Notes
- There is no scholarship dedicated specifically to the topic of Akhmatova and the cinema, although there is much work on her poetry’s relationship to painting, most recently Ol’ga Rubinchik’s ‘Esli by ia byla zhivopistsem…’: Ipobrazitel’noe iskusstvo v tvorcheskoi masterskoi Anny Akhmatovoi (St Petersburg: Serebriannyi vek, 2010). See Alexandra Harrington, The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors (London: Anthem, 2006), pp. 49–64 for an overview of cinematic techniques in the early poetry. Works on Mandel’shtam and cinema are referenced in the discussion that follows.
- Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 2 vols, ed. by M. M. Kralin (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), II, 149. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated.
- Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols, ed. by G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov (New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967–1971), II, 115–19 (p. 117). The nickname ‘Velikii Nemoi’ was a commonly used affectionate term for cinema in the 1910s: Yury Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, trans. by Alan Bodger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 21.
- A E Parnis and R D Timenchik, ‘Programmy ‘Brodiachei sobaki’’, Pamiatnik kul’tury, 10 (1983), 160–257 (p. 232).
- See Osip Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. by Jane Gary Harris (London: Collins Harvill, 1991), pp. 301–302, and Zapisnye knizhki Anny Akhmatovoi (1958–1966) (Moscow and Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1996), pp. 353–358 and 368. Akhmatova was close friends with Batalov’s mother, Nina Olshevskaia and her husband, Viktor Ardov. Batalov wrote a memoir of Akhmatova (which makes no reference at all to her attitude towards cinema or her scenario), ‘Riadom s Akhmatovoi’, Neva, 3 (1984), 155–164.
- See S. A. Kovalenko, ‘Poemy i teatr Anny Akhmatovoi’, in Anna Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1998–2004), III, 379–468 (pp. 444–447); See also Anatolii Naiman, Rasskazy o Anne Akhmatovoi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1989), p. 132.
- Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts, ed. by Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1.
- Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. ix.
- See note 3 above.
- Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 2–3.
- See his After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 1986), in particular the chapter ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’, pp. 44–65 (pp. 47 and 57).
- Huyssen, p. 46.
- McCabe, p. 13.
- Acmeism is not a straightforward concept to define or characterise, and a number of poets were loosely associated with it at various times. For the sake of simplicity, this article treats Acmeism as a movement comprising six ‘official’ members: Zenkevich, Narbut, Gorodetskii, Gumilev, Mandel’shtam, and Akhmatova. See Justin Doherty, The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 7.
- Doherty, p. 65.
- Doherty, p. 102.
- Doherty, p. 148.
- Doherty, p. 138.
- Stephen Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: the Word as Image (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), p. 58. See also Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd edition (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 130.
- Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, pp. 120 and 7. He refers copiously to the Symbolist reception of cinema: see also pp. 149–153 (on Blok and Belyi), 26–27 (on Blok), 35 and 115 (on Georgii Chulkov), 50 (on Valerii Briusov and Konstantin Bal’mont), 179 and 211–213 (on Belyi).
- ‘Beglye zametki’, Nizhegorodskii listok, no. 182 (4 July, 1896), p. 3. See also The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, ed. by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London and Cambridge, MA, 1988), p. 25. The quotation is from Leyda, pp. 407–409, which includes a full translation of the text as an appendix. Laura Marcus discusses the review in her The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 72–75. See also Birgit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2009), p. 537.
- Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 6.
- See Tsivian, ‘K istorii sviazei teatra i kino v russkoi kul’ture nachala XX v. (‘istochnik’ i ‘mimikriia’)’, in Problemy sinteza v khudozhestvennoi kul’ture, ed. by A. V. Prokhorov, B. V. Raushenbakh and F. S. Khitruk (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), pp. 100–114 (p. 100) on the process of exchange between cinema and traditional art forms and see also Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), p. 32.
- Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, p. 21.
- See Leyda, pp. 61–62 and 128–130.
- Hutchings, pp. 60–61. See also Boleslav Rostotsky, ‘Mayakovsky and the Cinema’, in Vladimir Mayakovsky: Innovator, trans. by Alex Miller (Moscow: Progress, 1976), pp. 120–136., and Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, pp. 12 and 61.
- See Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, pp. 133–134 and 109.
- ‘Zhiznopis’, Kinematograf, no. 2 (1915), p. 3.
- Gorodetskii, p. 3.
- See the chapter ‘Early Silent Film Theory’, in Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 22–33 (p. 27).
- In his dissatisfaction with contemporary filmmaking, in fact, he finds some common ground with the Symbolists: a similar attitude was expressed by Blok not long after, when he lamented that cinema had fallen into the hands of philistines who favoured high society subjects (Leyda, p. 130).
- Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 197.
- Jane Gary Harris, in The Collected Critical Prose, p. 603; S Vasilenko, B Miagkov, and Iu Freidin, the editors of ‘Mandel’shtam o Kinematografe’, Pamir, no. 10 (1986), 162–173 remark that he neither understand nor accepted the cinema (p. 162).
- ‘‘…Strashnoe, pravdivoe i mstitel’noe iskusstvo’: Osip Mandel’shtam o kinematografe’, Iskusstvo kino, no. 3 (1988), 79–86 (p. 79). The article continues in issue no. 4 (1988), 82–95 (hereafter, I and II respectively).
- Mandel’shtam, I, 30–31.
- For instance, ‘Tennis’ and ‘Kazino’ (1913 and 1912 respectively). See also Timothy C. Harte, ‘Game, Set, Stanza: Modern Sport in Russia and the Poetry of Osip Mandel’shtam’, Russian Review, 59 (2000), 353–370.
- ‘Symbolism’s Successors’, in The Noise of Change: Russian Literature and the Critics (1891–1917), ed. and trans. Stanley Rabinowitz (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986), pp. 218–247 (p. 235).
- Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 200.
- Such as Doherty detects in ‘Kazino’, for instance (pp. 194–195); Zhirmunskii, p. 235.
- See Tsivian’s section in Early Cinema in Russia, ‘The Evolution of Names’, pp. 20–23 (p. 20).
- The Collected Critical Prose, pp. 97–99 (p. 98).
- Zorkaia, I, 82.
- See Beth Holmgren, ‘The Importance of Being Unhappy, or, Why She Died, in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, ed. by Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 79–98 and Tsivian, ‘Early Russian Cinema: Some Observations’, in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, ed. by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 7–30 (pp. 7–8).
- Akhmatova associates silent film specifically with Paris in her memoir of Modigliani. In 1911, the Symbolist writer Leonid Andreev remarked: ‘Recently I happened quite by chance to hear a number of writers and artistes talking about cinema-theatre and I became convinced that by its very essence cinema continues to remain the same old unfamiliar stranger, licentious and somewhat repellent to people who have had an aesthetic and academic education. An artistic Apache, an aesthetic hooligan, an idle and predatory accessory on the wheel of true art — that characterises the attitude of the majority of those who spoke about this marvellous guest (Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, p. 27). Although he is enthusiastic about cinema, and censures others for their elitist attitude, Andreev still implies that it is a ‘guest’, rather than a native phenomenon.
- Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, p. 178.
- Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, p. 165.
- Stam, p. 22.
- The Social History of Art, IV (1962), (London: Routledge, repr. 1989), p. 243.
- Henri Bergson’s perception of cinema as giving a false impression of continuity might underpin this idea. See Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, p. 8 and Hilary L Fink, Bergson and Russian modernism, 1900–1930 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 64–77.
- Rubins, p. 201.
- Although Mandel’shtam shows himself here to be precisely the kind of medium-sensitive viewer in whose response to film Tsivian is particularly concerned, this lyric does not feature in his study.
- Early Cinema in Russia, p. 84. Tsivian discusses the acoustics of cinema performance in relation to music at some length (pp. 78–100).
- Hauser, p. 243; Marcus, p. 18. Tsivian devotes a chapter to the projection as a factor in aesthetic perception, invoking ‘apparatus theory’, a branch within film studies which focuses on the general conditions of cinematic reception, including the set up of the auditorium, the presence of the projector, and so on (Early Cinema in Russia, p. 49). He highlights the clattering, chattering sound of the projector as a characteristic element of early cinema (pp. 116–119).
- Rubins, p. 200.
- See McCabe, p. 14 on Eliot.
- See Doherty, pp. 92, 161, and 199 on this topic.
- She makes only passing reference in her early poems to popular culture in the form of the balagan (marketplace puppet theatre) and vaudeville in ‘Menia pokinul v novolun’e’ (1911), in which the speaker is a tightrope walker, and ‘So dnia Kupal’nitsy-Agrafeny’ (1913).
- See, for instance, ‘Vecherom’, ‘Progulka’ (both 1913), ‘Obman’ (1910).
- In Rekviem, for instance, there are two mentions of Black Marias. The first reference to an aeroplane occurs in 1944, after Akhmatova’s evacuation to Tashkent. Telephones first make their appearance in 1940, in both Poema bez geroia and Putem vseia zemli. In all of these cases, the connotations are overwhelmingly negative. The Black Marias are a symbol of brutality, crushing a writhing, innocent Rus’ beneath them. Aeroplanes are the means by which people are displaced and scattered. In Poema bez geroia the user of the telephone is a representative of officialdom and the literary bureaucracy. In a poem of 1959, Akhmatova writes: Ia davno ne veriu v telephony,/V radio ne veriu, v telegraf (Akhmatova, II, 67).
- Hutchings, p. 57.
- She showed considerable flair for self-marketing and dealt adeptly and circumspectly with ‘stardom’, employing a pseudonym and carefully constructing her ‘Akhmatova’ persona. One of the most iconic photographic portraits was taken in 1924 by Mosei Nappelbaum. In it, Akhmatova’s face is turned to display her famous profile with its aquiline nose. She wears a necklace of black beads, which she holds between her fingers as though it were a rosary, thereby evoking her second poetic collection and greatest critical success, Chetki. As Helena Goscilo has observed, photographs and portraits of Akhmatova, in both youth and middle age, testify to her ‘sophisticated understanding of self-presentation: grave poses, an undeviatingly thoughtful or melancholy expression, a skilfully draped shawl, deft ‘presentation’ of her ‘remarkably beautiful hands’, which she highlighted through manicures and rings’. This ‘choreographed demeanor’ deliberately created the impression of the poet as aloof and superior, unique and self-possessed. ‘Playing Dead: The Operatics of Celebrity Funerals, or, The Ultimate Silent Part’, in McReynolds and Neuberger, pp. 293–319 (p. 294).
- On the subject of Akhmatova and film, see I A Murav’eva, ‘Anna Akhmatova i dokumental’noe kino’, in Tainy Remesla, Akhmatovskie chteniia 2, ed. by N V Koroleva and S A Kovalenko (Moscow: Nasledie, 1992), pp. 148–157. Catriona Kelly argues that this controlling impulse is expressed in the poetry, too: ‘Painting and Autobiography: Anna Prismanova’s ‘Pesok’ and Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Epicheskie motivy’, in Kelly and Lovell, pp. 58–87 (p. 62).
- Budyko notes her antipathy for television. Quoted in R D Timenchik, Anna Akhmatova v 1960-e gody, Toronto Slavic Library Volume 2 (Moscow: Volodei; Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005), p. 338.
- Moscow Memoirs: Memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Literary Russia under Stalin, trans. and ed. by John Crowfoot (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 2004), p. 186.
- Quoted in Timenchik, p. 338.
- ‘Goodbye Again’, in Anna Akhmatova and her Circle, ed. by Konstantin Polivanov and trans. by Patricia Beriozkina (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), pp. 162–98 (p. 195).
- Mandel’shtam claimed in 1916 that Akhmatova brought all the complexity and richness of the Russian nineteenth-century novel to the lyric: ‘Otryvok iz neopublikovannoi stat’i o russkoi literature i ‘Al’manakhe Muz’’, II, 487. Similarly, A. I. Pavlovskii observes that Akhmatova draws extensively on techniques of Russian psychological prose, Anna Akhmatova: ocherk tvorchestva (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1982), p. 7, and Joseph Brodsky finds that her poetry ‘displays all the emotional subtlety and psychological complexity of nineteenth-century Russian prose’, ‘Introduction’, in Anna Akhmatova, Poems, trans. by Lyn Coffin (New York: Norton, 1983), pp. xiii–xxxi (p. xix).
- Ian Christie, quoted in Marcus, p. 19.
- McCabe, pp. 2–3.
- Akhmatova, I, 28.
- The Word That Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 11.
- Tsvian, Early Cinema in Russia, pp. 2.
- Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, p. 185.
- McCabe, p. 9.
- Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia, p. 188.
- See Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 99.
- Various features point to an underlying melodramatic structure: pale faces and veils are inherent elements of the melodramatic code, which routinely hints at hidden relationships and masked identities. The presence of a central mystery, the ‘joke’ (shutka), is in itself peculiarly suggestive of a melodramatic plot — a cruel intrigue or betrayal, of which the male figure is the innocent victim. See Harrington, ‘Melodrama, Feeling, and Emotion in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova’, Modern Language Review, 108 (2013), 241–273) on the topic of melodrama and its relationship to both silent film and the Russian psychological novel.
- See ‘On Contemporary Poetry’, in Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, pp. 105–107 (p. 107).
- ‘Reception as a Theme in Axmatova’s Early Poetry’, Dutch Contributions to the VIII International Congress of Slavists (Amsterdam, John Benjamins: 1979), pp. 205–231 (p. 227).
- ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in his Selected Writings, 5 vols (Paris: Mouton, 1971–1979), II, 239–59 (p. 256). See also Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Anna Akhmatova: Opyt analiza’ in his O poezii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969), pp. 75–147 (p. 133) on her avoidance of metaphor.
- Akhmatova, I, 141.
- McCabe, p. 6.
- Akhmatova, II, 12. See Humm, p. 27, on modernism’s implied male spectator.
- ‘Bylo dushno ot zhguchego sveta’ (Akhmatova, I, 45).
- Akhmatova, I, 53.
- ‘Ty pis’mo moe, milyi, ne komkai’ (Akhmatova, I, 64).
- ‘Protertyi kovrik pod ikonoi’ (Akhmatova, I, 71).
- McCabe, p. 3
- McCabe, p. 7.
- The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), p. 139.
- Quoted by McCabe, p. 68. See also p. 12.
- See Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture’, Kritika, 2 (2001), 111–164 (p. 112); In ‘They Love Movies Too’, Photoplay Magazine (November, 1937), p. 16, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr notes that in Moscow the film ‘packed the theater and was shown twenty-four hours a day’.
- See McCabe, p. 8.
- See Youngblood, p. 14; Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 31 and 56.
- See Marcus, p. xv.
- See Tsivian, ‘O Chapline v russkom avangarde i o zakonakh sluchainogo v iskusstve’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 81 (2006), reproduced at <http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2006/81/ci7-pr.html>
- Yana Meerzon, ‘Russian Formalists’ Views of Film and Theater Interdependence’, in Slavische Erzähl-Theorie, ed. by Wolf Schmid (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) pp. 239–272 (p. 247).
- See Zorkaia, II, 84–85.
- Mandel’shtam, I, 254–255.
- Clare Cavanagh points this out. See ‘Chaplinesque, or Villon Again: In Place of an Ending’, in her Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 279–303 (p. 292). An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Rereading the Poet’s Ending: Mandelstam, Chaplin, and Stalin’, PMLA, 109 (1994), 71–86.
- Cavanagh, p. 293.
- Cavanagh, p. 296.
- Cavanagh, p. 295.
- Cavanagh, p. 295.
- Cavanagh, p. 292.
- ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, Jewish Social Studies, 6 (1944), 99–122 (pp. 100 and 101). In fact, Arendt is one of a long line of writers to conceive of Chaplin as a Jew (this idea can be traced back at least to 1932, and the writings of Hebrew humorist Shimon Earnest), and film scholars have often noted that the little tramp resembles a Jewish stock figure. During Chaplin’s long career, claims about his Jewish ancestry were frequently made and were a central feature of Nazi propaganda of the thirties and forties (he was described as a ‘disgusting Jewish acrobat’), and of the US campaign against him in the forties and early fifties. His role as Jewish barber in The Great Dictator (1940) reinforced this association. See Ingeborg Kohn, Charlie Chaplin: Brightest Star of Silent Films (Rome: Portaparole, 2005), p. 66; Susan A Glenn, ‘In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity’, Jewish Social Studies, 8 (2002), 139–152 (p. 145).
- Arendt, p. 112.
- Cavanagh, p. 291.
- ‘Fourth Prose’, The Collected Critical Prose, pp. 312–325 (p. 323).
- Cavanagh makes reference to Sigmund Freud’s ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’ (1905), pointing out that if Mandel’shtam’s comic poems were to be subsumed under one of Freud’s categories, it would be that of ‘self-critical humour’ (Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition, p. 224); Homi K Bhabha, ‘Joking Aside: The Idea of a Self-Critical Community’, in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, ed. by Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. xv–xx (p. xvii).
- Cavanagh herself reads Mandel’shtam’s ‘Notre Dame’ and ‘François Villon’ in relation to Bakhtin’s ideas on the grotesque body, Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition, pp. 83–90. See Galin Tihanov, ‘Contextualising Bachtin: Two Poems by Mandel’štam’, Russian Literature, 50 (2001), 165–184 (pp. 168–169) for a discussion of the difficulty of establishing whether Mandel’shtam knew Bakhtin’s work.
- Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. by R W Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 106.; Catholic Encyclopaedia online <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06132a.html>; Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 3.
- The ‘Festival of the gathering of the grapes’ is also mentioned by Bakhtin in connection with folk carnival in the Middle Ages (p. 106), and Dionysus/Bacchus assumed the form of a goat.
- Bakhtin, p. 102.
- See David Robb, ‘Carnivalesque Meets Modernity in the Films of Karl Valentin and Charlie Chaplin’, in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. by Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 89–100 (p.90).
- Bakhtin, p. 104.
- Bakhtin, p. 104.
- Cox, p. 5.
- Mandel’shtam, I, 263–65.
- Cavanagh, p. 300.
- Eric L Flom, Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis of the Seven Talkies (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), p. xi.
- ‘Chaplin’, in Selected Writings 1927–1930, ed. by Michael W Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 199–200 (p. 200).
- Robb observes that Chaplin uses the motif of the double in his films from 1915, and portrays ‘the ambivalent split within people (the side by side existence of opposite characteristics, for example master/servant, bully/victim, strength/weakness)’, p. 97. McCabe also notes his ‘double personality’ and the frequency with which he plays two roles in his films, p. 74.
- Gershtein, pp. 4, 7, and 18.
- This is Cavanagh’s translation (p. 289).
- Cavanagh, p. 300.
- McCabe, p. 10.
- Cavanagh identifies this allusion, p. 299.
- See Gene D Phillips, Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1999), p. 33.
- ‘Chaplin’, in Literature and Cinematography, trans. by Irina Masinovsky (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), pp. 64–67 (p. 64).
- Jonathan Goldman, ‘Modernism is the Age of Chaplin’, in Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture, ed. by Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan E Goldman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 193–206 (p. 199).
- ‘Fourth Prose’, p. 317.
- See Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. by Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 150.
- Leyda, pp. 278–79. The most striking of Mandel’shtam’s cinematic metaphors is the disparaging image of the ‘metamorphic tapeworm’ of celluloid ribbon (metamorphoza lentochnogo glista) used in his essay ‘Razgovor o Dante’ (‘Conversation about Dante’, 1933). Tsivian remarks: ‘the image of the ribbon agreed with the image of cinematic narrative as perceived as cumulative, episodic, perennially unwinding text. Cinematic narrative was perceived as […] something that corresponded textually to the endless celluloid strip on which it was recorded — the image pinpointed by Osip Mandelstam’s sarcastic metaphor’ (Early Cinema in Russia, p. 10). However, Zorkaia reads this image specifically as an implicit criticism of the slow-paced early sound films of this period (II, 94).
- Huyssen, p. 59.
- Eisenstein writes: ‘we [Soviets] do not escape from reality to fairy tale; we make fairy tales real. Our task is not to plunge adults into childhood but to make the children’s paradise of the past accessible to every grown-up in every citizen of the Soviet Union’. Quoted by David Robinson in Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), p. 91.
- Stites, p. 117.
- Timenchik, p. 103.
- Zapisnye knizhki, pp. 79, 443, and 448.
- Zapisnye knizhki, p. 436. See also p. 442.
- The variant line ‘I Chaplin shutia voplotil’ appears in her notebooks (p. 241).
- Akhmatova, I, 263–4.
- Akhmatova, I, 203.
- ‘Liricheskoe otstuplenie Sed’moi elegii’, Akhmatova, II, 90.
- ‘Anna Akhmatova: a memoir’, in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. by Judith Hemschemeyer, ed. by Roberta Reeder (Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997), pp. 35–55 (p. 42).
- V sto pervom zerkale (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), p. 78.
- The Trial, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Vintage Books, 2009), pp. 7 and 211. Ronald Speirs and Beatrice Sandberg do note, however, that the subjunctive form in the original German text creates an ambiguity, so that ‘We are not reading the story of a man who is arrested despite the fact that he is innocent, but rather the story of a man who maintains that he has been wrongfully arrested’, quoted by Jakob Lothe, ‘The Narrative Beginning of Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie’’, in Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading, ed. by Jakob Lothe, Beatrice Sandberg, and Ronald Speirs (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), pp. 149–169 (p. 150).
- See Parker Tyler, ‘Kafka’s and Chaplin’s Amerika’, Sewanee Review, 58 (1950), 299–311 (p. 309).
- ‘Fourth Prose’, p. 323.
- It has two stresses rather than the expected three, and seven syllables rather than the expected eight. The variant line ‘I Chaplin shutia voplotil’, by contrast, conforms to the established metrical pattern.
- See, for instance, Tyler, or Philip Rahv, ‘Franz Kafka: The Hero as Lonely Man’, The Kenyon Review, 1 (1939), 60–74.
- Cavanagh even mistakenly reads it as a park bench which Akhmatova shares with ‘two fellow outcasts’, Kafka and Chaplin (p. 290).
- This term, along with the reference to a heart attack, brings to mind the ruthlessly cruel Andrei Vyshinksii, Stalin’s favourite prosecutor (General’nyi Prokuror) of the Moscow show trials, who died of a heart attack in the USA in 1954. Pilate features in other late poetry by Akhmatova, including ‘Cherepki’ (1958) and ‘Zashchitnikam Stalina’ (1962). Akhmatova may also have had in mind Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita, in which Pilate symbolises those who washed their hands of Stalin’s crimes.
- Arendt, p. 115.
- See Elaine Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005), p. 199.
- Zapisnye knizhki, p. 75. Her memoir of Modigliani records him telling her, ‘I forgot to tell you that I’m a Jew’ (J’ai oublié de vous dire que je suis juif). Akhmatova, II, 148.
- Akhmatova, II, 91 and 102.
- Akhmatova, I, 295.
- Charles J Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 296.