Life in a Black Shoe
An essay on Anna Akhmatova and
Sylvia Plath written by Anita Konkka
Translated by Hildi Hawkins
1
When I was young, I was an enthusiastic reader of the Russian
classics, which disparaged women along with women's novels and the women who read them. I
internalised the masculine viewpoint that women cannot write, which was later
detrimental to my career as a writer. I believed that women are unable to be interesting
because they do not question western culture or its norms. Because I did not know women
writers, I imagined that none of them had written honestly and critically about paternal
power or dared break the fourth commandment; and, young and daring as I was, I decided to
do so. The result was my first novel, Irti (Breaking Free) A couple of years had gone by
since the book's publication when I found on the bookshelf of a woman friend who had
returned from the United States a collection of poetry written by Sylvia Plath, then still
unknown in Finland. My friend said she was a good poet, so I began leafing idly through
the book, until her poem Daddy caught my eye. It felt as if an electric shock had gone
through me as I read the first verses. Of everything I had read, only Dostoyevsky's The
Brothers Karamazov had hit me in the same way as Plath's poem. Perhaps the reason for the
strength of my physical reaction was that in both texts fathers are killed.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time-
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal...
If I've killed one man, I've killed two-
the vampire who said he was you
and drank my blood for a year
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
I read the sixteen verses of the poem with my cheeks on fire,
holding my breath. I was amazed - no woman had ever written of her father in such a way.
Even I had not had the courage to write that my father was a fascist, with a love of the
rack and the screw:
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
the boot inn the face, the brute
brute heart of a brute like you.
I wanted to know who was this extraordinary woman, who wrote that
she have lived in a black shoe like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white, / Barely
daring to breathe or Achoo, for only a woman who was completely liberated from
paternal power could write like this. I went to the university library to find out more
about Plath, and realised that she was not as unknown as I had thought. Even in the early
1970s, a great deal had been written about her life and death.
"Daddy" had been written, with about thirty other poems, in October 1962, when
Plath had decided to separate from her poet-husband Ted Hughes. In the poem, the images of
father and husband melt together into a vampire that sucks blood for seven years, almost
as long as Plath and Hughes' marriage lasted. The disappointment and rage caused by their
separation led Plath to write poetry different from any previously written by a woman. All
the poems in her posthumously published collection Ariel seem really good to me. They are
many times better than the texts written during her marriage. She knew it herself, but
killed herself nevertheless, less than four months later.
Who knows but that I might be Plath's spiritual double, I thought when I read that her
spiritual mother had been Virginia Woolf. Plath, too, had admired Dostoyevsky, Yeats and
the Christian mystics St Theresa and St John of the Cross. She, too, had been interested
in eastern religions, dreams, mythologies and Tarot cards. She had been a typist in a
mental health office; I had done the same work in an educational advisory centre. Writing
was as difficult for her as it was for me. We had received good upbringings at home and
were full of invisible restrictions and rage that sizzled under our good-girl roles.
Forcibly smothered feelings struck her dumb; when she should have begun to write, she
became depressed. It was easy for me to identify with Plath, for even the archetype of
father was the same, with the sole difference that her father had been born in Germany,
mine near St Petersburg. She was eight when her father died. My father died during the
week when I received the galley proofs of my first novel. After that, my father became the
vampire of my dreams.
When I was trying to begin my second book, Plath's The Bell Jar was constantly on my desk.
I sought in it inspiration for my own writing and read it again and again. I admired
Plath's sarcastic style and revelled in the malice with which she described hypocritical
American youths. I had met the same kind of young men in Finland. The United States and
Finland were not much different in their spiritual atmosphere; the culture of the 1950s
was repressive for young women. The opening sentence of the book, in particular, stirred
me: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I
didn't know what I was doing in New York. I remembered the execution, which had been much
discussed at home. I wanted to begin my own book equally impressively.
Plath published The Bell Jar in January 1963 under the pseudonym "Victoria
Lucas" so that her American relatives and friends would not know she had written
about them. The reception of the book was fairly positive but half-hearted; one critic
compared Plath to Salinger, another said she would yet become a good writer, once she had
learned to structure a novel. A third wrote in The Listener that "the book criticises
America in a way that a neurotic can do as well as anyone and perhaps better, and Miss
Lucas does it with real brilliance."
Images of death have been seen in the Ariel collection, but for me the Ariel poems are
liberated compared to earlier poems - as if Plath had found her own voice and power once
she had separated from Ted Hughes. Only then did she dare write better than her husband.
It is fairly common for the writing of a book to be followed by depression. Women, in
particular, are prone to it. For two thousand years women have been taught to be silent in
the name of God, to make sacrifices and to be unselfish: the lesson is deeply ingrained,
and is difficult to relinquish. Women still suffer from a punishing and guilt-inducing
super-ego, give up writing and, in the worst cases, kill themselves.
Virginia Woolf, too, suffered so badly from depression after each book that she could not
eat or sleep, and she tried to kill herself many times, until finally she succeeded. After
each book, the Angel of the Home attacked her to punish her for escaping its surveillance
and writing another book. The Angel of the Home was the name Woof gave to the super-ego
shaped by culture that dictated what a proper woman could think, say and do. And these
limitations on thought and action were very strict. Woolf could certainly see the
limitations of patriarchal culture, but she was not, in her own life, able to free herself
of the destructive influence of the super-ego.
2.
I lived the whole of the 1970s in a "private totalitarian state", as I defined
my condition when some friend of former times happened to ask me how I was. I was more
fortunate than Sylvia Plath, I did not commit suicide; I did not have a super-ego severe
enough to punish me by death, although I had indeed symbolically killed my father in my
first novel. Instead, it began to sabotage my writing. When I sat at my typewriter, I felt
myself freeze over with fear and could not get anything on to paper. I believed that I was
afflicted with a fateful neurosis caused by a primitive super-ego. It was, apparently,
"difficult if not downright impossible to cure", it said in the book. I believed
what I read. It was thirteen years before I was able to write again.
During that period, I read a great deal of prison and samizdat literature, in English.
translation, because it rebelled against paternal power taken to an extreme. I first
became interested in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova because it was forbidden in the Soviet
Union. Akhmatova wrote of women's concerns: love and suffering - and, what was worse, did
it well. She was also popular among young working women.
Critics condemned Akhmatova because she sang the same old love song, and her personal
themes did not expand to embrace philosophical and social problems. Her books were not
published after the late 1920s. In 1940 she escaped the ban for a moment, but her feminine
poetry-world appeared still to be a serious threat to the state, for in 1946 Andrei
Zhdanov gave a famous speech according to which Anna Akhmatova was half nun, half whore:
"Her poetry is limited and poor: it is the poetry of a frenzied lady of the upper
classes, oscillating between the boudoir and the chapel. The basis of everything for her
are erotic love motifs, which are entwined with themes of melancholy, sadness, death,
mysticism and judgement."
Behind Zhdanov's words hung the jealousy of Stalin; Akhmatova had become too popular, she
must be silenced. And according to the old, well-tried patriarchal pattern, women can be
silenced if they are called whores. But Anna Akhmatova no longer kept silence or abandoned
the writing of poetry as she had twenty years before. It was an irony of fate that
Akhmatova herself did not learn that the Central Committee had expelled her from the
Writers� Union until she happened to read it from an old newspaper that was wrapped round
some fish she bought in a shop.
I read Anna Akhmatova's poetry in English and, since I knew a little Russian, I tried to
read them in Russian too, for they had not yet been translated into Finnish in the 1970s.
Most of all I liked the poems of the Requiem series, for which Akhmatova said she received
the impulse after spending seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad during the
years of the Yezov terror. Once, a woman who stood behind her whispered, "Can you
describe this?" and Akhmatova replied, "I can!"
The poems of Requiem were in harmony with my depressed state of mind. I had been silent as
a writer for almost eight years; for two years I had not even kept so much as a diary. I
felt that I was living like a convict who did not know why she was being punished. When I
read Requiem, its simple lines began to murmur in my mind like an ancient song. The quiet
Don flowed, the yellow moon went into the house and a woman hummed:
This woman is sick,
this woman is alone,
husband in the grave, son in prison,
pray for me.
When Solzhenitsyn visited Akhmatova and heard the Requiem poems,
he said: "This is the tragedy of an entire nation, but for you it is merely the
tragedy of a mother and son." Anna Akhmatova did not contest him; and why should she
- she had, after all, grown up in a paatriarchal culture where everything that men do and
say is more important than women's actions.
In 1918 Akhmatova had married Vladimir Shileyko, a well-known Assyrologist. Shileyko was a
jealous man. He forbade Akhmatova to write poetry, but despite the injunction she wrote:
You forbid songs, poetry, and smiles
and, long ago, you forbade prayers.
Let's just never part,
you couldn't care about anything else!
So a stranger to earth and heaven,
I live and my songs have died,
as though you ripped away my free soul
from both heaven and hell.
Shileyko burned Akhmatova's poems in a samovar. To keep her
husband's love, Akhmatova abandoned poetry for some time and began, like a good Russian
wife, to write her husband's research to dictation. She believed she had solved the
problem of marriage when she married Shileyko: she would give her intellectual gifts over
to her husband's use and would no longer have to compete with him, as she had in her first
marriage with Nikolai Gumilyov. But the way of life of a traditional woman did not work;
her poems broke away like unruly revolutionaries.
A couple of years later came divorce, and in 1926 Akhmatova moved into a house on the
Fontanka with the art historian Nikolai Punin. Punin, similarly, did not value Akhmatova's
gifts as a poet, but said: "As a poet you are of local significance in Tsarskoye
Selo".
In her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam describes Punin as an intelligent, but coarse and
unpleasant man. With Punin, Akhmatova attempted that which she had failed with Shileyko.
She helped Punin in his work, wrote him lectures on the architecture of St Petersburg and
translated texts from French, English and Italian. During the daytime, she looked after
his daughter while his first wife went to work. She tried to be a wife to Punin and a
mother to his child. In the words of Amanda Haight, "Once more she sacrificed her
poetic gifts to achieve domestic happiness".
But the atmosphere at home was very tense and, in the early years, terrible, for Punin's
first wife would not accept Akhmatova's presence as an unmarried wife. The situation eased
only in 1940, when Anna said to the first wife, "Let's change rooms", and she
moved back in to the same room with Punin. The sombre atmosphere in the house on the
Fontanka is reflected in the few poems that Akhmatova wrote during those years:
I drink to the home in ruins,
to my angry life,
to loneliness together,
and it's to you I drink -
to the lying lips that betrayed me,
to the deadly cold eyes,
to the fact that the world is cruel and coarse,
and that God did not save us.
Later Akhmatova told her friend Lydia Chukovskaya that while
lived with Punin in the house on the Fontanka she did not write poetry for thirteen years.
But after her husband's arrest her poetry had flowered anew.
By chance, I found on a woman friend�s bookshelf - what on earth would have happened to
me in those days without my women friends and their bookshelves - Amanda Haight's study of
Anna Akhmatova's life and work. I learned that the poems of Requiem had been written after
a long period of silence when Akhmatova's son Lev Gumilyov and her third husband Nikolai
Punin had been been arrested.
Punin's name led me to the thought that perhaps Anna Akhmatova had wished to punish
herself. I thought, perhaps Akhmatova had been unconsciously seeking a judge and punisher
because she felt guilt. People generally find precisely the person they need. Akhmatova
said she was a bad mother and a bad wife and that she gave her son to her mother-in-law to
care for so that she could write poetry. She had separated from the poet Nikolai Gumilyov,
and he had been executed after their divorce. It happened in 1921 outside Leningrad,
according to some accounts at Koirankangas, close to my father's home.
Counter-revolutionaries were brought there at night, they were shot, their bodies thrown
into a shallow mass grave and roughly covered. Foxes and dogs dug up the graves and
carried hands and other limbs through the forest. At that time it was not yet customary to
execute members of the intelligentsia, so Nikolai Gumilyov's death attracted a great deal
of attention. Anna Akhmatova wrote after his death:
I brought disaster to my dear ones,
And one after another they died.
Oh, woe is me! These graves
were foretold by my words.
During my own years of silence I read my own story in the poems
of Akhmatova and Plath. I felt guilty over the death of my father, I had stopped writing
and become engaged to a man who hated writing women, which had increased my depression. At
that time, the lines of Akhmatova's poem echoed in my head like a comforting mantra:
No, this is not me - someone else suffers.
I couldn't stand this: let black drapes
cover what happened,
and let them take away the lamps...
Night.
Through Akhmatova's and Plath's poetry I was in touch with my
feelings, which I could not identify, express or even recognise in any other way. I
learned to listen to myself more carefully, and books by other women, too, began to be
important to me. Books written by men, even the Russian classics that I had earlier
admired, did not, I now believed, reflect the true image. Through their mirror I saw a
distortion of my life as a woman. Akhmatova and Plath, on the other hand, were like guides
to my own inner life, from which I had become estranged. Their poems were important aids
on the journey to spiritual fulfilment. Gradually I began to free myself from the dominant
super-ego of culture, which claimed, in a man's voice, that women cannot write, paint,
compose music or even make proper food, and that women do not have a sense of humour. I
could write once more, but the super-ego still sometimes gains a momentary hold over me.
After writing a book, I am depressed and in the sway of self-accusation; I am ashamed of
what I have written, want to destroy the manuscript and start over again.
Translated by Hildi Hawkins
From Shakespearen sisarpuolet. Naisellisia lukukokemuksia (Shakespeare's half-sisters.
Femininine readings), edited by Sara Hein�maa and P�ivi Tapola (K��nt�piiiri, 1994).
The translations of Anna Akhmatova's poems are by Richard McKane (Bloodaxe Books, 1989)
and Iudith Hemschemeyer (Zephyr Press, 1990)
� Anita Konkka, Hildi Hawkins
