Letters to Celia Woloch

c/o Vins van Neerven, 

Hogerbeetsstraat 97 III, 

1052 VV Amsterdam, Netherlands 

   
Celia, my grlfrnd—                 Aug. Sept., 1992-93?

In the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. —Omni

AUG 20—Even in between sobs, it’s good to hear your voice via the Ma Belle satellite. And yes, I’m not writing much, lacking the focus. Where are the poems hidden? Why won’t they come?

Maybe this letter will open up the dam (Amster-dam: the 16th c. dam on the Amsterele river is real, not a metaphor. I’ve given into the timelessness of being at loose ends—with no agendas, hidden or otherwise—in a country not my own, seeking what oddities life has to offer.)

Where do poems come from? Page One of my notebook documents the oddities of The Final Frontier: After fighting nearly three years with Soviet bureaucracy for permission to hook up a computer telecommunications system with the Ukraine for a cultural exchange program, I finally let go of the idea. 

Then, shortly after April Fool’s Day, I received my first E-mail message from Oleg via GlasNET. Was it incongruous to read a satellite message transmitted half-way around the world that began with: “Cosmonaut lands, doesn’t recognize his own country?” 

Ex-lovers aside, how ironic: my first message from the new independent nation, Ukraine, is not about freedom, but about space, the final frontier. O-oh K.!?

Yes. Forgotten during the 1991 August coup, stranded Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev helplessly watched his country disappear: changing its name, anthem, and political order. The abandoned space program was officially broke with no way to get him home. 

Secret calls in the night; someone trying to sell Soviet space ships for hard currency. When Krikalev eventually returned to Earth after ten months in space, he didn’t recognize his own country. It was then discovered in the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. 

Moral: be careful of hasty conclusions and hearts stranded in space. Complex metaphor swiftly approaching from the starboard side. Will I regret not going to Russia after the Fall, and seeing for myself, the changes?

Letter to Poets & Writers, re. nonpayment for Don Meredith photo (no date)

Dear Debby Mayer,

Congrats on becoming managing editor of Poets & Writers. If my memory serves me right, I corresponded with you in regard to my listing in Poets & Writers.

I’m pleased that you used my photo of Don Meredith, page 19, July/August, issue, however, I’d love to also be paid as this is how I also survive as an artist. I do believe that Don Meredith mentioned this to you back in January when he sent you the story. Both Poetry Flash and APR pay me for my photos, as does the San Francisco Chronicle . Would you prefer an invoice?

I’ve been asked to review a video of Anna Akhmatova by video images, San Francisco, English translation is by Maryna Albert of Washington, also a poet. The video is very moving, and there are several story possibilities: a straight review, but I’ve never seen one in Poets & Writers, or a story in the making of the video which was banned in the USSR until last year year. 

I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience,

THE PERSONAL FILE OF ANNA AKHMATOVA (newspaper story)

In the film, Dr. Zhivago , at the funeral, Zhivago's brother says of the throngs of mourners filing past Zhivago's casket, those who love poetry love poets, and nobody loves poetry like the Russians.

But he could just as easily described the very real funeral scene of Anna Akhmatova—considered to be the high priestess of Russian poetry, and one of the great poets of the 20th century—in the documentary film, The Personal File of Anna Akhmatova , by Leningrad filmmaker Semyon Aranovich. 

In Zhivago , Anna's friend, Boris Pasternak captured a fragment of the darkness that must have descended upon Russia, as the material for the Iron Curtain was mined from the very psyche of her artists and intellectuals. The capital of culture, (and once the political capital of the USSR) St. Petersburg (Leningrad), with her mosaic of 101 islands wrested from the marsh, is said to be built on a foundation of human bones. 

In this dense, heavy, dark film, Aranovich effectively captures some of the real-life horror artists suffered while under the reign of Stalin. Akhmatova speaks, "The naked man on the naked earth. What a dangerous thing art is."

Russia has made great contributions to literary tradition: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Blok, Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, and of course, Akhmatova. 

Ironically, it was during my first visit to the USSR, in August of 1989, that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's work was allowed to be published for the first time, during that same epic month, Andrei Sakharov died, and the film, The Personal File of Anna Akhmatova, was broadcast on television. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Akhmatova were finally repatriated and reinstated—and filmmaker Aranovich as well. 

One of Stalin's first work camps bore this slogan, 'With an iron hand we shall lead humankind to happiness." On the green walls of Leningrad's Literature Club, I read a list: many of the world's greatest artists lived there, and during the Period of Stagnation, smuggled their work abroad.

Joseph Brodsky, who, as a young poet was befriended by Akhmatova, before he was forced to leave the Soviet Union for America, said "it depletes you by making you think of it all the time, and so you struggle with it, losing all your potential." 

In the film, one month before his own defection to the west, Solzhenitsyn tells Akhmatova "That's just what I thought— you are not silent, but write what cannot be published." 

And during the 1991 August putscht , I watched the film, only to hear the voice of Akhmatova utter, "August is always a frightening month for me. . . how many poems I did not write. . . I know beginnings and endings too. I did, probably, everything that could be done."

Born near Odessa in 1889, during the last days of the reign of the tsar, the spirited Anna Andrevna lived in the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in Tsarskoye Selo. At the age of seven, she knew her destiny, and changed her surname to Akhmatova, after the last prince of the Golden Horde. 

"When Papa found out about my poems he told me, Don't bring shame on my name. 'I can do without your name, I told him.' Only a crazy girl would choose a Tatar surname for a Russian pen-name!" she retorted.

She narrates: "The human soul is made in a strange way. Poems, even the greatest poems, never make the author happy." Though she suffered the full sting of Stalin's purges, Akhmatova's life itself was an act of courage: in 1946 she was silenced, expelled from the Writers' Union, and only partially rehabilitated after her death in 1966. 

"A writer with a frightened soul isn't qualified to be a writer," wrote her friend, Misha Zoschenko—who was banned at the same time. 

In 1912, her first book, Evening was published, and her son, Lev was born. "You are my son and my terror, . . .And I can no longer tell man from beast." she wrote. The second time her son was imprisoned for the crime of bearing his father's name—poet and counter-revolutionary Nikolai Gumilyov, executed in by the Bolsheviks in 1921—she suffered a heart attack that nearly killed her. 

No one is forgotten; nothing is forgotten— Akhmatova wrote of censorship, "I remember how the gods turned people / into things, not killing their consciousness." 

Akhmatova later committed nothing to paper: the poems, including her famous "Requiem" survived because friends memorized sections for her. 

"Requiem" is a chronicle of her wait in line outside the prison walls to see her son. An old woman asked," Can you describe this?" Akhmatova said, "Yes, I can." 

In Stalin's times, for many, the defiant act of poetry was the only way to stay conscious and sane. For this reason of bearing witness, the poet must never forget—for Akhmatova, to do so, was to commit a mortal sin. 

Later in the film, Anna says, "Solzhenitsyn gives us back our native languages and loves Russia with Blok called a "deadly insulted love." She refused to leave the Soviet Union, becoming "a forceful voice against oppression." Two years before her death, she was reinstated into the Writers' Union, Solzhenitsyn fled to the West to publish freely. 

Aranovich, who filmed archival footage of Akhmatova's funeral in  1966, risked arrest and was unable to show these images until now, under glasnost .

The story of the film itself, reads like the chronicle of Akhmatova's life: Aranovich was silenced when his footage of Akhmatova's funeral was confiscated by the KGB, the director demoted, and the footage remained missing for five years. 

According to the American translator of the script, poet Maryna Albert of Odessa Productions in Seattle, "Aranovich was told by someone to ask about the footage at the archives at Lenfilm Studios. He went with a bottle of vodka, and talked to the head archivist. They drank the bottle and Aranovich got another. Finally, the archivist says, 'I know what you're here for, your film, but you're not going to get it.' 

For almost 20 years they could not get ahold of the footage. Ironically, the only time it was shown was when the KGB wanted to know who was present at Akhmatova's funeral." 

Maryna Albert's own involvement in the film came about when she was in Russia in 1989, when she met a young musician who had just finished working on a film of Akhmatova. She saw the film, loved it, and met the director, Aranovich. 

In turn, she read him a poem she'd written at Akhmatova's graveside, translated by her friend, Leningrad writer and guitar -maker Yuri Dmitrievski. Aranovich liked the poem, and offered her the job of co-translating the Russian text of the film into English with Yuri. 

(Excellent translations of most of the poems and text of Anna Akhmatova are by Yuri Dmitrievski and Maryna Albert; three poems by Judith Hemschemeyer, from the recently released Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova , Zephyr Press 1990; two poems by Stanley Kunitz/Max Hayward from Poems of Akhmatova , Little, Brown & Company 1973.) 

The completion and subsequent airing of this important documentary film represents the banishment of repression not only for Aranovich. 

Yuri Dmitrievski who described Social Realism as "a monster nobody has actually seen with the naked eye," said "If you weren't killed, survival was agonizingly hard for anyone banished from the obedient herd. Consequently, there's scorn among Communists for anyone who is independent and, worst of all, creative."

Russian criticism of the film was that Aranovich objectified Akhmatova too much, placed her on a pedestal. She was more human, down to earth. Albert said the film, geared for Russian audiences, assumes those viewing the film are intimate with Russian history and literature. Not enough is explained for American audiences. 

"I tried to bring some clarity to the film, which is not always chronological." She was confronted with the added dilemma that the film had no separate sound track. Albert was able to make an American adaptation (2 and a half years in the making) funded by the Washington State Humanities Council, with only seven editorial cuts.

The 63-minute black and white film successfully weaves photographs and footage, often using pastiches, collage, overlays, and repetitive loops to achieve a visual poetic effect. Haunting, discordant music serves to enhance the nightmarish quality of some of the images—Stalin wiping his mustache over and over, or the wind riffling the pages of books.

The cult of Stalin juxtaposed against rows of animal skins, scored with Dmitrievski's percussive rendition of "Moscow Nights" and "Katushka" raises the hackles on one's neck. This is a dense film noir, requiring several viewings. Sometimes the subtitles go by so fast, there isn't adequate time to absorb them, and some of the text for the complete poems is almost too small to read. 

However, it's a film well worth seeing—especially as we in the west struggle to understand what Russia has already experienced, and what lies ahead.

Part of a growing Renaissance on the life of Akhmatova, the archival film will make its Bay WArea debut at the Mill Valley Film Festival in November, and it will be aired again in December at the Poetry Film Festival in San Francisco. 

An American companion film on Akhmatova—using much of Aranovich's original footage—"Fear and the Muse" will also air in November on KQED. And there is rumor of other documentary films on Akhmatova on the way.

Distributed by Oakland-based, non-profit national film distributor, The Video Project, The Personal File of Anna Akhmatova, is now part of their Glasnost Film Festival video series, the original 22 films which toured the US for over a year, have expanded to 33 titles. 

The Festival was brought to North American audiences in 1989 by the Citizen Exchange Council and the American-Soviet Film Initiative (Moscow).

The Video Project (originally the Educational Film & Video Project) was co-founded by Oscar nomination, I n the Nuclear Shadow: What Can the Children Tell Us? 1983, and Academy Award ( Women—For America, For the World , 1986) winning documentary filmmakers Vivienne Verdon-Roe and Ian Thiermann in 1983 to produce and distribute affordable alternative films and videos on issues crucial to our future on the planet. 

Verdon-Roe first saw the Soviet films at the Los Angeles premier of the Glasnost Film Festival. "I was quite unprepared for the emotional impact of these films. They are a vivid reflection of the changes sweeping the Soviet Union, a transformation that is now changing our world so dramatically. . . a society that is taking moral inventory of itself, trying to heal itself."

Over 150 films ranging from environmental to critical social issues such as the arms race, and Latin America—hard-hitting films rarely seen on television—are available for individual, or group rental or purchase at 5332 College Avenue, Suite 101, Oakland, CA 94618, or call (415)655-9050. Thiermann encourages grassroots groups to use the films to raise funds for their own efforts. Le Video in San Francisco and Video Droid in Mill Valley do stock some of their tapes as well.

I don't have a tear sheet for this, not edited version.

Maryna Albert & DJ Hamilton (not my photo)

Maryna Albert & DJ Hamilton. I never did learn his name. He ran off and joined the Pickle family Circus