Conclusions

Abstract

On International Women’s Day in 1942, Anna Akhmatova’s famous poem appeared in the pages of Pravda.¹ It was, of course, part of the increasingly traditional call to all Russians to the defense of their homeland, here imagined not as a territory or a population, but as a language, the ‘great Russian word’. Akhmatova’s appeal, published on the day in the Soviet calendar devoted to the celebration of women, addressed both women and men, evoking in its few short lines the awesome disasters threatening those on the battlefield and those in the rear. Yet this poem (perhaps especially in this translation) can potentially be misconstrued if the masculine is not read back into it. The title, of course, relies on that Russian word for ‘courage’ derived from the root for ‘man’ (muzh-’) and in the poem itself muzhestvo beats solemnly not once (as in this version) but twice, in its third and fourth lines.² If this English rendering conveys the sacrifice of life at both the front and the domestic rear with its falling ‘housetops’, the original was more ambiguous, referring not at all to houses under siege but only to those Russians ‘lying dead under bullets …[and] left drained of blood’.³ While Akhmatova’s intention was no doubt to include women here as victims of a merciless total war, one might ask if some readers would have imagined soldiers at the front as the chief sacrifice hailed in these lines.

We know what trembles on the scales, and what we must steel ourselves to face. The bravest hour strikes on our clocks: may courage not abandon us! Let bullets kill us — we are not afraid, nor are we bitter, though our housetops fall. We will preserve you, Russian speech, from servitude in foreign chains, keep you alive, great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children’s children pure on their tongues, and free.

‘Courage’ (Muzhestvo), translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward