"Burning Burning Burning Burning": the Fire of The Waste Land in Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero

Abstract

In 1940, when the flames of WWII were already devastating Europe and approaching the USSR, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) started what was to become her last major work, Poem Without a Hero (1940-1960). Thanks to the poet and writer Boris Pasternak, Akhmatova was able to read T.S. Eliot’s work. Although she and Eliot never met nor communicated directly, Akhmatova considered him her soulmate. Having witnessed WWI, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the communist purges, Stalinism, and foreseeing the upcoming Nazi invasion, Akhmatova turns to Eliot as one of her main inspirations. The present paper explores one of the leitmotivs of The Waste Land, the multifaceted fire, seeing it as, first, a symbol of the horrors depicted in Poem Without a Hero, and second, a hope of a purifying power. Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero originated in The Waste Land´s despair and longing for salvation, and the fire in her poem is as merciless as it is redeeming, “like a pure flame in a dish of clay” (Poem Without a Hero).