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Abstract: The article reconstructs the implicit presence of Isaiah Berlin in Anna Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero” and the related “Songs.” Its aim is to reveal the mechanism of metamorphosis of a biographical event into a poetic plot that passes through successive temporal, genre, and contextual transformations. The methodological framework combines structural-typological, cultural-historical, and textological methods with structural-semantic, intertextual, contextual-biographical, and genre analysis. The study demonstrates that the “Third and Last” dedication, bearing the authorial date January 5, 1956 retrospectively actualizes the divinatory semantics of the poem’s first chapter and allows the “Guest from the Future” to be interpreted as a figure of fulfilled yet initially misread prophecy. The textual history of “Poem without a Hero” reveals a temporal triad: the future tense of the dedication, the present of the mirror vision, and the completed past of the “song” beginning with “For you I paid in hard cash…”. Particular significance is attached to the variant dating of this poem to 1955/1956: 1956 coincides with the end of the ten-year interval specified in the text, Berlin’s return to the Soviet Union, and his meeting with Akhmatova that did not take place during that visit. A comparison of the poem with another “song” “Yet you and I were never lovers…” that later replaced it in the manuscript collection The Flight of Time, makes it possible to interpret this authorial substitution as both concealing and generalizing a possible biographical subtext. The combination of the chastushka-stradanie tradition, a ballad model, and camp-prison stylization produces the genre model of the “tragic chastushka,” in which a love-related poetic conflict is transformed into a generalized model of unequal life circumstances. The scientific novelty of the study lies in reconstructing the logic of the formation of the “Berlin” plot of the “Poem without a Hero”: a later biographical event is retrospectively inscribed into an already established divinatory scenario and comes to be perceived as a fulfilled prophecy. The article also traces how a personal biographical plot acquires an archetypal poetic turn in the course of subsequent text and genre transformations.

About the author(s) :

Lyubov G. Kikhney

A. S. Griboedov Moscow University (Moscow, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0342-7125

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 03.09.2026; date of publication: 31.10.2026

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