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PARTISAN REVIEW
not only after the transfer of the capital back to Moscow, but after its
name change in 1924. Neither Soviet degradation during the 1920s and
1930s, nor the wholesale death and ruin caused by the Second World
War and the nine-hundred-day siege, could destroy its legend. Mandel–
starn, whose sense of identification with the city had once been as strong
as Akhmatova's, gave up on it, and called it, after 1925, "an ordinary
Soviet city." N adezhda Mandelstam said in 1974 that for her Leningrad
had become simply a museum for tourists, a mausoleum. For Akhmatova,
however, a museum was where at some future time the muses might still
kick into life, a memorial place that needed to be kept intact and au–
thentic, even if only in words. Unlike Osip Mandelstam, who died in
Gulag in 1938, Akhmatova survived until 1966. Up until the 1960s she
gathered about herself a group of young peots. Some of those whom she
tutored, encouraged, and nourished, like Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry
Bobyshev, differed from her in their talents and styles. These poets and
the others in the group came to be known as "Akhmatova's orphans,"
and continued the "Petersburg theme," giving it an even more
"Akhmatovan" twist by adding more irony to it.
Today, Akhmatova's reputation depends much less on her poems of
helpless subservience to her two "masters," passion and the muse, than on
what Brodsky, in the brilliant essay included in his book,
Less Than
aile,
calls her role as "the Keening Muse," the poet of Russia 's great sorrows
and losses. This mode begins with her poems of the First World War in
which "I" becomes "we," and the prevailing tone is that of lament. [n
Hemschemeyer's translation of "July, 1914," for instance, Akhmatova
laments:
Low, low hangs the empty sky
And a praying voice quietly intones:
"They are wounding your sacred body,
They are casting lots for your robes."
Among these poems of grief for suffering Russia that appear with
greater frequency in her work from this time on, three long ones stand
out: "Northern Elegies," "Requiem," and "Poem Without a Hero." [n
these poems, "the shadow of passion and songs soon vanished from my
memory." They were inscribed instead in the "grim book of calamity."
"Northern Elegies," a cycle of reminiscent lyrics, evoked the St. Pe–
tersburg-Leningrad of different epochs, from the 1890s on, with great
atmospheric verisimilitude and an overall tone of somber reflection, an
exceptional account of the "dark city on the dread river." "Requiem,"
now Akhmatova's best-known work, depicts and is dedicated to the
women who stood in line outside prison doors to awa it news of hus-
