A.A. Akhmatova. Important autograph manuscript of "Poem Without A Hero", Part One, with corrections, 1963-1964

AKHMATOVA, ANNA
Important autograph manuscript of Poema bez geroya ("Poem Without A Hero"), Part One, with annotations and emendations throughout, signed ("Anna Akhmatova") at the end, Leningrad, 1963-1964

a fair copy of the complete text of Part One written in violet ink, with Akhmatova's near-final authorial and editorial revisions in orange crayon (a few in another hand), which are reflected in the final published text, including deletions of the names of the protagonists, Olga Sudeikina, Osip Mandelshtam and Vsevolod Knyazev (replaced with initials: cf pp. 4, 27 & 29), also including a small ink drawing of the striped Milestone on page 15 (line 157), the front wrapper annotated and dated by her ("Rejected and excluded / Moscow 1964") and, the title inscribed by her with the motto "Deus conservat omnia" (the device on a shield above the house where she began the poem) and her later annotation "in a separate section / Beg vremeni ['The Flight of Time']"
33 pages, folio (c.29.5 x 21cm), comprising a card wrapper inscribed by the author (Moscow 1964), title and 31 pages, brown and white papers, paginated by Akhmatova in blue crayon (1-8, 10-32), the text apparently complete although there is no page 9, the title annotated and signed by Alexey Surkov in red crayon ("Refused"), Leningrad 1963 and Moscow 1964, unbound, some creasing and small tears to margins, slightly affecting the text on page 1,

THIS IS THE AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT OF AKHMATOVA'S LONGEST AND BEST-KNOWN POEM, UNPUBLISHED IN RUSSIA DURING HER LIFETIME. Anna Akhmatova (née Gorenko, 1889-1966) is one of the great Russian poets: we have no record of any substantial autograph manuscript by her appearing in the West. This manuscript reflects the vicissitudes she endured, with a devastating note of rejection by a leading Soviet literary apparatchik on the title, her response on the front cover ("Rejected and excluded") and her subsequent alterations.

Poem Without a Hero occupied Akhmatova for over two decades (c.1940-1962). Fragments of Part One from an early version were published in Leningradskiy Al'manakh in 1944-1945, but they were severely criticized by Zhdanov and Akhmatova continued to revise the work. A fuller version was published in New York in 1961, and the complete authorized text in 1967, the year after her death. Akhmatova had approved a "final version" with Amanda Haight in London in June 1965 (she visited England to accept a doctorate conferred by Oxford University); she died in March 1966. This fair copy contains Part One complete, running to nearly five hundred lines, but not Parts Two and Three (together they add a further 200 lines, 698 lines in all); instead she marks the end "finale".

The note of rejection on the title page, signed by the apparatchik journalist and critic Alexey Surkov (1899-1983), reflects a fairly predictable Soviet reaction to her celebration of the "Silver Age" of Russian culture. Surkov was on the Communist Party's Central Audit Commission and apparently advised Akhmatova against publishing the poem. She prefaced Chapter Three (p.27) with her request that she might at least be allowed to publish this chapter without the first two. She then annotated the page in blue crayon: "rejected" (p.27), subsequently being granted permission to alter it for a set date (the 10th). In the event, her only alteration is to line 402, where the word "plil" is changed to "styl", so that the line "Over the Silver Age swam" now reads to "Over the Silver Age froze". Akhmatova may have hoped Surkov would support her because he had been involved in publishing anthologies of her poems in the years 1958-1961. However, he had criticized their perceived religious content and the author's failure to appreciate the iniquities of pre-revolutionary Russia or embrace the Soviet state. Later, in 1976, Surkov wrote an introduction to the first complete Russian edition of Akhmatova's poems, which included both the final and the earlier "Tashkent" versions of Poem without a Hero.

Akhmatova dates the present text "Leningrad 1963", and on the wrapper "Moscow 1964", so it presents a mature and largely complete text, very close to the 1965 version, and apparently including what must be her final or near-final corrections, after being initially rejected. For example, on page 20 (lines 248 & 249), three words are deleted from the prose description of Olga’s appearance on "Brocken", the mountain in Goethe's Faust. On the next page, two words are deleted from her description of Olga as Columbine and Donna Anna, including the word "legendary" immediately before "The Commander's Footsteps". This is on one level a reference to Aleksander Blok's poem 'Shagi Komandira', but also to the other Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Of particular interest is the drawing of the Milestone, which Akhmatova elsewhere identifies as a central character of the poem: "the Poet in general, the Poet with a capital P (something like Mayakovsky)"

Part One is the emotional...