ABSTRACT
The lines about the silver age in Poèma bez geroia (400-402 in Akhmatova 1976, edited by V.M.Zhirmunskii) are in the Third Chapter of Part One, in the evocation of Petersburg in 1913, on the eve of what Akhamatova called, in lines 425-426, “not the calendar, but the real twentieth century.” Lines 393-426 of this chapter, according to Akhmatova’s “stage directions” (which precede every chapter of this essentially dramatic, or libretto-like poem), are “muttered by a wind, whether reminiscent, or prophetic, one cannot tell.” They were originally published, as part of an excerpt which comprised lines 268-285, 393-402, and 415-420 under the title “Nineteen-thirteen” and was included in the cycle “The Pace of Time” [“Shag vremeni”], during the brief period when Akhmatova could appear in print before the disaster of 1946, in Leningradskii al’manakh (1945: 211):
Zhirmunskii’s commentary to the words “silver age” is extremely laconic: “The beginning of the twentieth century used to be called
[nazyvali] the silver age of Russian poetry in contradistinction to the “golden age” of Pushkin’s epoch” (Akhmatova 1976: 516). R.D.Timenchik, in his indispensable edition of Poèma bez geroia (Akhmatova 1989a) that includes a rich selection of conveniently arranged contemporary background literature, adduces, in the section entitled “The Last Year,” a passage from Vladimir Veidle’s [Wladimir Weidlé] essay “Three Russias,” originally published in Paris, in 1937, in the 65th issue of Sovremennye zapiski, and later reprinted in New York (Veidle 1956: 71-108). It is this passage that B.Gasparov (1992: 16) mentions, with an expression of indebtedness to Timenchik, as an example of the use of the term “Silver Age” preceding that by Akhmatova. A subtle though superficial essayist and a minor poet, V.Veidle (1895-1979) was quite influential as a critic, and his study of Russia as a brilliant failure cannot fail to impress those readers who are not familiar with the sources of his inspiration (he seldom acknowledged borrowed ideas). This is what he wrote about the silver age in 1937:
This expostulation by Veidle is an echo, partly polemical, of Berdiaev’s notions of Russias spiritual Renaissance in the early twentieth century as formulated in 1928 and 1935, but even more apparently, especially in Veidle’s use of the term “silver age,” it is a development of the terminology inaugurated in the émigré Russian press by Nikolai Otsup, whose essay “The Silver Age” (1933) will be discussed in the next chapter.
