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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
her manuscript, her literary isolation, and her aforementioned vision from
the time of "the fall of the Roman Empire":
No one knocks at my door,
Silence guards silence,
And the mirror dreams only of the mirror.
Brooding over her rejected lines about
1913
and the
commedia-del·
arte
tragi-comedy of Petrushka-Pierrot and Columbine that her socialist–
realist editor cannot accept, her muse unexpectedly stirs:
But the hundred-year-old cham1er
Suddenly wakes up and wants
To play. It has nothing to do with me.
Broad heroic gestures of the Romantic type - Byron putting the
torch to Shelley's funeral pyre - are out of the question, she realizes.
And yet, the muse promises:
"You and I will feast together
And with my royal kiss
I will reward your midnight malice."
Part three of the
poema
begins with a description of the Sheremetev
house during the siege. Akhmatova has been evacuated to Tashkent.
From there she vividly imagines the city of Leningrad under fire. All is
desolation and despair. She is a thousand miles away, and yet:
Our separtion is imaginary:
Weare inseparable,
My shadow is on your walls,
My reflection in your canals ...
Describing her own flight to Tashkent, she invokes an image of the
political prisoners who preceded her eastward, including her own son:
. the road
Down which so many have trod,
Down which my son was led,
And that funeral procession was long
Amidst the festive and crystal
Silence
