Anna Akhmatova Quotes

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches. ~ Anna Akhmatova

N.V.N.
(translated by Jane Kenyon)
There is a sacred, secret line in loving
which attraction and even passion cannot cross,
even if lips draw near in awful silence
and love tears at the heart.
Friendship is weak and useless here,
and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,
because the soul is free and does not know
the slow luxuries of sensual life.
Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand. ~ Anna Akhmatova

The Last Toast

I drink to our demolished hose,
to all this wickedness,
to you, our loneliness together,
I raise my glass -

And to the dead-cold eyes,
the lie that has betrayed us,
the coarse, brutal world, the fact
that God has not saved us.

1934 ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter. ~ Anna Akhmatova

I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it. ~ Sara Paretsky

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... ~ Anna Akhmatova

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

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 ... ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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 ... ~ Anna Akhmatova

a grieved shadow hunts my body's warmth ~ Anna Akhmatova

No other looked into her secret eyes.
Nobody dared. ~ Anna Akhmatova

You do not know just what you've been forgiven. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Now that you're there, where everything is known-tell me:
What else lived in that house besides us? ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

I've ceased to smile long ago,
The bitter winds now chill my lips,
Another hope was just let go,
Another song was added since.
Against my will, I'll cede this song
To people's laughter and offense,
Because love's silence for the soul
Is too unbearably immense. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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! ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Cold clouds of incense
Hide the height of the sky,
A burst of wind and everything opens.
We understand. The drama is over,
This is not the third autumn.
This is death. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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 ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

On Hemingway: Have you noticed how lonely all people in his works are - no relatives, no family? ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

I've got no more tears or explanations. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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 ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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 ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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) ~ Anna Akhmatova

Let love be the gravestone
Lying on my life. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

That is why we love this city –
Dark and stern, and full of water,
And we love our separations,
And brief moments when we meet. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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... ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place. - ANNA AKHMATOVA, FROM POEMS OF AKHMATOVA, TRANSLATED BY STANLEY KUNITZ, WITH MAX HAYWARD ~ Kristin Hannah

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Everything's looted, betrayed and traded,
black death's wing's overhead.
Everything's eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?
By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July's sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.
And something miraculous will come
close to the darkness and ruin,
something no-one, no-one, has known,
though we've longed for it since we were children. ~ Anna Akhmatova

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

I, the half-mad mourner of buried days, ~ Anna Akhmatova

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people. ~ Anna Akhmatova

But Fear and the Muse in turn guard the place
Where the banished poet has gone
And the night that comes with quickened pace
Is ignorant of dawn. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything
For his art he dedicated himself
To the Great Work

I admired his single-mindedness
All through my twenties
I argued his case

Now I think he was a jerk
For skipping his daughter's wedding
For fear of losing his focus

He believed in the ancient enmity
Between daily life and the highest work
Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies

It is probably a middle-class prejudice
Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova
Should have raised her son Lev

Instead of dumping him on her husband's mom
Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed
I was not worthy of it

Lev never considered it sufficient
For her to stand outside his prison
Month after month clutching packages

And composing Requiem for the masses ~ Edward Hirsch

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

My shadow serves as the friend I crave. ~ Anna Akhmatova