Anna Akhmatova Quotes

You dreamt of me, I knew,
And hence I couldn't sleep.
The lantern flickered blue
And there my path ran steep.

[...]

"This is a lake," you thought.
"There is an island here..."
Just then, on the darkened road,
A little blue light appeared.

By wretched sunlight severed,
You stirred and moaned in pain,
And for the first time ever,
You called me by my name.

And this tenderness was not like
That which a certain poet
At the beginning of the century called true
And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all-
It rang out, like the first waterfall,
It crunched like the crust of bluish ice
And it prayed with a swanlike voice,
And it broke down right before our eyes.

Place down the poison right before me
To take my voice out of my chest
And wash away my shameful glory
Into the gleaming nothingness.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed ... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

Without love, I'm more at ease, I'm sure.
The sky is high, the mountain wind is sweeping,
And all my thoughts are innocent and pure.

Before this grief, mountains must bend down
And rivers stop,
But prison locks are strong,
And behind them are the labor-camp bunks
And the deadly tedium.
For others the fresh breeze is blowing,
For others the extravagant sun sets -
For us everything is the same, we know nothing,
We hear only the keys and their hateful grinding.
Only the soldiers' stiff steps.
We get up as for early Mass in the city,
The savaged city, and coming
We meet ourselves, the dead, the unbreathing.
The sun is low, the Neva misty,
It is only in the distance that hope is singing.
The sentence . . . and at once tears,
Now everything has been taken,
The rest of life, torn from her heart,
Knocked backwards by a hoodlum
And yet she walks . . . stumbles . . . alone . . .
Where are they now, unwilling friends
Of years in Hell?
What visions do they see in Siberian snow-storms?
What hallucinations in the circle of the moon?
I send them this goodbye and wish them well.

My shadow serves as the friend I crave.

In Dream

Black and enduring separation
I share equally with you.
Why weep? Gove me your hand,
promise me you will come again.
You and I are like high
mountains and we can't move closer.
Just send me word
at midnight sometime through the stars.

1946

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.

In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

Now prisoners will come back home, and two Russias will look each other in the eye,
the one that put in prison and
the one that was put in prison.

Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,
Though you are the sister of the river willows,
I will kill you with my singing,
Without spilling your blood on the ground.
Not touching you with my hand,
Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,
But with your unimaginable groans
I will finally slake my thirst.
From her, who wandered the earth before me,
Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,
From her, who still exists in the ether
From her you will set me free.

But don't raise your eyes in defiance,
Protect my life, my dear.
They're brighter than first violets,
But deadly to me, I fear.

I am a Bard..."
(From Avetik Isaakian, Armenian Poetry)

I am a bard – I am a heaven bird,
I need no any richness of the world.

I love a flower and so charming lass
In aromatic springs that never pass.

I love a whisper, very gentle and long,
And, in full silence, a despondent song.

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I defend
Not my voice, but my silence

Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.
In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.
But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shing head they will flutter
And fall-and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.
And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedient gaze will feast upon them-
With a reverent hand,
Love will gather their rotting remains.

A loss, but who still mourns the breath of one woman, or laments one wife? Though my heart never can forget, how, for one look, she gave up her life.

Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief.

And just how many city skylines
Could have evoked my tears,
But I know just one city in the world,
And I can find it, blindfolded, in a dream.

Let love be the gravestone
Lying on my life.

You will not live again.
You will not rise from the snow
Twenty-eight holes from the bayonet
Five from the gun.

I have made a shroud for my friend,
Sad cloth.
She loves, loves blood
This Russian earth.

Monstrously giving birth to yourself,
Admiring yourself and choking on yourself,
Are you not, alas, the only tie
Between good and evil, earthly pits and paradise?
It seems to me that you are always on the boundary.

All my contemporaries
hundred-and-fivers or convicts
will tell you how we lived
in barely sentient fear, raising
children for the executioner,
prison, or the torture chamber.

Each and every day, I get
One letter like a bride.
I'm responding to my friend,
Writing late at night:

"On my way into the dark,
I've stopped in white death's den.
My dear, don't leave an evil mark
On another man."

And a brilliant star gleams
Between two trees at night,
Calmly promising that dreams
Will soon be satisfied.

None of the places where I grew up and live in my youth exist any longer: Tsarskoe Selo, Sevastopol, Kiev, Slepnyovo, Gungerburg (Ust-Narova).
The following have survived: Khersones (because it is eternal), Paris - by somebody's oversight, and Petersburg-Leningrad, so that there would be a place to lay my head.

How I love, how I loved to stare
At the ironclad shores,
On the balcony, where forever
No foot stepped, not mine, not yours.

And in truth you are -- a capital
For the mad and luminous us;
But when over Nieva sail
Those special, pure hours
And the winds of May fly over
You past the iron beams
You are like a dying sinner
Seeing heavenly dreams...

Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.

You thought I was that type: that you could forget me, and that I'd plead and weep and throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare, or that I'd ask the sorcerers for some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift: my precious perfumed handkerchief. Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul vicarious tears or a single glance. And I swear to you by the garden of the angels, I swear by the miracle-working ikon, and by the fire and smoke of our nights: I will never come back to you.

A fairy tale from the terrible past,
My double goes to the interrogation,
And then comes from the interrogation,

In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.

Real tenderness can't be confused, It's quiet and can't be heard.

I myself, from the very beginning, Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium Or a reflection in someone else's mirror, Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. Already I knew the list of crimes That I was destined to commit.

I asked him then: 'What are you after?'
'To be in hell with you,' he said.

I'm not weeping, I'm not complaining,
Happiness is not for me.

A solitary sorceress: her shadow is still visible on the eve of the new moon.

And if I die, then who
Will write my poems to you?

In human closeness there is a secret edge,
Nor love nor passion can pass it above,
Let lips with lips be joined in silent rage,
And hearts be burst asunder with the love.
And friendship, too, is powerless plot,
And so years of bliss with noble tends,
When your heart is free and known not,
The slow languor of the earthy sense.
And they who strive to reach this edge are mad,
But they who reached are shocked with anguish hard -
Now you know why beneath your hand
You do not feel the beating of my heart.

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone 'identified' me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear - (we all spoke in whispers there):
'Could you describe this?'
I said, 'I can!'
Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you ... more proud ...

Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

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I knew: the gods turned once, in their madness,
Men into things, not killing humane senses.
You've been turned in to my reminiscences
To make eternal the unearthly sadness.

Thus I live, without singing at all.
Neither sky nor earth is for me.

Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.

How many poems did I not write?
They hang in the air around me, a weird choir,
And some day
May suffocate me...

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.

I know: yes, no, even I must tear off
The delicate daisy petals.
Everyone on earth is destined to feel
The torments of love.

This land, although not my native land,
Will be remembered forever.
And the sea's lightly iced,
Unsalty water.
The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,
The air is heady, like wine,
And the rosy body of the pines
Is naked in the sunset hour.
And the sunset itself on such waves of ether
That I just can't comprehend
Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,
Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.

No sadness, my soul's no more of this world.

Dostoyevsky knew a lot but not everything. He, for instance, thought that if you kill a human you'll turn into Raskolnikov. But we know now that one can kill five - ten, one hundred people - and go to the theatre in the evening.

I'm happy. But some beauty is nonesuch -
The gently sloping path across the wood,
The wretched bridge that's just a little skewed
And that, for which, I won't be waiting much.

Natural thunder heralds the wetness of fresh water high clouds to quench the thirst of fields gone dry and parched, a messenger of blessed rain, but this was as dry as hell must be. My distraught perception refused to believe it, because of the insane suddenness with which it sounded, swelled and hit, and how casually it came to murder my child.

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.

All ten years of my trepidations,
Each and every sleepless night,
I placed them all in a quiet word
And I voiced it – in vain, unsure.
You walked off and with order restored,
My soul was empty and pure.

- From "Confusion", Anna Akhmatova, Rosary

Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

And so the decades file by, torture,
Deportations, executions. Sing -
You see...
I can't

The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.
I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again ...
But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house.

I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, Who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.

And it seemed to me that there were fires
Flying till dawn without number
And I never found out things-those
Strange eyes of his-what colour?
Everything trembling and singing and
Were you my enemy or my friend,
Winter was it or summer?

Song falls silent, music is dumb,
But the air burns with their fragrance,
And white winter, on its knees,
Observes everything with reverent attention.

Native Soil

There's
Nobody simpler than us, or with
more pride, or fewer tears.
(1922)

Our hearts don't wear it as an amulet,
it doesn't sob beneath the poet's hand,
nor irritate the wounds we can't forget
in our bitter sleep. It's not the Promised Land.
Our souls don't calculate its worth
as a commodity to be sold and bought;
sick, and poor, and silent on this earth,
often we don't give it a thought.
Yes, for us it's the dirt on our galoshes,
yes, for us it's the grit between our teeth.
Dust, and we grind and crumble and crush it,
the gentle and unimplicated earth.
But we'll lie in it, become its weeds and flowers,
so unembarrassedly we call it - ours.

I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.

I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise.

There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.

This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from this course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.

We are all carousers and loose women here;
How unhappy we are together!

Autumn, whispering through the maples,
Pleaded: 'Die here with me!

The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.

That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

I marvel at everything as if it were new.

Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed,
And stands there like a window open wide
Into a hushed and brightly lit abode
Where something dreadful has occurred inside.

Forgive me that I ignored the sun And that I lived in sorrow.

He never asks for endearment, all quiet,
Only gazes at me all the time,
And he bears with a blissful smile
This distressing oblivion of mine.

Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree.

I'm silent. Silently, I'm ready
To be transformed, earth, into you.

We will not drink from the same cup -
Neither water nor sweet wine is ours,
We will not kiss as the sun goes up
Or gaze at the night, on the sill, for hours.
I breathe by the moon, you – by the sun

Don't kiss me, I am weary -
Death will kiss me.

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight

I've got no more tears or explanations.

Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out.

The poet has to die many times,
Foolish child: he himself chose this way -
He couldn't bear the first outrage,
He didn't know at what door he stood,
He didn't understand what kind of road
Would open up before him...

I have much to do:
I must kill my memories
down to the last one,
I must change my soul into stone ,
I must learn to live again.

There are Four of Us

I have turned aside from everything,
from the whole earthly store.
The spirit and guardian of this place
is an old tree-stump in water.

We are brief guests of the earth, as it were,
and life is a habit we put on.
On paths of air I seem to overhear
two friendly voices, talking in turn.

Did I say two?...There
by the east wall's tangle of raspberry,
is a branch of elder, dark and fresh.
Why! It's a letter from Marina.


November 1962 (in delirium)

Forgive me, that I manage badly,
Manage badly but live gloriously,
That I leave traces of myself in my songs,
That I appeared to you in waking dreams.

We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.
That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together.

Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible and nocturnal . . .

No other looked into her secret eyes.
Nobody dared.

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.

Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.

Is this why, for countless days,
In my arms I carried you,
Is this why your strength had blazed
Through your lively eyes of blue!

Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's messenger,
his huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed is wife and spoke to her:
'It's not too late, you can look back still

At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
the square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows of that upper storey
where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.'

Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
her body turned into transparent salt,
and her swift legs were rooted to the ground.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she never will be lost,
she who gave up her life to steal one glance.

1922-24

A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me ...

They soar, they are somewhere mid-flight,
The words of love and liberation
And I'm succumbing to stage-fright,
My lips – ice cold in trepidation.
But soon, where birches, thin and humble,
Caress the windows with their leaves, -
The voice of the unseen will rumble
And roses will be tied in wreaths.

How the miracle of our meeting Shone there and sang, I didn't want to return From there to anywhere. Happiness instead of duty Was bitter delight to me. Not obliged to speak to anyone, I spoke for a long while. Let passions stifle lovers, Demanding answers, We, my dear, are only souls At the limits of the world.

If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.

And in the depths of music, I didn't find the answer,
And again there was silence, and again the ghost
of summer.

But at this moment he surely knows sorrow
No less than the wise and the old.
It seems that his eyes have begun to grow narrow,
And their brilliant light is now cold.