomes distorted; Sudeykina continues to dance while lights dim. Kuzmin has rushed outdoors without his coat. The music “morphs” from the Dance of the Seven Vails to Ragtime with a tape-over of distant party sounds (voices, laughter, glasses clinking, etc.). Gumilyov is waiting in a corner. Unaware, Akhmatova passes the shadow where Gumilyov stands. He steps behind her and grabs her arm. Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov:

And have you again been the astonishment of the night?

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova:

Nikolay Nikolaevich, you startled me!

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov:

Have you made tonight “an occasion”?


Whatever “occasion” was displayed was made by Kuzmin, not me!


I have come for you.


My mind has not changed.




Not to the point.


Do not be exasperating. We are not in a Dostoyvsky novel.


I have telegraphed mother . . .

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: So, already she knows?

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: And she has telegraphed back . . .

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: Such a busy man!

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: She will not have it.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: She? She? Did I ask her permission?


You know mother. Divorce—she’ll not stomach it!

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: I am divorcing you. Not her!


She will take Lev in her custody.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: He is only a baby, not much past a year. How dare she take my child?




You leave him with her for days at a time. She is more mother than you are.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: And you leave me with her for months at a time when you rush off to Africa.

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: You will have the privilege of visits, and at Christmas and on the boy’s name day, we will to take our places at the table.


To whom should I turn? Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov:

She grants you your freedom without restriction.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: She grants?

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: And so do I. You have your divorce, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, as completely as if it were by law.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: As if . . .?

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: But if you persist in your willfulness to carry this matter through the courts, she will make sure that you never see the child again!!xxxi

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: Holy Mother of Mothers!

Mandelstam: (During Gumilyov’s next lines, Mandelstam stands in the door between vestibule and cabaret. He hears Gumilyov’s



words and realizes he should not intrude and steps back into a shadow. Neither Gumilyov nor Akhmatova is aware of his presence.)


I bid you no good-bye. This child is our son. I am the father. You are the mother. So it shall be.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (turns away from him, face toward the audience. She shows no emotion, she refuses to cry. She notices Mandelstam in.)

(with her back to Gumilyov)

Arietta I concede nothing, sir. My life begins again this hour. It will begin again many times, sir, for I will live a very long time. I will witness much. Much I will speak And much I will leave unspoken. This night is but a foretaste of sorrows that will gall my tongue and sear my throat.

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: (He comes behind her, and tries to take her elbow. She

pulls away.) Where will you go?

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: It is not your affair.

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: I am your husband. Let me help.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: Name only.

(she points)



But see, Mandelstam is over there. He will help me to a cab.


And will you be staying with him now? Is this how the matter falls?

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: When I find a place to stay, if I find a place to stay, you will be informed. If I do not, I will not be the first homeless woman in Petersburg. Good night.

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: (again he reaches for her arm)

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (with surprising force.) Good night!

Nikolay Nikolaevich Gumilyov: (senses that matters are to an end, and reluctantly goes outside.)

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (ignores Mandelstam, as if reflecting to herself:)

I give you my curse. Not with words but with breath. The candle is snuffed. I will not cross your threshold again.xxxii

Mandelstam observes Anna's stoic stance. She shows no emotion.xxxiii He comes forward to her as if to offer a comforting embrace; her look tells him not to, and without words, she turns and starts to go outside, her back towards him. He looks helplessly after, then turns in futility and starts to go back into the cabaret. After a moment, she looks back at his turned figure.

Akhmatova-Mandelstam Duet Anna Andreevna Akhmatova:

He has rapped at the icy window of my soul and I do not open. Meanwhile Mayakovsky declares the future’s dawn.

What does he know about dawn? Has he walked along the Neva alone? Has he looked into winter grayness?



Has he learned how to wait?3 Have I?

Mandelstam: (Punctuating her words, Mandelstam mutters over and

over.) Inconsolable. Inconsolable. Inconsolable.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova: (When she finishes, she slowly leaves, face lifted proudly,

but feet dragging. As he begins his monologue, she mutters several times punctuating his monologue until she is offstage.)

Inconsolable. Inconsolable. Inconsolable.

Mandelstam: (he turns again just in time to see her vanish up the stairs.)

How does one reach to a soul in a purple shawl wrapping herself as if it were armor. Akhmatova. A woman walks into Petersburg’s dark cold. Akhmatova. A poet rises out of the snow. Akhmatova.xxxiv

(As Mandelstam continues, he transforms into an assertive, strong style of entranced delivery, head thrown back, eyes closed. As the poem progresses, he moves to the stage apron as if delivering a recitation where the audience has become his audience. A distinct music should accompany this recitation, perhaps a single double bass with an entranced Sprechstimme.)xxxv

Sprechstimme Solo

But what connects us to the world is such nonsense—a note slipped under the door, a book found on the Nevsky Prospekt, a woman with her shawl slung across her lean shoulder, a glance. Voices sing on a cranked Victrola, the crackling is comical, and a dancer at a caberet, a chair knocked down in haste,



3 A foreshadowing of the “waiting” signature motif.

and no one sees what really takes place.

END OF ACT



Act Two: Requiem (1934-1941) Akhmatova’s apartment in Leningrad, various residences of the Mandelstams, Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, and the line of wives and mothers outside the Kresty Prison in Leningrad.

Persons in Act Two

Anna Andreevna Akhmatovaxxxvi (age 45 in act 2) Lev Nikolaevich (Lyova) Gumilyov, her son (age 23 in act 2) Osip Emielevich Mandelstam (age 43 in act 2) Nadezhda Yakovlevna (Nadya) Mandelstam (age 35 in act 2) David Brodskixxxvii, a translator and informer (in his 30s) Time Keeper, who intones dates of separate scenes Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad A female chorus of wives and mothers outside the Kresty Prison, Leningrad—14 of

whom have small parts; however, the same singer can take more than one part. Officer of The Cheka number one Officer of The Cheka number two Officer of The Cheka number three Joseph Stalin, Secretary General of the Communist Party (age 58) Secretary to Stalin 3 Soviet Generals (may use only one of needed) Irina Punina, daughter of Anna Yevgenyevna Punina, xxxviii and Nikolay Punin, and a sort

of surrogate daughter to Akhmatova—in her late teens, almost a young woman. Svetlana Stalina, Stalin’s daughter—in her late teens, almost a young woman.

Requiem is Akhmatova’s great poem about the suffering of wives and mothers during the height of Stalin’s purge, arbitrary imprisonments, disappearances and deaths. Lines from the poem are used throughout the act. This act visually represents three layers of that reality: (1) political, (2) general, (3) specific.

Stalin in his Marshal’s starched uniform sits above the stage at a desk with papers, dispatches and telephones. Throughout the act, from time to time, secretaries and Soviet Officials enter and deliver messages or ask directions; or he receives phone calls. The orders include specific directives regarding Akhmatova and Mandelstam. Midway into the act, across the back of the main stage, a continuous procession of women in drab clothes moves through a queue towards a small grated window in a prison wall. It is bitter cold, and the line moves slowly. A male voice from the grate speaks curtly to each. The women bring small packages of clothes or food or money to their husbands or sons. When they get to the window, each mutters the name of the man for whom she has something. After a silent search through lists by the official, either the grate slides up so the parcel can be accepted—and



the woman knows he is still alive—, or the faceless male official says “No person of that name is known”—and the woman knows the man is likely now dead.

Late in the act, Akhmatova appears as one of the women in the line. But throughout most of the scene, she and Nadezhda Mandelstam appear at the front of the stage in a series of short scenes. In the manner of Brecht’s epic theater, a Time Keeper crosses the stage at the beginning of each scene, stops center stage, and sings the date and location. On an easel at the side of the stage, he places large cardboard placards with the year

In the short scenes, Akhmatova and Mandelstam represent the main events in their lives as women on the edge of survival. Sometimes they are together in Moscow helping each other; other times they are separate in simultaneous scenes on separate sides of the stage.

The act culminates with the beginning of WWII, the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad. It ends with Akhmatova’ famous radio speech.

Scene: May 13, 1934

The Mandelstam apartment on Nashchokin Lane in Moscow. Anna Akhmatova (age 45), Lev Gumilyov(age 23), Nadezhda (Nadya) Mandelstam (age 35), Osip Mandelstam (age 43) and David Brodski (in his 30s). There is an anxious restless mood. Osip paces incessantly in a circle. Nadezhda and Anna sit on a mattress on the floor. Lev sits in the only chair, intently trying to read a large scholarly tome. Evening. Only dusk lights the room through the window. Joseph Stalin sits at desk above the stage. Throughout the act, he pantomimes official business, answering phones, reading and signing documents, dispatching work to secretaries and various officials who enter from time to time and leave.

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage. At the far edge, he places a large

placard on an easel that reads “May 13, 1934.” Each time he crosses the stage, he replaces the placard with a new one. ) May 13,1934. Mandelstam’s apartment. House of Writers. Moscow. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Anna Akhmatova: Son, you did not meet the train again. Why can’t you learn the time-table.

Lev Gumilyov: (sullen) Mama, don’t start in on me. I’m grown, not a child, almost my father’s age when he died.

Osip Mandelstam: Nadya, my kitten, we must find something for Anna Andreevna to eat. She ate nothing on the train. I cannot stand it.



Nadezhda Mandelstam: What can I do?

Osip Mandelstam: I am going around to the neighbors. Someone must have something.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: Broadcast to the whole building that she’s here! You take too many risks!

(Abruptly Mandelstamm grabs a shapeless hat and strides out the door.)

One feels that one is always being watched—even at midnight in bed.

Lev Gumilyov: (mutters) Then, let’s all just curl up and die.

Anna Akhmatova: Locusts plague us. Are we Egyptians?

Nadezhda Mandelstam: Osip says: “Crows waiting to pick carcasses.”

Anna Akhmatova: When he came to Leningrad, we went walking. Just as we turned onto Gogol Boulevard, he said, “I am ready for death.”xxxix He said it as if offering tea. As we parted, right there at the tram station, I started to tremble uncontrollably.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (dry and academic) “Trembling is a physiological response and has nothing to do with ordinary fear.”

Anna Akhmatova: (in a burst of anger) “What do you mean it isn’t fear, what is it then?”xl


of 83

(pulling herself together, with measured calm)

Crows waiting. Remember that, son. Wait, wait and again wait. None of us knows how to do it.4

(turns to Lev)

Stalin: (into the telephone receiver) Absolutely not. Yagoda is in charge of Leningrad. Unconditional.

(hangs up and goes back to his papers.)

Female Chorus: At this point, one by one, never in groups, women come from various sides to form a single-file line that fills the back of the stage. Each has a small wrapped parcel: socks or a sweater or items of food, etc.) To the far right a wall with a small grated window. Behind the grate, the door is shut. After the line forms, the women wait in the cold, abject, stooped, without speaking or responding to one another.

Kresty Prison, Leningrad

Anna Akhmatova: (her monologue continues without interruption) At least, son, you could meet my train!

Lev Gumilyov: (forces his attention even more intently on the book)

Anna Akhmatova: (to Lev, pleadingly) Why does this memory of your father march in here buzzing and buzzing like locusts? Not a memory I want. Not today. Why?

Nadezhda Mandelstam: Anna, please, not now.



4 Akhmatova at several crucial points,makes comments about “waiting,” “learning to wait,” “not knowing how to wait,” etc. These culminate in the final words of the opera. A distinct signature motif should link all these comments.

Anna Akhmatova: The last time I saw him—as if yesterday—he came with Ivanov. He was quite rude. I took them down the back stairs—the ones that circle into darkness—like the cantos of Dante. I told him, only to executions, should one descend such stairs.xli I was a prophetess then.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: This is not the time . . .

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: Name?

First Woman: (at the grated window in the Kresty Prison wall) Ivan Illyich Boryotensky

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (after some time) I find no such name listed.

First Woman: (she leaves, stumbling, sobbing)

Anna Akhmatova: Of course when they shot him—a monarchist! Your father! Never!

(pause)

A requiem was to be said at Kazan Cathedral next day. I was there too.xlii

Lev Gumilyov: Mama, please, not now. That’s a long time ago.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: Over 15 years.

Anna Akhmatova: (drifts into nostalgia) Once upon a time, your father wrote deliciously about me. I was his giraffe, “delicate,” “grazing.” That little wonder of a poem he wrote about Lake Chad.



“You are sadder, today: I can see. And your arms, wrapped around your knees,

are thinner.”xliii Like Modigliani, he saw my neck.

(displays a fleeting hint of vanity)

Oh, and Modigliani died that year too, did I tell you?xliv

Lev Gumilyov: (addressed to Nadezhda with sarcasm) And next she will recite the poem she later wrote about the man whom I am supposed to call Papa.

(he stands up parodying his mother’s recitation style)

“The tear-stained autumn . . .”

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (rushes to him and claps her hand over his mouth forcefully)

Anna Akhmatova: (falls back onto the mattress with a shudder. She seems to

shrink in size)

Osip Mandelstam: (bursts in the door. A ukulele strums a folk song in the next apartment and is heard briefly until Nadezhda goes over and closes and locks the door.)

I have found an egg.

(holds it up triumphantly) (sudden knock on the door. Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam jump up. Out of a beat up old wicker hamper for travel, they pull manuscripts of poems.)

Nadezhda Mandelstam:

Which must we hide?

Anna Akhmatova: Or burn?

Osip Mandelstam: Where? No time!



Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad:

Name?

Second Woman at Kresty Prison: Simon Simonievich Lupinoff

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: Louder, I cannot hear you.

(he raises the grate so that for the first time his face shows)

Second Woman at Kresty Prison: (speaking close to his face)

Simon Simonievich Lupinoff

(after a pause, the grate to the window slides up and the woman’s parcel is accepted. The grate clanks down again and she sadly leaves.)

(Papers get wildly spread across the floor)

Three Officers of the Cheka: (tear open the door breaking the lock.xlv They wear the well-known uniform with the cap and blue headband that Akhmatova refers to in Requiem.)

First Officer: (with formality)

These papers, signed by Genrikh Yagoda himself authorize us to search the premises of Citizen Osip Mandelstam. You must present your identification.

(they four people in the room pull their identification books from pockets. The officers scrutinize each book carefully. During the subsequent search and fade to the next scene, the ukulele in the neighboring apartment can be heard through the open door.)


For whom?

Fourth Woman at Kresty Prison:



Boris Ivanovich Issak

(after a pause, the grate to the window slides up and the woman’s parcel is accepted. The grate clanks down again and she sadly leaves.)

(At the same time as the Fourth Woman’s dialogue at the gate and without conversation, the officers begin a destructive search of the apartment for manuscripts of incriminating poems. The search is pantomimed, pulling open invisible drawers, opening wall cupboards, etc. Meanwhile, they walk over the papers on the floor, which ironically are the very manuscripts they seek. The search is furious and quick. Finally, at the First Officer’s signal, the other two take Mandelstam by either arm and lead him toward the door. He wrenches free and rushes at Nadezhda passionately embracing her. She stands stoically refusing to show emotion or cry. He then kisses Akhmatova on each cheek as the officers again grasp his arms and bustle him out the door.)

(Akhmatova and Nadezhda hurry to the window, Lev picks up the overturned chair and slumps back into it.)

Anna Akhmatova: (after a moment.)

“And Russia, guiltless, Writhes beneath bloody boots, Beneath the tires of Black Marias.”xlvi

(The sound of a car motor, then the squeal of tires as it drives off. Scene fades. Light comes up on Stalin at this desk.)

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage)

May 13,1934. The Kremlin.

Stalin: (on the phone)

Phone Monolgue

Yes, secretary, connect him. (pause) Comrade Pasternak? What brings me the pleasure of a call from one of the Union’s most distinguished writers? (pause) Is that right? You say that Mandelstam has been taken for interrogation? “If my friend were in trouble, I would do everything possible to help him.” (pause) “But why didn’t you turn to me immediately?” (pause) But, (with weighted significancexlvii) Borya, are you sure there was no provocation—nothing about a poem that



might be seen as an insult to the party? (longer pause) And you say he is a genius? A master? A national treasure? (pause) “But why are we spending time talking about Mandelstam? I’ve wanted to chat with you for a long time, Boryushka.” (longer pause) “About what? . . . About what? Why, about life and death, of course.”xlviii (hangs up the phone and returns to paper work.)

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: Name?

Fourth Woman: Illya Ivanovich Krieger

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (he accepts the parcel)

Fourth Woman: (leaves)

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage) One week later. Mandelstam apartment, Moscow. Akhmatova’s room in Punin’s apartment in Leningrad.

Nadezhda Mandelstam is alone in her apartment, same as previous scene. On the opposite side of the stage, Akhmatova’s room in Leningrad. A dilapidated chaise longue is covered with tattered clothes for blankets. Akhmatova wears a worn silk kimono and lies covered as if too drained to get out of bed. Her hair hangs wildly about her face and shoulders. The chaise longue is missing one leg and is propped on a stack of books. Next to the chaise longue, like a nightstand, is a small steamer trunk standing upright so that the lid opens like a cupboard door. It is open and books and papers are more or less neatly arranged inside. On top is a candelabrum with several lit burnt-down candles. Night.

A scrim is hung at the back of the stage. Where it forms a wall behind Akhmatova, a reproduction of the famous Modigliani sketch is projected from the back. It is about the size of a wall painting. (In later scenes it will become larger and larger.) Next to the picture, from the flies hangs a window frame covered by worn tattered curtains.



Both women speak into telephones using a coded language.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: No, the weather has settled.

Anna Akhmatova: Are you certain another storm is not on its way?

Nadezhda Mandelstam: We worried this was the big one.

Anna Akhmatova: But . . . ?

Nadezhda Mandelstam: A miracle.

Anna Akhmatova: Should I send Lev? Next train?


The grasshopper is still in the cage.

Anna Akhmatova: Oh, blessed angels and archangels!—still!

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (pausing and then with careful deliberateness:) I have been into the cage myself.

Anna Akhmatova: Nadya, have you no fear?

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: Is this wrapped rubles?

Fifth Woman: For Georgy Mishavich Glinka

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (he accepts the parcel)



Parcels like this rarely make it. I warn you, not safe.

Fifth Woman: Send it, anyway. It is everything I have.

(leaves)

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (as a factual statement, not a boast:)

We women do what we must. (pause) I saw grasshoppers in all the halls. You cannot imagine what goes on . . .

Anna Akhmatova: Hush . . . even the walls . . .


. . . have ears. (pause) But I saw him . . .

Anna Akhmatova: They let you see him? . . . Miracle!


. . . very nervous . . . fidgety . . .

Anna Akhmatova: Yes? . . .

Nadezhda Mandelstam: He is to be let go . . .

Anna Akhmatova: You must take your grasshopper, my dear Nadya Yakovlevna, to a field far away. Let him go free.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: Tomorrow . . . morning . . . Cherdyn . . . train

. . . guards too . . .

Anna Akhmatova:



Cherdyn? . . . (Light fades on Nadezhda’s side of the stage.)

Arietta (Alone, lit by the candles:) What can it mean? I, here with a husband who is no husband. A house of unspeakable spite. Shunned. The first wife holds place of honor. Their child thrust in my care. French. Drills. Reading. And now Osip and Nadezhda, banished to Cherdyn—dreadful camp beyond the rivers. My son, with whom I have never learned how to converse. Which of us will crows pick clean first? He? Or them? Or me?

(candles sputter out; dark.)

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage) That night. Late. The Kremlin.

Stalin: (a uniformed official has entered Stalin’s office and has been standing at attention for some time waiting for the Secretary General to acknowledge his presence.)

Phone Monologue

Yes I understand that a poem was written . . . that I am said to have “cockroach whiskers”xlix . . . that witnesses have come forth . . . understood . . . no confession has been extracted . . . (pause) . . . and Pasternak says the man is “a national treasure” . . . (pause) Let him dangle at the end of an invisible tether . . . in Cherdyn!

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (the prison dialogue overlaps Stalin’s speech) For whom?

Sixth Woman, very old: Denis Denisovich Chleb

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (pauses to search the list)



There is no such name on the list.

Sixth Woman: (the old woman collapses in single piercing howl. The woman next in line helps her to stand again and leads her away.)

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage )

Summer 1934. Akhmatova’s room in Punin’s apartment. The Mandelstam’s rented room. Cherdyn.

(Akhmatova on her chaise longue as before; her son Lev Gumilyov is in the room with her. Nadezhda at a small table. Bright sun streams into both rooms. The tattered curtains in Akhmatova’s room are pulled open now. Both women read letters. Osip, listening, paces busily around the room behind Nadezhda’s chair. Lev, listening, stands looking out the window into the sunlight.

THE LETTER DUET

(Interjected as a counterpoint to the duet are two women’s approaches to the Kresty grated window.)

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (the prison dialogue overlaps the duet)

Name?

Seventh Woman: Evian Aram Ardumian.

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (pauses to search the list; the grate is lifted, the parcel accepted, and then slammed back down.)

Seventh Woman: (departs wearily)

Recitative

Anna Akhmatova: (reads) Dearest Anna Andreevna: We have rented a small room. The owner a sly woman.

Recitative

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (reads)



Dearest Nadezhda Yakovlevna: Are you both well? The infernal days and nights are upon us. Just yesterday I passed along the Kresty Prison. An endless line of women trudges slowly toward the gatehouse with parcels. If I could claim you as family, I too would stand there. I could send socks for Osip and tea for you. One wonders who these women are and what dread story lies buried in each face. I looked into their faces. Have they forgot how to be human? The crevices and lines reminded me of cuneiform texts cut into stone.l Like stones, these faces cannot be read.

Duet

Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam: (sing together while each continues to read) Anna: Nadezhda

I hope beyond hope that I hope beyond hopeli all is well with you and that all is well with and your dear son, Lev. you and your dear

husband, Osip.

Recitative Anna Akhmatova: (still reading)

When we arrived we were put in hospital rooms and I came down with typhus. I could not watch over Osip. How can I forgive myself? His tremors from interrogations got the better of him and one day he leapt from a window to kill himself. Only broke his arm and I was not told until my fever broke.

Recitative Nadezhda Mandelstam: (still reads stoically)

There are whisperings that Bedny and Pasternak got to Bukharin and he got to Stalin and that is why you are spared. But one friend says Pasternak himself went to Stalin.

Duet




I hope beyond hope that I hope beyond hopelii all is well with you and that all is well with and your dear son, Lev. you and your dear

husband, Osip.

Recitative Nadezhda Mandelstam: (still reading)

Here, there is nothing besides the heat. No poems. Have poems been utterly ripped from me? I do make slow headway with the Pushkin essay. Will anyone dare print it? Lev sends you his love.

Recitative Anna Akhmatova: (still reading)

But now with summer, we go to the woods to find berries and mushrooms. Life here has become quite normal again. Osip makes his jokes, and stops to befriend children and even stray dogs. But the greatest miracle is that he remembers the poems that were confiscated in Moscow. He dictates. I write them down. . . I worry about Mother. She sold everything and gave us her rubles. Bribes at every station, every transfer.

Duet


I hope beyond hope that I hope beyond hopeliii all is well with you. Osip that all is well with sends his fond regards. you. Lev sends his love. I pray for you, and all like you. I pray for you, and all Ever, like you. Nadezhda Ever, Anna

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (the prison dialogue overlaps the duet)

For whom?

Eighth Woman:



Georgy Shedntedze.

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (pauses to search the list; the grate is lifted, the parcel accepted, and then slammed back down.)

Eighth Woman: (departs wearily)

Akhmatova: (folding the letter into the bosom Nadezhda Mandelstam: (folding the letter

of her kimono, turning to Lev and into the bosom of her dress, turning gazing into the distant sunlight:) to Osip and gazing into the distant

sunlight:)

Will Mandelstam again Will Akhmatova again make poems? Is he ever make poems? Is she widower to the muse? widow to the muse?

End of The Letter Duet

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage; he stays standing beside the easel) On December First 1934, Leningrad Party Secretary, Sergei Kirov is assassinated publicly. Stalin unleashes a series of public show trials that last almost two years.

Female Chorus: (in line outside the Kresty Prison lift their heads together and let forth a wrenching wail, then return to their silent vigil.)

Owou-eeee-eeee !!!

Stalin: (stands up at his desk; spoken to himself) The end will come when it comes. No dog shall rest.

Time Keeper: (at the easel; then exits ) November 1935. The Mandelstams’ room in Voronezh, where they now live.

(The room is simple and poor. Osip enters briskly, in high spirits, with walking stick, notebook and pen)

Osip Mandelstam: (excited and boyish)

A splendid morning. The sun is low—like a slow ball rolling beneath the clouds and the snow is still clean. I



have done three strophes already today, Nadya, and the day is young.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: I worry you sitting in the park with the weather so brisk.

Osip Mandelstam: Life is young, my pet, and the muse is showering me!

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (waves a sealed letter) This came while you were out. I have not opened it?

Osip Mandelstam: Your mother?

Nadezhda Mandelstam: Elena Bulgakova—from Leningrad. It’s been opened once already, I can tell.

Osip Mandelstam: (starts pacing) Read.

Recitative

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (sits on a crate; reads stoically) Dear Mandelstams: I must write you immediately—all caution to the wind. On October 30th, the doorbell rang. I opened. Akhmatova was here. A terrible look on her face and so thin that neither I nor Mikhail recognized her. Her husband Punin and her son had been arrested that morning.liv The Black Marias took them to the Kresty.

Osip Mandelstam: (pacing more frantically, singing) Oh my God!

Recitative

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (still reads stoically)



At once, she and Punin’s first wife burnt everything that might appear compromising. Then, she hurried off to Lydia Seifullina, the writer, who phoned the Communist Party office. They told her that Akhmatova must personally deliver a letter to Stalin himself at the Kutafya Tower of the Kremlin.

Osip Mandelstam: (singing with passion)

Oh my God! Recitative

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (still reads stoically)

Now, believe it or not, she took the next train to Moscow and Boris Pilnyak drove her to the Kremlin with her letter. Stalin’s personal secretary took it, promising to hand it to Stalin. Pasternak wrote also on her behalf.

Stalin: (A male secretary enters and hands him a letter; after careful reading:)

Very well. We shall see. No dog shall sleep.

Osip Mandelstam: (skeptical, almost sarcastic, singing) Pasternak? Pasternak? Does he have such clout?

Recitative

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (still reads stoically) Anna says that you believe miracles happen. She has had one. Son and husband are released and back home as if nothing had happened. I have not told her that I am writing. You know her Tatar pride! What does any of us know when we rise from our sleep in the morning? Mikhail sends you his best regards. Honored to be your friend, Yelena Bulgakova

(jumps up and rushes to embrace Osip—her only display of physical affection towards her husband in the opera. She breaks into passionate singing.)



How dreadful! How wretched she must be! We can’t even go to her. Oh Osip Emielevich!

Brief Duet

Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam: (together)

We can’t even go to her. We can’t even go to her. We can’t even go to her.


During 1936 the show trials and purges continue. Academicians. Artists and writers. Military officers. Communist Party Officials. Radios speak of almost nothing else. (pause) Genrikh Yagoda, Head of the Secret Police is . . .

Stalin: (stands up at his desk; spoken to himself) Let no dog rest . . .

Time Keeper: . . . ousted and Nikolay Yezhov takes his place.

Aria

Osip Mandelstam: (while lights on Nadezhda fade, he steps forward,

meditatively. The musical style should be the same as his aria at the end of Act 1.)

Such a great poet—the first of her kind. She brings the wealth of the novel into the Russian lyric. If not for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and all of Dostoevsky, there is no Akhmatova. Her genius is in the psychology of Russian prose. And now her life has caught up with her poems. Terror. Anguish. Incommensurable doubt. And irony. And consciousness divided. Oh, Annushka . . . oh . . .lv

(lights dim on him and Nadezhda.)


Name?

Ninth Woman:



Igor Leonidovich Lansky.

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (pauses to search the list; the grate is lifted, the parcel

accepted, and the grate slammed back.)

Anna Akhmatova: (as if in line all along, at some point unobserved Akhmatova has slipped into the line of women, she is now at the head of the line.)

Ninth Woman: (departs)


Middle May 1937. The Mandelstams’ room. Voronezh.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (The light comes up on the Mandelstam’s. As in the

previous scene, she sits on the crate, and Osip paces; but her voice has grown curt as if a letter is always an ordeal.)

It is from Boris Pasternak in Moscow.

Osip Mandelstam: (impatiently) So read it already.

Recitative

Nadezhda Mandelstam: My beloved friends: I am writing to tell you about Akhmatova. I have learned that her son was taken again on May tenth and is held at the Kresty Prison.

Female Chorus: (in line outside the Kresty Prison lift their heads together and let forth a wrenching wail, then return to their silent vigil.)

Owou-eeee-eeee !!!

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (continues without interruption) I have made calls. He is accused of belonging to subversive student organizations. I am told there is no hope for release. My efforts will not abate. Akhmatova knows I am writing. Her hand cannot hold a pen nor shape letters on a page. Your loyal friend,



Boris

Osip Mandelstam: (singing) Oh my God!

(he grabs his walking stick and strides out the door, slamming it violently.)

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (muttering, reads the letter over and over as if trying to

comprehend it.)

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: For whom?

Anna Akhmatova: (with parcel in hand) Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov.

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (pauses to search the list; the grate is lifted; the parcel accepted, and the grate slams down.)

Anna Akhmatova: (walks slowly away, quietly saying)

Blessed Mother of mothers.

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage ) March 1938 Yagoda is tried and executed, Bukharin is tried and executed. Yezhov’s Terror stretches across the entire land.

Stalin: (stands up at his desk; spoken to himself) And no dog rests.

Nadezhda Mandelstam: (finishes muttering and raises her head wearily, then sings defiantly:)

Hope Against Hope.lvi

(the light dims)

Time Keeper:

The Punin apartment in Leningrad. March 1938.



Irina Punina: (sitting on the floor outside Akmatova’s bedroom door.

She is reading an opened letter)

Arietta Mother makes me the bearer of ill tidings. (petulantly) Why always me? I must read it and then wait for Madam Akhmtova to come in—too tired to read it herself. From the Kresty over an hour of trudging through snow to get home. No money for the tram. She will not eat when she gets here. Too tired. Too cold. And I must break this news to her. (waves the letter futilely) Why me?

Stalin: (three Soviet Generals (or at east one) enter Stalin’s office and stand before him.)

You tell me that Chancellor Hitler wants to go back on our accord! Does he have any idea with whom he must reckon! No German dog shall sleep!

(slams his fist onto the desk with a deafening battery of percussion!)

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (as the percussion settles)

Name?

Tenth Woman: Yevgeny Aaronovich Milstein.

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (pauses to search the list; the grate is lifted, the parcel accepted, and the grate slammed down.)

Tenth Woman: (walks slowly away)

Eleventh Woman: (far down the line, suddenly as if startled, she stammers)

You . . . you there in the black hair . . . I know you from someplace.

Anna Akhmatova: (standing behind the woman, shrinks into her dilapidated old coat.)

Eleventh Woman:



You are the famous poet, aren’t you.

(long pause as if searching her memory for a name.)

Anna Akhmatova!!

Twelfth Woman: (standing behind Akhmatova. As if wakened out of a long slumber, she reaches an ungloved finger out of her sleeve and touches Akhmatova’s face, suspiciously testing to see if she is real.)

Ah, can you describe this?

(a sweeping gesture takes in the long line of women, the destitution, the gatehouse, the grated window, all of it.)

Anna Akhmatova: (follows the woman’s sweeping gesture, measures it with

her full attention, then speaks with great strength:) I can.

Twelfth Woman: (breaks into a warm genuine smile; then in a moment, the women settle back into their anonymous waiting.)lvii


For whom?

Thirteenth Woman: Oleg Alexandrovich Yeltsin.

Officer at the Kresty Prison in Leningrad: (pauses to search the list.) There is no such name.

Thirteenth Woman: (walks slowly away quietly sobbing)

Female Chorus: (in line outside the Kresty Prison lift their heads together and let forth a wrenching wail, they repeat it several time, while . . .)

Owou-eeee-eeee !!!



Stalin: (. . . pounds his fist repeatedly and the battery of percussion thunders.)

Sudden fade. Dark Stage. Silence. The line of women is gone. Stalin is not lit. Only a dim lamp reveals Irina Punina asleep against the wall next to Akhmatova’s door.

Anna Akhmatova: (comes into the hall, frozen and exhausted. She stumbles

across the girl, almost unawares; then looks down:) Irina? You?

Irina Punina: (groggy, stumbling, gets up) A letter. I waited.

Anna Akhmatova: Osip?

Irina Punina: Yes.

Anna Akhmatova: Dead?

Irina Punina: No.

Anna Akhmatova: Arrested again?

Irina Punina: Yes.

Anna Akhmatova: In a camp, he will not make it through winter. Too frail.

Irina Punina: Yes.

Anna Akhmatova: (after a long absorbed pause)



None of us knows yet how to wait. (with deep reflection) But before the blessed death comes, each in her turn, each in her way,

must learn how waiting is done. Even you, my child, even you.5

(matter-of-factly without emotion.) Goodnight.

(Irina goes into her room and Akhmatova steps forward.)

Aria

I must live. Like Osip I must not give up on life. His poems must survive. (pause) Mandelstam is the poet who had no teacher. That is amazing. In all world poetry, is there another case? Not Pushkin, not Blok . . . not Dante or Shakespeare. (pause) Who can show us the source of the divine new harmony, which we call the poetry of Osip Mandelstam? Who can fathom it fully? Oh, Osip Emelievich . . . oh . . .lviii

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage ) Spring 1940. Hitler’s armies have invaded the Soviet Union. The war goes badly. Stalin’s wife committed suicide in 1932. He raises his children by himself. Vasily, despite alcoholism, is promoted to top command in the air force. His plane crashes. He dies. Stalin has only Svetlana.

(pause)

Stalin’s office. Late at night.

Stalin: (alone and tired)

Monologue

It is not acceptable that we cannot drive Hitler back. But what else must we do? What have I not tried? I can throw more troops into the front-line and wait for winter. Russia has inexhaustible men to throw into wars—and inexhaustible winters! (pause) We cannot bring back the past. Ever. Our task is to make the future. But how? I look out into the darkness when the city’s lights are doused and the air raids wail. An entire people depends on what I decide . . . but perhaps . . . I have lost my



5 The “waiting” signature motif.

way. Perhaps I am like the king in the fable—with no clothes—and I don’t even know it myself.

Svetlana Stalina: (quietly has come into the office and stands beside her father, gently stroking his hair)

Stalin:

It is you. Your mother would do that—enter quietly. But we cannot bring back the past. We must . . .

Svetlana Stalina:

I know, build the future.

Stalin:

You know me so well. You speak my thoughts before I speak. One must trust no one, child. But you I trust. (pause) This Hitler makes me feel powerless. But you give my power back. I can grant you anything. You, I can make happy.

Svetlana Stalina: Oh Papa, I have not come for gifts. Not tonight. I have come to beg forgiveness.

Stalin: (playful and curious) My little minx has something to tell her Papa?

Svetlana Stalina: I read forbidden poets.

Stalin:

Ah, but poetry is an innocent thing. And in Russia we have what Pasternak calls “national treasures.” (laughs) What’s to forgive?

Svetlana Stalina: I read the poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Stalin:

I have seen some myself. Remarkable. But too psychological for my taste.



Svetlana Stalina:

But her old books are impossible to find.

Stalin:

Buy the new ones then.

Svetlana Stalina: There are no new ones. Nothing since 1921.

Stalin:

We can’t have a national treasure wasting away while Hitler wants to destroy the entire Russian civilization. I will order Soviet Publishers to bring out a new book!

Svetlana Stalina: Oh Papa, would you?

Stalin:

Now, my pretty little minx, I must attend to these dispatches. Telegrams must go out before dawn.

(light fades on Stalin’s office)

Time Keeper: (walks across the stage ) Leningrad is under siege. How long can the city hold out? Shostakovich writes a Symphony about it. It is played on the radio almost every day. The score is smuggled out through Finland. Toscanini plays it on American radio. Then Koussevitzky . . . Stokowski . . . Mitropoulos . . . Ormandy . . . Beechem . . . Everywhere it is performed. (pause) Poets too inspire Leningraders to resist.

(pause)

September 1941. Radio Leningrad.

Anna Akhmatova: (center stage alone, dressed in a full length simple dress, as for a poetry reading, hair in a neat bun, she stands behind a tall radio microphone. At first there is static, then the voice through the auditorium speakers comes through with the strange clarity of an old radio broadcast. This speech should be spoken or sung sprechstimme without any accompaniment:)


of 83

Radio Monologue This is Anna Akhmatova. I am a poet. My new book From Six Books was printed last year in Leningrad, but I am not here to talk about poems. Dear fellow citizens, mothers, wives and sisters, the enemy threatens to overtake our city. I am a Leningrader, and like all Leningraders, I am mortified that our city—my city—could be razed. I became a poet in Leningrad and Leningrad is the life of my poems. Our descendants will forever remember the women who have stood strong during these horrific months. But none will be more revered than the woman who stood on the roof during the bombing with a boat hook and tongs to pull down shingles that caught ablze. A city that nurtured that woman cannot be conquered. The women and mothers of Leningrad promise that we will always be steadfast and courageous—even mothers who have lost their sons. Perhaps a son on a far away battlefield, or a son whose airplane was shot down, or a son who simply disappeared without messages. The city of Peter, the city of Lenin, the city of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Blok, Shostakovich will not be brought to its knees. The city of Akhmatova will endure!lix

END OF ACT



Act Three: Poem Without A Hero (1941 and 1946) Scene One

Akhmatova’s apartment in Leningrad, December 27, 1941

Persons in Act Three

Anna Andreevna Akhmatovalx (age 52 in act 3 scene 1, 57 in act 3 scene 2) Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya, Akhmatova’s friend and confidante, age 30 Joseph Stalin, Secretary General of the Communist Party Irina Punina, in her early twenties Time Keeper (the same as in Act 2) Andrey Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, age fifty,

a balding, burly well-dressed official Various persons from The Stray Dog cabaret of Act One, still young, but now dressed for

a masquerade ball (pantomime roles), including: Olga Afanasevna Glebova-Sudeykina, dressed as Columbine with a black and white fan Mikhail Aleseevich Kuzmin, dressed as Mephistopheles Vsevolod Knyazev, dressed in his uniform as a cadet in the dragoons A nameless young man dressed as Don Giovanni Poem Without A Hero is Akhmatova’s great poem about memory and responsibility to the past. Lines from the poem are used for the writing-monologue at the end of scene one. Begun during the siege of Leningrad, the poem went through many drafts and additions over the next twenty years. Set as a phantasmagoria or hallucination on the night of December 27, 1940,lxi it indirectly recalls the events of Vsevolod Knyazev’s suicide in 1913 in the guise of a New Year’s Eve harliquinade and costume ball. In 1959, Akhmatova imagined the material as a ballet libretto, and wrote a short sketch. 27 December 1941, Akhmatova’s room in the Punin’s apartment in Leningrad, furnished as in Act 2, but even more derelict. At the back of the stage is a stark window suspended on wires from the flies flush with the scrim, the panes broken out. When the window is uncovered later in the



scene, outside it the black branches of a maple tree claw at the frame whenever the wind blows; and from the distance the flicker of bombs and shelling can be seen and heard faintly and intermittently throughout the scene. Next to the window, the Modigliani drawing is projected onto the scrim—larger than in Act 2—almost the size of the window. As the scene opens, the window is entirely covered by a heavy black air-raid cloth. The room is very cold with only candles in a holder on the steamer trunk. Akhmatova wears a man’s worn greatcoat that has lost all buttons. It is tied with a wide buckle-less leather belt. She is on the chaise longue huddled beneath a mound of clothes and rags—no blankets. On the floor is a pair of large worn-out rubber galoshes. She is reading by candlelight.

(a vigorous knocking at the door, then Irina and Lydia burst in excited.)

Anna Akhmatova: (sits up in bed and closes her book, carefully marking the

page)

Has a bomb landed in the street? Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya:

You would not believe . . . Irina Punina:

. . . at the House of Writers . . . Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya:

. . . we heard . . . Anna Akhmatova: (hurriedly climbs out of the mounds of clothes and rags,

and pulls the old over-sized galoshes over her bare feet. Stands up.)

It is Lev! He’s released. Or is it Punin? My boy’s petition came through? He can join the army? Come back from the camp?

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya and Irina Punina:

(are caught off guard by the urgency of Anna’s questions and the desperate hope that drives them. They shake their heads “NO.”)



Anna Akhmatova: Well, out with it already!

Irina Punina:

. . . we were in a long line . . . waiting . . .

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya:

Zoschenko pulled us aside . . . Irina Punina:

. . . a small office in a back hall . . .


. . . showed us . . . Irina Punina:

An émigré newspaper from Paris! . . .not that old. . . Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: Olga is alive. She was mentioned.lxii Anna Akhmatova: (visibly touched by this news)

My lost darling . . . alive still . . . Sudeykina! At The Stray Dog, you should have seen her. How they called for her . . . “Sudeykina! Sudeykina! Sudeykina!” . . . My darling, my alter ego!


But that was not all. Irina Punina:

No! There’s also a poem. Anna Akhmatova: (strongly curious)

Poem? What poem? (reminiscing) I can close my eyes and see her dancing. Those tiny feet. Like quicksilver. Like goat feet.




He made a copy for you. Anna Akhmatova:

Zoschenko? Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya:

An anonymous thing, written in Paris.

Irina Punina:

About Kuzmin.


His last salon.lxiii Anna Akhmatova: (scornful)

But who knows about those days? Kuzmin! Gone. Forgotten. No one in Paris understands us. They live in a dream-Russia.

Irina Punina: (girlishly)

Shall I read it?

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (firmly)

I shall read it. Anna Akhmatova: (resigned)

If you must. Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (as she reads, Akhmatova shows increasing displeasure,

trying to grab the paper from Lydia, who persiste in reading the whole thing.) Aria

Moth Wings and Lavenderlxiv



An iridescent and lovable moth he was, come back to life from the shelf. He was always a collector—nurse out of Chekov— gatherer of odd bits—tea services with nosegays. And what is he now? His arching wings flutter and his lavender talc sifts over the room, for once more we come this last time, sadness as thread worn as his dry smile. A Scriabin Mazurka’s sad perfume from an old piano spreads, rustle of skirts. Was there a piano? Were there skirts? Was it Scriabin? He flutters up to the dais, moth opening the tired wings, voice sighing and softly cracking. His old songs we all knew were once more chanted. And some of us could only lay tears at his feet. Farewell, Kuzmin. One last time we did come together.

Anna Akhmatova: (scornful)

Imposter. Sycophant. Lier. None of that happened! I was there.


Then what did? Anna Akhmatova: (sterner)

Burn that sentimental twaddle. And don’t name his name in my presence again.

Irina Punina: (solicitous)

You don’t mean that? You’re on edge from the bombs.


Pull yourself together. Kuzmin was your friend—the first to defend your poems. He never wavered.

Anna Akhmatova:



Never wavered? What about 1923? He denounced me—and Mayakovsky—in the same breath! “Too popular to be able to grow creatively.”lxv

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: But that essay was a warning, not a denunciation.

Anna Akhmatova: (persistent and argumentative)

But his other side! After all these years, I cannot shake the nasty impression his last book left.


The Trout?

Guilt Monologue Anna Akhmatova:

That one. Unwholesome. Everything derived from German Expressionism. Like Caligari in the movie. Decayed. “The salaciousness leaves one with a heavy heart . . . Kuzmin was always homosexual in his poetry, but here he goes beyond all reasonable bounds.” No one can write with that vulgarity and get away with it.lxvi


What is going on here? Why such a harsh judgment on him now?

Anna Akhmatova:

Kuzmin was Kuzmin. “He practiced evil for evil’s sake.”lxvii Then was then. A bad dream now. Harsh, yes, but it is not him whom I judge. I judge myself. Why was my book so quickly withdrawn, after Stalin himself ordered its publication? Do you know? Do you? “The Central Committee is absolutely right, I myself am to blame . . . Yes, yes. They wanted to publish my poems. The publishing house selected some poems and took them to Moscow. They were approved. Then, out of the blue I took it upon myself to add new ones, and, as if that weren’t enough, I put the saddest poem in pride of place and, on top of that, used the title of the poem for the whole section . . . And in



the end it turned out to be an entirely different book from the one which had been approved . . .”

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (starts to protest)

Anna Akhmatova:

“Please don’t argue. This is exactly how it all happened.”lxviii Don’t you see how indulgent I am? Olga, sweet angel, indulgent too! A spoiled child. But I am a woman. Kuzmin wrote as he pleased. No responsibility to witness to his time. Flight into fantasy. And I have been like both of them. Verdict: GUILTY!

Irina Punina: (has stayed by the door seeking an unobtrusive chance to

leave) Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (approaches Akhmatova as if to console her.)

Requiem is your witness. The women at the Kresty. The black Marias.

Anna Akhmatova: (imperiously waves both women away in a single gesture

that brooks no refusal. They leave.) (She slams the book she had been reading onto the floor, pulls off the galoshes and hurls them across the room, and jerks the air-raid curtain from the window.)

(A blast of cold air hits her face and douses the candles. The maple branch claws the window frame. Moonlight streams through the window. Suddenly chilled, she climbs back under the pile of clothes and lies facing the window.)

(The lighting becomes misty and hallucinatory. Snatches of music from The Stray Dog of Act 1 filter in and out of an orchestral ballet episode.) Choreography:lxix

Sudeykina leaps through the window dressed as Columbine and dances while a clock strikes midnight. The chorus streams in from both sides with linked hands, meet center stage and form a ring to skip around Sudeykina. Everyone is in costumes, including Don Giovanni, Donna Anna in mourning, the Commandatore, Faust in old age, Gretchen, Harlequin, Perrot, etc. Knyazev is in his dragoon’s uniform (not a costume), Kuzmin is Mephistopheles. The two men break from the circle and dance a wild Russian dance, while Sudeykina coyly captures Kanyazev’s attention. She slips a note to him. He is elated and moves to the side. While the commotion progresses, Akhmatova has emerged from the shadows in her greatcoat, barefoot, but she wears the purple shawl from Act 1. Visibly in conflict, part of her wishes to join the revelers, but she also wishes to shun them. Some of them clutch at her hand to encourage her to join in the merry-making.



The Commandatore gallantly steps forward and with great ceremony hands her a long-stemmed black rose. She caresses the bloom, then backs off from the crowd, moving to the center front stage, back to the audience, and like a conductor, she raises the rose to signal for the frolicking to cease.

Clock strikes one.

In slow motion the chorus members leave the stage one at a time, as Akhmatova directs them to, until only Kuzmin and Knyazev are left. Kuzmin approaches Knyazev as if to invite him to dance again. Knyazev gestures him away. Kuzmin, rejected, leaves the stage, his gestures recalling the similar moment of rejection in Act. 1. Knyazev rereads the note from Sudeykina. He pulls out his pocket watch. Strolls around killing time. Meanwhile on the opposite side of the stage, unseen by him, Sudeykina traipses in playfully leading the young man costumed as Don Giovanni. She pulls him into the shadow and kisses and embraces him.

Clock strikes two.

Knyazev excitedly walks across stage peering at imaginary houses as if looking for house numbers and rechecking the note. Suddenly at a short distance he becomes aware of Sudeykina and the young man, not sure who they are. He freezes. She is so busy with her lovemaking that she does not see him. With a long flirtatious laugh she pulls the man into the full light and passionately kisses him, then skips off stage. He chases after, delighted.

Knyazev in a shattered daze performs a grief-stricken solo dance, leading him suddenly to pull his revolver from his belt and putting it to his temple and pulling the trigger. This should be so sudden as to startle the audience. The gun shot should be very loud and all music ceases. Akhmatova, back still to the audience, witnesses everything, and still waving her rose, follows his grief-dance with visible empathy. As he shoots himself, she collapses front center stage, the two figures collapsing simultaneously.

In the silent aftermath, the room returns to the way it was before the revels exploded—slowly and at a distance intermittent shelling is again heard and, the maple again claws the window-frame, etc.

Anna Akhmatova: (slowly gets up and with determination, goes to the steamer trunk, pulls sheets of paper from it, a pen and a bottle of ink. She lights the candles and sets them on the floor. With the paper, pen and ink, she uses the bare floor for a surface and starts to write.) (while she performs these almost ritualistic actions, the orchestra lays out the first tentative Chaconne variation.) (The writing scene should communicate a renewed purposefulness, determination and confidence by Akhmatova. The music is a chaconne or passacaglia. Each repetition of the ground increases in strength of instrumentation and harmony. Akhamatova’s ten variations on the ground are phrases from the draft of a new poem Poem Without A Hero.)



(While she writes, Sudeykina with her black and white fan steps onstage rear stage left, Kuzmin steps on front stage left, and Knyazev steps in front stage right. Each assumes a characteristic pose and holds it throughout the writing-scene.)

Aria: Chaconne

1.lxx

Because I don’t have enough paper I write on your old rough draft.

(A light comes up briefly on Knyazev and then fades.) Here a strange word shows though, and like a snowflake on a cuff, fades trustingly without reproof.

2.

It’s you, Delirium-Psyche, bending down over me,

(A light comes up briefly on Sudeykina and then fades.) fluttering your black-white fan, and secretly you want to say to me that you’ve crossed the River Lethe and now breathe a different spring.

3.

When numbing fear overwhelms me, I call upon Bach’s Chaconne, but there behind it a man stands,

(A light comes up briefly on Kuzmin and then fades.) whose role is not fond husband. He calls to mind Epiphany evenings, the maple at the window, wedding candles. He brings only devastation.

4. I hear ringing in the distance and feel a chilling dampness—



stone, fire, ice . . . “You are mistaken: The Venice of Doges— next door—but you come right in, in masks and capes and staffs and garlands. Now you must give all that up.”

5.

I trust you are not so bold as to bring the Lord of Darkness here?

(A light comes up briefly on Kuzmin and then fades.) Mask, skull, face—whatever— the expression is malicious pain like only Goya could portray. Common brat!—taunter!

6.

I have forgotten your lessons, sweet talkers! Pseudo prophets!

But you have not forgotten me. as the future ripens into the past, so the past rots into the future— terrible festival of dead leaves.

7. (A light comes up briefly on Sudeykina and then fades.)

Like little hooves, your boots stamp, like little bells your earrings clink, wicked little horns peak among your curls,

intoxicated with your accursed dance— as if on a black-figured vase, you run toward the sky-blue waves, a gala and revealing display.

8.

(As the last variations are sung, a dim gray winter dawn breaks across the back of the stage.)

(A light comes up briefly on Knyazev and then fades.)



And behind her in greatcoat and helmet, you, entering here without a mask, what torments you so today? such bitterness in every word, such melancholy in your love, and why does blood trickle down smudging the bloom of your cheek?

9.

On the landing the scent of strong perfume, and the dragoon cornet with his love-note and with a pointless death in his breast rings the bell, if he can muster sufficient courage. He will spend his final moments praising you.

(A light comes up briefly on Sudeykina and then fades.)

10. But to your notorious repute which has lain thirty years in a ditch I will no longer offer up praise. You and I jointly trample it down, and with my real kiss, again I celebrate your midnight crime.

(As she notices the light from the window, she blows out the candles. She stands up, tottering, only now realizing how stiff and cold she is. She sits on the chaise longue and rubs her bare feet to bring circulation back. Looking back at the papers strewn on the floor, deep in thought, she says:)

And what shall I call this unannounced visitation come at a dark time? (an idea comes to her) Ah yes, perfect. “Poem Without A Hero” !! (an afterthought) And I will dedicate it to Olga in Paris, who by some miracle still lives!lxxi

END OF SCENE ONE NO BREAK BETWEEN SCENES



Act Three: Poem Without A Hero (1941 and 1946) Scene Two

Akhmatova’s apartment in Leningrad, September 4, 1946

Stalin’s office in the Kremiln (as in Act 2, above the rear of the stage) and simultaneously, the assembly hall of the Leningrad Branch of the Union of Soviet Writer

Anna Akhmatova sits on the chaise longue in a housedress, working on her poem on her lap. Drapes are drawn across the window. The room is otherwise the same as Scene 1 except that the Modigliani drawing is even larger. Time Keeper: (walks across the front of the stage)

Monologue

Imagine that the war has come and gone, that Akhmatova was sent to Tashkent with her friend Chukovskaya, that she has returned, that her son was freed, fought valiantly, helped in the liberation of Berlin, and was again charged with parasitism to be sent to a far eastern camp. Leningrad is slowly coming back to life, but the devastation of the siege has been vast. Ruins and shortages everywhere. It is September 4, 1946. (places a placard on the eisel) The Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Writers is meeting this very hour. They are honored today by an address from Andrey Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He has come by night train from Moscow for this occasion. (gestures to the audience) Please give our distinguished visitor your undivided attention.

Andrey Zhdanov: (strides to the center of the stage, warmly greeting the

audience, until he stands exactly where Akhmatova had stood with her back to the audience in the previous scene. He faces the audience, addressing the members as if they are the Union of Soviet Writers. Stalin is in his place on the level above the back of the stage. He stands and like a marionette master pulling strings, his pantomime is coordinated with Zhdanov’s histrionic gestures during the speech.)

Aria

“What positive contribution can Akhmatova’s work make to our young people? It can do nothing but harm. It can only sow despondency, spiritual depression, pessimism, and the desire to walk away from the urgent questions of public



life—to leave the wide paths of public life and activity for the narrow little world of personal experience. How can we place the education of young people in her hands? . . . The gloomy tones of hopelessness before death, mystic experiences intermingled with eroticism—this is the spiritual world of Akhmatova, a leftover from the old aristocratic culture, which has sunk once and for all into oblivion. . . Half nun, half harlot, or rather a harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer.” Let her be forevermore persona no grata. Parasite. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is hereby expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. All rights and privileges are revoked.lxxii

(Zhdanov’s hands are frozen in a triumphant upraised gesture.)

Joseph Stalin: (lowers his hands and simultaneously Zhdanov’s hands fall limp to his side, his head slumps forwards, and his body droops like an unused marionette.)

Anna Akhmatova: (continues to write. A final variation of the Chaconne

accompanies her voice as she adds new lines to the poem.)

11.

And in my dreams it seemed, this is a libretto I write for someone else, but there’s no “all clear” from the music’s roar. A dream, you see—can be quite real. I myself was hardly glad

at the infernal harliquinade, hearing it emit infernal yowls. I hoped the whole thing would pass far wide But the mirror only dreams of a mirror, and silence over silence watches.

QUICK FADE

END OF ACT



Epilogue

Akhmatova’s apartment in Leningrad, March 5, 1953

Persons in the Epilogue Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (age 64) Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya, Akhmatova’s friend and confidante, age 41 Irina Punina, Akhmatova’s stepdaughter, in her early thirties Time Keeper

(Akhmatova’s room in the Punin apartment in Leningrad. It is better furnished, but still simple. Along the back wall is a huge reproduction of the famous Modigliani drawing. Akhmatova and Lydia are seated at a table working on manuscripts of poems.)

Time Keeper: (walks across the front of the stage and silently places a placard on the eisel that says “March 5, 1953.”)


I have read it over several times, and I still find the stanzas right here

(she shows Akhmatova the passage in question)

to be disconnected and choppy. Anna Akhmatova:

They are disconnected. A lot is going on in the mind of the narrator, jumping from this thing to that thing.


But your punctuation makes it all seem like a single thought. The reader will be confused.

Anna Akhmatova:

How many times have I told you, Lydushka, that I know nothing about punctuation? Absolutely nothing.


Well, it’s time you learned.



Anna Akhmatova:

That’s why I have you. You know just where to put in those three little dots you’re so fond of, and you know when to use the dash. It all makes perfect sense when you finish with it.

Irina Punina: (rushes in without knocking)

Anna Andreevna, telephone. For you. Pasternak calling from Moscow. Hurry downstairs.

Anna Akhmatova: (excited)

Boris Leonidovich! Oh Mother Mary, he has managed to get Lev released! My boy will be home by Easter if we are lucky.

Irina Punina:

Hurry, the phone is just dangling on the wall. Someone will walk by and hang it up.

Anna Akhmatova:

You take the message for me. My legs will not carry me down those stairs fast enough. Hurry.


Don’t build up your hopes. Anna Akhmatova:

Hope is always against hope. Nadezhda taught us that. I am no fool.

Irina Punina: (comes back, an alarmed look on her face) Anna Akhmatova:

Well? Irina Punina:

Prokofiev. Dead. Just an hour ago. Boris wanted you to know before the radio announcement.

Anna Akhmatova:



Prokofiev is a courageous man. A great artist. Go borrow a radio.

(Irina leaves) Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya:

He left Russia, tried Paris, tried Chicago, came back. Very brave.

Anna Akhmatova: (nodding in full agreement)

And the Opus 27, as I call it. Has anyone set any of my poems as well? Those five gems. And remember last summer when we crowded around the neighbor’s radio. The BBC from London, broadcasting the Opus 27 live with Vishnevskaya singing and that young English conductor—what’s his name?—Leonard Britten—or Benjamin Bernstein—something like that? (starts to laugh with gentle nostalgia) And something else . . . I haven’t thought of it in years. He would play piano at The Stray Dog. He played a small gavotte—the most fetching little thing. Everyone had such fun with it. Someone—I don’t remember who it was—even wrote a backwards variation. (in a knowing prophetic manner) Of course, now that he can reap no benefit from it, they will permit the Bolshoi to stage Romeo and Juliet in the grand manner. And they will carry it on tours to France and England—to show off what Soviet artists can do. And it will become, overnight, a great classic.

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (straightening the papers) It is time for tea, rest ourselves from this work. Anna Akhmatova: (nodding in full agreement) Yes, that would be nice. Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (leaves to make tea) Irina Punina: (comes back without radio) Anna Akhmatova: Where is the radio? Irina Punina:



I went to three apartments. No one will loan us one. Stalin is dead.

Anna Akhmatova: (shouts) Lydia! Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (rushes back into the room) Anna Akhmatova: Tell it again! Irina Punina: Stalin is dead! Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: Is this a joke? Irina Punina:

Go look in the streets. The trams and the traffic have stopped. Silence everywhere. It is amazing that Pasternak’s call came through at all. Now all the lines are shut down. The radio says that the entire Soviet Union is to stop what it is doing for one full hour of solemn respect for the “death of our father.”

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (with total contempt) Father? Russia’s nightmare! Irina Punina: Be fair. He did great things! Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: Greatly evil things! Anna Akhmatova:

Irina, my child, never confuse the Russian people with their leaders. Stalin did not win the war. Stalin did not liberate Leningrad. The people did. (suddenly starts to laugh) Do



you remember that joke that went the rounds awhile back about him on his deathbed?

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: The one where he calls up Lenin in heaven on the telephone? Irina Punina:

You should not repeat such things. Someone may hear you. Anna Akhmatova:

And what can be done to me that has not already been done to me? The one about the bird.

Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: I’ve not heard that one. Anna Akhmatova:

It goes like this.

Stalin is on his deathbed. He calls two likely successors—you fill in the names—doesn’t matter who—and orders two birds be brought.

He gives each man a bird. The first man grabs his bird but is afraid it will wiggle free and fly away, so he squeezes very hard.

When he opens his hand, the bird is dead. Seeing Stalin’s disapproval, the second man loosens his grip so much that the bird escapes.

Stalin is furious. “Bring me a bird!” he shouts. A bird is brought.

Stalin takes the bird by its legs and slowly, one by one, plucks all the feathers from its tiny body. Then he opens wide his palm. The bird lies there naked, shivering, helpless. Stalin looks at the bird and smiles, “You see . . . and he is even thankful for the human warmth coming out of my palm.”

Irina Punina: (embarrassed, she turns to the window to avoid meeting

Akhmatova’s direct gaze) Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya: (unsure whether or not to laugh, she looks intently at

Akhmatova)


of 83

Anna Akhmatova: (breaks into a broad smile, warmly embraces Lydia, and

laughing, says)

Oh yes, my friend, now we all must learn how to laugh all over again. After we had learned how to wait, we waited. A very long time. Even you, Irina Nikolaevna, even you!6

FINAL LIGHTS OUT

END OF OPERA



6 The “waiting” signature motif.

i Biographers, translators and editors transliterate Russian names differently into English. I have used,

except when noted otherwise, the spellings from Chukovskaya’s The Akhmatova Journals because they conform most closely to Russian name-use customs.

ii Spelling from Reeder. iii Zinaida Gippius’s name is translated into English as both Gippius and Hippius. Biographers, critics and

standard reference sources have established no common practice regarding this spelling.

iv Spelling from Reeder. v Spelling from Reeder. vi “Anna Andreyvna was always surrounded by people in the Stray Dog. But she never seemed as gay as the

first time I saw her. Perhaps she was showing restraint, aware that strangers were looking at her with curiosity and perhaps, little by little, something of her character, in her general outlook, began to change. All kinds of people—those she knew and those she didn’t—would approach her and “half-tenderly, half-lazily” touch her hand. Mayakovsky was one. One day he held her delicate, thin hand in his huge paw and with derisive admiration exclaimed for all to hear: “My God! What little fingers!” Akhmatova FROWNED AND TURNED AWAY.”” (Adamovich 66).

ix “When the Italian Futurist poet and dramatist Marinetti came to the Stray Dog in 1914, Lourie gave a lecture on the “art of noise,” and when Richard Strauss visited, Lourie played a Gluck gavotte in his own modern arrangement, after which Strauss got up and went over to the piano to compliment Lourie” (Kron paraphrased by Reeder. 68).

x Reeder States: The Central figure of the cabaret was the famous actress, dancer, and singer Olga

Glebova-Sudeikina, wife of the artist Sergey Sudeikina, and for many years Akhmatova’s closest friend. “Elegant, charmingly feminine, always surrounded by hordes of admirers,” Chukovsky said of Sudeikina, “she was the living embodiment of her desperate and piquant epoch.” …. Arthur Lourie, who lived with her and Akhmatova in the early 1920s, compared Sudeikina to Debussy’s “Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” and called her a Petersburg beauty, gray-green eyes like sparkling opals.

She played the role of Columbine in Meyerhold’s Columbine’s Scarf at his experimental studio. One of her most popular roles was Confusion in Yury Belyaev’s play of that name, and it is in this role that she appears in the famous paining by her husband. In the 1912-13 season she appeared in a new play by Belyaev, Psyche. At the Stray Dog, Sudeikina danced, sang, and recited also great poetry—the works of Russian poets, and of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. (Reeder 65)

Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero, written in the 1940s, is a nightmarish recollection of the Stray Dog and the period of 1912-13. In the poem Akhmatova alludes to Sudeikina’s performance of the Madonna in Kuzmin’s version of the Nativity play which Sergey Diaghilev attended. And her portrayal of a bacchante in the Goat-legged Nymph with music by Ilya Sats” (Reeder 65-6).

ix Symbolism in Russia had dominated poetry in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. It



saw poetry as a vehicle to thrust readers beyond the words and images of the poem into a transcendent and universal spiritual world. Scriabin is the fullest musical equivalent. Zinaida Gippius, Alexandr Blok, Andrey Bely and Vyacheslav Ivanov were leading symbolist poets; Dmitry Merezhkovsky, critic and philosopher, articulated the Symbolist program. Gippius’s play The Red Poppy was the basis for Reinhold Gliere’s ballet, the suite from which is still performed. By 1913 Symbolism was under attack by both Acmeists and Futurists.

x Gippius was know for her coldness, her lack of human warmth; one contemporary describes her as a “decadent Madonna.” “Slender, fragile, a mass of copper hair, green eyes and thickly powdered face, she wore an ebony cross and rings on her fingers, smoking fragrant cigarettes and played with a glittering lorgnette” (Reeder 18).

xi As a young man, Gumilyov is record to have been awkward with a strong list, both of which with great effort he overcame. “He had an elongated head that looked, as a friend put it, as if the midwife’s tongs had pulled too hard. Shrewd eyes squinted from either side of a fleshy, shapeless nose. His lips were thick and pale” (Monas 3). By 1913, “[h]e acquired a reputation as a Don Juan, and women fell at his feet. But the “simple arrogant dream” of Don Juan (as he called it in any early pome [p.41]—though it recurred throughout his life—could not satisfy him: “ . . . never father to a woman’s child / never any man’s brother” (5).

xii Acmeism was a major poetic movement, represented by Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Kuzmin and Mandelstam among others. It was centered in Petersburg. It rejected symbolism and the notion of art as a new religion. Instead, it affirmed the poem as a verbal object, which seeks to crystallizes the “acme” of an experience. Its attention to verbal perfection and control led it to champion Pushkin and the tradition of Russian lyric poetry. Thus, it embodies a neo-classical impulse and has as a musical equivalent the Prokoviev of the First Symphony and the Stravinsky of the neo-classical Paris ballets of the 1920s.

xiii “Knyazev was handsome, slender, with warm brown eyes and blond hair . . . . Kuzmin devoted a cycle of poems, “Autumn May,” to Knyazev in 1910,” early in their relationship (Reeder 382).

xiv The tragic love triangle that unfolded later that year between Kuzmin, Knyazev and Sudeykina led to Knyazev’s suicide. These events form the backdrop of Akhmatova’s major poem of the 1940s Poem Without A Hero, the plot of which “is loosely based on reality. A young poet, Vsevolod Knyazev, once the lover of the poet Kuzmin, fell in love with Olga Sudeikina and wrote many passionate verses to her; but after being coldly rejected, he shot himself on April 5, 1913 (New Style), and died on April 7” (Reeder 382).

xv The movement of peasant art was a kind of primitivist movement, seeing the images and materials of peasant artifacts as usable for conscious artistic creation. The movement was simultaneously nostalgic for a fast disappearing peasant culture and intentional anti-intellectual. For some artists, it relished a high degree of barbarism. Musical equivalents include Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite and Stravinsky’s sensational three early ballets, but also his later Les Noces. Diaghelev’s original choreography and Gonchorova's original sets and costumes for The Rite of Spring fully manifest the Peasant arts movement aesthetic as it sought to celebrate to pre-Christian Russian cultures.

xvi “Klyuyev’s origins partly explain the pose he affected. He always wore a high felt hat, of the kind worn by prosperous Russian peasants t the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a poddyovka or an armyak (peasant coats), tarred Morocco or box calf boots, an embroidered Russian shirt reaching to his knees, and a silk cord with tassels for a belt. The Old Believers’ style of dress was meant to divert attention from his [Mongolian] feature and figure” (Zavalishin 91-2). Klyuev is variously described as Mongolian, Mongoloid, Eskimo, Samoyed and Lapp.)

xvii At a later date, Esenin was married for awhile to the American dancer Isadora Duncan, but eventually returned to the Soviet Union.



xviii Lourié was an important composer who served Lenin’s government after the Revolution as the first Soviet

Commisar of Music, but eventually fled to Paris and later the USA. Two recent CDs (ASV CD DCA 1020 and Telarc 4509-98440-2) attest to the rediscovery of his long-forgotten music. A few years after this scene, Lourié and Akhmatova were lovers briefly later in 1913. Throughout their long lives they held the highest regard for each other (Reeder “Mirrors” 20).

xix Livshits described one of Akhmatova’s “entrances”: When Akhmatova sailed in, in a tight-fitting black silk dress, with a large oval cameo on

her belt, she had to pause by the entrance in order to write her latest poems in the pigskin bound book handed her by the insistent Pronin. (in Reeder 64)

Georgy Adamovich writes: I was stunned by Anna Andreyevna’s appearance. When people recall her today they sometimes say she was beautiful. She was not, but she was more than beautiful, better than beautiful. I have never seen a woman whose face and entire appearance, whose expressiveness, genuine unworldliness and inexplicable sudden appeal set her apart anywhere and among beautiful women everywhere. Later her appearance would acquire a hint of the tragic: Rachelle in Phaedra, as sip Mandelshtam put it in his well-known octet. He made this comment after a reading at the Stray Dog Cafe when Akhmatova, standing on the stage with her “pseudo-classical” shawl falling off her shoulders, seemed to ennoble everything around her. But my first impression was different. Ann Andreyevna almost constantly smiled, laughed, and exchanged cheerful, sly half-whispers with Mikhail Leonidovish Lozinsky, who tried to persuade her to act I a more serious manner, as becomes a famous poet, and to listen to the poems more attentively. For a minute or two she would be silent, and the once again gain begin to joke and whisper. When she was finally asked to read something, she immediately changed and almost seemed to go pale; the future Phaedra was lurking behind the scoffer . . . . (64)

xx By 1913, Mandelstam wore full sideburns in the style of Pushkin, perhaps to subdue the prominence of his large ears.

His acquaintances are almost unanimous in their testimony concerning the exceedingly poor figure that Mandelstam cut in the milieu that included the dashing, though far from conventionally handsome, Gumilyov and the poignantly beautiful Akhmatova . . . . Most witnesses agree as to the initial impression created by the young Mandelstam: it was unprepossessing, to say the least of it. His head was large, far too large for the scrawny neck on which it seemed to be imperfectly balanced, for it was always thrown back . . . . Thin and emaciated, the face was sharply featured. His large forehead had begun to expand very early with the recession of his hairline, which left only a forelock in the middle, and was framed by a mass of reddish, curly hair, the quality of which is everywhere described as ‘downy.’ His ears protruded noticeably. (Brown Mandelstam 49-50)

xxi This is the second piece from the Ten Small Pieces, Op.12. xxii This episode is based on a slightly different actual episode. “When the Italian Futurist poet and dramatist

Marinetti came to the Stray Dog in 1914, Lourie gave a lecture on the “art of noise,” and when Richard Strauss visited, Lourie played a Gluck gavotte in his own modern arrangement, after which Strauss got up and went over to the piano to compliment Lourie” Kats and Timmenchik in Reeder 68.

xxiii Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Khlebnikov and others initiated the Futurist movement. They were centered in



Moscow. They saw the mission of poetry to tear down the false institutions of the past and to open the path to a socialist brotherhood in the future fostered in part by the industrial progess and the triumph of the machine. They later supported the Bolshevik Revolution. Musical equivalents are Mosolov’s The Steel Foundry and the ballet Steel in particular, but also some of the works of Miaskovsky and Gliere in the 1920s. Pasternak moved away from Futurism although he retained his strong Moscow identity.

xxiv Information to design this poem comes mainly from Jakobson 25-32 and Chukovsky 44-46 and Rothenberg

320-50. xxv This remark was recorded by Mikhail Karpovich as quoted by Brown (48), albeit in a different context and

later date. xxvi Throughout her life, Akhmatova’s public readings are similarly described by memoirists; the drape of her

shawl, her distracted gaze with half shut eyes, particularly when reciting, and the chanting enunciation “ ‘with a crack,’ which lent . . . a special charm” Reeder 224, 264.

xxvii This is Mager’s translation of:

Вce мы бражники здесы блудницы, Как невесело вместе нам! На стенах цветы и птицы Томятся по облакам. Ты курицы черную трубку, Так cтранен дымок над ней. Я наде ла узкую юбку, Чтоб казтасья еще стройней. Навсегда забиты ококши: Что там, изморозь иль гроза? На глаза осторожной кокши Похожи твои глаза. O, как сердце мое тоскует! Не смертного ль часа жду? А та, что сейчас танцует, Непременно будет в аду.

—I январа 1913 xxviii Despite the profound ideological differences between Futurists and Acmeists, and despite Mayakovsky’s

political prominence under the Bolshevik Soviet state and the increasing discrediting of most of the Acmeists during the 1920s, his high regard for Akhmatova’s poetry, right up to his final tormented and suicidal months, is frequently described. In particular he had by memory many of her poems dealing with the torments of love and would often quote them.

xxix Adamovich records this episode as told by Reeder 66. xxx To construct this poem, I have relied heavily on the critical analysis by Oleg A Maslenikov. xxxi Reeder (17, 21) describes the details of Akhmatova’s failed attempt to divorce Gumilyov. xxxii This poem is built from one cited in Sinyavsky 57.



xxxiii “Akhmatova’s letters to von Shtein reflect a pattern of coping that appears in her poems as well as in her

personal life. When someone tried to hurt her—a lover, a critic, the state—Akhmatova built a psychological wall around her inner spiritual and creative resources, overcoming the situation imposed from without, and achieving not so much a state of numbness or indifference as one of inner peace that allowed her to endure. However, this pattern also made her appear remote and cold in contrast to her counterpart from Moscow, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva, whose solution to pain inflicted from without was an explosion of fury and wrath” (Reeder 21).

xxxiv In 1915 Mandelstam wrote a striking poem about Akhmatova (poem No.59 in the New York edition) that

Clarence Brown translates thus:

Half turning around, O sadness, she glanced at the uncaring crowd. The pseudo-classical shawl falling from her shoulders turned to stone. The dire voice, hopelessly intoxicating, unfetters the depths of the soul: Thus Rachel used once to stand— And indignant Phèdre.

Reeder translates the same poem thus: Half-turned, oh grief, She gazed at those indifferent. Falling off a shoulder The neo-classical shawl turned to stone. Ominous voice—bitter intoxication— The soul unfetters one’s entrails Thus—Rachel once stood— As indignant Phaedra. (Reeder 64)

As Brown argues in depth, Akhmatova’s image did seem to unfetter Mandelstam’s soul for his two untitled Phaedra poems (New York edition No.81 written in 1915 and No.82 written in 1916) have intertextual references to the Akhmatova poem. The Phaedra poems assume tremendous significance when we realize that in Mandelstam’s highly structured volumes, No.81 is the final poem in is first book Stone and No.82 is the opening poem in his second book Tristia.

xxxv In his book, Brown several times describes Mandelstam’s public readings. He quotes Yelena Tager:

At that time, all poets more or less observed the meter in reading their poems aloud, but Mandelstam’s reading was more than rhythmical. H didn’t just scan or pronounce his lines—he sang them like a shaman seized by visions. (69)

Another description comes from Mikhail Mabo who ”feared that the occasion would turn out to be a fiasco, but he found, as did many others, that Mandelstam underwent a remarkable transformation when he stood before an audience to recite his poetry.” Brown goes on to quote Mabo:

He came out onto the stage with his head lowered and had the appearance of such a queer fellow. But when he had begun to read he was instantly transformed, just as if he had caught fire with some holy flame . . . And when he left the stage, accompanied by stormy applause, he was a totally different man. (80)

Brown also quotes Nadezhda Pavlovich: The most interesting evening was the one at which Osip Mandelstam gave a public

reading—the first since his return to Petrograd.



He brought some magnificent poems, and Blok listened to him with great interest,

especially to his poem about Venice, which recalled to Alexandr Alexandrovich [Blok] his own Venetian impressions.

Mandelstam’s face was not striking on first glance. Thin, with slight irregular features, he reminded on in his whole aspect of the people in Channel’s paintings. But then he began to read, in a sing-song way and slightly rocking to the rhythm of the verse. Blok and I were sitting side by side. Suddenly he touched my sleeve softly and with his eyes pointed toward the face o Osip Emilevich. I have never seen a human face so transformed by inspiration and self-forgetfulness. Mandelstam’s homely, insignificant face had become the face of a seer and prophet. Alexandr Alexandrovich was also astonished by this. (88)

xxxvi Biographers, translators and editors transliterate Russian names differently into English. I have used,

except when noted otherwise, the spellings from Chukovskaya’s The Akhmatova Journals because they conform most closely to Russian name-use customs.

xxxvii Spelling for this name is from Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope. xxxviii The complex relationship between the art historian Nikolay Punin and his two wives and various mistresses

is not the subject of this libretto. Akhmatova and Punin maintained a domestic relationship for fifteen years, but early on, when housing become scarce, he moved his first wife, Anna Yevgenyevna, and their daughter Irina in. In time, Punina assumed more the role of head of the house, with Akhmatova relegated to a small room. Akhmatova did have a pleasant relationship with the child and tutored her in French. Later when Irina had a daughter of her own, Akhmatova took the role of grandmother. Anna Yevgenyevna Punina died in 1943, and Nikolay in 1952 in a gulag camp where he had been imprisoned since 1949.

xxxix This conversation is reported by Reeder, p.197. xl This conversation is reported by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, p.30 xli This incident is described by Reeder, p.141. xlii Details described by Reeder, p.145. xliii Nikolai Gumilev’s “The Giraffe” is translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago in Selected Works. xliv Akhmatova and Amedeo Modigliano, the painter, had had a brief but significant affair in Paris

during the winter of 1910-11. Modigliano did a couple of drawings of Akhmatova including a famous one often reproduced in books by and about her. He died in 1921. She learned of the death when one day she was at the World Publishing House in Leningrad and saw an obituary in a foreign magazine (Reeder 133).

xlv The secret police was known as The Cheka, members of the force as Chekists. Later the force was known

successively as the OGPU, GPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB and the KGB. xlvi The last 3 lines of the first section of the Prelude to “Requiem,” translated by Don Mager. Black Marias

was a popular euphemism for the cars used to carry away arrested persons. xlvii Stalin’s use of the nickname for Boris, and later the diminutive form, can imply many things: that he

regard’s Pasternak as a friend, that he is condescending to him, that he is speaking as if to a child, or that he is granting him the rare honor of being addressed as a peer.

xlviii The portions of this speech in quotation marks are paraphrased from Akhmatova’s account in “Osip

Mandelstam,” a memoir written and revised several time between 1957-63, My Half-Century, pp.102-3.



xlix The reference is to line 7 of “Mandelstam’s Poem On Stalin (November 1933)” as cited in Hope Against

Hope, 13. l This memorable image is used in Requiem, the Epilogue I, lines 3-4. Mager’s translation reads: I have learned how faces disintegrate, How guardedly they peep out on the world, How cuneiform lines cut Into cheeks, incisive and hard . . . (Epilogue 1-4) li Hope Beyond Hope is the title of Nadeshda Mandelstam’s memoir. lii Hope Beyond Hope is the title of Nadeshda Mandelstam’s memoir. liii Hope Beyond Hope is the title of Nadeshda Mandelstam’s memoir. liv The events of these arrests are described by Reeder, p.202, as quoted from the wife of the novelist Mikhail

Bulgakov, Yelena’s diary. lv Paraphrased from Mandelstam’s Complete Critical Prose and Letters, p.158, as quoted in the notes to My

Half-Century, p.376. lvi This is the title of Nadezhda’s memoir about her husband—one of the greatest autobiographies of all time. lvii This dialogue enacts the opening lines of Requiem “IN PLACE OF AN INTRODUCTION.” In Mager’s

translation: “In the dreadful year of the Yezhovshina,lvii I stood in line for seventeen months outside a

Leningrad prison. On one particular occasion, someone “identified” me. Then a woman standing behind me with lips blue from cold, who surely never before had heard me called by my name, seemed to gain consciousness from a daze and spoke close to my ear (everyone there spoke in whispers):

Ah, can you describe this? And I said: —I can. Then something like a smile slipped across what was her face. Leningrad, 1 April in the year 1957” lviii Paraphrased from Meyer’s translation of Akhmatova’s “Osip Mandelstam,” My Half-Century, p.106. lix This speech is loosely based on “An Address Broadcast On The Program “This Is Radio Leningrad”

(September 1941)” in My Half-Century: Selected Prose by Anna Akhmatova, p.258. The speech in the liberator borrows some phrases from Ronald Meyer’s translation and changes the emphasis somewhat from Akhmatova’s original. Biographers, translators and editors transliterate Russian names differently into English. I have used, except when noted otherwise, the spellings from Chukovskaya’s The Akhmatova Journals because they conform most closely to Russian name-use customs.

lxi Mager’s most violent wrenching of dates and chronological sequence occurs with the dating of this scene.

Whereas Akhmatova give 27 December 1940 as the inception of “Poem Without A Hero,” I place it one full year later. I do this for two reasons. One, to set the siege during the full bombardment of Leningrad by the German Nazi army. The blown out window and the shelling are images from the poem, including the maple tree at the window, so this change of mine is not inconsistent with the tonality of the poem. Second, I want the radio broadcast to end act two.



lxii Olga-Glebova Sudeykina went to Paris in the early 1920s and for a long time hoped that Akhmatova might

join here or that she might return to Leningrad, for she never made a good adjustment to émigré life and was unhappy there (Reeder 178). The two women lost touch with each other for many years. Olga died in 1945.

lxiii Malmstad and Bogomolov discuss in detail Kuzmin’s last semi-public reading on October 11, 1925 and

view it as a sort of swan song for the “homosexual” art coterie to which he had been a figurehead. Akhmatova attended as the photograph reproduced in their book attests (between pages 252-253).

lxiv This poem is entirely fictional as is the conjunction of memories of Sudeykina and Kuzmin as a prompting

for the first draft of Poem Without A Hero at the end of this scene. As with all major works of art, the inspiration, context, promptings, situation and motivations are far more complex than the scenario offered in this libretto suggests. DM

lxv Kuzmin was one of the earliest to review favorably Akhmatova’s early books of poetry. In 1923 he wrote an essay, while still asserting “I love them too much to wish them a creative path and not peaceful and deserved popularity” worried that popularity might drive both Akhmatova and Mayakovsky to the dead-end of self-imitation (see Reeder p.170).

lxvi These lines are quoted and paraphrased from the entry 5 September 1940 from Chukovskaya’s The

Akhmatova Journals: Volume 1: 1938-1941, pp.152-3.

lxvii Reeder quotes Chukovskaya (Reeder p.67). lxviii These lines are quoted and paraphrased from the entry 13 November 1940 from Chukovskaya’s The

Akhmatova Journals: Volume 1: 1938-1941, p.175.

lxix The idea to stage Akhmatova’s scenario for Poem Without A Hero comes from her. In 1959, she

envisioned the poem being recast as a ballet and wrote notes towards a libretto for such a ballet. Ronald Meyer has translated these documents in My Half-Century: Selected Prose (pp.139-ff.). I borrow a few details from these sketches, but take most of my staging cues from the poem itself, along with my own inventions.

lxx Although I admire much about Hemschemeyer’s translation of Poem Without A Hero and have learned

much from close comparison of it with the original and from Hemshemeyer’s notes, I chose not to use it in this libretto. Instead I have made my own complete translation of the poem. The eleven excerpts used for the writing-scene come from my translation. DM

lxxi The final published edition of Poem Without a Hero has several dedicatees. “First Dedication” is “In memory of Vs. K.” (Vsevolod Knyazev). “Second Dedication” is to “O.A.G.-S.” (Olga Glebova-Sudeykina). “Third and Last” is to the guest from the future, i.e. the English philosopher, Isaiah Berlin.

lxxii I quote from the translation of Zhdanov’s speech given by Reeder (p.292).

Works Cited



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Akhmatova · Music Outline Act 1 (approximately 55 minutes) 1. Dialogue and chorus 14. Arietta:...

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