Shadows of the Past: Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero and Lourié’s Incantations

Arthur Vincent Lourié (1891–1966), futurist, communist commissar of music, and close friend of Stravinsky in Paris in the 1920s, was an important member of avant-garde Russian artistic circles in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet by the 1950s he seems to have faded into obscurity. This article attempts to fill the gap left by the lack of discussion of the strange permutations of Lourié’s career after his emigration in 1922 by way of an analysis of his miniature 1961 song cycle Zaklinaniya (‘Incantations’). The cycle consists of five settings of lines from Anna Ahkmatova’s Poema bez geroya (‘Poem Without a Hero’), whose first part recalls Lourié and Akhmatova’s shared past in Russia’s Silver Age. Akhmatova (1889–1966), an intimate friend of the dandyish Lourié and at the centre of avant-garde artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg, describes the early 1910s as a Meyerholdian nightmarish masquerade in which the protagonists were constantly in danger of losing their identity through nihilistic role playing. Lourié’s elusive figure can be seen as the embodiment in the Poema of the frightening, superfluous shadow with ‘neither face nor name’. Rather than any unfortunate turn of political or personal history, it was Lourié’s affection for masks – for taking up exaggerated poses and concealing his real face – that provides the most compelling reason for his gradual disappearance from view in the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century.