Research for this essay was assisted by grants from the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council and the Joint Committee on Soviet Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the US Department of State under the Russian and Soviet Studies Research and Training Act of 1983 (Title VIII). I would like to thank Michael Lopez for his comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this essay.

1. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 8, 18 Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, “What is an Author,” in Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Bouchard, Donald F., trans. Bouchard, Donald F., Simon, Sherry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–39Google Scholar, esp. 117; Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music-Text, ed. and trans. Heath, Stephen (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–43Google Scholar.

2. Jakobson, Roman, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” trans. Brown, Edward J., in Erlich, Victor, ed., Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 164 Google Scholar; Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 143. For a provocative discussion of the notion of the “death of the author” in modern French and Russian poetry, see Boym, Svetlana, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. This issue has been ably addressed by other Slavists, both in Russia and the west; one might note here the work of William Mills Todd III, among American Slavists. Among scholars who have followed the lead of Iurii Lotmann and Lydia Ginzburg, one might mention, inter alia, Boris Gasparov, Irina Paperno and Aleksandr Zholkovsky, practitioners of a semiotics of culture that might be called the Russian answer to new historicism.

4. Of Grammatology, 15.

5. Megill, Allan, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 340, 347.Google Scholar

6. The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann, R.G. Hoilingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 396.

7. Megill, Prophets, 351.

8. The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 66.

9. “What is an Author,” 124. For an incisive discussion of the limits of Foucault's theory on Stalinist soil, see Holmgren, Beth, Women's Works in Stalin's Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 7–9.Google Scholar

10. Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), 178. Elsewhere in the same volume, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam recalls her husband's reproach: “Why are you complaining? … Only here do they really respect poetry—they kill because of it. More people die for poetry here than anywhere else” (167). It is easy to mythologize the situations in extremis in which poets are called upon to die for their verse. Whether poetry should ideally be a matter of life and death is a vexed question, to say the least; the fact remains that in certain circumstances, the poetic word has consequences that far outreach the limits of postmodern ecriture.

11. Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, 200.

12. “Believe me, I've had it up to here/With the triumphs of a civic death,” Akhmatova complains in one late lyric (“Torzhestvami grazhdanskoi smerti,” Sochineniia, v. 3, 502). She explains the nature of her premature burial and “posthumous existence” in her essay on Georgii Ivanov's Peterburgskie zimy (1961): “They stopped publishing me altogether from 1925 to 1939 … I was witness to my civic death for the first time then. I was thirty-five years old …” ( “On Petersburg Winters,” in Akhmatova, Anna, My Half Century: Selected Prose, ed. Meyer, Ronald (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1992), 57.Google Scholar

13. Trotskii, Leon, Literature and Revolution, trans. Strunsky, Rose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 171.Google Scholar

14. Mandel'shtam refers to “Stalin's book” in his last lyrics, written in Moscow before his final arrest. The phrase itself is taken from his chilling “Stanzas” (Stansy), written in July 1937, as printed in Osip Mandel'shtam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. P.M. Nerler (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), v. 1, 316–17. On Stalin as the master artist who fulfills avant-garde dreams of fusing life and art, see Sinyavsky, Andrei, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Turnbull, Joanne (New York: Little, Brown, 1990), 93–113 Google Scholar; and Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, , Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Rougle, Charles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 Google Scholar.

15. Akhmatova, Anna, “Mandel'shtam (Listki iz dnevnika),” Sochineniia, ed. Filipoff, Boris and Struve, G.P. (vs. 1–2, Washington, DC: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1968, v. 3, Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), 2: 181.Google Scholar

16. Quoted in Naiman, Anatoly, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, trans. Rosslyn, Wendy (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 128.Google Scholar

17. Mandel'shtam, Osip, “Literary Moscow: The Birth of Plot,” The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Harris, Jane Gary, trans. Harris, Jane Gary, Link, Constance (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 152 Google Scholar. All further translations of Mandel'shtam's prose will be taken, with slight modifications, from this edition.

18. “Poema bez geroia,” Sochineniia, 2: 125.

19. “O Mandel'shtame,” Den’ poezii 1967 (Leningrad, 1967), 167. Eikhenbaum's notes on Mandel'shtam were never completed; although they were written in 1933, they were published for the first time only several decades later.

20. Mandel'shtam, Osip, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Struve, G.P., Filipoff, B.A. (vs. 1–3, Washington, DC: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1971, v. 4; Paris: YMCA Press, 1981), 1: 202.Google Scholar

21. Quoted in Fleishman, Lazar, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. “Mandel'shtam,” Sochineniia, 2: 179.

23. On Mandel'shtam's recitations of the epigram, see E. Polianovskii, “Smert’ Osipa Mandel'shtama I,” hvestiia (23–28 May 1992); and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Vospominaniia: kniga pervaia, esp. 88, 96–98 165–70. According to both sources, Mandel'shtam's interrogator at the Liubianka Prison denounced the poem as a “provocation” and a “terrorist act. “

24. In his notebooks of 1931–1932, Mandel'shtam recognizes the real-life implications of certain kinds of speech: “Only in government decrees, in military orders, in judicial verdicts, in notarial acts and in such documents as the last Will and Testament does the verb [or “word “—the modern Russian for “verb” coincides with the Old Russian term for “word,” glagol] live a full life” (Complete Critical Prose, 469). By treating his “Stalin Epigram” as a de facto Will and Testament, Mandel'shtam could thus compete with the verdicts and decrees whose “full lives” threatened to deprive him and other Russians of their own more vulnerable lives.

25. Complete Critical Prose, 438, 317.

26. Complete Critical Prose, 316–17, 314; Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 157–158.

27. “Vse ushli i nikto ne vernulsia,” Sochineniia, 3: 72.

28. Sochineniia, 1: 361; translation taken from Amert, Susan, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 32.Google Scholar

29. “Journey to Armenia” (1933), Complete Critical Prose, 372. Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 170, 214, 169. On the role of articulation in Akhmatova's late poetry, see Amert, In a Shattered Mirror, 32–34.

30. Andrei Sinyavsky quotes Voloshin in Soviet Civilization, 233.

31. Complete Critical Prose, 415–16.

32. “Poema bez geroia,” Sochineniia, 2: 101.

33. Bulgakov's phrase is taken from The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita, 1940).

34. “And now I'm writing, just as before, without corrections/My verses in a burnt notebook,” Akhmatova notes in a poem of 1956 ( “Son,” Sochineniia, 1: 291). I am endebted to Amert's discussions of Akhmatova's “burnt notebooks” and “poems written for the ashtray” in In a Shattered Mirror, 143–51.

35. Amert demonstrates that Akhmatova's poem, is engaged in a complex, revisionary dialogue with one of the most popular stalinist-era hymns, “Song of the Motherland” (Pesn’ o rodine) (In a Shattered Mirror, 30–59).

36. Akhmatova quotes Mandel'shtam in her recollections of the poet (Sochineniia, 2: 185).