Europa im Schatten des Ersten Weltkriegs

Violence and Rhetorical Strategies in Sigmund Freud’s Study Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919–1920) and Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems (1917–1924)

Fatima Festić (Amsterdam)

The short preface to Anna Akhmatova’s1 Requiem,2 which she wrote more than twenty years after she completed this elegy, appeared to me as a cathartic enactment of the invigorating poetic witnessing to the dignity of people exposed to state violence. I will quote this preface, or as Akhmatova put it “Instead of a preface” (“Вместо предисловия”), in my own translation.3

In the dreadful years of the Yezhov’s4 terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day, somehow, somebody in the crowd “recognized” me. Then, a woman, standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before, moved out of the numbness weighing down on us all and asked me, whispering to my ear (everyone whispered there):

“You can describe this?” (А это вы можете описать)?

And I said (И я сказала):

“I can.” (Могу.)

Then, something like smile passed briefly over what had once been her face.

(Leningrad, April 1, 1957)

I read these lines for the first time after I completed my dissertation on witnessing, violence, and artistry (in 1998),5 upon the turn-of-the-century wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Already then, this Akhmatova’s retrospective Instead-of-Preface6 to her Requiem recalled to me – although in inversion – the structural dynamics of Sigmund Freud’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle,7 which in my work I interpret as a foundational text of postmodernism. That is, the difference in narrative strategies of these two authors appeared to me as making a crucial point. Then, keeping to my belief that the most an author can do is admit the very position from which she or he starts to think, and starting to read closely Akhmatova’s earlier poetry8 – and specifically the poetry of her transition from ravishing lyric subjectivity to profound social commitment to witnessing (here, I offer my own selection from the poems that Akhmatova wrote between 1917 and 1924, as pertaining to the discussion topic)9 – I found yet another proof that this confessing authorial quality is much more inherent in a feminine account10 than a masculine one.

In my contribution to this book collection on the post-Great War violence, I discuss the ways in which Freud and Akhmatova each deal textually and strategically with their encounter with violence and death that interrupted their linear lives, after crashing and burying many of their contemporaries in the Great War and its immediate aftermath. In their “witnessing writing”, they have opened the rhetorical horizons for generations of scholars to come. In feminist criticism, Freud was reproached fiercely for annulling the woman’s voice and presence in this text (of his deceased daughter Sophie) in his self-curing narcissistic cathexis while he formulated the death drive after the repetition compulsion. Hence, I discuss Akhmatova’s strong woman’s voice that poetically and dialogically reflects on the violence of the dissipating worlds.

If these two authors are read simultaneously – relative to their socio-physical positions in two emerging post-imperial, yet different political structures (and with the application to their works of the analytic terms of ‘cathexis’11 and ‘transference’12) – the course of the narrative disclosures of Akhmatova in her poems can be seen as if working through the overt self-protection of Freud’s narrative revelation of repression, repetition, and drive. Henceforward, the discussion could hint toward the claims that understanding of drive13 is also informed by gender, as it is also the understanding of the dreadful materializations of drive within the radical political imaginaries that shaped the realities of these two authors.

1. Death in the Mirror

As evidenced in his letters and in his analytic discourse, Freud suffered two heavy losses upon the war’s end. The more personal loss was the death of his beloved daughter Sophie who suddenly died of pneumonia in February 1920;1 the other, and more widely implicated socially-existentially, was the 1918 loss of the quite sheltering Empire,2 the symbolic (and reigning socio-political) structure in which Freud was born, raised, educated, lived, procreated, practiced his work, and developed his revolutionary thought. The relevance of Freud’s loss of his daughter for his writing of the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, particularly for its second chapter as the exemplification of his theory of the death drive that manifests itself in the compulsion to repeat, is extensively discussed by major 20^th-century theorists,3 while the relevance of the loss of the Empire for the same matter was widely ignored or marginalized. Beyond the Pleasure Principle discusses the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in two different spheres: first, the dreams in traumatic neurosis4 that Freud observed in the war survivors, and second, the waking life in a child’s game that Freud observed in Sophie’s son Ernest,5 three to four years before he wrote this essay.

However, informed by my own interpretative relation to transference, I have found the integral dimension of the second chapter as decisive for understanding Freud’s formulation of the death drive (Todestrieb) primarily as a rhetorical delivery of his witnessing function that Freud himself could not confess openly (or, he could not “bind ‘It’” by the secondary processes). That is, I read the missing link between these two losses that Freud experienced (yet not explicitly saying that connection) as placed in the relation between the two activities he studied: 1) the dreams of neurotics caused by an unexpected violence forcing them to wake up repetitively into a new fright and 2) the waking life of generating a play as instinctual renunciation through a cultural achievement.

Freud wrote the first draft of the essay from March to May 1919, while also working on the text The Uncanny,6 mentioning in both texts the “compulsion to repeat” but not the death instincts. He returned to the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle at the beginning of 1920, right after the death of his daughter, Sophie Freud-Halberstadt, and finished it between May and July of the same year, and only then formulated the death drive. However, in the text in which no personal names are given, besides his own name as the text’s signed author, Freud does not mention either Sophie’s death or his own fatherly loss. He describes that only in his letters to his colleagues in the days following Sophie’s death as “a serious narcissistic injury inflicted on him,” so that he is regaining his balance through writing, trying to overcome the painful experience through the continuity of his work: “I work as much as I can, and I am thankful for the diversing […] what is known as mourning will probably follow only later.”7

In the essay, the compulsion to repeat is seen as the universal attribute of instincts and perhaps all organic life – as the impulse for restoring the earlier state of things that was abandoned under the pressure of previous disturbing forces. The essay’s key second chapter consists of seven pages in the standard edition. On the first three pages, Freud speculates on the dark, desolate subject of the manifestations of fright8 in traumatic neuroses. He does not say that this tormenting psychic experience is anchored in and modulated by the hard turning-point of the emerging post-war existential and socio-political uncertainty, which all (of those surrounding him) – including Freud as a member of the Jewish minority in the post-Austro-Hungarian Empire Austrian (Germanic) national formation – inhabited, and certainly feared. Then, in just one sentence, Freud passes to the warmth and comfort of the family narrative, without saying that this is also triggered by the loss that he suffered himself, which certainly must have reminded him of his own mortality. Skillfully, he switches to the reassuring authority of his interpretation of his small grandson’s game (indeed, largely taken from Sophie’s own interpretation)9 that evolved in four different stages: 1) the boy throwing small objects away; 2) pulling back one as the game of disappearance and return to him of his mother as his primary object; 3) most important, the boy crouching down beneath the full-length mirror saying that himself he is “gone”, and 4) a year later, throwing his toys as sending his father “to the front” where his father really was.

In Freud’s own “masculine” and “senior” game of repetitions – where his daughter Sophie disappears repetitively as annulled by her father Freud in his own text – and with the aim to restore his ego, “regaining his balance through writing” (the balance that however is itself called into question by the topic of the death drive), Freud transfers to his grandson, as to the metonymical object, the burden of his own sudden fright caused by Sophie’s death. The link of grandfather-father/daughter-mother/son-grandson forms the chain of functions that can be directly related to consideration and confirmation of the factor of heredity in repetition, of which Freud writes in the same text. It is indicative to mention that Freud’s reaction to his father’s death (23.10.1896) was entirely different, described in his letters as the “heaviest loss in one’s life”, so that Freud “cannot write at all”, not even to thank colleagues for condolences.10

By the 1990s, a canon of the feminist interpretations of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle had already been established. Nevertheless, a comprehensive, literary ground-breaking reading of this text is offered by Elisabeth Bronfen in the chapter “The Lady Vanishes” of her 1992 book Over Her Dead Body.11 Bronfen describes the rhetorical strategy of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as such that it self-reflexively repeats its thematic concerns.

Repetition is doubly inscribed, for one by the death drive; directed toward reduction of tensions; toward an original of complete identity; toward an animate state anterior and posterior to which both precede and follow the life, and then it is inscribed by the pleasure principle, which is directed toward production of tensions through division of unity; separation leading through the detour of substitution to the production of new unities.12

Bronfen explains how, in this interstice, repetition serves to acknowledge the death drive beyond the pleasure principle in the sense that the mother/infant dyad must be renounced and translated into supplementation because the division death threatens is always inherent in this pleasurable unity.

In my reading of the wider context of the essay, the symbolic structure of the Empire worked out with similar materialist features for Freud, therefore and likewise it had also to be renounced by him while he was actively retaking the position of his rejection of it – after the Empire had been already “gone” – in the immensity of the death’s over-presence, leaving behind the crack and the interstice of much larger dimensions. The structure of the “departed” Empire in the prospect of the coming nationalism/Nazism as well as the rebelliousness of the forthcoming vast domain of socialist revolutions (analogous to that of the scientific launching of psychoanalysis by Freud)13 as aptly exemplified by Freud’s focus on his small grandson’s games – is yet another platform of the “maternal realm” that Freud uses for his theoretical articulation. According to this, Freud’s textual distribution of the observed child’s four performances only reinforces the importance of the missing link of this narration to the first part of the chapter that discusses traumatic neurosis as Freud’s difficulty to display the reference to his own social-existential reality of the violence-riven post-war condition.

The child’s two games of repetitively throwing away his toys, and the game of pulling one item back14 as an interpreted reference to the child’s mother Freud describes in the main text, adding his (and Sophie’s) arbitrary semantic coding of the sounds the child exclaimed ([o-o-o-o] fort-da, as denoting “gone-back”). However, the most important act of the boy crouching down beneath the full-length mirror saying that himself he is “gone” (“baby o-o-o-o-o!”) 15 is moved down to a footnote. It is widely claimed that Freud refused to acknowledge an interdependence between the theoretical formulation of the death drive and the experience of his daughter’s death, because an acceptance of the intersection between a real event of death and a theoretical speculation would counteract the solace this piece of writing was to afford to Freud. It is a common place in interpretations (by D. W. Winnicott, J. Lacan, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, J. Kristeva, etc.) to read Freud’s description of these games as Freud’s self-representation of representation (of a departure) and the necessary return of and to the self, only more so because Freud persistently endeavored to separate the impartiality and authority of his theoretical insight from the open reference to his own trauma caused by Sophie’s death. Still, the question remains, why does Freud, who certainly has other possibilities for controlling his loss, react finally like the one and half year-old child when he, not mentioning his daughter’s death, sacrifices for the sake of the grapheme of his text, the dead Sophie for the second time in his text? Hence, we could also assume that as much as Freud’s concept of the death drive came out of his most intimate emotions, hints, resentment at the power of death, in the concrete case of his deceased daughter, it also came out of his own fright caused by his own facing compulsively the murky post-Empire developments. Or, also, his foreseeing the looming national-socialism, intuitively or theoretically, which would be in line with his psychoanalytic discipline.

Since Freud tried to deny any autobiographical connection, let us recall his own sentence from the same text, that in a person “only ego is resistant, but not the unconscious” (whose only endeavor is “to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action”).16 Accordingly, the intersection between the autobiographical and rhetorical strategy of self-reflexivity, the repetitive erasure of Sophie in the displacement from the daughter’s significant part to that of a grandson (as a blind spot) – can make for my claim that the common experience of fright as the turning point in the post-war reality is seen in the repetitive phenomenology of the mirror that takes hold of Freud’s narration. And that the whole authority of Freud in this text is moved to the footnote that describes the child’s fright from his encounter with his own reflection in the mirror (which is not his mother) and his hiding from himself. To hide from the mirror or to enter the mirror – that is how I would formulate the strategic ambiguity of the epistemological and ontological within the witnessing function.

2. The Mirror in Death

At this point, let us reach for “Anna of all the Russias”, as Akhmatova was called,1 not a minority at all, yet herself choosing to be a minority, already when she took her pen name from the Tatarian maternal side of her father (replacing her father’s surname Gorenko with the Tatar name Akhmatova, as relating to her more distant family lore).2 This memorable woman author3 of the same post-Great-War period, after the crash of the Russian Empire, at the onset of Bolshevism, much younger than Freud, was exposed to much tougher circumstances of getting destitute, enduring official scorn, the execution of her recently divorced husband and the father of her son, the lasting and terrible stigmatization, banned publication, close surveillance, persecution, the imprisonment and murders of those closest to her.4 In spite of all that,5 Akhmatova introduces a different view on repetition and repression than the one Freud offers. Likewise, in all her reticence, her quite generous love-life with equally imperiled or persecuted Russian intellectuals6 considerably challenges Freud’s simultaneous speculations on life and death instincts, and (those which he postulated prior to them) of the singularity of ego and plurality of sexual procreation.7 Furthermore, amidst her utterly frightening situation, it is the phenomenology of the (allure of the) mirror that gives Akhmatova a life apart from life so as if to make some other Anna experience the cruelty, against which Anna mirroring art, spirit, and tradition consolidates her witnessing self, repetitively.

Akhmatova’s poems don’t say that we repeat because we repress, but on the contrary – that we repress because we repeat, that we forget because we repeat, that we repress because we can live certain things only in the mode of repetition. Or, also, that we are bound to repress especially the representation that negotiates what was lived before, connecting it to the form of an analogous or identical object. As Freud himself wrote in his text, in some normal people, not neurotics, also there is a perpetual recurrence of the same thing – if it is related to an active behavior, “there is an essential character trait remaining the same, compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences”,8 while the last sentence of the text’s second chapter suggests that “the consideration of these cases and situations – which have a yield of pleasure as the final outcome – should be taken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject matter”.9 And, while the later 20^th-century (psychoanalytic yet anti-Freudian) philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, offered such a (cultural) view of repetition10 with a crucial emphasis on difference involved in the repeating acts, Akhmatova wrote out the same, yet her involved understanding of it, already much in advance. In the Bolsheviks’ realm, Akhmatova asks about establishing a difference between each of the repetitions, retrieving the very biography, psychology, and history that were officially erased,11 while introducing a considerable difference also within repression and that what is repressed.12

Her 1917 poem “When in the Throes of Suicide” (“Когда в тоске самоубийства“) decidedly establishes Anna as a crucial witness to the radical changes that Russia started to undergo by the end of the Great War.13 Since the later 20^th-century studies in witnessing and testimony14 (developed in the Western hemisphere, and significantly rooted in the Holocaust experience), has extended witnessing function also to prophetic function, it would be easy to identify Akhmatova with her that-time growing conviction that above all she is the resilient “embodiment of her poetic voice”.15 As such, she is also an instrument of bearing witness16 to the structures of violence multiplying all around her, as she stayed in Russia during the war and after the Revolution by her deliberate choice.17 However, I also read Akhmatova as an avant-garde prophetess of the later 20^th-century developments in psychoanalysis, according to which the early mirror stage18 remains artistically vital throughout one’s life. And according to which the death drive is entirely rewritten by the elaboration of the approach to the abyss of Das Ding (the [traumatic] Thing; La chose), making out of it partial or transitional objects, and correcting lacks and losses through language and libido that are in tandem in a biological organism.19

“When in the Throes of Suicide” opens into the two-way mirroring field of “our people” threatened by the “German guests” and “our Russian Church deserted by the stern Byzantine spirit”, indeed, both locked up in the – obviously plural – act of the country committing suicide. It is Akhmatova’s singular repetitive “I” that takes upon herself the role of a negotiating medium, as to fend off the soothing, tempting call (“Mne голос был. Он звал утешно, oн говорил“) to Russian people to abandon themselves, “go abroad” (“oставь Россию навсегда“). However, that “Voice” and its repetitive “It,” as talking the Russians into betrayal, comes from within Anna herself, at once speaking to her as a part of her and becoming the new “I” of the “It”, the dialogized “Ich” of the foreigner. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” – that is, “where It was, I shall come into being,” – Freud said (only in 1933),20 yet not confessing it about himself. This poem by Akhmatova delivers two “I”-s as opposing each other. Furthermore, the “Voice”, the “It” turning into “I”, disguises itself as purifying, dignifying, healing in its own right. The poem’s prodigy is that as “It” becomes the “I” of the Voice, the inner voice also rises up to the surface of Anna’s body, becomes external and manageable by Anna’s consciousness so upon that, indifferently, she “simply blocks her ears from the outside” (“Но равнодушно и спокойно руками я замкнула слух”) – “so that the unworthy talk cannot desecrate me, in my grief” (“Чтоб этой речей недостойной не осквернился скорбный дух”). In a few short lines, (as if) Akhmatova translates this seminal dictum by Freud (before he even comes to formulate it) into her own living testimony to the switching power of the conscious over the unconscious. “It” takes courage – to speak the “I”: Anna’s “I” takes courage to speak the “It”.

The subsequent 1917 “Now, Nobody Will Want to Listen to Poems” (“Tеперь никто не cтaнeт слушать песeн”) stages Akhmatova’s departure from her early sumptuous lyricism as her confessed pain of her own mirroring herself in her Poem as her interlocutor and the narratable21 You of her “I”, her own observed physical and spiritual reflection – that begs the Poem “not to shatter Anna’s heart” as the Poem suddenly empties itself in its ruining moves (“Моя последняя, мир больше не чудесен, не разливай мне сердца, не звени”), as the “foretold menacing days have come” (“Предсказанные наступили дни”).

In the next few years, through 1921, as a character in her verses Akhmatova introduces Death as “chalking the doors with crosses”, “calling the ravens to fly in”, as the “age is worse than earlier ages (“Чем хуже этот век предшествующих?”), unhealable by the power of fingers (“Он к самой черной прикоснулся язве, но исцелить ee нe тoг” 1919). Still, with the 1921 poem “Everything is stolen, betrayed, sold…” (“Все расхищено, предано, продано”) – the consolidating mirror of art and spirituality returns to Anna the plural of her “We” who, still however, somehow “do not despair” (“Отчего же нам стало светло?”). As Akhmatova’s profuse temperament and sensibility in the full blow of counteraction cannot but perceive that, still, out there, there is a world of nature, Earth, cosmos, and larger, unrevealed meanings pertaining to them.

Soon after, Akhmatova’s first poetic fellow, and husband, Nikolay Gumilyov22, is shot dead by the officials of the Soviet secret police. Within a few days, Akhmatova wrote down the poem “Fear Fingers All Things in the Darkness” (“Страх, во тьме перебирая вещи”), merging the grasps of the Pre-Christian and Christian motives with the sheer Acmeist23 craft toward a fullest possible perfection of a ‘poetic cathexis’. That is, Anna’s self-controlled expression of the consternation with the cold-blood murder of the one among the closest to her, to whom however she was not allowed even to refer openly, let alone to name him in her poem, as she herself was under the immediate physical life-threat. Unlike her senior contemporary Freud, who himself chose the authorial-safeguard-exit away from naming his daughter’s Sophie part in his text. That is, Anna’s articulation of the fear on the background of the state mechanisms, that nevertheless in her poem make “a moon-bean point to an ax”, while “an ominous knock is heard behind the wall” – “what is there? a ghost, a thief, or rats?” (“Страх, во тьме перебирая вещи, Лунный луч наводит на топор. За стеною слышен стук зловещий – Что там, крысы, призрак или вор?”).24

The 1922 “I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land” (“Не с теми я кто бросил землю”) – “to its enemies to tear it apart” – is a further consolidating poem that develops the dynamics between “I” and “You”, “We” and “They” – the narrative dynamics through which Akhmatova strives to protect her poems as her lone property from any unwanted sharing with or reference to either the internal enemies or refugees from Russia. Her poetry is her self-protective mirror into which she perpetually enters and freely moves (as a character) within its multiplying imaginative and phenomenological planes. There are those who left and those who stayed in the dead ashes of the Revolution’s fire, and the toughest temptation for those who stayed is the word of the same language that has seduced others into either betrayal or departure. Anna’s lovers and friends were leaving Russia one by one25 – it is from what was most intimate to her that her splitting narration has to defend itself. For better or for worse, “resistant and proud, I am not singing about them, yet I feel forever sorry for their exile lot” (“Но вечно жалок мне изгнанник”), as “‘We’ [Anna and her poems] are made straighter by the surrounding wild.”26

The anti-exile topic makes it further to “Lot’s Wife” (“Лотова жена” 1922–1924) that repetitively merges the figurations of a woman witness and a woman prophet, falling back into this Biblical motive.27 Again, the “Voice” comes out loudly from inside a woman as her restless challenge (“Но громко жене говорила тревога: Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть на красные башни родного Codoma”). Yet, in this poem in inversion, for it is the words of staying and not leaving that the Voice is preaching, the woman’s overt opposition to her man Lot who is set out to leave the native land. The voice talks the woman into throwing her last glance to the life she is departing from. Certainly, the glance and its mirror-reflection set the trap, the wife’s single glance with the “arrow of pain stitching her eyes before she could let a sound out”, her “body flaking into transparent salt”, her “shaking legs as a pillar rooting to the ground”. The woman who at the cost of life chose to stay and bear witness, as well as the witnesses to her subsequent punishment – both those who departed and those who stayed – get inseparable within the mirroring reference to the ecumenical script that however glorifies a woman’s choice if only embodied in Akhmatova’s reprise.

The last poem to which I will refer is from the 1924, “The Muse” (“Муза”), repetitively staging Akhmatova’s respectful bow down to Poetry itself, to its messenger and conveyer, the Muse – “whom no one can command”28. In the generous act of self-denial, hanging by a thread, Anna gives all she cherishes most – just for her to come.

It is the wait and then the encounter between the two, obviously imaginary, dialogized within Akhmatova herself, which opens the poem’s space as to reflect (on) two Infernos 1) the Inferno of the surrounding Soviet terror and 2) the early 14^th-century famed representation of Inferno, which Anna calls to her aid. As Anna is “seeing herself as seeing herself”29 in the mirror of her Muse, who with her unveiled face is “staring Anna down”.30 The rescuing land of the poetry past brings Akhmatova to retaking the pen of the Poet of the spaces after the Last Judgement – “I ask: ‘That’s you whom Dante heard dictate the lines of his Inferno?’ She answers: ‘Me.’” (“Ей говорию: Ты лъ Данту диктовала Страниць Ада? Отвечает ‘Я.’”)31