The flowering of creativity which occurred in silver Age Russian poetry. Famous poetess, translator, nominee for Nobel Prize- she made an invaluable contribution to the development of Russian literature, becoming one of its brightest representatives. But few will remember that Akhmatova’s real name is completely different.
The poetess's childhood and adolescence
Anna Andreevna's real name was Gorenko. Her father was an engineer navy retired, and his mother was a distant relative of the poetess Anna Bunina. Later, this circumstance that no one in the family wrote poetry except Bunina will be reflected in Akhmatova’s notes alone. A year after the girl was born, in 1890, the whole family moved to Tsarskoe Selo. And Anna, from an early age, begins to “absorb” into herself all the beauty of Tsarskoye Selo life that Pushkin wrote about.
She always spent her summer at sea near Sevastopol, where she was brought every year. Anna Andreevna adored the sea: she could swim in any weather, loved to run barefoot and sunbathe in the sun, which amazed the Sevastopol girls, who nicknamed her “wild” for these habits. Akhmatova learned to read using the famous ABC of L.N. Tolstoy, and at the age of five she already spoke French, simply by listening to how it was taught to older children.
In 1900, the girl began studying at the Mariinsky Gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo. IN primary school Her academic performance was poor, but she was able to catch up, but the girl was reluctant to study. Anna studied at this gymnasium for only 5 years, because in 1905 her parents divorced, and she left with her mother for Evpatoria. But Akhmatova did not like this city, and a year later they moved to Kyiv, where in 1907 she completed her studies at the gymnasium.
In 1908, Anna Andreevna continued her studies at the Kyiv Higher Women's Courses and entered the law department. But the girl failed to become a lawyer. But she was able to learn Latin, which later helped her master Italian. And Akhmatova was able to read Italian works.
Literature always occupied a special place in Akhmatova’s life. She made her first attempts at poetry at the age of 11. And while studying in Tsarskoe Selo, Anna met her future husband and famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov. It was he who later influenced and helped take the first steps in the literary field. The girl's father was skeptical about her literary hobby and did not encourage it.
In 1907, Gumilyov published Anna’s first poem, “There are many shiny rings on his hand...” in his magazine published in Paris. In 1910, the girl marries Nikolai Gumilyov, and they leave for Honeymoon in Paris. After him they came to St. Petersburg, and the period from 1910 to 1916. Anna spends in Tsarskoe Selo. On June 14, 1910, the girl’s first poetic performance took place, V. Ivanov listened and appreciated her poems. His verdict was as follows: “What dense romanticism...”.
In 1911 Anna Gorenko began publishing her poems under new name- Akhmatova. This decision was influenced by the girl’s father: who disapproved of his daughter’s poetic experiments, he asked to sign the poems with a different surname so as not to disgrace his name. Where did this interesting surname come from?
This is the maiden name of Anna Andreevna’s great-grandmother, Praskovya Fedoseevna Akhmatova. The poetess decided to create the image of a Tatar grandmother, who traces her origins to the Horde Khan Akhmat. Subsequently, the poetess never changed this surname, even when getting married, she always added Akhmatova to her husband’s.
This was the beginning of the formation of a great poetess, whose work is a subject of admiration and admiration for many. Her poetry became famous all over the world, and even at a time when they refused to publish it, she did not give up and continued to be creative. It doesn’t even matter what Akhmatova’s real name was. Because she became known for her gift, soulful poetry, which touched on all the most subtle things that could be. Anna Andreevna was a talented poetess and became one of the brightest and famous representatives era of the Silver Age.
In the poetry of Anna Akhmatova was the main one love theme. Love is served in moments of rise and fall, the highest flowering of a feeling and its withering, meeting and separation. Lyrical heroine poet – tender, touching, proud and impetuous. In her poems, A. Akhmatova recreates the multifaceted world of the female soul, rich, subtle, noble.
A. Akhmatova's lyrics are extremely intimate and frank, distinguished by openness, directness, the absence of petty experiences and affectation, and are filled with the deepest experiences and personal tragedies. The fragility of feeling is combined with the hardness and stability of the verse: emotions and experiences are conveyed in clear, expressive details, thanks to which the reader feels mental tension and pain. In this, A. Akhmatova’s work is especially connected with Acmeism.
IN revolutionary years The theme of Russia appears in A. Akhmatova’s poems. In poetry we hear a voice courageous man- a citizen who did not leave his native lands in difficult days. In 1921, Anna Akhmatova’s husband Nikolai Gumilyov was shot on false charges, but Akhmatova did not leave Russia. Her poems express true patriotism:
I'm not with those who abandoned the earth
To be torn to pieces by enemies.
I don't listen to their rude flattery,
I won’t give them my songs. (1922)
And the one who says goodbye to her beloved today, –
Let her transform her pain into strength.
We swear to the children, we swear to the graves,
That no one will force us to submit!
But A. Akhmatova understood that war is death, fear and evil. Most of her poems are anti-war, based on universal humanistic values (“Consolation”, “Prayer”):
Give me the bitter years of illness,
Choking, insomnia, fever,
Take away both the child and the friend,
And the mysterious gift of song–
So I pray at Your liturgy
After so many tedious days,
So that a cloud over dark Russia
Became a cloud in the glory of the rays.
The 1930s turned out to be a tragic period in the life of Anna Akhmatova: her husband and son were arrested. During the war, Anna Akhmatova's son was sent to the front. In 1949, Lev Gumilyov was imprisoned for the third time for 7 years. A. Akhmatova spent seventeen months in prison lines. The main result of this difficult period of life is the poem “Requiem” - a lament for all those who have died and are dying. In poetic lines the poet described state of mind everyone who stood in line at the prison window with her was in general horror and numbness. The poem shows a picture of reality, of the whole country. "Requiem" is soaked tragic feeling grief, pain of loss, fear and hopelessness:
Mountains bend before this grief,
The great river does not flow
But the prison gates are strong,
And behind them are “convict holes”»
And mortal melancholy.
In the poem fate lyrical hero, Anna Akhmatova merges with the fate of the people:
No, and not under an alien sky,
And not under the protection of alien wings, -
I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.
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“Memories have three eras,” Anna Akhmatova once said. Her creative destiny also falls into three stages, three biographical circles.
The beginning of the first - 1912 - the publication of the collections “Evening” and “Rosary”. Akhmatova’s work of this period is connected with Acmeism, and even later the poet (Akhmatova did not recognize the definition of “po-ethess” in relation to herself) did not renounce her connection with Acmeism. The lyrics of the first books are almost exclusively love lyrics. The miniature poems were lyrical and internally dramatic, sometimes even plot-driven (“Confusion”). In her early poems, the combination of tenderness and fragility of feeling with the firmness and clarity of the verse was striking. Contemporaries talked about the “mystery” of Akhmatova. Her love lyrics are extremely intimate and extremely frank and sensual. “The Duel of Fatal Passions” is close to Tyutchev.
Love is the main nerve of Akhmatova’s early lyrics. It is given in extreme moments of crisis - rise and fall, breakup and meeting, recognition and refusal (“As simple courtesy commands...”, “An unprecedented autumn built a high dome...”).
The lyrics of the first collections convey a feeling of the fragility of existence, some kind of instability. In the pre-revolutionary years, biblical and historical associations appeared in poems, and the theme of Russia asserted itself more and more powerfully (“You know, I’m languishing in captivity”). For Akhmatova, Russia was often associated with Tsarskoye Selo, where “a dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys,” where everything was permeated with the spirit of Pushkin’s poetry. Her Russia is also St. Petersburg - a city of culture and sovereign greatness.
The theme of the Motherland and its interpretation during the First World War differed from the jingoistic views of many poets. Akhmatova understood that war is murder, death, a great evil. Her poetry is anti-war, pacifist in nature, based on religious basis(“Consolation”, “Prayer”).
Give me the bitter years of illness, Choking, insomnia, fever, Take away both the child and the friend, And the mysterious gift of song - So I pray at your liturgy After so many languid days, So that the cloud over dark Russia Becomes a cloud in the glory of the rays.
The second period of Akhmatova’s work covers the years from the revolution to the end of the 1930s. Poetry is filled with universal human content. All the difficult years of devastation, hunger, and deprivation, Akhmatova did not leave her homeland and did not emigrate. The poems “I had a voice, he called comfortingly...” and “I am not with those who abandoned the land...” expresses the true patriotism and courage of the poet, who considers it a shame to leave the country in difficult times:
I had a voice. He called comfortingly, He said: “Come here. Leave your land, deaf and sinful, Leave Russia forever.” But indifferently and calmly I closed my ears with my hands, so that the sorrowful spirit would not be defiled by this unworthy speech.
Akhmatova’s poetry reflected all the tragic contradictions of the era: the destruction of life, family, culture. During the years of the civil war, Akhmatova writes: “Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold.” Despite the terrible life, the poet sees the light. The power of life allows you to believe in a wonderful future, to say words of blessing to the newness and beauty of life.
The 1930s turned out to be difficult times for Akhmatova: her husband and son were arrested. She herself - ex-wife“counter-revolutionary” Nikolai Gumilyov, executed in 1921, lived in anticipation of arrest. All this gives rise to the tragic poems “The Last Toast”, “Why did you poison the water...”. The main result of the 1930s was the poem “Requiem”. With it, Anna Akhmatova fulfilled her civic duty to those who had been standing in line at the prison window for many months. The poem conveys a suffocating atmosphere of general stupor. An amazingly capacious image of the City was created here, which differs sharply from the former Blok-Akhmatov Petersburg. Now this is not a city of beauty and harmony, but an “unnecessary” appendage to the giant prison into which the whole country has turned: Material from the site
It was when only the dead smiled, glad for the peace. And Leningrad dangled like an unnecessary appendage Near its prisons.“Requiem” is a cry not only for one’s own son, but for everyone who was “taken away at dawn.”
In the 1940s - during the Great Patriotic War— Akhmatova’s poems were heard on the radio. “Oath”, “Courage” are permeated with the confidence that “no one will force us to submit”, that “we will protect you, Russian speech, the great Russian word.”
Akhmatova’s poems, collected in the final collection “The Running of Time,” are elegiac, imbued with a philosophical attitude to life, wise and majestic. Akhmatova’s poetic “sun” was Pushkin. She inherits the traditions of Pushkin's poetry, its brevity, accuracy, simplicity and harmony.
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On this page there is material on the following topics:
- Anna Akhmatova creative path collections and poems
- short biography of Anna Akhmatova
- Akhmatova's creativity briefly
- features of Akhmatova’s creative path
- stages of Akhmatova’s life and work briefly
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
MUNICIPAL EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION "SAKMARA SECONDARY SCHOOL".
______________________________________________________________
Essay
Topic: “The main periods of creativity
Anna Akhmatova"
Alexandra Viktorovna,
11th grade student
Supervisor:
Utarbaeva
Vera Ortanovna
I. Introduction. “Women's poetry” by Anna Akhmatova. __________________3
II. The main periods of Anna Akhmatova's creativity.
1. Akhmatova’s triumphant entry into literature – the first stage
her creativity. ____________________________________________5
2. The second era of creativity - the post-revolutionary twenty years.10
3. “The Third Glory” by Akhmatova.________________________________18
III. Conclusion. The connection of Akhmatova’s poetry with time, with her life
people__________________________________________________________20
IV. Bibliography ______________________________________________21
I. "Women's Poetry" by Anna Akhmatova.
Anna Akhmatova's poetry is “women's poetry.” At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - on the eve of the great revolution, in an era shocked by two world wars, perhaps the most significant “women's” poetry in all world literature of that time arose in Russia - the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. The closest analogy that arose among her first critics was the ancient Greek love singer Sappho: the Russian Sappho was often called the young Anna Akhmatova.
The accumulated spiritual energy of the female soul for centuries received an outlet in the revolutionary era in Russia, in the poetry of a woman who was born in 1889 under the modest name of Anna Gorenko and under the name of Anna Akhmatova, who acquired universal recognition over fifty years of poetic work, now translated into all the major languages of the world.
Before Akhmatova, love lyrics were hysterical or vague, mystical and ecstatic. From here, a style of love with halftones, omissions, aestheticized and often unnatural love spread in life. This was also facilitated by the so-called decadent prose.
After the first Akhmatov’s books, people began to love “in the Akhmatovian way.” And not just women. There is evidence that Mayakovsky often quoted Akhmatova’s poems and read them to his loved ones. However, later, in the heat of controversy, he spoke of them with ridicule. This circumstance played a role in the fact that Akhmatova was separated from her generation for a long time, because Mayakovsky’s authority in the pre-war era was indisputable.
Anna Andreevna highly appreciated Mayakovsky's talent. On the tenth anniversary of his death, she wrote the poem “Mayakovsky in 1913,” where she recalls “his stormy heyday.”
Everything you touched seemed
Not the same as it was before
What you destroyed was destroyed,
Every word contained a sentence. Apparently she forgave Mayakovsky.
Much has been written about Anna Akhmatova and her poetry in the works of leading scientists in our country. I would like to express words of respect and love for the great talent of Anna Andreevna, and recall the stages of her creative path.
Various materials collected together paint an image of a man and a poet who evokes feelings of gratitude and respect. So in “Notes about Anna Akhmatova” Lydia Chukovskaya shows us on the pages of her diary a famous and abandoned, strong and helpless woman - a statue of sorrow, orphanhood, pride, courage.
In the introductory article to the book “Anna Akhmatova: I am your voice...” David Samoilov, a contemporary of the poet, conveys his impressions of meetings with Anna Andreevna and shows important milestones in her creative path.
The creative path of Anna Akhmatova, the features of her talent, and her role in the development of Russian poetry of the twentieth century are described in the book “Anna Akhmatova: Life and Creativity”,
II. The main periods of Anna Akhmatova's creativity.
1. Akhmatova’s triumphant entry into literature is the first stage of her work.
Anna Akhmatova's entry into literature was
sudden and victorious. Perhaps her husband, Nikolai Gumilev, with whom she married in 1910, knew about her early formation.
Akhmatova almost did not go through the school of literary apprenticeship, at least the one that would have taken place in front of the eyes of teachers - a fate that even the greatest poets could not avoid - and immediately appeared in literature as a completely mature poet. Although the road ahead was long and difficult. Her first poems in Russia appeared in 1911 in the magazine “Apollo”, and the following year the poetry collection “Evening” was published.
Almost immediately, Akhmatova was unanimously ranked by critics among the greatest Russian poets. A little later, her name is increasingly compared with the name of Blok himself and highlighted by Blok himself, and after some ten years one of the critics even wrote that Akhmatova “after Blok’s death, undoubtedly, takes first place among Russian poets.” At the same time, we have to admit that after Blok’s death, Akhmatova’s muse had to become a widow, because Blok played a “colossal role” in Akhmatova’s literary fate. This is confirmed by her poems directly addressed to Blok. But the point is not only in them, in these “personal” poems. Almost the entire world of Akhmatova’s early, and in many ways later, lyric poetry is connected with Blok.
And if I die, who will
He will write my poems to you,
Who will help become the ringers
Words not yet spoken.
On the books given to Akhmatova, Blok simply wrote “Akhmatova – Blok”: equal to equal. Even before the release of “Evening,” Blok wrote that he was concerned about Anna Akhmatova’s poems and that “the further they go, the better.”
Soon after the release of “Evening” (1912), the observant Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky noted in her a trait of “grandeur,” that royalty without which there are not a single memory of Anna Andreevna. Was this majesty the result of her unexpected and noisy fame? We can definitely say no. Akhmatova was not indifferent to fame, and she did not pretend to be indifferent. She was independent of fame. Indeed, even in the darkest years of Leningrad apartment confinement (about twenty years!), when no one had heard of her, and in other years of reproach, blasphemy, threats and expectation of death, she never lost the greatness of her appearance.
Anna Akhmatova began to understand very early that you should only write those poems that if you don’t write, you will die. Without this shackled obligation there is and cannot be poetry. And also, in order for the poet to sympathize with people, he needs to go through the pole of his despair and the desert of his own grief, learn to overcome it alone.
The character, talent, and destiny of a person are molded in youth. Akhmatova's youth was sunny.
And I grew up in patterned silence,
In a cool nursery of the young century.
But in this patterned silence of Tsarskoe Selo and in the dazzling blue of ancient Chersonesus, tragedies followed her relentlessly.
And the Muse became deaf and blind,
The grain rotted in the ground,
So that again, like a Phoenix from the ashes,
Rise blue on the air.
And she rebelled and took up her task again. And so all my life. What has befallen her! And the death of sisters from consumption, and she herself was bleeding at the throat, and personal tragedies. Two revolutions, two terrible wars.
After the publication of her second book, “The Rosary” (1914), Osip Mandelstam prophetically predicted: “Her poetry is close to becoming one of the symbols of the greatness of Russia.” It might have seemed paradoxical then. But how exactly it came true!
Mandelstam saw greatness in the very nature of Akhmatova’s verse, in the poetic matter itself, in the “royal word.” “Evening”, “Rosary” and “White Flock” - Akhmatova’s first books were unanimously recognized as books love lyrics. Her innovation as an artist initially appeared precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeated and seemingly played out theme to the end.
The novelty of Akhmatova’s love lyrics caught the eye of her contemporaries “almost from her first poems, published in Apollo,” but, unfortunately, the heavy banner of Acmeism under which the young poetess stood, for a long time seemed to be draping her true, original in the eyes of many appearance Acmeism, a poetic movement, began to take shape around 1910, that is, around the same time when she began to publish her first poems. The founders of Acmeism were N. Gumilev and S. Gorodetsky, they were also joined by O. Mandelstam and V. Narbut, M. Zenkevich and other poets who proclaimed the need for a partial rejection of some of the precepts of “traditional” symbolism. The Acmeists set themselves the goal of reforming symbolism. The first condition of acmeistic art is no mysticism: the world must appear as it is - visible, material, carnal, living and mortal, colorful and sounding, that is, sobriety and a healthy realistic view of the world; a word must mean what it means in a real language real people: specific objects and specific properties.
The early work of the poetess outwardly quite easily fits into the framework of Acmeism: in the poems “Evenings” and “Rosary” one can immediately easily find the objectivity and clarity of outline that N. Gumilev, S. Gorodetsky, M. Kuzmin and other.
In the depiction of the material, material environment, connected by a tense and undiscovered connection with the deep subterranean bubbling of feeling, Innokenty Annensky, whom Anna Akhmatova considered her teacher, was a great master. Annensky is an extraordinary poet, who matured alone in the wilderness of poetic time, miraculously developed verse before Blok’s generation and turned out to be, as it were, his younger contemporary, for his first book was belatedly published in 1904, and his second - the famous “Cypress Casket” in 1910, a year after his death author. For Akhmatova, “The Cypress Casket” was a genuine shock, and it permeated her work with long, strong creative impulses that went back many years.
By a strange coincidence of fate, these two poets breathed the air of Tsarskoe Selo, where Annensky was the director of the gymnasium. He was the forerunner of new schools, unknown and unconscious.
...Who was the harbinger, the omen,
I felt sorry for everyone, I breathed languor in everyone -
This is what Akhmatova will later say in her poem “Teacher”. Poets most often learn not from predecessors, but from forerunners. Following her spiritual forerunner Annensky, Akhmatova honored the entire previous rich world human culture. So Pushkin was a shrine for her, an endless source of creative joy and inspiration. She carried this love throughout her life, not being afraid even of the dark wilds of literary criticism, she wrote articles: “ The Last Tale Pushkin (about “The Golden Cockerel”)”, “About Pushkin’s “Stone Guest””, and other well-known works by Akhmatova the Pushkin scholar. Her poems dedicated to Tsarskoye Selo and Pushkin are permeated with that special color of feeling, which is best called love - not, however, the somewhat abstract one that accompanies the posthumous fame of celebrities at a respectful distance, but a very lively, immediate one, in which there is fear, annoyance, and resentment, and even jealousy...
Pushkin once sang the praises of the famous Tsarskoe Selo statue-fountain, glorifying it forever:
The maiden dropped the urn with water and broke it on the cliff.
The virgin sits sadly, idle holding a shard.
Miracle! The water will not dry up, pouring out from the broken urn;
The Virgin, above the eternal stream, sits forever sad!
Akhmatova responded with her “Tsarskoye Selo statue” irritably and annoyed:
And how could I forgive her
The delight of your praise, beloved...
Look, she has fun being sad
So elegantly naked.
Not without vindictiveness, she proves to Pushkin that he was mistaken in seeing in this dazzling beauty with bare shoulders some eternally sad maiden. Her eternal sadness has long passed, and she secretly rejoices at the enviable and happy female destiny bestowed on her by Pushkin’s word and name...
The development of Pushkin's world continued throughout his life. And, perhaps, most of all, Pushkin’s universalism, that worldwide responsiveness that Dostoevsky wrote about, responded to the spirit of Akhmatova’s creativity!
The young critic and poet N.V. presciently wrote in an article in 1915 that the love theme in Akhmatova’s works is much broader and more significant than its traditional framework. Nedobrovo. He, in fact, was the only one who understood before others the true scale of Akhmatova’s poetry, pointing out that the distinguishing feature of the poetess’s personality was not weakness and brokenness, as was usually believed, but, on the contrary, exceptional willpower. In Akhmatova’s poems he saw “ lyrical soul rather tough than too soft, rather cruel than tearful, and clearly dominant rather than oppressed.” Akhmatova believed that it was N.V. Nedobrovo guessed and understood her entire future creative path.
Unfortunately, with the exception of N.V. Not good, the criticism of those years did not fully understand the real reason her innovations.
Thus, the books about Anna Akhmatova published in the twenties, one by V. Vinogradov, the other by B. Eikhenbaum, almost did not reveal to the reader Akhmatova’s poetry as a phenomenon of art. V. Vinogradov approached Akhmatova’s poems as a kind of “individual system of linguistic means.” In essence, the learned linguist was of little interest in the specific living and deep dramatic fate of a loving and suffering person confessing in poetry.
B. Eikhenbaum's book, in comparison with the work of V. Vinogradov, of course, gave the reader more opportunities to form an idea of Akhmatova - an artist and a person. The most important and, perhaps, the most interesting thought of B. Eikhenbaum was the consideration of the “romanticism” of Akhmatova’s lyrics, that each book of her poems is, as it were, a lyrical novel, which also has in its family tree Russian realistic prose.
Vasily Gippus (1918) also wrote interestingly about the “romanticism” of Akhmatova’s lyrics:
“I see the key to Akhmatova’s success and influence (and her echoes have already appeared in poetry) and at the same time the objective significance of her lyrics is that these lyrics replaced the dead or dormant form of the novel. The need for a novel is an obviously urgent need. But the novel in its previous forms, the novel, like a flowing and high-water river, began to occur less frequently and began to be replaced by swift streams (“short story”), and then by instant geysers. In this type of art, in the lyrical miniature novel, in the poetry of “geysers,” Anna Akhmatova achieved great mastery. Here is one such novel:
As simple courtesy dictates,
He came up to me and smiled.
Half-affectionate, half-lazy
He touched his hand with a kiss.
And mysterious ancient faces
The eyes looked at me,
Ten years of freezing and screaming.
All my sleepless nights
I put it in a quiet word
And I said it in vain.
You left. And it started again
My soul is both empty and clear.
Confusion.
The novel is over,” V. Gippus concludes his observations: “The tragedy of ten years is told in one brief event, in one gesture, look, word..."
Her poem “I had a voice” should rightfully be considered a kind of summary of the path Akhmatova traveled before the revolution. He called comfortingly...”, written in 1917 and directed against those who, in times of severe trials, were about to abandon their homeland:
He said: "Come here,
Leave your land deaf and sinful,
Leave Russia forever.
I will wash the blood from your hands,
I will take the black shame out of my heart,
I'll cover it with a new name
The pain of defeat and resentment."
But indifferent and calm
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that with this speech unworthy
The mournful spirit was not defiled.
This poem immediately drew a clear line between emigrants, mainly “external”, that is, those who actually left Russia after October, as well as “internal”, who did not leave for some reason, but were fiercely hostile towards Russia, who entered the another way.
In the poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly...” Akhmatova essentially (for the first time) acted as a passionate civic poet of patriotic sound. The strict, upbeat, biblical form of the poem, forcing one to remember the prophets-preachers, and the very gesture of expelling from the temple - everything in this case is surprisingly proportionate to its majestic and harsh era, which was beginning a new era.
A. Blok loved this poem very much and knew it by heart. He said: “Akhmatova is right. This is an undignified speech. To run away from the Russian revolution is a shame.”
In this poem there is no understanding of it, there is no acceptance of the revolution like Blok and Mayakovsky, but the voice of that intelligentsia that went through torment, doubted, searched, rejected, found and made its main choice sounded sufficiently in it: stayed with its country, with your people.
Naturally, Akhmatova’s poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly...” was received by a certain part of the intelligentsia with great irritation - in much the same way as A. Blok’s poem “The Twelve” was received. This was the pinnacle, the highest point reached by the poetess in the first era of her life.
2. The second era of creativity - post-revolutionary
twentieth anniversary.
The lyrics of the second era of Akhmatova’s life - the post-revolutionary twenty years - were constantly expanding,
absorbing new and new areas that were previously not characteristic of it, and love story, without ceasing to be dominant, nevertheless occupied only one of the poetic territories in it. However, the inertia of reader perception was so great that Akhmatova, even in these years, when she turned to civil, philosophical and journalistic lyrics, was perceived by the majority exclusively as an artist of love. But this was far from the case.
At the very beginning of the second period, two books by Akhmatova were published - “The Plantain” and “Anno Domini”. They served as the main subject of discussions and disputes regarding Akhmatova’s work and its suitability for Soviet readers. The question arose like this: is being in the Komsomol, not to mention the ranks of the party, compatible with reading Akhmatova’s “noble” poems?
Came out in defense of Akhmatova wonderful woman– revolutionary, diplomat, author of many works devoted to the idea of women's equality A.M. Kollontai. The critic G. Lelevich objected to her. His article is one of the harshest and most unfair in the numerous literature about Akhmatova. She completely erased any meaning of her lyrics, except for the counter-revolutionary one, and in many ways, unfortunately, determined the tone and style of the then critical speeches addressed to the poetess.
In her diary entries, Akhmatova wrote: “After my evenings in Moscow (spring 1924), a decision was made to stop my literary activity. They stopped publishing me in magazines and almanacs and no longer inviting me to literary evenings. I met M. Shaginyan on Nevsky. She said: “What an important person you are: there was a decree of the Central Committee about you (1925): do not arrest, but do not publish.” The second Resolution of the Central Committee was issued in 1946, when it was also decided not to arrest, but not to publish.
However, the property of the articles, which unexpectedly and sadly united A.M. Kollontai and G. Lelevich - a property essentially characteristic of all those who wrote about Akhmatova in those years and later was to ignore the civil theme that made its way through her poems. Of course, she did not appear to the poetess very often, but no one even mentioned such a beautiful image of journalistic verse as the poem “I had a voice.” He called comfortingly...” But this work was not alone! In 1922, Anna Akhmatova wrote a remarkable poem “I am not with those who abandoned the earth...”. It is impossible not to see in these works certain possibilities that unfolded in full and brilliant force only later in “Requiem”, in “Poem without a Hero”, in historical fragments and philosophical lyrics that conclude “The Running of Time”.
Since Akhmatova, after the first, as she put it, Resolution of the Central Committee, could not publish for fourteen years (from 1925 to 1939), she was forced to do translations.
At the same time, apparently, on the advice of N. Punin, whom she married after V. Shuleiko, the architecture of Pushkin’s St. Petersburg. N. Punin was an art critic, an employee of the Russian Museum and, presumably, helped her with qualified advice. This work greatly fascinated Akhmatova because it was connected with Pushkin, whose work she intensively studied during these years and achieved such success that she began to enjoy serious authority among professional Pushkin scholars.
For understanding Akhmatova’s work, her translations are also of no small importance, not only because the poems she translated, in the general opinion, convey the meaning and sound of the original to the Russian reader exceptionally correctly, becoming at the same time facts of Russian poetry, but also because, for example, in the pre-war years, translation activities often and for a long time immersed her poetic consciousness in the vast worlds of international poetry.
Translations to an important extent also contributed to the further expansion of the boundaries of her own poetic worldview. Thanks to this work, a sense of kinship with the entire previous multilingual culture arose again and again and was affirmed in her own work. The sublimity of the style, which was repeatedly mentioned by many who wrote about Akhmatova, stems to a large extent from her constant feeling of an obliging neighborhood with great artists of all eras and nations.
The 1930s turned out to be the most difficult trials in her life for Akhmatova. She witnessed the terrible war that Stalin and his henchmen waged against their own people. The monstrous repressions of the 30s, which fell on almost all of Akhmatova’s friends and like-minded people, destroyed her family home: first, her son, a student at Leningrad University, was arrested and exiled, and then her husband, N.N. Punin. Akhmatova herself lived all these years in constant anticipation of arrest. She spent, according to her, seventeen months in long and sad prison queues to hand over the package to her son and learn about his fate. In the eyes of the authorities, she was an extremely unreliable person: the wife, albeit divorced, of the “counter-revolutionary” N. Gumilyov, who was shot in 1921, the mother of the arrested conspirator Lev Gumilyov, and, finally, the wife (though also divorced) of the prisoner N. Punin.
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
she wrote in “Requiem,” filled with grief and despair.
Akhmatova could not help but understand that her life was constantly hanging by a thread, and like millions of other people, stunned by unprecedented terror, she listened with alarm to any knock on the door.
OK. Chukovskaya writes in her “Notes about Anna Akhmatova” that with such caution, she read her poems in a whisper, and sometimes she did not even dare to whisper, since the dungeon was very close. “In those years,” L. Chukovskaya explains in her preface to “Notes...”, “Anna Andreevna lived, bewitched by the dungeon... Anna Andreevna, visiting me, read me poems from the “Requiem”, also in a whisper, but in her Fountain House she did not she even dared to whisper: suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, she fell silent and, pointing with her eyes at the ceiling and walls, took a piece of paper and a pencil, then loudly said something secular: “Would you like some tea?” or “You are very tanned,” then she would write a piece of paper in quick handwriting and hand it to me. I read the poems and, having memorized them, silently returned them to her. "Today early autumn“,” Anna Andreevna said loudly and, striking a match, burned the paper over the ashtray.
It was a ritual: hands, a match, an ashtray - a beautiful and sad ritual..."
Deprived of the opportunity to write, Akhmatova at the same time—paradoxically—experienced her greatest creative rise in those years. In her grief, courage, pride and creative fire, she was alone. The same fate befell the majority of Soviet artists, including, of course, her closest friends - Mandelstam, Pilnyak, Bulgakov...
Throughout the 30s, Akhmatova worked on the poems that made up the poem “Requiem”, where the image of the Mother and the executed Son is correlated with gospel symbolism.
Biblical images and motifs made it possible to expand the temporal and spatial framework of the works as widely as possible in order to show that the forces of Evil that have gained the upper hand in the country are fully correlated with the largest human tragedies. Akhmatova does not consider the troubles that have occurred in the country to be either temporary violations of the law that could be easily corrected, or the misconceptions of individuals. The biblical scale forces us to measure events with the largest measure. After all, we were talking about the distorted fate of the people, millions of innocent victims, and apostasy from basic universal moral norms.
Of course, a poet of this type and way of thinking was certainly an extremely dangerous person, almost a leper, whom it was better to beware of until he was put in prison. And Akhmatova perfectly understood her exclusion in the dungeon state:
Not the lyre of a lover
I'm going to captivate the people -
Leper's Ratchet
Sings in my hand.
And you’ll have time to fuck off,
And howling and cursing.
I'll teach you to shy away
You, brave ones, from me.
In 1935, Akhmatova wrote a poem in which the theme of the poet’s fate, tragic and lofty, was combined with an appeal to power:
Why did you poison the water?
And they mixed my bread with my dirt?
Why the last freedom
Are you turning it into a nativity scene?
Because I remained faithful
My sad homeland?
So be it. Without executioner and scaffold
There will be no poet on earth.
We have shirts of repentance,
We should go and howl with a candle.
What lofty, what bitter and solemnly proud words - they stand densely and heavily, as if cast from metal in reproach to violence and in memory of future people. In her work of the 30s, there really was a takeoff; the scope of her verse expanded immeasurably, incorporating both great tragedies - the outbreak of the Second World War, and another war, the one that was unleashed by a criminal government against its own people.
Akhmatova’s main creative and civic achievement in the 1930s was her creation of the poem “Requiem,” dedicated to the years of the “Great Terror.”
“The Requiem consists of ten poems, a prose Preface, called “Instead of a Preface” by Akhmatova, a Dedication, an Introduction and a two-part Epilogue. The “Crucifixion” included in “Requiem” also consists of two parts. In addition, the poem is preceded by an epigraph from the poem “So it was not in vain that we suffered together...” This poem was written in 1961 as independent work, not directly related to “Requiem”, but actually, internally, of course, connected with it.
Akhmatova, however, did not include it entirely in the poem, since the stanza “No, and not under an alien firmament...” was important to her above all, since it successfully set the tone for the entire poem, being its musical and semantic key. When the question of including “Requiem” in the book was being decided, perhaps the main obstacle for both the editors and the censor was the epigraph. It was believed that the people could not be in some kind of “misfortune” under Soviet power. But Akhmatova refused the proposal of A. Surkov, who oversaw the publication of the book, to remove the epigraph and was right, since he, with the power of a minted formula, uncompromisingly expressed the very essence of her behavior - as a writer and a citizen: she really was with the people in their trouble and Indeed, she never sought protection from “alien wings” - neither then in the 30s, nor later, during the years of Zhdanov’s massacre, She perfectly understood that if she conceded the epigraph-key, other concessions would be demanded of her. For these reasons, “Requiem” was first published only 22 years after the poet’s death, in 1988. Akhmatova spoke about the vital basis of the “Requiem” and its internal purpose in a prose Prologue, which she called “Instead of a Preface”:
“During the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad. One day someone “identified” me. Then a woman with blue lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard my name in her life, woke up from the stupor that is characteristic of us all and asked me in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper):
Can you describe this?
And I said:
Then something like a smile crossed what had once been her face.”
In this small piece of information, the era clearly emerges. Akhmatova, standing in a prison line, writes not only about herself, but about everyone at once, speaks of “the numbness characteristic of us all.” The preface to the poem, like the epigraph, is the second key; it helps us understand that the poem was written, like Mozart’s “Requiem” once upon a time, “to order.” A woman with blue lips (from hunger and nervous exhaustion) asks her for this as the last hope for some triumph of justice and truth. And Akhmatova takes upon herself this order, such a heavy duty.
“Requiem” was not created at once, but over different years. Most likely, Akhmatova initially hardly had a clear idea of writing a poem.
The dates under the poems that make up the “Requiem” are different; Akhmatova associates them with the tragic peaks of the sad events of those years: the arrest of her son in 1935, the second arrest in 1939, the sentencing, the troubles of the case, the days of despair...
Simultaneously with the “Requiem”, poems from “Skulls”, “Why did you poison the water...”, “And I’m not a prophetess at all...” and others were written, correlating with the poem not indirectly, but directly directly, which allows us to treat them as a kind of commentary "Requiem". Particularly close to it are “Shards”, which are like a musical echo, sounding directly after the lines of the poem.
Speaking about “Requiem”, listening to its harsh and hysterical mourning music, mourning millions of innocent victims and one’s own sad life, one cannot help but hear echoes of many other works of Akhmatova of that time. So, for example, “Dedication” was written simultaneously with the poem “The Way of All the Earth”: they have a common date - March 1940. The poem “The Way of the Whole Earth” - with the image of a funeral sleigh in the center, with the expectation of death, with the ringing of the bells of Kitezh, is a lamentation poem, that is, also a kind of requiem:
Great winter
I've been waiting for a long time
Like a white schema
She was accepted.
And into a light sleigh
I sit down calmly...
I'm coming to you, residents of Kitezh,
I'll be back before nightfall.
Behind the ancient site
One transition...
Now with the Kitezhan woman
Nobody will go
Neither brother nor neighbor
Not the first groom, -
Just a pine branch
Yes, a sunny verse,
Dropped by a beggar
And raised by me...
In the last home
Give me peace.
It is impossible not to see in the poem elements of a memorial service, at least a farewell mourning.
If you put both texts side by side - the poems “The Way of All the Earth” and “Requiem”, one cannot help but see their deep kinship. In current editions, as if obeying the law of internal cohesion, they are printed side by side; Chronology also forces us to do the same.
But there is a difference - in “Requiem” one is immediately struck by a wider register and the very “we” that predetermines its epic basis:
Mountains bend before this grief,
The great river does not flow
And behind them are “convict holes”
And mortal melancholy.
For someone the wind is blowing fresh,
For someone the sunset is basking -
We don't know, we're the same everywhere
We only hear the hateful grinding of keys
Moments of periodic returns to the “Requiem”, which was created gradually, sometimes after long breaks, each time were determined by their own reasons, but, in essence, it never - as a plan, duty and goal - never left consciousness. After the extensive “Dedication”, which reveals the address of the poem, comes the “Introduction”,
directed directly to those whom women mourn, that is, to those leaving for hard labor or execution. Here the image of a City appears, in which there is absolutely no former beauty and splendor; it is a city appendage to a gigantic prison.
It was when I smiled
Only dead, glad for peace,
And dangled like an unnecessary pendant
Leningrad is near its prisons.
And only after the “Introduction” the specific theme of the “Requiem” begins to sound - lamentation for the Son:
They took you away at dawn
I followed you like I was being carried away,
Children were crying in the dark room,
The goddess's candle floated.
There are cold icons on your lips,
Death sweat on the brow... Don't forget!
I will be like the Streltsy wives,
Howl under the Kremlin towers.
Akhmatova, as we see, gives the scene of arrest and farewell broad meaning, meaning not only her farewell to her son, but many sons, fathers and brothers to those who stood with her in the prison line.
Under the poem “They took you away at dawn...” Akhmatova puts the date “Autumn 1935” and the place – “Moscow”. At this time, she turned to Stalin with a letter asking for a pardon for her son and husband.
Then, in “Requiem,” a melody appears unexpectedly and sadly, vaguely reminiscent of a lullaby, which prepares another motive, even more terrible, the motive of madness, delirium and complete readiness for death or suicide:
Madness is already on the wing
Half of my soul was covered,
And he drinks fiery wine,
And beckons to the black valley.
And I realized that he
I must concede victory
Listening to your
Already like someone else's delirium.
The “Epilogue” consists of two parts, first it returns us to the beginning of the poem, we again see the image of a prison queue, and in the second, final part it develops the theme of the Monument, well known in Russian literature according to Derzhavin and Pushkin, but never in either Russian or in world literature, such an unusual image has not arisen as Akhmatova’s - the Monument to the Poet, standing, according to his will and testament, at the Prison Wall. This is truly a monument to all victims of repression:
And if ever in this country
They are planning to erect a monument to me,
I give my consent to this triumph,
But only with the condition - do not put it
Not near the sea where I was born:
The last connection with the sea is severed,
Not in the royal garden near the treasured stump,
Where the inconsolable shadow is looking for me,
And here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they didn’t open the bolt for me...
"Requiem" by Akhmatova - authentic folk piece, not only in the sense that it reflected and expressed a great national tragedy, but also in its poetic form, close to folk folk tale. “Woven” from simple, “overheard,” as Akhmatova writes, words, he expressed his time and the suffering soul of the people with great poetic and civic power.
“Requiem” was not known either in the 30s or in subsequent years, but it forever captured its time and showed that poetry continued to exist even when, according to Akhmatova, the poet lived with his mouth clamped.
Akhmatova’s military lyrics are also of interest as an important detail of the literary life of that time, the searches and discoveries of that time. Critics wrote that the intimate and personal theme during the war years gave way to patriotic excitement and anxiety for the fate of humanity. It is characteristic that her war lyrics are dominated by a broad and happy “we”.
We know what's on the scales now
And what is happening now.
The hour of courage has struck on our watch.
And courage will not leave us.
Courage.
Akhmatova’s poems from the very end of the war are filled with sunny joy and jubilation. May spring greenery, the thunder of joyful fireworks, children raised to the sun in happy mother's arms...
Throughout the years of the war, although sometimes with long interruptions, Akhmatova worked on the “Poem without a Hero,” which is essentially a Poem of Memory.
3. "Third Glory" by Akhmatova.
Akhmatova’s “third glory” came after Stalin’s death and lasted for ten years. (Anna Andreevna still managed to see the beginning of a new suspicion towards her, which lasted two decades).
This was not only all-Union glory, but also foreign glory. She was awarded the Etna-Taormina literary prize in Italy, and in England she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
At that time, Anna Andreevna willingly communicated with young poetry, and many of its representatives visited her and read their poems to her.
The majesty that was noted early in her by everyone who met her was reinforced in those years by her advanced age. In communication she was unusually natural and simple. And she amazed me with her wit.
In Akhmatova’s later poetry, the most consistent motif is farewell to the entire past, not even to life, but specifically to the past: “I have given up on the black past...”.
And yet, she did not have such a decisive and all-denying break with the “first manner,” as Akhmatova was inclined to believe. Therefore, we can take any line - from early or late creativity, and we will unmistakably recognize its voice - divided, distinct and powerful, intercepted by tenderness and suffering.
In her later lyrics, Akhmatova relies not on the direct meaning of the word, but on its inner strength, which lies in poetry itself. She reaches, with the help of her fragments of witchcraft reticence, with the help of her poetic magic, to the subconscious - to that area that she herself has always called the soul.
All poems by Akhmatova recent years almost identical both in their meaning and in their appearance to the broken and half-doomed human world.
However, the dense darkness of her later poems is not pessimistic: it is tragic. In her last poems, especially about nature, one can see
beauty and charm.
In recent years, Akhmatova worked very intensively: in addition to original poems, she translated a lot, wrote memoir essays, prepared a book about Pushkin... She was surrounded by more and more new ideas.
She didn't complain about her age. She was resilient like a Tatar, making her way to the sun of life from under all the ruins, despite everything - and remained herself.
And I go where nothing is needed,
Where the sweetest companion is only a shadow,
And the wind blows from the deep garden,
And under your foot is a grave step.
The beauty of life constantly overcame the darkness of her last poems.
She left us poetry, where there is everything - the darkness of life, and the dull blows of fate, and despair, and hope, and gratitude to the sun, and “the charm of a sweet life.”
III. The connection of Akhmatova’s poetry with time, with her life
people.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova died in March 1966. No one from the then leadership of the Writers' Union showed up. She was buried near Leningrad in the village of Komarovo in a cemetery among pine forest. There are always fresh flowers on her grave; both youth and old age come to her. For many it will become a necessity.
Anna Akhmatova’s path was difficult and complex. Starting with Acmeism, but having already found herself much broader than this rather narrow direction, she came over the course of her long and intensely lived life to realism and historicism. Her main achievement and her individual artistic discovery was, first of all, love lyrics. She really wrote new pages in the Book of Love. The powerful passions raging in Akhmatova’s love miniatures, compressed to the point of diamond hardness, were always depicted by her with majestic psychological depth and accuracy.
Despite all the universal humanity and eternity of the feeling itself, Akhmatova shows it with the help of the sounding voices of a specific time: intonation, gestures, syntax, vocabulary - everything tells us about certain people a certain day and an hour. This artistic precision in conveying the very air of time, which was originally a folk property of talent, then, over many decades, was purposefully and hardworkingly polished to the degree of that genuine, conscious historicism that amazes all those who read and, as it were, rediscovering the late Akhmatova - the author " Poems without a Hero" and many other poems that recreate and intersperse various historical eras with free precision.
She was a poet: “I never stopped writing poetry, For me, they contain my connection with time, with the new life of my people. When I wrote them, I lived by the rhythms that sounded in heroic story my country, I am happy that I lived during these years and saw events that have no equal.
Akhmatova’s poetry turned out to be not only a living and developing phenomenon, but also organically connected with the national soil and national culture. We have been able to see more than once that it is the ardent patriotic feeling and awareness of one’s blood connection with the multi-layered firmament national culture helped the poetess choose the right path in the most difficult and critical years.
The poetry of Anna Akhmatova is an integral part of modern Russian and world culture.
IV.
Bibliography
1.Anna Akhmatova / Edited by. Edited by N. N. Skatov. Collection cit.: - M., 1990.
2.Anna Akhmatova / Comp. Black. Collection Op. – M., 1986.
3. Chukovskaya L.K. Notes about Anna Akhmatova. Book 3. – M., 1989.
5. Pavlovsky. A. I. Anna Akhmatova: Life and creativity. – M., 1991.
6. Vilenkin. V. In the one hundred and first mirror. – M., 1987.
7. Zhirmunsky V. Anna Akhmatova. – L., 1975.
8. Luknitskaya V. From two thousand meetings: a story about a chronicler. – M., 1987.
June 11, 1889 near Odessa. Her youth was spent in Tsarskoe Selo, where she lived until she was 16 years old. Anna studied at Tsarskoye Selo and Kyiv gymnasiums, and then studied law in Kyiv and philology in St. Petersburg. In the first ones, written by a high school student at the age of 11, the influence of Derzhavin was felt. The first publications occurred in 1907.
Since the beginning of the 1910s, Akhmatova regularly published in St. Petersburg and Moscow publications. In 1911, the literary association “Workshop of Poets” was formed, whose “secretary” was Anna Andreevna. 1910-1918 – years of marriage to Nikolai Gumilyov, Akhmatova’s acquaintance from the time of studying at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium. In 1910-1912, Anna Akhmatova traveled to Paris, where she met the artist Amedeo Modigliani who wrote it, as well as to Italy.
1912 became the most significant and fruitful year for the poetess. This year the light is "Evening", her first collection of poems, and her son, Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov. In the poems of “Evening” there is a precise precision of words and images, aestheticism, poeticization of feelings, but at the same time a realistic view of things. In contrast to the symbolistic craving for the “superreal”, the metaphorical nature, ambiguity and fluidity of Akhmatova’s illustrations, she restores the original meaning of the word. The fragility of spontaneous and fleeting “signals”, glorified by symbolist poets, gave way to precise verbal images and strict compositions.
I.F. are considered to be the mentors of Akhmatova’s poetic style. Annensky and A.A. Block, masters - . However, Anna Andreevna’s poetry was immediately perceived as original, different from symbolism, acmeistic. N.S. Gumilev, O.E. Mandelstam and A.A. Akhmatova became the fundamental core of the new movement.
In 1914, a second collection of poems entitled “The Rosary” was published. In 1917, The White Flock, Akhmatov's third collection, was published. Oktyabrskaya greatly influenced the life and attitude of the poetess, as well as her creative destiny. While working in the library of the Agronomic Institute, Anna Andreevna managed to publish the collections “Plantain” (1921) and “Anno Domini” (“In the Year of the Lord,” 1922). In 1921, her husband was shot, accused of participating in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Soviet criticism did not accept Akhmatova, and the poetess plunged into a period of forced silence.
Only in 1940 did Anna Akhmatova publish the collection “From Six Books,” which a short time returned her “face” as a modern writer. During the Great Patriotic War she was evacuated to Tashkent. Returning to Leningrad in 1944, Akhmatova faced unfair and cruel criticism from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, expressed in the resolution “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”. She was expelled from the Writers' Union and deprived of the right to publish. Her only son was serving