Quote "Echo" of J. Keats in the Late Lyrics of Anna Akhmatova

Belousova Ol'ga Geral'dovna PhD in Philology English teacher, Department of English, Military University of the Ministry of defense 105066, Russia, Moscow, lane. Tokmakov, 13-15, sq. 8 gero@myrambler.ru

Anna Akhmatova in her late work embodied the vector of "longing for world culture", which Osip Mandelstam spoke about in 1933: "On February 22, 1933, speaking at the Leningrad Press House, Osip Mandelstam called acmeism "longing for world culture" ^[2]. References to numerous phenomena of world culture, sometimes hidden and encrypted, are present in Akhmatova's work after the 1930s. The theme of the "English trace", which is an important part of this spectrum of allusions, is considered in a number of modern studies by domestic scientists. Implicit and explicit references to Poe are considered in the study ^[12], "Shakespeare's trace" - in the works ^[6],[11]. Also, the author of this study has developed the topic of the connection of the text of the "Poem without a hero" with the poems of Robert Browning ^[15] and George Byron ^[17].

In relation to the multi-stage allusions presented in Akhmatova's texts, the principle of "mirror writing", explicitly indicated by the author himself, applies ("I write with a mirror letter..." ^{[9, p. 207]}, "mirror dreams of mirror" ^{[9, p. 173]}): in the quote used, as in a mirror, another (and another) cultural layer – the author compares it with a "mirror corridor" characteristic of pre-revolutionary architecture. Thus, references to Keats contain references to Boccaccio and Dante, and through them to Virgil.  

In the article, in continuation of the theme of the "English" layer of Akhmatova's late work, hidden and explicit references to the work of John Keats are considered. According to Valentin Berestov, "Akhmatova carried Dante's Divine Comedy everywhere with her. But for some time now she has not parted with a volume of Keats. She said that in poetry there has not been such a sound as Keats for a long time: in each line the voice seems to take off" ^[14]

References to Keats' work are present in the epigraph to the cycle "From the burned notebook": "And you art distant in humanity" (translated by Akhmatova from her notebooks – "And you are among the living, in the crowd of people" ^{[5, p. 194]}). This is a quote from Keats' poem "The Basil Pot", which in turn refers to another cultural tradition - Boccaccio's "Decameron". Keats creates a poetic arrangement of the fifth novella of the fourth day, dedicated to the murdered lover – the noble girl Isabella was in love with the servant Lorenzo, who, after learning about this love, was killed by her brothers. Lorenzo appears to Isabella in a dream and tells her where he is buried, after which Isabella digs up his head and puts it in a pot of basil, which from now on becomes her only friend. Lorenzo utters the phrase in the epigraph in a dream, addressing Isabella: having appeared to her, he informs her that he has become a spirit, a shadow, and now he is alone, and he is surrounded by the sounds of life and the buzzing of bees flying into the field. The bee is mentioned twice in Keats' poem: first as a symbol of the attraction of love:

And Isabella’s was a great distress,

Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove

Was not embalm’d, this truth is not the less -

Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers,

Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers ^[1].

Love is compared here with a bee flying to the sweetest nectar of the most poisonous flower. Let's pay attention to the word "embalmed" – Isabella suffered from love, and Lorenzo was by no means "embalmed", that is, he responded vividly to her love, and the beloved was drawn to him like a bee to a flower. The bees are mentioned for the second time already when they are circling over the dead Lorenzo – he is still equated with a flower and turns into a flower - pot with basil, which Isabella irrigates with tears. The cycle "From the burned notebook" is dedicated, as it is believed, to Isaiah Berlin – a man with whom Akhmatova was associated with short meetings and the power of attraction of love, despite the significant age difference [Solovyov]. The separation by the "iron Curtain" was no less irrevocable than the separation by death in Boccaccio's novella, and, addressing her distant hypothetical friend, Akhmatova used an epigraph containing a complex system of references to various cultural layers.

Keats' text also contains a reference to well-known culturally significant love stories: Isabella and Lorenzo are compared to Theseus and Ariadne, Dido and Aeneas, and the severed head refers to the context of the Christian myth of the beheading of John the Baptist.

Also, the epigraph from Keats associated with Boccaccio interacts with the epigraph to the last poem of the cycle, "After many years": "Men che dramma / Di sangue m'e rimasa, che non tremi" ^{[2, p. 36]}. This is a quote from the 30th song of "Purgatory" of Dante's "Divine Comedy": the words that Dante utters when he meets Beatrice in the world of the dead. As a rule, when referring to this scene, the following line is quoted, not included by Akhmatova in the epigraph – "Conosco i segni dell'antica fiamma" ("Traces of the fire of the past I recognize") ^{[2, p. 328]}, which in turn is a quote from Virgil's Aeneid – and thereby closes the theme of Aeneas and Dido – Dante and Francesca – Lorenzo and Isabella – the author of the cycle of poems and its addressee.

The word "embalmer" – "embalmer", the same root to the epithet "embalmed", used by Keats in the "Basil Pot", in turn, is the key in the "Poem without a hero". The quote from Keats' poem "To Sleep" is presented in the context of stanza 5 of Part 2:

And in the dream it all seemed that this

I'm writing a libretto for someone,

And there is no end to the music.

But a dream is also a thing,

“Soft embalmer!” The Blue Bird,

Elsinore terraces parapet ^{[9, p. 174]}.

References to three significant works are listed, two of which are plays (Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird and Shakespeare's Hamlet). In one row with them is a small sonnet by Keats. Valentin Berestov writes about this in his memoirs about Akhmatova: "What Keats meant to her is said in The Poem Without a Hero. ... "The Gentle Comforter" (Soft embalmer), which flashed in 14 lines of the sonnet, with the help of Akhmatova, entered the family of great romantic heroes, and the sonnet became equal to an entire play, such as "The Blue Bird". ^[14]. Grigory Kruzhkov also writes about the image of the "embalmer", noting its importance in the context of reading the theme of immortality: "But embalm, unlike balm, does not mean "to heal wounds" and not "to comfort", but "to embalm"; embalmer — "embalmer" or "embalming agent"; in a figurative sense, "that which keeps from decay, from destruction". In English, you can say: "The lines ought to embalm his memory" — "These lines should preserve the memory of him." ... Here it is worth bearing in mind that all of Keats' recent, mature poems are devoted to one topic — immortality. In Keats' creative imagination, sleep and poetry are always there. The dream snatches the poet out of the noise of everyday life and connects him with the vast silence of eternity.

Midnight and silence surround the heroine in the "Poem without a Hero". This thing of Akhmatova's is also a dream — a controlled, lucid dream, the super goal of which was to preserve, to save from oblivion the world in which she once lived, the people she knew "in those fabulous years" - the wasted, the dead, the disappeared" ^[10]. In this reading, embalmer resonates with the epigraph "Deus conservat omnia" and points to the preservation of "conservation" of images of deceased people through the lines of the poem. V. Berestov mentions Akhmatova's admiration for the sound side of the word "embalmed" – interested in the image of the "embalmer" from the ode "To Sleep", Akhmatova transferred this interest to the "Pot with basil", using an epigraph from it in a later cycle.

The key images of the ode "To Sleep" also penetrate into the text of the "Poem without a Hero". Keats' ode is dedicated to the opposition of light and darkness, and light is thought of as negative, and darkness as a blessing: the lyrical hero dreams of falling asleep, forgetting about the worries of the day. Moreover, a dream in such a reading can be equated with death, and this tonality is set by the phrase quoted in the Poem without a Hero: "soft embalmer": a dream "embalms" the hero's body, closes his eyes flooded with light. The hero explicitly asks twice to close his eyes, which again refers to the image of the deceased, to whom someone closes his eyes, since he cannot do it himself. The dream showers the lyrical hero with poppies – there is not only a reference to the soporific properties of the poppy, but also the image of a dead body strewn with flowers. The last two lines are a request to "turn the key and seal the casket of the soul" of the hero, that is, sleep lulls and locks the hero (closes the coffin) – the word "casket" used by Keats means not only the casket / casket, but also the coffin.

It is interesting that the author's translations of epigraphs both in the "Poem without a Hero" and in the cycle "From a burnt Notebook" rather obscure than expose these meanings. In the Poem without a Hero, Akhmatova uses the word "comforter", and in the translation of the epigraph to "From the burned notebook" she eliminated the word "distant", the key to the meaning of the phrase: the dead Lorenzo mentions that his beloved is far, far from him.

Also in the text of the "Poem without a hero" there is a veiled reference to the work of Keats through interaction with the ode "To sleep" and the image of the "English lady".

Keats' ode To Sleep has an original form that does not allow it to be fully recognized as a sonnet, although it has 14 lines. The first quatrain presents a cross–rhyming midnight – light and benign - divine. The same is observed in the following stanza: close – throws, eyes – charities. Then there are two non–rhymed lines Then save me, or the passed day will shine / Upon my pillow, breeding many woes – they do not rhyme with each other, the first one contains a rhyme to the words benign - divine, the second one to the words throws-close. The last quatrain again has a cross rhyme of lords – wards and mole – Soul. Thus, the poem has the following scheme: abab cdcd bc efef. It seems that in this way Keats wanted to dissociate himself from the form of the sonnet, that is, to show that not every poem in 14 lines should be read as a sonnet. In his sonnets, as a rule, the same rhymes are presented in the first two quatrains, with a cross or encircling rhyme (that is, abab abab or abba abba), then the tercets rhyme in variations of cde cde or cdcdcd. The rhyming scheme used in the ode To Sleep practically makes it impossible to consider this form as a sonnet – Keats brings the reader to the idea of a "sonnet – not a sonnet". We see the same thing in "A Poem without a hero" - "a poem is not a poem":

"Until now, in the most conventional, most approximate way, only increasing the feeling of annoying dissatisfaction, the stanza in which the Poem speaks about itself, not playfully "retreating and closing with a handkerchief" has been interpreted,

But she persisted stubbornly:

"I'm not that English lady

And not Klara Gazul at all,

I don't have a pedigree at all,

Except sunny and fabulous,

And July himself brought me."

That is, not an English romantic poem of the beginning of the XIX century, in which the author saw its origin not without reason, and not the dramatic plays of Prosper Merime, which he wrote on behalf of the actress of the traveling theater Clara Gazul, but - ?.. To answer this "eh?" Akhmatova leaves the reader" ^[13].

Commentators see in the image of the "English lady" not only a typical English poem – but also a very specific lady from another Keats poem, "La belle dame sans merci", dedicated to the love of a beautiful lady and a knight. This small work, like the "Basil Pot", was popular in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites who illustrated Keats. "A beautiful ruthless lady," according to commentators, is death itself ^{[4, p. 563]}: it is not by chance that after meeting her, the knight turns pale, fades and wanders aimlessly, not finding a place for himself. In this reading, there is a connection with the main plot of the "Poem without a hero" - a meeting with a deceased lover, a meeting of the living and the dead. The same theme is seen through the frame text of the epigraphs in the verses of the cycle "From the burned notebook".

Thus, quoting John Keats' poems "To Bed" and "A Pot of Basil" in the texts of "Poems without a Hero" and the cycle "From a burnt Notebook" connects the two texts together through the theme of the meeting of the living and the dead. In Boccaccio and Keats, a living Isabella meets a dead Lorenzo, in Dante, a living poet meets a dead Beatrice, in Keats's ballad about a Beautiful Lady, a fairy meets a knight, and it is unclear from the context of the poem which of them is alive and who is dead. Through a system of references to other texts embedded in epigraphs, the love of the lyrical heroine of the cycle and its addressee is embedded in the series "Ariadne – Theseus, Dido – Aeneas, Beatrice – Dante". Keats' texts become tools for connecting to the system of images of world culture, and a deliberately inaccurate translation is the key to the "sealed casket" in which Akhmatova hides these meanings for the dedicated reader.

The analysis of explicit and implicit references to the work of John Keats makes it possible to clarify, thus, the principle of "mirror writing" declared by Akhmatova: direct quotations and implicit references create a multilayered meaning of the work, deepening the levels of its understanding. The poem turns from a phenomenon of Russian literature into a phenomenon of world culture, a kind of "assemblage point" of various motifs, images and quotations.