The work of Anna Akhmatova.
- The beginning of Akhmatova’s creativity
- Features of Akhmatova's poetry
- Theme of St. Petersburg in Akhmatova’s lyrics
- The theme of love in Akhmatova’s work
- Akhmatova and the revolution
- Analysis of the poem "Requiem"
- Akhmatova and the Second World War, the siege of Leningrad, evacuation
- Death of Akhmatova
The name of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is on a par with the names of outstanding luminaries of Russian poetry. Her quiet, sincere voice, depth and beauty of feelings are unlikely to leave at least one reader indifferent. It is no coincidence that her best poems have been translated into many languages of the world.
- The beginning of Akhmatova’s creativity.
In her autobiography entitled “Briefly about myself” (1965), A. Akhmatova wrote: “I was born on June 11 (23), 1889 near Odessa (Big Fountain). My father was at that time a retired naval mechanical engineer. As a one-year-old child, I was transported to the north - to Tsarskoye Selo. I lived there until I was sixteen... I studied at the Tsarskoye Selo girls’ gymnasium... My last year was in Kyiv, at the Fundukleevskaya gymnasium, from which I graduated in 1907.”
Akhmatova began writing while studying at the gymnasium. Her father, Andrei Antonovich Gorenko, did not approve of her hobbies. This explains why the poetess took as a pseudonym the surname of her grandmother, who descended from Tatar Khan Akhmat, who came to Rus' during the Horde invasion. “That’s why it occurred to me to take a pseudonym for myself,” the poetess later explained, “because dad, having learned about my poems, said: “Don’t disgrace my name.”
Akhmatova had virtually no literary apprenticeship. Her first collection of poetry, “Evening,” which included poems from her high school years, immediately attracted the attention of critics. Two years later, in March 1917, the second book of her poems, “The Rosary,” was published. They started talking about Akhmatova as a completely mature, original master of words, sharply distinguishing her from other Acmeist poets. Contemporaries were amazed by his undeniable talent, high degree creative originality of the young poetess. characterizes the hidden mental state of an abandoned woman. “Glory to you, hopeless pain,” - such words, for example, begin the poem “The Gray-Eyed King” (1911). Or here are the lines from the poem “He left me on the new moon” (1911):
The orchestra plays cheerfully
And the lips smile.
But the heart knows, the heart knows
That box five is empty!
Being a master of intimate lyricism (her poetry is often called an “intimate diary”, “a woman’s confession”, “a confession female soul"), Akhmatova recreates emotional experiences with the help of everyday words. And this gives her poetry a special sound: everyday life only enhances the hidden psychological meaning. Akhmatova’s poems often capture the most important, and even turning points, in life, the culmination of mental tension associated with the feeling of love. This allows researchers to talk about the narrative element in her work, about the impact of Russian prose on her poetry. So V. M. Zhirmunsky wrote about the novelistic character of her poems, bearing in mind the fact that in many of Akhmatova’s poems life situations are depicted, as in the novella, at the most acute moment of their development. The “novelism” of Akhmatova’s lyrics is enhanced by the introduction of lively colloquial speech spoken aloud (as in the poem “Clenched her hands under a dark veil.” This speech, usually interrupted by exclamations or questions, is fragmentary. Syntactically divided into short segments, it is full of logically unexpected, emotionally justified conjunctions “a” or “and” at the beginning of the line:
Don't like it, don't want to watch?
Oh, how beautiful you are, damn you!
And I can't fly
And since childhood I was winged.
Akhmatova's poetry, with its conversational intonation, is characterized by the transfer of an unfinished phrase from one line to another. No less characteristic of it is the frequent semantic gap between the two parts of the stanza, a kind of psychological parallelism. But behind this gap lies a distant associative connection:
How many requests does your beloved always have!
A woman who has fallen out of love has no requests.
I'm so glad there's water today
It freezes under the colorless ice.
Akhmatova also has poems where the narration is told not only from the perspective of the lyrical heroine or hero (which, by the way, is also very remarkable), but from the third person, or rather, the narration from the first and third person is combined. That is, it would seem that she uses purely narrative genre, suggesting both narration and even descriptiveness. But even in such poems she still prefers lyrical fragmentation and reticence:
Came up. I didn’t show my excitement.
Looking indifferently out the window.
She sat down. Like a porcelain idol
In the pose she had chosen long ago...
The psychological depth of Akhmatova’s lyrics is created by a variety of techniques: subtext, external gesture, detail that conveys the depth, confusion and contradictory nature of feelings. Here, for example, are lines from the poem “Song of the Last Meeting” (1911). where the heroine’s excitement is conveyed through an external gesture:
My chest was so helplessly cold,
But my steps were light.
I put it on my right hand
Glove from the left hand.
Akhmatova's metaphors are bright and original. Her poems are literally replete with their diversity: “tragic autumn”, “shaggy smoke”, “silent snow”.
Very often, Akhmatova’s metaphors are poetic formulas of love feelings:
All for you: and daily prayer,
And the melting heat of insomnia,
And my poems are a white flock,
And my eyes are blue fire.
2. Features of Akhmatova’s poetry.
Most often, the poetess’s metaphors are taken from the world of nature and personify it: “Early autumn hung //Yellow flags on the elms”; “Autumn is red in the hem//Brought red leaves.”
One of the notable features of Akhmatova’s poetics should also include the unexpectedness of her comparisons (“High in the sky, a cloud turned grey, // Like a squirrel’s skin spread out” or “Stifling heat, like tin, // Pours from the heavens to the parched earth”).
She often uses this type of trope as an oxymoron, that is, a combination of contradictory definitions. This is also a means of psychologization. A classic example of Akhmatova’s oxymoron is the lines from her poem “The Tsarskoye Selo Statue* (1916): Look, it’s fun for her to be sad. So elegantly naked.
A very large role in Akhmatova’s verse belongs to detail. Here, for example, is a poem about Pushkin “In Tsarskoe Selo” (1911). Akhmatova wrote more than once about Pushkin, as well as about Blok - both were her idols. But this poem is one of the best in Akhmatova’s Pushkinianism:
The dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys,
The lake shores were sad,
And we cherish the century
A barely audible rustle of footsteps.
Pine needles are thick and prickly
Low lights cover...
Here was his cocked hat
And the disheveled volume Guys.
Just a few characteristic details: a cocked hat, a volume beloved by Pushkin - a lyceum student, Guys - and we almost clearly feel the presence of the great poet in the alleys of the Tsarskoye Selo park, we recognize his interests, peculiarities of gait, etc. In this regard - the active use of details - Akhmatova also goes in line with the creative quest of prose writers of the early 20th century, who gave details greater semantic and functional meaning than in the previous century.
Akhmatova’s poems contain many epithets, which the famous Russian philologist A. N. Veselovsky once called syncretic, for they are born from a holistic, inseparable perception of the world, when feelings are materialized, objectified, and objects are spiritualized. She calls passion “white-hot,” her sky is “scarred by yellow fire,” that is, the sun, she sees “chandeliers of lifeless heat,” etc. But Akhmatova’s poems are not isolated psychological sketches: the sharpness and surprise of the view of the world is combined with poignancy and depth of thought. The poem "Song" (1911) begins as an unassuming story:
I'm at sunrise
I sing about love.
On my knees in the garden
Swan field.
And it ends with a biblically deep thought about the indifference of a loved one:
There will be stone instead of bread
My reward is Evil.
Above me there is only the sky,
The desire for artistic laconicism and at the same time for the semantic capacity of the verse was also expressed in Akhmatova’s widespread use of aphorisms in depicting phenomena and feelings:
There is one less hope -
There will be one more song.
From others I receive praise that is evil.
From you and blasphemy - praise.
Akhmatova assigns a significant role to color painting. Her favorite color is white, emphasizing the plastic nature of the object, giving the work a major tone.
Often in her poems the opposite color is black, enhancing the feeling of sadness and melancholy. There is also a contrasting combination of these colors, emphasizing the complexity and inconsistency of feelings and moods: “Only ominous darkness shone for us.”
Already in the early poems of the poetess, not only vision, but also hearing and even smell were heightened.
Music rang in the garden
Such unspeakable grief.
Fresh and sharp smell of the sea
Oysters on ice on a platter.
Due to the skillful use of assonance and alliteration, details and phenomena of the surrounding world appear as if renewed, pristine. The poetess allows the reader to feel the “barely audible smell of tobacco”, feel how “a sweet smell flows from the rose”, etc.
In terms of its syntactic structure, Akhmatova’s verse gravitates towards a concise, complete phrase, in which not only the secondary, but also the main members of the sentence are often omitted: (“Twenty-first. Night... Monday”), and especially to colloquial intonation. This conveys a deceptive simplicity to her lyrics, behind which lies a wealth of emotional experiences and high skill.
3. The theme of St. Petersburg in Akhmatova’s lyrics.
Along with the main theme - the theme of love, another one emerged in the poetess's early lyrics - the theme of St. Petersburg, the people inhabiting it. The majestic beauty of her beloved city is included in her poetry as an integral part of the spiritual movements of the lyrical heroine, in love with the squares, embankments, columns, and statues of St. Petersburg. Very often these two themes are combined in her lyrics:
IN last time we met then
On the embankment, where we always met.
There was high water in the Neva
And they were afraid of floods in the city.
4. The theme of love in Akhmatova’s work.
The depiction of love, mostly unrequited love and full of drama, is the main content of all the early poetry of A. A. Akhmatova. But these lyrics are not narrowly intimate, but large-scale in their meaning and significance. It reflects the richness and complexity of human feelings, an inextricable connection with the world, for the lyrical heroine does not limit herself only to her suffering and pain, but sees the world in all its manifestations, and it is infinitely dear and dear to her:
And the boy who plays the bagpipes
And the girl who weaves her own wreath.
And two crossed paths in the forest,
And in the far field there is a distant light, -
I see everything. I remember everything
Lovingly and briefly in my heart...
("And the Boy Who Plays the Bagpipes")
Her collections contain many lovingly drawn landscapes, everyday sketches, paintings of rural Russia, signs of the “scarce land of Tver”, where she often visited the estate of N. S. Gumilyov Slepnevo:
Crane at an old well
Above him, like boiling clouds,
There are creaky gates in the fields,
And the smell of bread, and melancholy.
And those dim spaces
And judgmental glances
Calm tanned women.
(“You know, I’m languishing in captivity...”)
Drawing discreet landscapes of Russia, A. Akhmatova sees in nature a manifestation of the almighty Creator:
In every tree is the crucified Lord,
In each ear is the body of Christ,
And prayers are the most pure word
Heals sore flesh.
Akhmatova’s arsenal of artistic thinking included ancient myths, folklore, and sacred history. All this is often passed through the prism of deep religious feeling. Her poetry is literally permeated with biblical images and motifs, reminiscences and allegories of sacred books. It has been correctly noted that “the ideas of Christianity in Akhmatova’s work are manifested not so much in the epistemological and ontological aspects, but in the moral and ethical foundations of her personality”3.
From an early age, the poetess was characterized by high moral self-esteem, a sense of her sinfulness and a desire for repentance, characteristic of the Orthodox consciousness. The appearance of the lyrical “I” in Akhmatova’s poetry is inseparable from the “ringing of bells”, from the light of “God’s house”; the heroine of many of her poems appears before the reader with a prayer on her lips, awaiting the “last judgment”. At the same time, Akhmatova firmly believed that all fallen and sinful, but suffering and repentant people would find the understanding and forgiveness of Christ, for “only the blue//Heavenly and mercy of God is inexhaustible.” Her lyrical heroine “yearns for immortality” and “believes in it, knowing that “souls are immortal.” The religious vocabulary abundantly used by Akhmatova - lamp, prayer, monastery, liturgy, mass, icon, vestments, bell tower, cell, temple, image, etc. - creates a special flavor, a context of spirituality. Focused on spiritual and religious national traditions and many elements of the genre system of Akhmatova’s poetry. Such genres of her lyrics as confession, sermon, prediction, etc. are filled with pronounced biblical content. Such are the poems “Prediction”, “Lamentation”, the cycle of her “Bible Verses” inspired by the Old Testament, etc.
She especially often turned to the genre of prayer. All this gives her work a truly national, spiritual, confessional, soil-based character.
Serious changes in Akhmatova’s poetic development were caused by the first world war. From that time on, her poetry even more widely included motives of citizenship, the theme of Russia, her native land. Perceiving the war as a terrible national disaster, she condemned it from a moral and ethical position. In the poem “July 1914” she wrote:
Juniper smell sweet
Flies from burning forests.
The soldiers are moaning over the guys,
A widow's cry rings through the village.
In the poem “Prayer” (1915), striking with the power of self-denial feeling, she prays to the Lord for the opportunity to sacrifice everything she has to her Motherland - both her life and the lives of her loved ones:
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.
5. Akhmatova and the revolution.
When in years October Revolution Every artist of the word was faced with the question: whether to stay in his homeland or leave it; Akhmatova chose the first. In her 1917 poem “I had a voice...” she wrote:
He said "Come here"
Leave your land, dear 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 was the position of a patriotic poet, in love with Russia, who could not imagine his life without her.
This does not mean, however, that Akhmatova unconditionally accepted the revolution. A poem from 1921 testifies to the complexity and contradictory nature of her perception of events. “Everything is stolen, betrayed, sold,” where despair and pain over the tragedy of Russia are combined with hidden hope for its revival.
Years of revolution and civil war were very difficult for Akhmatova: a semi-beggarly life, life from hand to mouth, the execution of N. Gumilyov - she experienced all this very hard.
Akhmatova did not write very much in the 20s and 30s. At times it seemed to her that the Muse had completely abandoned her. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that the critics of those years treated her as a representative of the salon culture of the nobility, alien to the new system.
The 30s turned out to be the most difficult trials and experiences for Akhmatova in her life. The repressions that fell on almost all of Akhmatova’s friends and like-minded people also affected her: in 1937, her and Gumilyov’s son Lev, a student at Leningrad University, was arrested. Akhmatova herself lived all these years in anticipation of permanent arrest. In the eyes of the authorities, she was an extremely unreliable person: the wife of the executed “counter-revolutionary” N. Gumilyov and the mother of the arrested “conspirator” Lev Gumilyov. Like Bulgakov, Mandelstam, and Zamyatin, Akhmatova felt like a hunted wolf. She more than once compared herself to an animal that had been torn to pieces and hung on a bloody hook.
You pick me up like a slain beast on the bloody one.
Akhmatova perfectly understood her exclusion in the “dungeon state”:
Not with the lyre of a lover
I'm going to captivate the people -
Leper's Ratchet
Sings in my hand.
You'll have time to fuck off,
And howling and cursing,
I'll teach you to shy away
You, brave ones, from me.
("The Leper's Ratchet")
In 1935, she wrote an invective poem in which the theme of the poet’s fate, tragic and lofty, is combined with a passionate philippic addressed to the authorities:
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 didn't mock
Over the bitter death of friends?
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.
(“Why did you poison the water...”)
6. Analysis of the poem “Requiem”.
All these poems prepared the poem by A. Akhmatova “Requiem”, which she created in the 1935-1940s. She kept the contents of the poem in her head, confiding only in her closest friends, and wrote down the text only in 1961. The poem was first published 22 years later. the death of its author, in 1988. “Requiem” was the main creative achievement of the poetess of the 30s. The poem ‘consists of ten poems, a prose prologue, called “Instead of a Preface” by the author, a dedication, an introduction and a two-part epilogue. Talking about the history of the creation of the poem, A. Akhmatova writes in the prologue: “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 eyes 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.”
Akhmatova fulfilled this request, creating a work about the terrible time of repression of the 30s (“It was when only the dead smiled, I was glad for the peace”) and about the immeasurable grief of relatives (“Mountains bend before this grief”), who came to the prisons every day, to the state security department, in the vain hope of finding out something about the fate of their loved ones, giving them food and linen. In the introduction, an image of the City appears, but it now differs sharply from Akhmatova’s former Petersburg, because it is deprived of the traditional “Pushkin” splendor. This is an appendage city to a gigantic prison, spreading its gloomy buildings over a dead and motionless river (“The great river does not flow…”):
It was when I smiled
Only dead, glad for the peace.
And dangled like an unnecessary pendant
Leningrad is near its prisons.
And when, maddened by torment,
The already condemned regiments were marching,
And a short song of parting
The locomotive whistles sang,
Death stars stood above us
And innocent Rus' writhed
Under bloody boots
And under the black tires there is marusa.
The poem contains the specific theme of the requiem - lamentation for a son. Here the tragic image of a woman whose most dear person is taken away is vividly recreated:
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.
But the work depicts not only the poetess’s personal grief. Akhmatova conveys the tragedy of all mothers and wives, both in the present and in the past (the image of the “streltsy wives”). From specific real fact the poetess moves on to large-scale generalizations, turning to the past.
The poem sounds not only maternal grief, but also the voice of a Russian poet, brought up in the Pushkin-Dostoevsky traditions of worldwide responsiveness. Personal misfortune helped me feel more acutely the misfortunes of other mothers, the tragedies of many people around the world in different historical eras. Tragedy of the 30s is associated in the poem with gospel events:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
For Akhmatova, experiencing a personal tragedy became an understanding of the tragedy of the entire people:
And I’m not praying for myself alone,
And about everyone who stood there with me
And in the bitter cold and in the July heat
Under the red, blind wall, -
she writes in the epilogue of the work.
The poem passionately calls for justice, for the names of all those innocently convicted and killed to become widely known to the people:
I would like to call everyone by name, but the list was taken away and there is no place to find out. Akhmatova’s work is truly a people’s requiem: a lament for the people, the focus of all their pain, the embodiment of their hope. These are the words of justice and grief with which “a hundred million people shout.”
The poem “Requiem” is a clear evidence of the civic spirit of A. Akhmatova’s poetry, which was often reproached for being apolitical. Responding to such insinuations, the poetess wrote in 1961:
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.
The poetess later put these lines as the epigraph to the poem “Requiem”.
A. Akhmatova lived with all the sorrows and joys of her people and always considered herself an integral part of it. Back in 1923, in the poem “To Many,” she wrote:
I am the reflection of your face.
Vain wings, vain fluttering, -
But I’m still with you to the end...
7. Akhmatova and the Second World War, siege of Leningrad, evacuation.
The pathos of a high civil sound permeates her lyrics, dedicated to the theme of the Great Patriotic War. She viewed the beginning of the Second World War as a stage of a global catastrophe into which many peoples of the earth would be drawn. This is precisely the main meaning of her poems of the 30s: “When the era is being raked up”, “Londoners”, “In the forties” and others.
Enemy Banner
It will melt like smoke
The truth is behind us
And we will win.
O. Berggolts, recalling the beginning of the Leningrad blockade, writes about Akhmatova of those days: “With a face closed in severity and anger, with a gas mask over her chest, she was on duty like an ordinary fire fighter.”
A. Akhmatova perceived the war as a heroic act of world drama, when people, exsanguinated by internal tragedy (repression), were forced to enter into mortal combat with external world evil. In the face mortal danger, Akhmatova makes an appeal to melt away pain and suffering through the power of spiritual courage. This is exactly what the poem “Oath”, written in July 1941, is about:
And the one who today says goodbye to her beloved, -
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!
In this small but capacious poem, lyricism develops into epic, personal becomes general, female, maternal pain is melted into a force opposing evil and death. Akhmatova addresses women here: both to those with whom she stood at the prison wall even before the war, and to those who now, at the beginning of the war, are saying goodbye to their husbands and loved ones; it is not for nothing that this poem begins with the repeating conjunction “and” - it means continuation of the story about the tragedies of the century (“And the one who today says goodbye to her beloved”). On behalf of all women, Akhmatova swears to her children and loved ones to be steadfast. The graves represent the sacred sacrifices of the past and present, and the children symbolize the future.
Akhmatova often talks about children in her poems during the war years. For her, children are young soldiers going to their deaths, and dead Baltic sailors who rushed to the aid of besieged Leningrad, and a neighbor’s boy who died during the siege, and even the statue “Night” from the Summer Garden:
Night!
In a blanket of stars,
In mourning poppies, with a sleepless owl...
Daughter!
How we hid you
Fresh garden soil.
Here maternal feelings extend to works of art that preserve the aesthetic, spiritual and moral values of the past. These values, which must be preserved, are also contained in the “great Russian word,” primarily in Russian literature.
Akhmatova writes about this in her poem “Courage” (1942), as if picking up the main idea of Bunin’s poem “The Word”:
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.
It's not scary to lie dead under bullets,
It's not bitter to be left homeless, -
And we will save you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
We will carry you free and clean,
We will give it to our grandchildren and save us from captivity
Forever!
During the war, Akhmatova was evacuated in Tashkent. She wrote a lot, and all her thoughts were about the cruel tragedy of the war, about the hope of victory: “I meet the third spring far // From Leningrad. The third?//And it seems to me that it//Will be the last...”, she writes in the poem “I meet the third spring in the distance...”.
In Akhmatova’s poems of the Tashkent period, alternating and varying, Russian and Central Asian landscapes appear, imbued with a feeling of national life going back into the depths of time, its steadfastness, strength, eternity. The theme of memory - about the past of Russia, about ancestors, about people close to her - is one of the most important in Akhmatova’s work during the war years. These are her poems “Near Kolomna”, “Smolensk Cemetery”, “Three Poems”, “Our Sacred Craft” and others. Akhmatova knows how to poetically convey the very presence of the living spirit of the times, history in people's lives today.
In the very first post-war year, A. Akhmatova suffered a severe blow from the authorities. In 1946, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks issued a decree “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”, in which the work of Akhmatova, Zoshchenko and some other Leningrad writers was subjected to devastating criticism. In his speech to Leningrad cultural figures, the Secretary of the Central Committee A. Zhdanov attacked the poetess with a hail of rude and insulting attacks, declaring that “the range of her poetry is pathetically limited - an enraged lady, rushing between the boudoir and the chapel. Her main theme is love and erotic motifs, intertwined with motifs of sadness, melancholy, death, mysticism, and doom.” Everything was taken away from Akhmatova - the opportunity to continue working, to publish, to be a member of the Writers' Union. But she did not give up, believing that the truth would prevail:
Will they forget? - that's what surprised us!
I've been forgotten a hundred times
A hundred times I lay in the grave,
Where maybe I am now.
And the Muse became deaf and blind,
The grain rotted in the ground,
So that after, like a Phoenix from the ashes,
Rise blue on the air.
(“They’ll forget - that’s what surprised us!”)
During these years, Akhmatova did a lot of translation work. She translated Armenian, Georgian contemporary poets, poets of the Far North, French and ancient Koreans. She creates a number of critical works about her beloved Pushkin, writes memoirs about Blok, Mandelstam and other contemporary and past writers, and completes work on her greatest work, “Poem Without a Hero,” which she worked on intermittently from 1940 to 1961 years. The poem consists of three parts: “The Petersburg Tale” (1913),” “Tails” and “Epilogue.” It also includes several dedications from different years.
“A Poem without a Hero” is a work “about time and about oneself.” Everyday pictures of life are intricately intertwined here with grotesque visions, snatches of dreams, and memories displaced in time. Akhmatova recreates St. Petersburg in 1913 with its diverse life, where bohemian life is mixed with concerns about the fate of Russia, with grave forebodings of social cataclysms that began since the First World War and revolution. The author pays a lot of attention to the topic of the Great Patriotic War, as well as the topic of Stalinist repressions. The narrative in “Poem Without a Hero” ends with an image of 1942 - the most difficult, turning point year of the war. But there is no hopelessness in the poem, but, on the contrary, there is faith in the people, in the future of the country. This confidence helps the lyrical heroine overcome the tragedy of her perception of life. She feels her involvement in the events of the time, in the affairs and achievements of the people:
And towards myself
Unyielding, in the menacing darkness,
Like from a waking mirror,
Hurricane - from the Urals, from Altai
Faithful to duty, young
Russia was coming to save Moscow.
The theme of the Motherland, Russia appears more than once in her other poems of the 50s and 60s. The idea of a person’s blood affiliation with his native land is broad and philosophical
sounds in the poem " Native land"(1961) - one of best works Akhmatova in recent years:
Yes, for us it’s dirt on our galoshes,
Yes, for us it's a crunch in the teeth.
And we grind, and knead, and crumble
Those unmixed ashes.
But we lie down in it and become it,
That's why we call it so freely - ours.
Until the end of her days, A. Akhmatova did not leave creative work. She writes about her beloved St. Petersburg and its environs (“Ode to Tsarskoye Selo”, “To the City of Pushkin”, “Summer Garden”), and reflects on life and death. She continues to create works about the mystery of creativity and the role of art (“I have no need for odic hosts...”, “Music”, “Muse”, “Poet”, “Listening to Singing”).
In every poem by A. Akhmatova we can feel the heat of inspiration, the outpouring of feelings, a touch of mystery, without which there can be no emotional tension, no movement of thought. In the poem “I don’t need odic armies...”, dedicated to the problem of creativity, the smell of tar, the touching dandelion by the fence, and the “mysterious mold on the wall” are captured in one harmonizing glance. And their unexpected proximity under the artist’s pen turns out to be a community, developing into a single musical phrase, into a verse that is “fervent, gentle” and sounds “to the joy” of everyone.
This thought about the joy of being is characteristic of Akhmatova and constitutes one of the main through-cutting motives of her poetry. In her lyrics there are many tragic and sad pages. But even when circumstances demanded that “the soul petrify,” another feeling inevitably arose: “We must learn to live again.” To live even when it seems that all strength has been exhausted:
God! You see I'm tired
Resurrect and die and live.
Take everything, but this scarlet rose
Let me feel fresh again.
These lines were written by a seventy-two-year-old poetess!
And, of course, Akhmatova never stopped writing about love, about the need for the spiritual unity of two hearts. In this sense, one of best poems poetesses post-war years- “In a Dream” (1946):
Black and lasting separation
I carry with you equally.
Why are you crying? Better give me your hand
Promise to come again in a dream.
I am with you like grief is with a mountain...
There is no meeting in the world for me with you.
If only you would be at midnight
He sent me greetings through the stars.
8. Death of Akhmatova.
A. A. Akhmatova died on May 5, 1966. Dostoevsky once said to the young D. Merezhkovsky: “Young man, in order to write, you have to suffer.” Akhmatova’s lyrics poured out of suffering, from the heart. The main motivating force of her creativity was conscience. In her 1936 poem “Some look into tender eyes...” Akhmatova wrote:
Some look into gentle eyes,
Others drink until the sun's rays,
And I'm negotiating all night
With your indomitable conscience.
This indomitable conscience forced her to create sincere, sincere poems and gave her strength and courage in the darkest days. In her brief autobiography, written in 1965, Akhmatova admitted: “I never stopped writing poetry. For me, they contain my connection with time, with new life my people. When I wrote them, I lived by the rhythms that sounded in the heroic history of my country. I am happy that I lived during these years and saw events that had no equal.” That's true. The talent of this outstanding poetess was manifested not only in the love poems that brought A. Akhmatova well-deserved fame. Her poetic dialogue with the World, with nature, with people was diverse, passionate and truthful.
Akhmatova's creativity
5 (100%) 4 votesThe work of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is not just the highest example of “female” poetry (“I taught women to speak...” - she wrote in 1958). It is exceptional, becoming possible only in the 20th century. a synthesis of femininity and masculinity, subtle feeling and deep thought, emotional expressiveness and figurativeness, rare for lyric poetry (visuality, representability of images).
Being from 1910 to 1918 the wife of N.S. Gumilyov, Akhmatova entered poetry as a representative of the direction of Acmeism, which he founded, which contrasted itself with symbolism with its mysticism, attempts to intuitively comprehend the unknowable, vagueness of images, and musicality of verse. Acmeism was very heterogeneous (the second largest figure in it was O.E. Mandelstam) and did not exist as such for long, from the end of 1912 until approximately the end of the 10s. But Akhmatova never renounced him, although her developing creative principles were more varied and complex. Her first books of poetry, “Evening” (1912) and especially “Rosary” (1914), brought her fame. In them and in the last pre-revolutionary book “The White Flock” (1917), Akhmatova’s poetic style was defined: a combination of understatement, which has nothing to do with symbolist vagueness, and a clear representability of the pictures drawn, in particular poses, gestures (the initial quatrain of “Song of the Last Meeting” 1911 “So helplessly my chest grew cold, / But my steps were light / I put on my right hand / The glove from my left hand” became, as it were, in the mass consciousness. business card Akhmatova), severity inner world through the external (often in contrast), reminiscent of psychological prose, dotted plot, the presence of characters and their short dialogues, as in small scenes (criticism wrote about Akhmatova’s lyrical “short stories” and even about the “lyric novel”), the primary attention is not to stable states, but to changes, to barely outlined ones, to shades under extreme emotional stress, the desire for colloquial speech without its emphasized prose, the rejection of the melodiousness of verse (although in late creativity the cycle “Songs” will also appear), external fragmentation, for example, the beginning of a poem with a union despite its small volume, the diversity of the lyrical “I” (the early Akhmatova had several heroines of different social status - from a society lady to a peasant woman) while maintaining signs of autobiography. Akhmatova’s poems are outwardly close to the classical ones, their innovation is not demonstrative, and is expressed in a complex of features. A poet - Akhmatova did not recognize the word “poetess” - always needs an addressee, a certain “you”, specific or generalized. Real people in her images are often unrecognizable; several people can cause the appearance of one lyrical character. Akhmatova’s early lyrics are predominantly love, its intimacy (the forms of a diary, a letter, a confession) is largely fictitious; in the lyrics, Akhmatova said, “you won’t give yourself away.” What was purely personal was creatively transformed into something understandable to many, experienced by many. This position allowed the subtle lyricist to subsequently become the spokesman for the destinies of a generation, people, country, era.
The First World War gave rise to thoughts about this, which was reflected in the poems of “The White Flock.” In this book, Akhmatova’s religiosity, which has always been important to her, although not orthodox in everything, sharply intensified. The motive of memory has acquired a new, largely transpersonal character. But love poems connect “The White Flock” with the 1921 collection “Plantain” (friends dissuaded me from the title “Hard Years”), two-thirds consisting of pre-revolutionary poems. 1921 was a terrible year for Akhmatova, the year of news of the suicide of her beloved brother, the year of A.A.’s death. Blok and execution of N.S. Gumilyov, accused of participating in a White Guard conspiracy, and 1922 were marked by a creative upsurge despite a difficult mood, personal and everyday troubles. The book “Anno Domini MCMXXI” (“The Summer of the Lord 1921”) is dated 1922. In 1923, the second, expanded edition of “Anno Domini...” was published in Berlin, where the civic position of the poet, who did not accept the new authorities and orders, was especially firmly stated already in the first poem “To Fellow Citizens,” which was cut out by censors from almost all of those submitted to the USSR copies of the book. In it, Akhmatova mourned the untimely departed and ruined, looked anxiously into the future and took on the cross - the duty to steadfastly endure any hardships together with her homeland, remaining true to herself, national traditions, and high principles.
After 1923, Akhmatova hardly published until 1940, when the ban on her poems was lifted at the whim of Stalin. But the collection “From Six Books” (1940), including from the “Reed” (the “Willow” cycle), which was not published separately, was precisely a collection of mostly old poems (in 1965 it was included in the largest lifetime collection “The Running of Time” will include the “Seventh Book” carefully sifted by the publishing house, also not published separately). In the fifth, “Northern Elegy” (1945), Akhmatova admitted: “And how many poems I have not written, / And their secret chorus wanders around me...” Many poems that were dangerous for the author were kept only in memory; excerpts from them were later remembered. “Requiem,” created mainly in the second half of the 30s, Akhmatova decided to record only in 1962, and it was published in the USSR a quarter of a century later (1987). Slightly less than half of Akhmatova's published poems date back to 1909-1922, the other half was created over a period of more than forty years. Some years were completely fruitless. But the impression of Akhmatova’s disappearance from poetry was deceptive. The main thing is that even in the most difficult times she created works of the highest level, in contrast to many Soviet poets and prose writers, whose gift was gradually fading away.
Patriotic poems 1941-1945. (“Oath”, “Courage”, “To the Winners”, poems that later formed the “Victory” cycle, etc.) strengthened Akhmatova’s position in literature, but in 1946 she, together with M.M. Zoshchenko became a victim of the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad””, which accused her poetry of lack of ideas, salonity, lack of educational value, and in the crudest form. Criticism has been vilifying it for a number of years. The poet endures the persecution with dignity. In 1958 and 1961 Small collections were published, and in 1965 the final “Running of Time” was released. At the end of her life, Akhmatova’s work received international recognition.
The late poems, collected by the author in several cycles, are thematically diverse: the aphoristic “String of Quatrains”, the philosophical and autobiographical “Northern Elegies”, “Wreath to the Dead” (mainly to fellow writers, often also with a difficult fate), poems about repression, “Ancient Page ”, “Secrets of the Craft”, poems about Tsarskoye Selo, intimate lyrics reminiscent of a former love affair, but carried through poetic memory, etc. The addressee of the late Akhmatova is usually some kind of generalized “you”, uniting the living and the dead, people dear to the author. But the lyrical “I” is no longer the many-faced heroine of the early books, it is a more autobiographical and autopsychological image. Often the poet speaks on behalf of the hard-won truth. The forms of the verse became closer to the classical ones, and the intonation became more solemn. There are no former “scenes”, the former “materiality” (carefully selected subject details), more “bookishness”, complex overflows of thought and feeling.
Akhmatova’s largest and most complex work, on which she worked from 1940 to 1965, creating four main editions, was “Poem without a Hero.” It emphasizes the unity of history, the unity of culture, the immortality of man, and contains encrypted memories of last year before the global catastrophe - 1913 - and the First World War appears as a harbinger of the Second, as well as revolution, repression, and in general all the cataclysms of the era (“The non-calendar one was approaching - / The Real Twentieth Century”). At the same time, this work is deeply personal, full of hints and associations, explicit and hidden quotations from the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Akhmatova’s work is usually divided into only two periods - early (1910-1930s) and late (1940-1960s). There is no impassable border between them, and the watershed is a forced “pause”: after the publication of her collection “Anno Domini MCMXXI” in 1922, Akhmatova was not published until the end of the 30s. The difference between the “early” and “late” Akhmatova is visible both at the content level (the early Akhmatova is a chamber poet, the later one is increasingly drawn to socio-historical themes) and at the stylistic level: the first period is characterized by objectivity, the word is not restructured by metaphor, but dramatically transformed by the context. In Akhmatova’s later poems, figurative meanings dominate, the word in them becomes emphasized symbolic. But, of course, these changes did not destroy the integrity of her style.
Once upon a time, Schopenhauer was indignant at women’s talkativeness and even proposed extending the ancient saying to other areas of life: “taceat mulier in ecclesia.” What would Schopenhauer say if he read Akhmatova's poems? They say that Anna Akhmatova is one of the most silent poets, and this is true, despite her femininity. Her words are stingy, restrained, chastely strict, and it seems that they are only conventional signs inscribed at the entrance to the sanctuary...
Akhmatova’s strict poetry amazes the “zealot of the artistic word”, to whom multi-colored modernity gives such generously euphonious verbosity. The flexible and subtle rhythm in Akhmatova’s poems is like a stretched bow from which an arrow flies. An intense and concentrated feeling is contained in a simple, precise and harmonious form.
Akhmatova's poetry is the poetry of strength, its dominant intonation is strong-willed intonation.
It is common for everyone to want to be with their own people, but between wanting and being there was an abyss. And she was no stranger to:
“Over how many abysses she sang....”
She was a born ruler, and her “I want” actually meant: “I can”, “I will make it happen.”
Akhmatova was an artist of love incomparable in her poetic originality. Her innovation initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal theme. Everyone noted the “mystery” of her lyrics; Despite the fact that her poems seemed like pages of letters or torn diary entries, the extreme laconicism and sparingness of speech left the impression of muteness or interception of the voice. “Akhmatova does not recite in her poems. She simply speaks, barely audible, without any gestures or postures. Or he prays almost to himself. In this radiantly clear atmosphere that her books create, any declamation would seem unnaturally false,” wrote her close friend K.I. Chukovsky.
But the new criticism subjected them to persecution: for pessimism, for religiosity, for individualism, and so on. Since the mid-20s, it has almost ceased to be printed. A difficult time came when she herself almost stopped writing poetry, doing only translations, as well as “Pushkin studies,” which resulted in several literary works about the great Russian poet.
Let us consider the features of Anna Akhmatova’s lyrics in more detail.
Flowers
Along with the general, “generic” ones, each person, thanks to certain realities of life, develops “specific”, individual color perceptions. Certain emotional states are associated with them, the repeated experience of which resurrects the previous color background in the mind. The “artist of words,” narrating about past events, involuntarily “paints” the depicted objects in the color that is most meaningful to him. Therefore, from a set of similarly colored objects, it is possible, to a certain extent, to restore the original situation and determine the author’s “meaning” of the color designation used (outline the circle of the author’s experiences associated with it). The purpose of our work: to identify the semantics of gray in the works of A. Akhmatova. The sample size is limited to works included in the first academic edition.
This edition contains 655 works, and objects painted in gray are mentioned in only 13 of them. Considering that almost every work contains at least one of the primary colors of the spectrum (including white and black), gray cannot be considered a widespread color in Akhmatova’s lyrics. In addition, its use is limited to a certain time interval: 1909-1917. Beyond this eight-year period, we did not find a single mention of this color. But within this interval, in some years there are two, three or even four works in which a gray object is present. What causes this “spectral feature”?
The list of objects painted in gray allows us to notice that approximately half of them are not “things”, but “people” (“the gray-eyed king”, “the gray-eyed groom”, “there was a tall boy with gray eyes”, etc.), and the rest - objects directly or indirectly associated with them (“gray dress”, “gray logs”, “gray ash”, etc.). At first glance, it may seem that the answer lies on the surface: during the indicated period, Akhmatova was carried away by someone “gray-eyed.” There is a temptation to find out, by comparing the dates of life and creativity, by whom exactly. But delving deeper into the intratextual context shows that the development of an artistic situation is subject to its own logic, without taking into account which direct comparisons are not so much risky as meaningless. What logic does the coloring of objects from A. Akhmatova’s poetic world in gray obey?
Akhmatova's poetic world is characterized by reverse chronology.
As a rule, the work that depicts the final situation is published first, and a few years later texts appear that present variants of the previous stages of its development. Akhmatova poetess creativity poetic
The final situation, in our case, is the situation described in the work “The Gray-Eyed King”. It opens a chronological series of gray objects (finished in 1909 and published in the first book of poems, “Evening”). It talks about the death of the main character: “Glory to you, hopeless pain! / The gray-eyed king died yesterday...”. As you might guess, this “king” was the secret lover of the lyrical heroine and the father of her child: - “I’ll wake up my daughter now, / I’ll look into her gray eyes...”. Let us highlight the following motives that characterize this situation.
Firstly, the lyrical heroes are united by a secret love affair, and it is far from platonic: the “gray-eyed daughter” serves as living proof. This connection, one might say, is “illegal” and even “criminal,” since each of them has his own “legitimate” family. A royal daughter born in a “secret marriage” inevitably becomes an “illegitimate queen,” which cannot bring joy to anyone around her. Therefore, we will define the first of the manifested meanings as follows: the crime of extramarital physical love and the associated need to “shroud” it in a “veil of secrecy.”
Secondly, the secret connecting the lyrical heroes dates back to the past. By the time of the events depicted, one of them is already dead, which draws a dividing line between the past and the present. The past turns into the irrevocably past. And since the second is still alive, the flow of time continues for him, carrying him further and further “along the river of life.” This movement “from source to mouth” only increases, over the years, the width of the dividing line beyond which happy times remain. The second of the manifested meanings: the irrevocability of happiness, youth and love left in the past and the growing hopelessness of the present over the years.
Thirdly, the title "king" indicates the "height of position" of the beloved (his high social status). He retains this “height of position” even after death. The expression “Your king is not on earth...” testifies: he moved “to heaven” (“social vertical” was transformed into “spatial”). Stability of "position" lyrical hero reveals the third meaning: the beloved is a supreme being who temporarily descended from heaven to earth. The fourth meaning is connected with this: the division of the lyrical heroine’s world into two - “this” and “that”, which can only be overcome in a love union.
The appearance of two gray-eyed characters at once (the king and his daughter) outlines two lines of subsequent ("preceding") development of the situation. Let's call them, conventionally, male and female lines and trace their distribution through the text, guided by the highlighted gray markers.
It is logical to expect that the marriage of the lyrical heroine is preceded by a meeting with the groom. And indeed, four years later, the “gray-eyed groom” appears: “It doesn’t matter that you are arrogant and angry, / It doesn’t matter that you love others. / There’s a golden lectern in front of me, / And there’s a gray-eyed groom with me” (I have one smile ..., 1913). His appearance reveals the third and fourth meanings - the otherworldliness of the beloved, the conditioned division of the world into “this” (where “you are arrogant and evil”) and “that” (where there is a “golden lectern”).
In the same year, the work “Imagination Submissive to Me / In the Image of Gray Eyes” appears, repeating, in an abbreviated and weakened version, the final situation. Main character although not a “king,” but a famous person with a high social status: “My famous contemporary...”. Like the “king,” he is married or, in any case, belongs to another woman: “Beautiful hands, happy captive...”. The reason for separation, as last time, is “murder,” but not of a hero, but of “love”: “You, who ordered me: enough, / Go, kill your love! / And now I am melting...”.
And a year later, an even younger character appears - just a “boy”, in love with the lyrical heroine: “Grey-Eye was a tall boy, / Six months younger than me. / He brought me white roses...<...>I asked. - What are you, a prince?<...>“I want to marry you,” He said, “I’ll soon become an adult and I’ll go north with you...”<...>“Think, I will be a queen, / What do I need such a husband for?” (Near the sea, 1914).
This “gray-eyed boy” has not yet reached the required “height of social status”, and therefore cannot hope for reciprocity. But even now he is distinguished by some characteristic features - tall growth and " geographic altitude aspirations": he is going "to the north" (to high latitudes). This "gray-eyed boy" is even closer to the "beginning" male line gray objects.
The female line, on the contrary, appears as a kind of “line of fate” for the gray-eyed daughter. Three years later, we see her as an adult, who by the time she met her “darling” had managed to change three roles and put on the “gray dress” again: “Don’t look like that, don’t frown angrily, / I am your beloved, I am yours. / Not a shepherdess, not a princess / And I’m no longer a nun - // In this gray everyday dress, / On worn-out heels..." (You are my letter, dear, don’t crumple it. 1912).
During this time, much more time passed in the poetic world. The “illegitimate” royal daughter spent her childhood as a “shepherdess”; then, probably, the widow of the “gray-eyed king” recognized her rights as a “royal princess”; then, for an unknown reason, followed by leaving or imprisonment in a monastery - becoming a “nun”.
And so, returning to her beloved in the hope of continuing the relationship, she experiences “the same fear”: “But, as before, a burning embrace, / The same fear in the huge eyes.” This, apparently, is the fear of exposure, which she had previously experienced during secret meetings with her lover. Before this, her parents experienced “the same fear,” but in a mirror-symmetrical situation. Previously, these were meetings of the “king” with an ordinary woman, and now - of the royal daughter with the “poor man”.
Three years later, the gray-eyed lyrical heroine moves to another world, to “God’s garden of rays”: “I walked for a long time through fields and villages, / Walked and asked people: “Where is she, where is the cheerful light / Of the gray stars - her eyes?”<...>. And above the dark gold of the throne / God’s garden of rays flared up: “Here she is, here is the cheerful light / Of the gray stars - her eyes.” (Walked for a long time through fields and villages..., 1915). The daughter repeats the fate of her father, since “from birth” she occupies the highest position in this world - she is a descendant of the “supreme being” who descended to earth in the form of a “gray-eyed king.” Thus, the male and female lines are closed in one circle, exhausting the topic plot-wise and chronologically.
But the above is true only for anthropomorphic images. Within this circle there are still zoomorphic characters and inanimate objects. Studying this set allows us to make some clarifications and additions.
The first inanimate object mentioned is a gray Cloud, similar to a squirrel skin: “High in the sky, a cloud turned gray, / Like a spread squirrel skin” (1911). It is natural to ask the question: where is the Squirrel from whom this “skin” was torn off? Following the law of reverse chronology, we go down four years in the text and discover that the “gray squirrel” is one of the forms of posthumous existence of the lyrical heroine herself: “Yesterday I entered the green paradise, / Where there is peace for body and soul...<...>Like a gray squirrel I’ll jump onto the alder tree.../ So that the groom won’t be afraid.../ To wait for the dead bride” (Milomu, 1915).
The second, in the same year, 1911, a gray domestic cat is mentioned: “Murka, gray, don’t purr...”, the childhood companion of the lyrical heroine. And a year later - the “gray swan,” her school friend: “These linden trees probably haven’t forgotten / Our meeting, my cheerful boy. // Only after becoming an arrogant swan, / The gray swan changed.” (The straps contained a pencil case and books..., 1912).
The last example is especially noteworthy - it shows that not only the lyrical heroine, but also her companions are capable of zoomorphic transformations. In passing, we note that if the transformation of the “swan” into the Swan had taken place a little earlier, then we would have observed the classic scene “Leda and the Swan”.
If you line up all the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images in one row, then at one end there will be a little girl and her pet - a gray cat, and at the other - an adult married woman and her lover is the grey-eyed King. The gap between the Cat and the King will be filled sequentially (“by age”) by three pairs: a schoolgirl and a “gray swan” (aka “cheerful boy”), a teenage girl and a “gray-eyed boy” (no longer “cheerful”, but "tall"), "dead bride" (gray Squirrel) and "gray-eyed groom".
In light of the above, the conclusion suggests itself that the coloring of objects in the poetic world in gray is subject to the same logic as the natural flow of life in extra-textual reality - from beginning to end, only it is realized in reverse chronological sequence. Therefore, each character, along with an extra-textual prototype, necessarily has an intra-textual “original image”. We do not know what kind of extra-textual stimulus induced the appearance of the image of the gray-eyed king, but its intratextual prototype is quite obvious - this is Murka.
This is supported, firstly, by the similarity of the “mechanism” of zoomorphic transformations. The lyrical heroine “entered the green paradise yesterday,” and today she is already jumping like a “gray squirrel” through the winter forest (that is, in about six months). And the “gray-eyed king” “died yesterday...”, so it is not surprising that today (two years later) he turned into a gray cat.
Secondly, this is also indicated by the presence of two “centers of attraction” of gray color, one of which is the eyes of a person, and the other is the soft and fluffy “clothing” of an animal (the “skin” of a squirrel or the plumage of a bird). The presence of these centers is felt even when inanimate objects are mentioned.
For example, in the work “The Eyes Unwillingly Ask for Mercy...” (1912) their color is not formally mentioned, and then, in the second quatrain, it talks about “gray logs”: “I’m walking along the path into the field, / Along the gray stacked logs. ..". But in fact, this is the color of the “eyes”. The canonical connection of the images of the Log and one’s Eye is all too well known, and in addition, when approaching a lying log, it is easy to see its end – the same “gray eye”.
In the work “My voice is weak, but my will does not weaken, / It even became easier for me without love...” (1912) further, also in the second quatrain, “gray ash” is mentioned: “I do not languish over gray ash...” . The canonical combination of the concepts of Love and blazing Fire leaves almost no doubt that this “gray ash” is a trace of the former “love fire”. But the main quality of ash, in our case, is its softness and fluffiness, as well as the ability to take off, at the slightest breath, like a gray cloud.
Probably, the appearance of these centers reflects the ability to perceive objects with both vision and touch. Zoomorphic transformation, in this case, is an artistically transformed version of the revival of tactile images in the mind after the visual ones. The sense of touch evolutionarily precedes vision and is associated with it, so children’s tactile and visual sensations from gray animal “skins” and bird feathers could well be resurrected in memory when looking at any emotionally exciting gray object, especially such as the gray eyes of a loved one.
Thirdly, the preservation of the structure of the relationship attracts attention: one of the members of the pair He and She is always tall or high at the top, and this scheme is usually duplicated. The last work in this series, written eight years later (1917), is especially significant:
And into a secret friendship with the tall one,
Like a young eagle with dark eyes,
I’m like in a pre-autumn flower garden,
She walked in with a light gait.
There were the last roses
And the transparent month swayed
On gray, thick clouds...
It contains the same motifs as in "The Gray-Eyed King", retold in almost the same words. The action takes place somewhat earlier (“pre-autumn flower garden,” and not “Autumn evening...”), but the same “color” is reproduced: “there were the last roses.” We can say that now the eye is attracted by “scarlet spots”, because previously the entire “evening” was painted in this color (“...it was stuffy and scarlet”). And then it was the “last” color perception before the approaching darkness.
The main character is not only “tall”, but also looks like an eagle (a bird known for “flying high”). In this “young” it is difficult not to recognize the almost adult “gray-eyed boy”.
And even higher up you can see the “transparent” Moon (i.e. “gray”, if you imagine that the black night sky is shining through it). The moon swaying on “gray, thick (like fur?) clouds” is more than an overt symbol. The “secret friendship” of the lyrical heroine with the “dark-eyed” is no different from her previous love relationship with the “gray-eyed” one.
So, the “gray-eyed king” turns, after death (1909), first into a gray Cat (1911), and then into an Eagle (1917). The lyrical heroine undergoes the same series of posthumous zoomorphic transformations. Along with turning into a gray Squirrel, she also intends to become a “weasel” (almost a Swallow) and, finally, a Swan: “I’ll jump onto an alder tree like a gray squirrel, / I’ll run like a timid little weasel, / I’ll start calling you Swan...” (Milomu, 1915 ).
The complete parallelism of the transformation of images in the male and female lines of gray allows us to suggest that the image of the “gray-eyed king” had two intratextual prototypes. One of them is the aforementioned Murka, and the second is his mistress, who has felt like a “queen” since childhood.
Semantics of gray color - semantics of gray ermine mantle.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova ( real name- Gorenko) (June 23, 1889 - March 5, 1966) - a great Russian poetess of the 20th century, whose work combined elements of classical and modernist styles. She was called “the nymph Egeria of the Acmeists”, “the queen of the Neva”, “the soul silver age».
Anna Akhmatova. Life and creativity. Lecture
Akhmatova created extremely diverse works - from small lyrical poems to complex cycles, like the famous "Requiem" (1935-40), a tragic masterpiece about the era Stalin's terror. Her style, characterized by brevity and emotional restraint, is strikingly original and sets her apart from all her contemporaries. The strong and clear voice of the poetess sounded like a new chord of Russian poetry.
Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. Artist K. Petrov-Vodkin.
Akhmatova's success was precisely because of the personal and autobiographical nature of her poems: they are openly sensual, and these feelings are expressed not in symbolic or mystical terms, but in simple and intelligible human language. Their main theme is love. Her poems are realistic, vividly concrete; they are easy to imagine visually. They always have a specific place of action - St. Petersburg, Tsarskoe Selo, a village in the Tver province. Many can be described as lyrical dramas. The main feature of her short poems (they are rarely longer than twelve lines, and never exceed twenty) is their greatest conciseness.
You can't confuse real tenderness
With nothing, and she is quiet.
You are in vain carefully wrapping
My shoulders and chest are covered in fur.
And in vain are the words submissive
You're talking about first love.
How do I know these stubborn
Your unsatisfied glances.
This poem is written in her first style, which made her famous and which dominates the collection Beads and, for the most part, in White pack. But in this latest book a new style is already emerging. It begins with poignant and prophetic verses under the meaningful title July 1914. This is a stricter, more severe style, and its material is tragic - the difficult trials that began for her homeland with the beginning of the war. The light and graceful metric of the early poems is replaced by a stern and solemn heroic stanza and other similar dimensions of the new rhythm. Sometimes her voice reaches a rough and gloomy grandeur that makes one think of Dante. Without ceasing to be feminine in feeling, he becomes “masculine” and “masculine.” This new style gradually replaced her earlier style, and in the collection Anno Domini even took possession of her love lyrics, became the dominant feature of her work. Her “civil” poetry cannot be called political. She is suprapartisan; rather it is religious and prophetic. In her voice one can hear the authority of one who has the right to judge, and a heart that feels with unusual strength. Here are typical verses from 1916:
Why is this century worse than the previous ones? Isn't it
To those who are in a state of sadness and anxiety
He touched the blackest ulcer,
But he could not heal her.
The earth's sun is still shining in the west
And the roofs of cities shine in its rays,
And here it is white house marks with crosses
And the ravens call, and the ravens fly.
Everything she wrote can be roughly divided into two periods: early (1912-25) and later (from approximately 1936 until her death). Between them lies a decade in which she created very little. During the Stalinist period, Anna Akhmatova's poetry was subject to condemnation and censorship attacks - right up to special resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1946. Many of her works were published only twenty years later. extra years after death. However, Anna Andreevna deliberately refused to emigrate in order to remain in Russia as a close witness to the great and terrible events of that time. Akhmatova addressed the eternal themes of the passage of time, the undying memory of the past. She vividly expressed the hardship of living and writing in the shadow of brutal communism.
Information about Akhmatova's life is relatively scarce, since wars, revolution and Soviet totalitarianism destroyed many written sources. Anna Andreevna was subject to official disfavor for a long time; many of her relatives died after the Bolshevik coup. Akhmatova's first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed security officers in 1921. Her son Lev Gumilev and her third husband Nikolai Punin spent many years in Gulag. Punin died there, and Lev survived only by a miracle.
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 Tsarskoe Selo gymnasium. In 1910-1912, Anna Akhmatova traveled to Paris, where she met the artist Amedeo Modigliani, who painted her, and also 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 for 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