Perhaps there is no other stage of life more universally feared and abhorred than death. This has been true throughout human history as it is today. Ancient Hebrews regarded the body of a dead person as something unclean and not to be touched, while early American Indians believed there were evil spirits in the body and shot arrows into the air to drive the spirits away. In the past fifty years the process of dying has received much attention due to the pioneering work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. There has been an effort to help the dying retain their humanity, rather than be treated as pariahs, like the lepers of the Middle Ages. Yet ridding death, and the illnesses that hasten it, of its negative cultural connotations is not easily done. It was to that end that Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, motivated by her own experiences fighting breast cancer. She opens her essay by defining the subject: "Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick." She finds that Western culture is replete with literary examples of the metaphors used to define illness and impending death. Yet a piece of literature also expresses an individual’s unique experience of illness, more especially poetry, which is often a picture of the lyricist’s inner state. Three poems on illness from different epochs of Russian history will illustrate these points: Anna Bunina in the early 19th century, Boris Pasternak in the mid-20th century and Nina Iskrenko in the late 20th century. Not only are the stylistic differences evident in these three poems because of their different historical times, but each one has a different attitude toward the encounter with illness and death.
The lives of Anna Bunina and Nina Iskrenko span almost two centuries. Both were women who suffered with breast cancer and both chose to write in an unorthodox manner for women of their time. For Iskrenko this made her the accepted champion of a new kind of poetry, but for Bunina it placed her in a marginal group of women writers, whom the male-dominated literature chose not to accept. In the early 19th century most women writers were dilettantes, supported by relatives or benefactors. Bunina chose to be neither. She devoted herself exclusively to writing and hoped to derive income from it, as a professional writer of poetry. Her writing also betrayed her non-conformism. No images of women in the role of wives and mothers or as selfless and submissive pervaded her work as it did that of other female writers of the time. Likewise, there was no presentation of the idyllic aspects of nature and of personal relationships, characteristic of her contemporaries, Maria Pospelova and Anna Alekseevna Volkova. She further alienated herself from the generally accepted role of the writer by turning away from the Sentimentalist perception of death as an evil that frustrated happiness; Bunina welcomed it as happiness itself. She made herself no more welcome in Romantic circles by her marked divergence from the view of life after death, espoused by Zhukovsky. She supposed no existence of a realm beyond this world. The alienation that surrounded her in life and in facing death is evident in her lyric "Maiskaia progulka boliashchei ("A sick woman’s May walk").
Her poem belongs to a tradition of other poems concerning a lady’s walk in nature. Two of Pospelova’s poems on this subject regard nature with euphoria and joy, a sentimentalist representation of spring. Volkova’s poem about a morning walk does express some alienation, but only Bunina uses nature as a vehicle to express her intense distaste for life and utter isolation from comfort. Her poem is like T.S. Eliot’s answer to Chaucer’s joyful representation of spring in the opening of The Canterbury Tales in his poem, The Wasteland, "April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land!" Bunina writes, "Sun, was it to me you smile?/ May, to me you promise joy?" ("Mne l’ ty, solntse, ulybnylos’?/ Mne l’ sulish’ otradu, mai?"), but "Hell is nesting in my soul,/ Etna burns my dried-up breast;" ("Ad v dushe moi znesditsia, / Etna ssokhnu grud’ palit"). She chooses not the melancholic autumn of Zhukovsky’s poems, but a spring of lost hope and bitter exile.
The form of the poem emphasizes the dissonance she feels with nature. There are no stanzas, with ten sections of unequal length and there is no rhyme, common in this period of Russian literature. Her rebellion and isolation in the face of her illness are typical for the romantics, but she finds no solace in an after life and no melancholy in leaving life. The rhythm is iambic tetrameter, like the rhythm of a walk. Not a typical spring walk, but an allegorical journey to death is the subject of Bunina’s poem. She died from breast cancer after more than ten years of pain and struggle. Other poetic devices describe her plight.
There are ten sections to the poem, six in the first half, four in the second. The poem is divided in half (line 45 out of 100) by the line "O, woe is me! I am alone!" ("Ia odna! O, gore mne!"). The first half of the poem is a more intense expression of her pain than the second: each of the six sections is shorter, there are eight questions concerning her fate and the use of anaphora five times (Bozhe, Gde, Net). In the second half Bunina uses no questions, anaphora is found once (Tshchetno) and the sections are longer. The images in the first half are predominately ones of fire: "Breath is now a raging fire" ("V ogn’ dykhan’e pretvorilos’"), "But the fire (in my breast) does not abate" ("No v grudi ogon’ ne zasnet"). She longs for the coolness of water, but "Healing’s stream has all run dry" ("Tok tselenia issiak"). The metaphors that she chooses ("my boiling blood" {"krov’ kipuchuiu"}, "all the ulcers deep have burst" {"vse gluboki vskrylis’ iazvy"}describe the very type of pain some women have used to describe certain types of breast cancer, heat and ulcers. It is only in the second half that Bunina receives solace from the water, which extinguishes the fire ("Cool my dried-out breast, and pour/ Water on its burning fire." {"Prokhladi mne grud’ issokhshu,/ Zhguchii ogn’ ee zalei"}) and the wind, which would blow away her pain and swallow her in an abyss "Sullen helmsman, let me board!/ Set a course to face the wind!/ Chasm gape and swallow me!" {"Dai men cheln, ugromnyi kormchii!/ K vetram v lik svoi put’ s moria!/ Khliab’ razverzis’ pogloti!"}). In the end nature has grown quiet, but detached from her. It is as if she is no any longer there.
In the course of her poem Bunina has moved from impugning God for deserting her, railing against her illness and her isolation, to rejecting the old man who offers her consolation and to finally seeking solace and obliteration in nature’s elements. It is as if she has moved through the five stages of death, as described by Kübler-Ross: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Examples of isolation and anger have already been mentioned. A type of bargaining occurs as she listens to the old man she rejected, who could be considered her alter-ego in the poem, urging God to come to her aid; depression comes when she realizes that she is no longer a daughter of nature; final acceptance is reflected in the serenity of nature at the end; and, a semblance of death in her absence from the end of the poem.
Nineteenth century patients were thought to get cancer from hyperactivity and hyperintensity. Sontag quoted Kant as writing in 1798, "Passions are cancers, unfortunate moods that are pregnant with many evils." In Bunina’s poem there is a preponderant intensity of emotions that engulf the poet. Bunina did indeed believe that she was plagued by evil, "Evil’s power hangs over me" ("Tiagoteet zlo na mne"). This evil then turns within and brings about the illness, according to Sontag’s description of the view of the disease. It was visited upon the body due to a person’s own evil actions, so that one with cancer was possessed by a demonic enemy that aroused dread and horror. "Coiling round my heart, a snake, /Thirsting, sucks my boiling blood" ("Zhadnyi zmii, viias’ vkrug serdtsa,/ Krov’ kipuchuiu soset"), Bunina writes. Her body and her life have become her enemies. It is not improbable to think that Bunina even considered her illness as an allegory for the privations and isolation she felt as a women poet at this time, as it was the subject of other poems of hers. A stark contrast to the war raging in Bunina’s poem is Boris Pasternak’s experience of illness in his poem "V bol'nitse" ("In the hospital").
One scholar has described this poem as Pasternak’s prayer of gratitude. The feelings of anger and rage in Bunina’s poem are completely absent in Pasternak’s. Recalling Kübler-Ross’s stages of death, Pasternak has come very quickly to the last one, acceptance, that grows into gratitude in his conversation with God. According to his son, Evgeny, Pasternak was taken by ambulance to the hospital with coronary thrombosis in October 1953, where he lay first in an outpatients’ ward and then in the corridor of the hospital. In his biography of his father Evgeny quotes the following letter that describes that night:
I was overcome between losing consciousness and attacks of nausea and vomiting, by such feelings of tranquility and bliss…. The mile-long corridor with its sleeping bodies, immersed in dark silence, ended in a window giving on to the garden bathed in the inky turbulence of a rain-spattered night and the reflected glow of the night lights of Moscow peeping out above the treetops. And this corridor and the green globe of the lampshade on the night-sister’s desk by the window, and the stillness, and the shadows of the nurses and the presence of death beyond the window and behind one’s shoulder – it all formed in its concentrated essence such a fathomless, such a superhuman poem…’O Lord.. I thank thee…that thou hast made me an artist…and that my life long has prepared me for this night.’ And I exulted and wept for joy.
Four years later the poem "V Bolnitse" was written, describing these experiences.
The poem consists of 13 quatrains in 3-foot amphibrachus. The second foot loses its stress in 8 out of 52 lines, making 5 unstressed feet in a row. This would have been highly uncommon in 19th century verse, but by 1956 would already have been employed by poets. The rhyme scheme is alternating masculine and feminine lines. There are a few cases of inexact rhyme, vitrinoi/mashinu, zastava/koriavoi, acceptable in Russian verse at this time. Four times in the poem a poetic line consists only of three plural nouns, separated by commas:
Панели, подъезды, зевак (St. 2)
Pavements, entrances, a yawnМилиция, улицы, лица (S. 3)
Police, streets, facesК палатам, полам и халатам (S. 6)
At the wards, the floors and the robesПостели, и люди, и стены (S. 10)
Beds, and people, and walls
This device has been used also by Pushkin and more recently Mandel’shtam. I cannot help but think of Blok’s poem of 1912, "Noch’, ulitsa, fonar’, apteka", which also ends with a line of three nouns, "Apteka, ylitsa, fonar’", or his 1904 poem "V kabakakh, v pereulkakh, v izvivakh", particularly as Pasternak was occupied with Blok at this time. In a few deft strokes both poets have described a scene using only commonplace nouns. It is a powerful use of metonymy. Both poet’s triads are emphasized metrically, one stress per word, and graphically, separated by commas, making the picture more vivid to the ear and the eye. And they choose concrete nouns that are easily visualized by a reader. In Pasternak’s poem the sound orchestration is remarkable. The first triad repeats pa and ez-ze. It emphasizes the word zevak, by its being the only singular word in the line and the last word. The second triad plays upon the syllable lits, the third upon pala and am, the fourth upon ste and i.
Pasternak displays rare ability to make everyday words come alive with emotion and ecstasy. Aleksandr Zholkovsky has defined this as the connection between things of time and things of eternity and between the interior world of a house and the outer world of nature and the city. He also recognizes the window as a primary image in Pasternak that helps make these connections. Pasternak’s vision is often that of a child, which brings together incongruous and disparate objects, united only by their presence in the same poem. It is also the perspective of a sick man, with its attentiveness to objects close at hand and the experience of space spread out into eternity beyond them. In the poem under analysis here there is, indeed, a sick man, looking though a window in the hospital. All of these ideas will be important in the following study of "V bol’nitse".
The poem can be divided into three parts: the first four stanzas describing the trip to the hospital, the middle five laying in the corridor of the hospital and the last four his conversation with God. The entire poem is from the perspective of the sick man, how he sees things, experiences them, even what he heard and smelled. The first part describes his being taken out onto the street in a stretcher and hoisted into the ambulance, as a crowd of onlookers "stood as if before a store window" ("stoiali kak pered vitrinoi"). The next two stanzas also have a confluence of images that show the confusion and rapidity of experiences. Kübler-Ross describes this almost dehumanizing part of illness:
Whoever has been very sick and has required rest and comfort especially may recall his experience of being put on a stretcher and enduring the noise of the ambulance siren and hectic rush until the hospital gates open. Only those who lived through this may appreciate the discomfort and cold necessity of such transportation which is only the beginning of a long ordeal—hard to endure when you are well, difficult to express in words when noise, light, pumps and voices are all too much to put up with.
Pasternak has accomplished this masterfully by choosing isolated objects, as if they are rushing past his gaze: "Police, streets, faces/Flashed in the light of the street light ("Militsiia, ulitsy, litsa/Mel’kali v svetu fonaria"). He is helpless and alone on the stretcher in the ambulance, merely an observer to whom things happen. When they arrive at the hospital, it grows quiet, where the rain, the drip of a drain, the scribble on his admission papers are heard. This stanza is a transition to experiences inside the hospital.
At the end of the fifth stanza the window appears. Connecting the interior of the hospital with the outside, "It blew from the street through the window" ("I s ulitsy dulo v okno"). The next stanza opens with a more familiar Pasternakian line "The window embraced a square/Part of the garden and a patch of sky" ("Okno obnimal kvardratom/Chast’ sada i neba klochok"). The window looks onto another world than that in which the ill person lies. The garden and sky enter through the window and already begin a process of animating the things in the hospital with, what I would call, a breath of eternity. The sound orchestration in this stanza help to unite these images, already connected by proximity, with the repetition of a stressed ‘o’ in the words "okno", "obnimal", "klochok", "novichok" and of stressed ‘a’ in "kvardratom", "chast’", "sada", "palatam", "khalatam", and "prismatrivalsia". There is a sense of childlike awe communicated with the vowels ‘o’ and ‘a’ and the patient is described as, a "novice" ("novichok"), a conversational word from the jargon of schoolboys.
In the next and central stanza of the poem the ill man accepts the inevitability of his own death in these circumstances. When he looks back toward the window in the following stanza, he sees the lights of the city "Exactly like a spark of a fire/From the lit-up city" ("Byla tochno iskoi pozharnoi/Iz goroda ozarena"). In this and the next stanza is an example of the combined metaphor "man-landscape", as Zholkovsky calls it, where nature is animated with man, becomes the body of man. The city is lit up with the experience of gratitude Pasternak has in sensing the eternal beyond the limits of the present moment. Everyday things, the city, a wall, a maple, seen though the window, are transformed. Once again rhymes and sound parallels assist this process, bringing together images associated with man and those in the outer world: ‘ar’ , ‘arno’ and ‘arne’ in "blagodarno", "pozharnoi", "ozarena" and ‘ev’ and ‘ve’ in "zareve", "otsvete", "otveshival", "vetkoi".
The word, window, is found in three of the central stanzas of the poem (stanza 5, 6, 8). It is the image in the poem that allows the ill man to find a way from the confines of the hospital and from the idea that death will be an end. Many of the everyday images he has chosen to use are ones that set limits: "streets", "car", "cabin", and later, "wall", "gates", "beds". They have the shape of squares or rectangles, like that of the window. A square is usually associated with confinement, so that the line "The window embraced a square" is an oxymoron, for the very function of a window is to allow access to the outside. And in this poem it is through the window that the ill man finds the inspiration to reach beyond the inevitability of death to have his conversation with God.
"The beds and the people and the walls/The night of death and the night city" (Posteli, i liudi, i steny,/Noch’ smerti i gorod nochnoi") in the last section of the poem also illustrates this point. Now the word ‘death’ appears, not as a thing to be feared, but as a perfect deed of God. Pasternak has turned the "night-side of life", as Sontag calls illness, into an experience of ecstasy. The tears in the next stanza recall the rain falling outside, earlier in the poem. It is as if nature shed tears that "night of death" that became tears of joy. The close juxtaposition of "pulling at a handkerchief" ("platok terebia") and "O God" ("O Bozhe") infuses the commonplace with the lofty. Likewise, in the next to the last stanza, does the placement of the dim light falling on the bed next to the sweetness of your priceless gift serve a similar role.
The last stanza uses a montage of different registers and incongruent images. The first line is more colloquial, while the next one reaches into the spiritual. The heat of this line is like the fire in the city ("zhar"/ "pozharnoi"), now attached to the hand of God. The ill man is held like a commercial product ("izdel’e"), the image of held connoting warmth and that of the product coldness. In the last line he has become a ring that is hidden in its case. He is now valued as a jewel, but a jewel that has been worn and now returned to rest in its case—a very apt metaphor for the acceptance of death. The poem has moved from a feeling of isolation and exposure on the street and in the foyer of the hospital to one of enclosure in a spiritual warmth. From a place of confinement in the hospital bed to the liberation through the window, he has gratefully moved into the safety and warmth of the ring in a case held by God. Encountering death became a heightened experience for Pasternak. The poet Nina Iskrenko, writing at the end of the 20th century, had quite a different experience of it.
The same propensity as Pasternak to alter the meaning of the word is exhibited by the Iskrenko. She is part of Russian post-modernism, one of a group of polystylistic writers according to Michael Epstein. Her poetry has been compared to pastiche, or palimpsest, as Iskrenko herself has called it. Epstein describes polystylistics as multicoded poetry that unites various discourses using the principle of collage.
The "low" discourse of everyday life, the heroic-solemn ideological discourse, the language of traditional landscape painting and technological manuals…(polystylistics) plays with the incongruity of objects in its collages and the resultant catastrophic disintegration of reality.
Whereas, Pasternak charges the word with alchemical powers, Iskrenko shocks the meaning of the word by placing it in contexts where it is not usually found. Like Anna Bunina, she was a rebel in her time, but, different from Bunina, found a place for herself in Russian letters. She was a prominent member of the Moscow Club, Poetry (Poeziia), that brought together formerly underground poets, a favorite at poetry readings and has been translated into many languages. Her untimely death in 1995 from breast cancer, at the age of forty-three, brought forth a stream of essays in her memory. The poem under attention here, "Obychno posle operatsii" was written as she struggled with this illness.
The poem has no stanzas, but is written in
five sections of between 4-6 lines. She uses no punctuation, employing line
change, capitals or extended spaces between words to illustrate new phrases
or sentences. The rhythm is iambic, varying from 3-6 feet. The rhyme is usually
between grammatical endings, such as atsii in "operatsii"
and "ovatsii" in the first stanza. Rhyme occurs at irregular intervals:
first stanza in lines 1 and 4, second stanza in lines 1, 2, and 5 and 3 and
4, third stanza in lines 2 and 3, fourth in 2 and 3, fifth in lines 1 and
6, 2, 3, and 4. Repetition of vowel and consonant sounds within lines plays
a large role. In the first stanza there is a preponderance of ‘o’ in the syllables
ob, po, op, lo, vo, nov, ov. The second stanza moves to the ‘e’ sound
surrounded by similar consonants: ekse, shei, nezh, shest, step, vet. ‘O’
returns again in the third stanza in the syllables vos, dob, gnom, nos,
sok, ro, ko. The last two stanzas revolve around the breath sounds kh,
st, zh, ch, shch. These repetitions both tie together the collage of images
the poet uses and emphasize their disparity. Another use of repeated sounds
is that of word roots as different parts of speech or repetition of entire
words. Examples are the root leg, found in the form of ‘legkosti’ and
‘legkikh’ in the first stanza and in the fourth as ‘legko’ and the repeated
word ‘bezhish’ in the fourth and fifth stanzas. What might be considered hackneyed
in a different style of poem works very well for Iskrenko’s polystylistics.
Her poem, like Pasternak’s, takes place in a hospital, but
describes experiences after an operation. The first two lines underline the
essential difference between Iskrenko’s impressions and Pasternak’s. Iskrenko
calls the feeling of bliss in Pasternak’s poem, "a feeling of lightness"
("chustvo legkosti"), which usually comes after the operation. In
her case it does not come. Throughout the first two stanzas Iskrenko plays
with the descent from the height of lightness usually experienced. The most
distinctive device she uses is repeating the phrase "Obychno posle"
("Usually after") in the first line of the first two stanzas. In
this way "operatsii" ("operation") is contrasted with
a word having sexual denotation here, "eksekutsii" ("execution").
But it is not the height of sex with another here, but alone, in the word
"masturbatsii" ("masturbation"). The colloquial "lovim
kaif" ("reach ecstasy") and the discordant "nezhnost’
mikrokosma" ("gentleness of the microcosm") descend into the
oxymoron of the "sixth step of pofigism" (shestaia stepen’ pofigizma").
At last the reality of the hospital prevails with "c vetochkoi gliukozy"
("from the branch of glucose") finally ending in her own body "v
zubakh" ("in the teeth"). This is a description of the IV from
a patient’s point of view as it flows down from the bottle of glucose through
the tube. The movement downward is emphasized in this last phrase by a graphical
separation into a new stanza and syntactical separation with the use of enjambment.
The shifts of discourse in Iskrenko are so frequent that I will not enumerate
all of them, but illustrate the use of this device in the second stanza. Beginning with the same phrase as that in stanza one, the
second stanza makes an abrupt shift into sexual terminology in the first two
lines. "Lovim kaif" is jargon used to describe any feeling of ecstasy,
often in sex or drugs, while "nezhnost’ mikrokosma" ("gentleness
of the microcosm") is hardly ever used together, thus hardly comprehensible.
Microcosm is a word used more in a philosophical context and connotes its
larger opposite, macrocosm, signifying the descent into smaller and smaller
images. "Shestaia stepen’" ("sixth stage") denotes added
degrees, but becomes subtracted degrees in the slang word "pofigizm"
("pofigism"), meaning apathy or ambivalence. Lastly, the descent
into the IV bottle through its tube occurs in the last line. The word "akatsuu"
("acacia") here, a flowering tree, makes sense in this context only
as ‘a branch of acacia’. In designating her poems as palimpsest, Iskrenko has indicated
that all these images appear as if laid one on top of another, a type of multiple
exposure in photography. The disintegrating effect is like that in cubist
art, but here in layers rather than in divided segments. Each layer of image
is so different and often discordant with the other, that they seem to battle
against each other for prominence and can find no sense of harmony. Like contemporary
classical music, where street noises, nature sounds, or machine noises are
part of the orchestral composition, they shatter reality into many pieces,
like a mirror broken on a floor. In the central stanza it appears that friends and family visit,
but in the form of angels and gnomes, fairy tale beings, echoed in the "talismany"
("talismans") and "magicheskie luny" (magical moons")
mentioned later. They come, however, with everyday shopping bags, bringing
her juice. Her real feelings begin to creep in with the appearance of the
word "onkolo" ("oncolo") at the end of the stanza, tied
to the adjectival ending placed before, rather than after, its noun, "gicheskie"
("gical"). It is a stark contrast with the adjective magical, with
the same ending, stating the ugly reality of her cancer. Now fear and struggle
appear in the poem. She finds herself in the paws of the extremists in the next
stanza, singularly beautiful men and women, adepts in the chase. Images from
politics, fashion and hunting all merge in a description that seems to be
about the nurses and doctors who have given her the operation and now care
for her. Metaphors associated with cancer and its treatment have long been
drawn from the language of warfare. Sontag writes, "With the patient’s
body considered to be under attack ("invasion"), the only treatment
is counterattack." Even the methods of treatment use such vocabulary:
"patients are ‘bombarded’ with toxic rays" and "treatment aims
to ‘kill’ cancer cells". The extremists in this stanza could as well
be the cancer within her own body. In both cases, her response is fear. She
becomes the hare they all chase about the page of her present or past writing.
The pace quickens, she runs and runs, "Bezhish’ bezhish’ I ushki prizhimaesh’",
rabbit ears held back in fear. The repetition of breath sounds and whole words
with these sounds enhances the feeling of the movement of a panicked rabbit.
Then, an unexpected break. If she doesn’t run, she could embroider or work
at frail charity, an occupation she obviously disparages. But, at that point,
a reminder of her cancer, an x-ray, intrudes in the graphic representation
of the word "x-lipkoi" ("frail"). The poem ends with the
hare preparing to run again, its ears held back. The fear she demonstrates here can have a number of levels.
The attention her body is given in the hospital by so much machinery and so
many anonymous personnel is depersonalizing and dehumanizing. The amount of
isolation one feels in this situation is very great. This only contributes
to the primal fear we have of death itself, especially cancer. A diagnosis
of cancer is like a death sentence today. Like leprosy in its day, cancer
is a subject of dread, a scourge, plagued by the superstitions surrounding
an illness for which neither the cause nor the cure are understood. It is
not only a lethal disease, but a shameful one. For a woman with breast cancer
the feeling of shame is even greater. When Iskrenko referred to the "singularly
beautiful men and women", it could also have been a slur at herself become
ugly through her own shame and through the surgery. In another poem written
that same day, Iskrenko writes "izoblichaiushchim uroda/s kosym metepsikhoznym
rtom" ("convicting the ugly one/ with the crooked metepsychotic
mouth"), obviously referring to herself. This illness would have been particularly difficult for a
poet to whom writing well seemed to come easily, who loved to perform her
poems in public, and to a poet Leonid Shevchenko said had a "nevynosimaia
legkost’ bytiia" ("unbearable lightness of being"). "The
show must go on," he wrote, "even let death turn into a show, a
game, that’s what I recall reading Nina Iskrenko’s book ("Shou golzhno
prodolzhat’siadazhe smert’ puskai prevratitsia v shou, v ugru vot chto ia
vspomnil, dochitayvaia knigu Niny Iskrenko"). This aspect of her life
helps to understand the line at the end of the first stanza concerning new
studies and ovations, that is ovations from the audience, and her repeated
use of words related to legkost’. She begins that other poem written
that day, "Ob etom govorit’ ne nado/Ne nado govorit’ ob etom" ("About
this we don’t have to talk/we don’t have to talk about this"). It appears
to discuss her illness to which she refers only as ‘eto’ or ‘to’. A woman
with the spirit of Iskrenko would probably not come to an acceptance of death
as Pasternak did. In her life she appears to have carried on as she did before
("dazhe umiraia, ne otprekaetsia ot svoei obychnoi roli"). But the
very fact that she wrote poems about that which was for her unspeakable reveal
her own way of struggling with illness and death. Even though she writes about
denial and isolation in relation to her own illness, the stages of death do
not occur in any given order, but are lived to fit the needs of each individual.
Iskrenko begins another poem, written a few months earlier
than the ones mentioned above, "Pisat’ o smerti khorosho" ("To
write about death is fine") Skirting the issue of death throughout the
poem, she ends with the line "neonovaia lamochka s nadpis’iu Zhit’! Zhit’!
Zhit’!" ("the neon lamp with the inscription Live! Live! Live!").
Like Dylan Thomas, who wrote, "And death shall have no dominion",
she had an insatiable appetite for life. She tried to continue life with her
same lightness of being. It was Anna Bunina, who fought against her illness,
as Thomas wrote, "Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against
the dying of the day." (footnotes to be added)