On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche

Author:Stephen Marche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2023-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

A disquieting possibility: It may be that the best work forms itself in degradation and fear. Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet, lived a merry bright youth with seasons at the Summer Palace and portraits by Modigliani in Paris. She wrote banalities during all that merry brightness. The work that counted, the work that mattered, came out of the pure anguish of Stalinism. Anguished technique may be superior to merry brightness.

During the purges, Akhmatova lived on the charity of others in the “cesspit of communal homes,” after having been expelled from the writers’ union and forgoing her food ration card. Surveillance by the state was so total that she would place a hair in her notebooks to see if anyone had entered her house to read them, even though she would only ever dare to jot down banalities. While she survived barely, cooking in borrowed pots, cobbling together borrowed mittens and borrowed boots to equip her son for the gulag, she continued to write. She persevered even though she could literally not put words down on paper.

Her friend Lydia Chukovskaya described the unique process of the composition of Akhmatova’s masterpiece, Requiem. The poet had to write down her lines and have her friends memorize them before destroying any record of their composition.

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