Praise and Lament, Part 4: Direct Lament—Akhmatova's "Requiem"

Now I’d like to talk about two very different approaches to lament. One is what I would call direct lament. In this sort of work, the author makes it very clear that she or he is mourning the defeat or loss of something. The writer describes the condition of that loss in clear terms and the reader is in no way unaware or confused about the emotion the author is expressing.

Anna Akhmatova as sketched by Amadeo Modigliani in Paris, 1911

A good example of direct lament is Anna Akhmatova’s classic poem “Requiem.” Akhmatova wrote this poem in several parts during the darkest stays of the Stalinist terror, when all of the Soviet Union was in horrible fear of the deportations to Siberian labor camps, executions, and internal exile that marked this period in Russian history when the Communist Party ruled with through a network of repressive institutions. Akhmatova and her family and friends suffered greatly during this persecution, when as many as 14 million people were sent to prison or forced labor camps. The Stalinist purges took the lives of two of her husbands and her son spent many years in forced labor camps.

Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” about the Stalinist terror was written at great personal risk. The secret police had searched her house in surprise dawn visits and went through all her papers. She only was able to retain this long poem by having various friends memorize pieces of it, and then she reassembled the friends and the poem after Stalin’s death. One section was lost for years when she lost touch during World War II with one of the memorizers, and Akhmatova only was able to reconstruct that section years later when the two of them met accidentally on the street in Leningrad—there were no phone books allowed in the Soviet Union.

Here is the Prologue of “Requiem” in the English version by D.M. Thomas in his Akhmatova translation, Selected Poems:

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us, and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tyres of the Black Marias.

Black Marias were the vans that the secret police used to transport prisoners.

This is clearly a poem of direct lament. The reader knows that the writer is describing a terrible loss, and in deep mourning for that loss. One of the lines that haunts me is “Leningrad city swayed like/A needless appendix to its prisons.” The prisons have become the raison d’être, the reason for being of this great cultural capital, which Akhmatova describes as now mainly good for supplying inmates for the gulag.

“Requiem” is a masterpiece, and even more moving because Akhmatova somehow turned her country’s most terrible hour into something stately and, well—beautiful. That is an enormous victory, even while her family and her nation and justice suffered so many awful defeats. I recommend reading the whole poem to get a fuller sense of her enduring achievement.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Dramatic Monologue: Part 2, Pros and Cons

The dramatic monologue has many advantages for a writer. The form allows for a distance between the author and the speaker. In a dramatic monologue, the person using the "I" is by definition not the author. Why should that matter? With distance, the burden of self-disclosure is lifted. By its nature, the dramatic monologue tends to preclude self-pity or gut-wrenching confession, no matter how intimate the subject. Interestingly, the distance between the author and the speaker sometimes allows for a more personal revelation, since the writer does not have to claim the material as autobiographical. Sometimes we are most truly ourselves when we are wearing masks.
            By standing in the shoes of a character different from ourselves, we are able to show the unique ability of writing to empathize with another person. Film and theater, for instance, can only show a person from outside. In a dramatic monologue, a writer has the ability to actually understand the thoughts of another human being.

The disadvantages of the dramatic monologue include the fact that the reader is sometimes not sure at any given moment if the content is real or fictional. The reader might not be certain whether to trust the content. so the impact may be lessened. The authenticity of autobiography is also missing. A writer may use a persona as a mask, and hide or lose awareness of his or her real thoughts and/or emotions.

For these reasons, the dramatic monologue fell out of favor for many years. This change of aesthetics began with Anna Akhmatova and the Acmeist poets in Russia in the early twentieth century, starting with Akhmatova’s first book, Evening, published in 1912.

Frontispiece of Akhmatova's first book, Evening

Akhmatova wrote, “I’m somewhat anti-Browning. He always spoke in another character, for another character. I don’t let anybody else speak a word (in my poetry, it goes without saying). I speak myself and for myself everything that is possible and that is not.” Akhmatova says she is “anti-Browning,” because Robert Browning was the acknowledged master of the dramatic monologue in poems such as “My Last Duchess” and “Andrea del Sarto.”
            Akhmatova's viewpoint was echoed by Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, and an important chronicler of this generation of Russian writers: “In poetry, every word is a confession, every finished work is part of the poet’s autobiography…”

The eclipse of the dramatic monologue continued during the decades of confessional poetry that began in the 1950s with the writing of U.S. poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Identity politics of the late 1980s and the decades that followed also made dramatic monologues somewhat suspect, especially when the author and the speaker of the monologue were not from the same background. If the speaker and the author were not of the same origin, many readers felt that the author was attempting to speak for or appropriate the material of another group.

In the last decade or two, the dramatic monologue has made something of a comeback. Poets such as Cornelius Eady, Julie Sheehan, and Robert Thomas have reclaimed the form. The pendulum has swung back, now that identity politics has made many vital points, and confessional poetry has explored in depth a range of topics approached by authors testifying from a standpoint very close to their own. Dramatic monologues are now making a comeback.

Remember when you write a dramatic monologue that it’s a form meant to be spoken aloud. Read your drafts out loud to make sure they sound like a character is speaking in their own, individual voice, telling their story. That voice can and should be very different from your own. 

The Dramatic Monologue, Part 1: Roots

___________________________________________________

Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

For the Russian Writers Protesting Putin’s Crackdown on Dissent

A remarkable event happened in Moscow on, May 13, 2012. Twelve Russian writers organized a walk to protest President Vladimir Putin’s recent attacks on dissidents, and 10,000 Russian citizens turned out to join them, defying police and the recent mass arrests and physical attacks on demonstrators in Moscow and elsewhere. I salute all those brave human rights protestors.

That amazing event in 2012 was an attempt to reverse the Russian government’s brazen crackdown on dissent, including the military’s statement that they would conscript any young men protesting Vladimir Putin’s third inauguration as president, and the arrest of more than 650 who were demonstrating against the swearing-in.

The turnout for the May 13, 2012 walk by the Russian writers, from the statue of poet and playwright Aleksander Pushkin to the statue of playwright Aleksandr Griboyedov, was testimony to two important facts. First, a great many Russians revere their writers and love literature. Not a small thing, in the age of reality TV and gladiator-style entertainment. Second, Russian writers have often stood side by side with the people of Russia. From novelist Leo Tolstoy freeing his serfs, to poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s revolutionary politics, to Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam circulating secret poems to protest Stalin’s purges, to Solzhenitsyn’s documentation of Soviet prison camps, Russian writers have taken a strong stand in support of human rights. 

The bond between Russian writers and the Russian people is closely connected to the moral vein in that country’s writing. When I say “moral,” I don’t mean “moralistic.” I mean bravely speaking out in the face of dictatorship, or dictatorial actions by the current government.

North American authors have much to learn from the example of the dozen Russian writers who called the 2012 protest walk. Where are the writers of the United States protesting the enormous weight of debt that burdens so many households in our country, when annual interest rates on credit cards soar above 20%? Where are the writers calling for demonstrations against the U.S. dependence on fossil fuels? When are writers going to announce a protest of our military budget, now $700 billion annually, while our people lack health care and quality schools, and the number of homeless is in the hundreds of thousands?

Yes, writers are marginalized in the U.S., but part of that we have inflicted on ourselves, by avoiding the issues that are most pressing for our people.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer