CLICK HERE for a PDF manuscript entitled Us 4 Plus 4 of poems by  eight Soviet-era poets who wrote to and about each other. This posting is updated periodically, most recently March 3, 2008. Translations are by Don Mager. The preface to the anthology follows.

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"Raise your voice on their behalf . . ."
Tsvetaeva

 

". . . inimitable voice . . ."
Akhmatova

 

". . . portentous voice . . ."
Mandel'shtam

"We were people.  Now we're epochs."
Pasternak*

 

In 1961 while she was in a care center outside Leningrad, Anna Akhmatova wrote "Us Four" with epigraphs from poems by Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak written to her earlier in the century.  Thus four years before her death, the last living of them enshrined these four as the central poets of her era in Russia.  Ronald Hingley's 1981 Nightingale Fever: Russian Poets in Revolution unfolds the decades from the 1910s to the 1960s as their four careers.  He passes the narrative baton from one to another and transitions with references to poems from one or other to another.

 

For many, this pantheon of  "us four" still holds.  But when she wrote it, Akhmatova's poem was a deliberate reframing of an evolving definition, for in 1921 the fourth poem in Pasternak's cycle "Could I Forget Them" began with the line "Us few.  Perhaps us three--just . . ."  Addressed to Maiakovskii and Tsvetaeva, it is sometimes anthologized as a separate poem.  Two years later, in 1924 Tsvetaeva's "Us Two" narrowed the pantheon to just Pasternak and herself.

 

If we scan the entire 20th century, three other poets might have claims to join Akhmatova's four: Maiakovskii, Blok and Brodskii.   Maiakovskii's reputation has had its ups and downs.  For awhile it was artificially inflated by Stalin's canonization, but with the anti-Stalin campaign in the 1960s, his luster faded.  Recently a more balanced appraisal recognizes in his best work an incomparable psychological anguish, grandeur, verbal astonishment and delight.   At the beginning of the century Alexander Blok transcended the symbolist movement he led and by the time he died in 1921 was honored by all the poets in this anthology as second only to Pushkin among Russian poets--a place few today would dispute. 

 

After two impish 1911 quips by Mandel'shtam, the anthology begins in earnest in 1913 with the mutual admiration between Blok and a young Anna Akhmatova who had yet to publish her first book.  At the opposite end of the century, Nobel laureate Joseph Brodskii was among the handful of young poets ("Akhmatov's orphans" as they were sometimes called) whom she encouraged during the last decade of her life.  In terms of importance he might be the seventh but his career crosses none of the others except hers, even though he later was to write magnificently definitive essays about Tsvetaeva, Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova.

 

Since the fall of the Soviet Union dozens of poets--Gumilev, Kuzmin, Khlebnikov, Kliuev, Briusov, Sologub--have been republished in Russia.  Many of them are quite amazing.  Even so, Akhmatova's "us four" continues to define the period.

 

They are stunningly different from one another and in no sense represent a school.  The Petersburg poets, Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova, marched for awhile under the Acmeist banner, but their poems realize its aesthetic in almost opposite ways--her transparency--his density.  The Moscow poets Tsvetaeva and Pasternak were charged by the verbal experiments of various brands of futurism but neither signed up for the long haul.  Each found an independent path.

 

All four, as they chased the trajectories of their own muses, eyed each other and kept track of his or her achievements.  As Hingley shows their trajectories often crossed.   Tsvetaeva had intense brief amours--infatuation seems to slight a term--with both Mandel'shtam and Pasternak, and high voltage poems were exchanged.  Akhmatova and Pasternak materially supported Mandel'shtam and his wife after his arrest and exile to Voronezh. Pasternak also supported Akhmatova while her son and husband were in Stalinist camps.  He tried to give succor to Tsvetaeva after her return to the Soviet Union when her husband and daughter were arrested and he blamed himself for her suicide.

 

These four also honored each other with tributes as their careers streaked brilliantly across the white nights of Russian poetry and with elegies when those careers plummeted in wrenchingly unexplicatable suicides.

 

To Akhmatova's "us four" I add my "plus four."   Alexander Blok impacted the Akhmatova generation.  They wrote to him, and after his death, honored him.   Vladimir Maiakovskii was the dynamo of the age.  No one could pay attention to poetry in Russia between 1910-1930 and not react to his elemental originality. Of the four, all but Mandel'shtam wrote poems to Maiakovskii.  Sergei Esenin was the best loved and most prolifically printed and reprinted poet of the Soviet era.  His drunken, self-pitying, hooligan persona resonated powerfully with common readers and his lyric purity made his poems easy to memorize and set to music.  He was the first of the poet suicides under Soviet rule and his death sent tremors across the lives of the others.  Maiakovskii polemicized Esenin's suicide-poem in a desperate attempt to shore up his own vitalism, only to crash two years later.  Tsvetaeva's poem after Maiakovskii's suicide placed the two young suicides together before a posthumous inquisition.  Esenin did not enter the exchange that this anthology records.  I include him because of the poems written to him.  The most extensive and perhaps most profound of which was Nikolai Kliuev's Lament for Sergei Esenin, in which he lamented as much the passing of peasant Russia under forced collectivization as he did Esenin himself.  Its length excludes it and, not wanting to make exceptions to the us 4 plus 4 design, I dreaded that one exception would surely lead to another . . . and another__Ol'ga Berggol'ts poems about Akhmatova during the bombing of Leningrad, for instance.

 

Igor Severianin hobnobbed with Maiakovskii and Pasternak and performed in the traveling futurist road show.  Apparently a superb reader like the other two, his witty dexterous poems were enthusiastically received on first hearings, but stood up less well under readerly scrutiny.  Fashionable in the 1910s and 1920s, his status now is minor.  However, in 1934 after he left the Soviet Union for Estonia his volume Medallions was printed by an emigre press in Belgrade.  It consists of almost 90 sonnets, each a snapshot of some writer or composer.   Writers dominate with two thirds of them Russians and the rest European or American.  Except for Mandel'shtam he draws portraits of the other six.

 

His poems fit well in the weave of the other seven voices pitched so differently and nuanced so distinctly, who sing to one another across half a century.  Without thumbnail biographies, I let those voices in their "inimitable" and "portentous" individualities unfold the stories of us 4 plus 4.  Occasional footnotes fill biographical or textual gaps.

 

The anthology creates its own "inimitable" symmetry.  The two opening quips by Mandel'shtam in 1911, one to Akhmatova and one to Blok, are mirrored in the two final poems by Akhmatova, one to Mandel'shtam (1957) and one to Blok (1960).  She gropes around memories and looks over old manuscripts.  The first leads her back to the Petersburg of Mandel'shtam's and her youth when Blok was the Heldentenor  of the age.  The second leads her to a belated recollection of the night in 1938 when Mandel'shtam was arrested the second time, never again to be seen.  But Mandel'shtam's impish and boyish humor is just scarcely able to mask premonitions of doom.  His Blok is a poet of despair and retribution.  And Pasternak's expansive "Wind" of 1956 honors Blok for his elemental zest even as clouds of retribution mount.  Mandel'shtam's joke that a 22 year old Akhmatova could only be touched by an assassin who attacks her through her writing, is "portentous," for later in life she was indeed target to many such attacks.

 

Don Mager
Charlotte, NC
November 2006

*   In order epigraphs are from 'To my gathered loved ones going their way . . .", "Death of a Poet, "  "Akhmatova," and "Could I forget Them."