Although during the hard times of the civil war, Akhmatova almost stopped writing (according to N.A. Struve, she creates in 1918, 1919 and 1920, respectively, 4, 5 and 1 poem after 32 in 1917), in 1921-1922 “her inspiration again beat with a powerful jet” (respectively 33 and 19 poems). In the early 1920s, the books "Plantain" and "Anno Domini MCMXXI" ("The Summer of the Lord 1921") were published. But in 1923, a sharp decline sets in (N. Struve fixes a single poem), and then Akhmatova writes poetry only occasionally, earning herself an unloved translation job. From the heights of glory, she was immediately thrown into complete poetic non-existence. The circulation of the 2nd edition of Anno Domini, published in 1923 in Berlin, according to the author of the book, “was not allowed to return home ... The fact that there were poems that were not published in the USSR was one third of my fault, that caused the first ruling about me (1925); the second third - an article by K. Chukovsky "Two Russia (Akhmatova and Mayakovsky)"; the third third is what I read at the evening of "Russian Contemporary" (April 1924) in the hall of the Conservatory (Moscow) "New Year's Ballad". Her poems, according to Akhmatova, were banned "mainly for religion" (shortly before, in 1922, the Bolsheviks brought down mass repressions on the church). “I met M. Shaginyan on the Nevsky. She said: “Here you are, what an important person: there was a decision of the Central Committee about you; not to arrest, but also not to print. Under the sword of Damocles, without any contact with the reader, in poverty, Anna Akhmatova, who voluntarily remained after the revolution in her homeland, was destined to live for decades.
Anna Andreevna more than once was indignant at articles and conversations (including abroad) that her work had exhausted itself: those who said so did not know the works that were not even stored on paper, but only in the memory of the author and a few closest friends (of many, they later remembered excerpts only). And yet, the colossal under-realization of the creative gift of the great poet - one of the gravest crimes of totalitarianism against Russian culture - is obvious: in the main body of Akhmatova's works, "14 years 1909-1922 account for 51% of her surviving lines, 43 years 1923-1965 - 49%" . In the "late" Akhmatova, "poems of 1935 - 1946" are distinguished. and 1956-1965 The biographical boundaries between these ... periods are quite obvious: ... 1923-1939. - the first, unofficial expulsion of Akhmatova from the press; 1946-1955 - the second, official expulsion of Akhmatova from the press. On the eve of her second exile, she wrote in the Fifth "Northern Elegy" (1945): "I, like a river, / The harsh era turned, / They changed my life." Creative self-denial is a sign of the same substitution: “And how many poems I have not written, / And their secret chorus wanders around me ...” Even the transformation of a pseudonym into a surname is recognized here as a substitution of one person for another: “And some kind of woman is mine / The only She took her place, / She bears my most legitimate name, / Leaving me a nickname ... ”But, of course, Akhmatova remained herself, with all the significance of her evolution, and most importantly, she did not suffer a qualitative drop in talent, unlike many Soviet poets and prose writers.
The main features of Akhmatov's poetics were already formed in the first collections. This is a combination of understatement “with a completely clear and almost stereoscopic image”, the expression of the inner world through the outer (often in contrast), reminiscent of psychological prose, the predominant attention not to the state, but to changes, to the barely outlined, barely perceptible, in general to shades, to “a little bit” with the strongest tension of feelings, the desire for conversational speech without prosaicing it, the rejection of the melodiousness of the verse, the ability to build a “cautious, deliberate mosaic” of words instead of their flow, the great importance of gesture for conveying emotions, plot, imitated fragmentation (in in particular, the beginning of a poem with a union, including an adversative one), etc. As a rule, Akhmatova’s poems contain a certain “mystery”, but not of the same order as that of the symbolists: the post-symbolists (Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak) “transferred her from the zone of mysterial incomprehensibility to the zone of logical obscurations and breaks.” Tradition, outwardly prevailing "classicism" of Akhmatova's verse, "is purely external, it is bold and new, and, preserving the guise of classical verse, it makes earthquakes and upheavals inside it."
Akhmatova's lyrics were often compared to a diary. Authentic diaries are a chronologically sequential presentation of events. “In Akhmatov’s story-revelation, the milestone moments of the ongoing relationship “I” and “you” are captured - rapprochement, closeness, separation, gap - but they are presented mixed up and in many repetitions (many first meetings, many last ones), so build a chronicle of a love story is simply unthinkable." In Akhmatova's books, chronology is deliberately violated (with almost mandatory dating - sometimes mystifying): the chronology of both the creation of poems, as well as the events that caused them. The “confessional” and “autobiographical nature” of Akhmatova’s poems, the idea of which is generated both by the fact that “she often speaks of herself as a poetess”, and “forms of“ intimate ”letter, fragments of a diary, a short novel, as if torn from a friendly story, and etc., are actually quite misleading. Real events and faces are always transformed, often contaminated, rethought and re-evaluated. Anna Andreevna even contrasted lyrics with narrative prose, where the personality of the author is reflected in everything: “But there is no lyrics. Lyric poetry is the best armor, the best cover. You won't give yourself away there." Of course, Akhmatova's poems express her personality, but not literally, but in the highest degree creatively.
Created in 1917-1922 belongs to the first of the two main stages of Akhmatov's work. In the first five books, the love theme certainly predominates. But since 1914, since the beginning of the World War, there has been a growing feeling of an impending global catastrophe, and at the beginning of The White Pack (September 1917) there is a poem from 1915, about which, after the revolution, Mayakovsky joked, “what, they say, I had to sell a skirt at the market and already writes that every day has become a memorial day. But it was not about poverty and wealth in the material sense.
We thought: we are poor, we have nothing,
And how they began to lose one after another,
So what happened every day
Memorial day -
Started making songs
About the great bounty of God
Yes, about our former wealth.
This miniature, close in form to free verse, "beggarly" in terms of the artistic means used, was considered by Akhmatova as the best of her early poems. And at the end of 1917, anticipating the coming “muteness”, she wrote: “Now no one will listen to songs. / The predicted days have come "- and personified her last song as a" hungry beggar, who cannot be knocked "at the gates of others."
The collection “Plantain”, which includes these poems, was published in April 1921, consists of two-thirds of pre-revolutionary works and is thematically connected with the “White Flock”, primarily with the cycle addressed to the mosaic artist and officer B.V. Anrep. Back in the beginning February Revolution he emigrated to England. The motif of the road in Plantain is very important. The very first poem, “It immediately became quiet in the house ...” (July 1917), contains the question “Where are you, affectionate groom?”, The statement “The secret ring was not found” (Akhmatova gave Anrep a family black ring) and the conclusion “ As a tender prisoner, the song / Died in my chest, "and the second, simultaneous poem begins with the words" You are an apostate: for the green island / You gave, gave your native country, / Our songs, and our icons ... "In the artistic embodiment, the wishful is passed off as the real , the hero is imagined moaning “under my high window” (a fairy tale motif of the bride’s inaccessibility). The prototype was an atheist, but the hero, who “he himself lost grace” (grace is the meaning of the Hebrew name Anna), the deeply believing Akhmatova reproaches with infidelity not only to her homeland, but also to religion: “So now blaspheme and swagger, / Orthodox soul destroy ... " According to the poet, he himself was afraid of this: "That's why during prayer / You asked to remember you." In The White Flock, there was a poem about the same thing: “Your spirit is darkened by arrogance ...” (January 1, 1917).
Nevertheless, in the summer of 1917, along with the poem “And the whole day, frightened by their groans ...”, which conveys the heavy premonitions of the period between the two revolutions (“Sinister skulls laugh”, “Death sent sentinels home”), poems were written “Wake up at dawn...” and “It’s simple, it’s clear...”, from which it follows that before the Bolshevik coup, for some short time, Akhmatova, at least on paper, did not exclude the possibility of emigration or a trip abroad . But what stands out is “When in the anguish of suicide ...”, created in the autumn of 1917 in anticipation of the “German guests” - the German offensive on Petrograd. In the conditions of suicidal behavior not only of the people, but also of the church, from which the “spirit of harsh Byzantineism” “flew off”, the heroine hears a certain voice calling her away from Russia. The words "There was a voice for me" sound as if we are talking about a divine revelation, similar / to those that the heroes of the Bible were honored with. But this, obviously, is both an inner voice reflecting the heroine's struggle with herself, and an imaginary voice of a distant friend. The poem ended with the call for a "voice" in a newspaper publication in 1918; there was no answer to it. In Plantain, the second stanza was removed about the Neva capital, which, “like an intoxicated harlot, / Didn’t know who was taking her” (in 1921, the reader would have put the Bolsheviks in the place of the Germans, and this was unsafe for the author), but appeared a clear answer is the last stanza “But indifferently and calmly ...” Now the choice has been decisively made, the “voice”, previously, perhaps, inspired by God, utters, it turns out, an “unworthy” speech that defiles the “sorrowful spirit”. Akhmatova accepted her cross as a great test sent down from above. In 1940, she removed not only the second, but also the first stanza, completely eliminating the German theme. Tests were no longer predicted - there were already mass repressions, it was in 1940 that Akhmatova's "Requiem" was completed. The more energetic sounded the finale of the poem, which now began with the words “I had a voice. He called consolingly...”, the more sharply contrasted the consoling voice and the mournful spirit.
"Anrepov" theme and in further time from time to time it appears in the work of Akhmatova, and in "Plantain" it is interrupted by poems that are based on relationships with completely different people. In 1918, Anna Andreevna divorced Gumilyov and married the orientalist V.K. Shileiko, a person extremely gifted in his field, but in everyday terms even less adapted than Akhmatova, known for her impracticality. Obviously, she indulged in the idea of sacrificial service to a man whom she considered a genius. But in the poems of the end of 1917-1922, associated with this period of life (“You are always mysterious and new ...”, “Ice floes are floating, ringing ...”, From your mysterious love ...”, “Dear traveler, you far away...”, “You obedient? Are you crazy!...”, “Third Zachatievsky”), although there is a motive of gratitude “for letting your wanderer into the house”, the protest of a woman who finds herself in an oppressed position, even “in the dragon’s cave”, where “a whip hangs on the wall, / So that I don’t sing songs.” Of course, everyday hardships of the times of the civil war also affected. Nevertheless, Akhmatova tried to look at what was happening philosophically. In the winter of 1919 she wrote:
Why is this century worse than the previous ones? Is
Those that are in a daze of sadness and anxiety
He touched the blackest ulcer.
But he couldn't heal her.
Much harsher is the simultaneous appeal to "Fellow Citizens" (much later, retrospectively, Akhmatova decided to rename it to "Petrograd, 1919"), which opened the first section in the 2nd edition of "Anno Domini" - "After everything." The page with this poem was cut out by Soviet censorship from almost all copies of the circulation. Akhmatova speaks on behalf of the inhabitants (“we”), imprisoned in the “wild capital” and forced to forget “forever”, in fact, everything that is in the “great homeland”. The beloved city and the freedom that it does not have are contrasted, just as there is no help to people. In the face of the imminent death of citizens, the "sacred city of Peter" should turn into a monument to them.
The flashing wing of the “Black Death” is also mentioned in the poem “Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold ...” (June 1921), but the depressing picture of ruin and “hungry longing” is suddenly replaced by the question: “Why did it become light for us?” Motivation seems to be reduced to the life-giving power of summer nature. If desired, one could see here (and some saw) the "acceptance of the revolution." However, we are talking, most likely, about religious enlightenment, about the miraculous, according to the Orthodox tradition, instantaneous strengthening of spiritual strength in contrast to everything around:
And so close comes the miraculous
To the ruined dirty houses...
No one, no one knows
But from time immemorial we have desired.
The same verse was written in 1922. “Prediction” (“I saw that gold-plated crown ...”) - a monologue of a certain spiritual guide, offering a crown of thorns instead of a “stolen” crown: “Nothing that with crimson dew / He will refresh the pampered forehead.” The heroine Akhmatova, enlightened, embarked on the path of spiritual achievement. Subtle femininity (“effeminacy”) now organically merges in her poems with severe masculinity.
Relying on divine wisdom and justice does not at all mean expecting direct, let alone immediate, help from above. Not only murmuring is excluded, but also prayer as a request, a supplication. In the 2nd edition of Anno Domini, Akhmatova "included probably the most ruthless and cruel poem ever written by a mother woman":
Do not torment the earthly joy of the heart,
Don't be addicted to your wife or home,
Take bread from your child
To give it to someone else.
And be the most humble servant of the one
Who was your pitch foe,
And call the forest animal brother
And don't ask God for anything.
The collection "Anno Domini" originally (November 1921, on the cover - 1922) consisted mainly of poems from 1921, then replenished with poetry written the following year, but also included several earlier poems, including 1915: "After leaving groves of the sacred homeland ... "and" It is getting dark, and in the sky dark blue ... "later, together with the poem" At that time I was visiting the earth ... "(1913) made up the cycle" Epic Motifs ", which opens the series autobiographical and philosophical "monologues" written in white iambic 5-foot characteristic of the verse of dramaturgy; the “Voice of Memory” section includes “That August, like a yellow flame ...” and “Lullaby”, which is determined to be related to the departure of N.S. Gumilyov to the war. After his arrest in August 1921, Akhmatova wrote two disturbing quatrains - “You will not be alive, / You will not get up from the snow ...”, which refers to the death of a wounded warrior in battle (roll call with poems of 1915). The conclusion is, as it were, in the spirit of folklore: "He loves blood / Russian land."
In "Anno Domini" the "Shileik's" cycle ends and a number of poems about sensual love and jealousy appear, they also contain the threat of a break with an unfaithful loved one. Behind the image of this hero is not the ascetic Shileiko, but his complete opposite - A.S. Lurie, a futuristic composer and head of the music department of the People's Commissariat of Education, is a completely immoral person, ugly in appearance, but attractive as a vice. From the idea of serving a chosen friend, i.e. Shileiko, Akhmatova rushed to the other extreme. But in August 1922, the Soviet music commissar went on a business trip abroad, from where he preferred not to return. However, even before this loss, the attitude towards voluntarily emigrated, at least in verse, was harsh. In July 1922, “those who abandoned the land” were contrasted (those who left the country “to be torn apart by enemies” were denied “songs”) and those exiled. Although there have already been reminders in the press in connection with this poem about the expulsion in the summer of 1922 of many Russian writers, primarily philosophers, all Akhmat studies so far identify “those who abandoned the earth” and “exiles”. But the characters of the first and second stanzas are different, and the poet's attitude towards them is different. To the latter, it is filled with pity and sympathy (“Your road is dark, wanderer, / Alien bread smells of wormwood”). This stanza is, in fact, a protest against the political action of the Soviet government. It is especially boldly said about those who remained, who did not escape "not a single blow." It speaks of the future historical justification of "every hour" of their lives (not the people themselves - they have nothing to justify: "... in the world there are no people more tearless, / Haughtier and simpler than us"). In contrast to the poem "To Fellow Citizens"? ("Petrograd, 1919") now, not the rest, but the deportees are compared with the prisoner (and the sick).
"Anno Domini" contains poems of 1921-1922 "The angel who kept me for three years ...", "Until I fall under the fence ...", "On the threshold of a white paradise ..." about a deceased friend-patron who remained ideal for a heroine. N.V., who died in 1919, is recognized in him. Nedobrovo, author of the article "Anna Akhmatova" (1915), which Anna Andreevna considered prophetic, revealing to her the inner source of all her future strength. But in the context of the collection, associations also arise with Gumilyov (“Neither roses, nor the forces of the Archangel” - a reminiscence from his “Iambic Pentameters”, addressed to Akhmatova). And Nedobrovo, and Gumilyov, and other friends and relatives of Akhmatova will also remind themselves more than once in her poems - either together or separately. In 1923, in the New Year's Ballad, the heroine meets New Year with my husband and friends. The “owner” and two friends make speeches, but “six devices are on the table, / And only one device is empty” - the heroine herself, who is surrounded by the dead; they, according to the younger, "must drink for the one / Who is not with us yet." This is "my thoughts in response." The dead and the living are still inseparable. Subsequently, the motif of the gloomy New Year will sound in 1940 (“Happy New Year! Happy new grief!...”), and the New Year’s “parade” of the dead, people from the pre-war 1913, will form the plot basis of “Poem without a Hero”, in which there is a direct quote from the "New Year's ballad": "And wine, like poison, burns."
In the autumn of 1922, after Lurie's departure, Akhmatova relied on the support of his friend, art historian N.N. Punin. These hopes were reflected in the poems “Heavenly autumn built a high dome ...” and “Here is the shore of the northern sea ...” Akhmatova, 33, who has already experienced a lot and lost many, now only dreams of peace. The "spring autumn" is described in detail, wonderful, improbable - and the hero's appearance, reflected in one final verse, seems just as incredibly beautiful: "That's when you, calm, came up to my porch." But not earlier than 1926, Akhmatova moved to the wing of the Sheremetyev Palace on the Fontanka, to the apartment where Punin's family (including his divorced wife) lived. "Fountain House" served as a haven for Akhmatova longer than any other, although back in 1930 she tried to leave it, and in 1941-1944 she was evacuated. In 1952, resettled from there (already in the absence of N.N. Punin, who was arrested in 1949 and died in the northern camp at the beginning of 1953), she wrote: “I have no particular complaints about this illustrious house. But it so happened that almost all my life I lived under the famous roof of the Fountain Palace... I entered it as a beggar and leave as a beggar... Again the motif of "begging" - and quite a strong hyperbole about "almost all my life". Not all her life, but the most terrible, worthy of a different life, months and years Akhmatova spent here.
At first, the years were not so terrible, but also bleak. To some extent, Anna Andreevna returned to the idea of "service" talented person. N.N. Punin shone with lectures, for which Akhmatova made translations from foreign art history literature. Relations with the new "family" were far from ideal. They were reflected in the poem "I hid my heart from you ..." (1936), the cycle "Gap" (1934, 1940), the Fourth "Northern Elegy" (1942). Already since 1923, Akhmatova's creative productivity has dropped sharply; in other years, not a single completed poem appears. In 1935, three of them were noted, including "They took you away at dawn ...", the first in the future "Requiem". The heroine compares herself with the "streltsy wives", personal experience is thus included in a broad historical, more precisely, prehistoric context. A poem was written after the then arrest of N. N. Punin - Lev Gumilyov was arrested at the same time - and, the only one in the Requiem, is addressed to her husband, and not to her son. Subsequently, only the shot N. Gumilyov, Lyova's father, will become a “husband” (“Husband in the grave, son in prison ...”). Then, in 1935, Akhmatova, on the advice of friends, came to Moscow and “under the Kremlin towers” handed over a letter of petition addressed to Stalin. The chief liked to play with his victims. This time, relatives of Akhmatova were released. But the humiliation experienced was not forgotten, as was the fear for those arrested. Then it couldn't help either. “I threw myself at the executioner’s feet, / You are my son and my horror,” Akhmatova wrote in 1939. And much later, about herself and those who experienced the same thing as she: “Together with you, I was lying at my feet / At the executioner’s bloody doll.” It is unlikely that any smaller executioner is meant, this is a metaphor: the main executioner himself is a “doll”, and not a person. From this poem, "So it was not in vain that we had troubles together ..." (1961), Akhmatova took the epigraph to "Requiem":
No, and not under someone else's firmament,
And not under the protection of other people's wings, -
I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.
The moral shock also caused by the first arrest and exile of O.E. Mandelstam (1934) and the expulsion of many intellectuals from Leningrad in 1935 (repressions provoked by the murder of Kirov began), had an exciting effect on Akhmatova's creative gift. In 1936 and 1939 N.A. Struve still records nine surviving poems. Perhaps, as early as 1934, such an important one was written as “Wild honey smells of freedom ...” (Pasternak and Mandelstam considered it the best by Akhmatova), where “freedom” and beautiful smells are opposed to the smell of blood - it “only smells of blood .. .” In the second part of the poem (it is without rhymes, which Akhmatova often has a sign of strengthening philosophicalness and generally raising the topic), the “viceroy of Rome”, washing his hands, and the “Scottish queen”, i.e. Lady Macbeth, who “was in vain from narrow palms (“Acmeistic” detail. - Auth.) / Washed off red splashes / In the stuffy darkness of the royal house ...” The litter in one of the lists is “1934. Leningrad” - unambiguously actualizes such seemingly distant evangelical and literary, tragic plots.
In January 1936, the poem "Boris Pasternak (Poet)" refers to the poet's involvement in all the diversity of life, they turn out to be equally significant, clear and bright:
He is rewarded with some kind of eternal childhood,
That generosity and vigilance of the luminaries,
And all the earth was his inheritance,
And he shared it with everyone.
And in the room of the disgraced poet
Fear and Muse are on duty in their turn
And the night goes on
Which does not know the dawn.
In August, "Dante" is written - about the exiled poet, who did not repent and even "did not return after death / To his old Florence." To him, unlike Lot's wife, who did not look back, "I sing this song." Dante (Dante), the great, proud and suffered as a result of political troubles, was equally dear to Mandelstam and Akhmatova, who constantly read him in the original. Back in 1924, Akhmatova addressed her Muse, apparently outwardly completely unlike Dantova (she looks like a “nice guest with a pipe in her hand”), but it turns out to be the same. “I say to her: “Did you dictate to Dante / Pages of Hell?” She answers: “I.” Akhmatova had to write her Hell, the “Soviet” Hell of the 20th century.
In a late autobiographical sketch, she noted:<...>in 1936 I start writing again, but my handwriting changes, but my voice already sounds different. And life brings such a Pegasus under the bridle, which is somewhat reminiscent of the apocalyptic Pale Horse ... There can be no return to the first manner ... 1940 is the apogee. According to N.A. Struve, this is already 33 works. Indeed, 1940 is the most fruitful year for Akhmatov, because then, in addition to lyric poems, the poem “The Way of All the Earth” and the first version of the unlike “Poem Without a Hero” are created, work on which will continue for a quarter of a century. And in the same year, the “Requiem” was completed, only the prose “Instead of a preface” was written in 1957 and the epigraph was selected from a poem in 1961.
In 1938 L.N. Gumilyov was again arrested, in fact, only because he had parents objectionable to the regime. This year dates II and IV of ten poems of the main body of the cycle-poem and the first part of the X poem - "The Crucifixion". Already in them, the heroine appears in three persons: a sick woman somewhere on the “quiet Don”, who, however, has the fate of Akhmatova herself, “the Tsarskoye Selo merry sinner” (this is her past, now it seems not sad, but cheerful), and, finally. To the mother, to whom the unnamed son (Son) said: “Oh, do not weep for Me...” The diversity of the future complex work is already here. "Requiem" is both autobiographical, deeply personal, and extremely generalized - both on the scale of the entire national, historical and supra-historical life, and on the sacred plane. For seventeen months, Anna Andreevna waited for a decision on the fate of the one whom she now considered the only native person (it was in 1938 that she stopped close relations with Punin), stood with transfers in long lines "under the red blinded wall" of the Kresty prison, on the banks of the Neva . The cruciform shape of the prison buildings, as it were, once again motivated the use of the highest symbol for a believer: even before the “Crucifixion”, the white nights “About your high cross / And they talk about death” (poem VI. 1939). Akhmatova's son was sentenced to ten years in labor camps (in 1939 the term was reduced to five years). She called him “Stone word” (“VII. Sentence”). The heroine of "Requiem" seeks consolation from death ("VII. Towards Death", 1939) and succumbs to madness ("IX. Already madness is a wing ...", 1940); great sorrow, however, makes her, as it were, a new Mother of God, elevates her extremely. and the grief she experiences, it is more significant and majestic than the sobs or even the “petrification” of others, albeit also close people. Lapidarna the second part of the "Crucifixion" (1940):
Magdalene fought and sobbed,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And to where silently Mother stood,
So no one dared to look.
Magdalene is the only name that appears in the "Requiem": its content, so personally significant, is instead extremely generalized. This is both a cycle of lyrical poems and a single work - a poem of an epic scale. Through the lips of the heroine, “a hundred millionth people scream.” Before she begins to succumb to madness, "mad with torment, / The already condemned regiments were walking." His own, personal forms the basis of the central part, ten numbered poems, while the general is more presented in an extensive frame (epigraph, “Instead of a preface”, “Dedication”, “Introduction”, two-part “Epilogue”), approximately equal in volume to the main part, but precisely here, for the first time, Akhmatova has the Derzhavin-Pushkin theme of the monument, which can be erected not to the many-sided lyrical heroine of early work, but to a specific person with a real biography, whose personal grief at the same time symbolizes the enormous grief of the people. Akhmatova not only as a mother (in "The Crucifixion"), but also as a poet takes on the role of the Mother of God - the patroness of the suffering: "For them I wove a wide cover / From the poor, they also overheard words." This is not just a consolation - such grief is inconsolable. The word "requiem" at the beginning of the Catholic hymn (accepted by Akhmatova, obviously, through Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri" with its opposition of genius and villainy) means a request for eternal rest. Akhmatova, on the other hand, is afraid to forget what is happening - to forget “even in blessed death,” which is why her monument is unusual, it is like a living, weeping monument. In "Requiem" the motive of sin, important for Akhmatova, appeared in a new way, far from being only the sin of an individual. In her opinion, as the researcher of this issue writes, the “historical” sin of the country “was the revolution of 1917 itself, and its causes (“Russian Trianon”, “Petersburg in 1919”, “Tsarskoye Selo ode”, “My young hands .. .”, etc.), and consequences (civil lyrics, “Requiem”, “Tails”, “Seventh Northern Elegy”, etc.). Retribution for perfect sin revolutions, regicide and atheism - Stalin's repressions; redemption - the Great Patriotic War, which brought forgiveness to the people for their incalculable disasters.
Akhmatova only at the end of 1962 decided to record the Requiem, which until then had been kept in the memory of the author and several closest friends. In 1963, without the knowledge of the author, it was printed in Munich, and in the USSR - only in 1987.
In 1939, Stalin's daughter Svetlana, after reading some of Akhmatov's old poems, awakened the wayward leader's curiosity about her. Suddenly, Akhmatova began to be published again in magazines. This was also the reason for her creative upsurge. In the summer of 1940, her collection "From Six Books" was published. The sixth book was not published separately, but was prepared by Akhmatova from new poems called "Reed"; two-thirds of them in the collection of 1940 made up the section “Willow” (“And the stone word fell ...” without a title “Sentence” was included in it from “Requiem”). It did not have an internal "lyrical plot", as in the first five books, the poems of 1924-1940 were deliberately mixed up. The book includes Dante (1936), Cleopatra (1940), When a Man Dies... (1940) and other masterpieces. Both in subject matter and poetics, they contrasted with pre-war Soviet literature. It didn't scare me at first. Subsequently, Akhmatova wrote: “The following circumstance influenced the fate of this book: Sholokhov put it up for the Stalin Prize (1940). He was supported by A.N. Tolstoy and Nemirovich-Danchenko. The prize was to be received by N. Aseev for the poem "Mayakovsky begins." Sent denunciations and everything that is supposed to be in such cases. Akhmatova also assumed that the collection did not immediately catch the eye of Stalin, and then the consequences were not slow to affect. Reptilian criticism pounced on the collection "From Six Books". In the year the Requiem was completed, Akhmatova had to endure this as well.
She was shocked by the beginning of the Second World War. The cycle “In the fortieth year” opens with the words “When an era is buried, / The grave psalm does not sound ...” (“August 1940”). The capture of Paris by the Germans, the bombing of London (“The twenty-fourth drama of Shakespeare / Writes time with a passionless hand” - the poem “To Londoners”) Akhmatova perceived it as the death of her own European civilization. Even earlier, in March 1940, she turned to the earliest sources of historical upheaval. XX century. The poem "The Way of All the Earth (Kitezhanka)" is built on the reverse course of time: from the revolution to the First World War and the Russian-Japanese, and then the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. “I, a Kitezhan, / They called me home” - one of the first words of the poem, and the final ones - “In the last dwelling / Rest me.” This is a poem about death, eternity and history. Kitezhanka Akhmatova was called N.A. Klyuev. She highly appreciated Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia. The heroine of her 1940 poem “She put her curly-haired son down ...”, written by a folk warehouse, is identified with the virgin Fevronia. And in the poem, “the heroine, traveling from 1940 to the years of her poetic glory, Crimean youth, childhood, birth, returns to her “eternal” home - the legendary city of Kitezh, miraculously saved from enemies.
The poem turned out to be prophetic. The Patriotic War, in a sense, rescued Akhmatova, saved this time from ostracism. Her patriotic poems began to appear in the press: "The Oath", "The First Long-Range in Leningrad", etc., "Courage" March 8, 1942 printed "Pravda", main newspaper country, organ of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b). Akhmatova’s heroine again spoke directly on behalf of everyone, on behalf of the people, as a woman in general, a mother in general: the first long-range German shell in Leningrad “indifferently brought death / to my child”, as if about her own (and alive: “Knock with your fist - I will open it”) she writes in the evacuation, in Tashkent, about the one who died under the bombs little son her neighbors in the Fountain House (“In Memory of Valya”, 1942), and even an old statue in summer garden, carefully covered by the earth, for her "daughter" ("Nox. Statue" Night "in the Summer Garden", 1942). The cycle "Victory" of three poems Akhmatova began to create already in January 1942. Her military poems did not contradict either the mass mood or the Soviet canons, but it was absolutely organic.
In Tashkent in 1942, Akhmatova completed the first edition of "A Poem without a Hero", which began on the night of December 26-27, 1940. The main first part of Akhmatova's largest work was called "One thousand nine hundred and thirteenth year." The loneliness of the heroine ("I lit the cherished candles / And together with the one who did not come to me / I meet the year forty-first") is fantastically replaced by the invasion of "New Year's tomboys" - a carnival of masks, shadows on the eve of 1914. Inverted dates (14-41) of two world catastrophes (although their correlation was discovered after the fact) they give, as it were, a mirror reflection, and a motif is associated with the mirror Christmas divination. For Akhmatova, the images of the mirror and the looking-glass (the other world) are one of the most important and most frequent. In the "Poem" she was not forgotten by the "talkers and false prophets" of distant years. Dead, they come to the heroine, the only one alive among them (as in the "New Year's ballad" of 1923), but the mysticism is explained historically: "As the future ripens in the past, / So the past smolders in the future - / A terrible festival of dead leaves." Among the “confused words” one hears “a clear voice:“ I am ready for death! and I’m ready for death, / I’m the coin with which the creator / Buys the salvation of wolves. ”Anna Andreevna considered only three of them, Gumilyov, Mandelstam and herself, to be true acmeists. Also declaring in verse more than once about readiness for death, now she writes about the indestructibility of everything what was (later, after the words “I am ready for death” and the added remark, the words will appear: “There is no death - everyone knows this, / It has become insipid to repeat it ...”) Akhmatova accepted the cultural centrism that was noted in 1916 in .M. Zhirmunsky as distinguishing feature poetry of Mandelstam. Subsequent revisions will lead to the “Poem” being permeated with many explicit and hidden quotations and allusions to certain texts, but already in the “Tashkent” edition, Akhmatova wrote: “You know - they will be accused of plagiarism ...” And in 1956 she aphoristically will say in the form of a classic Persian rubaiyat:
Do not repeat - your soul is rich -
What was once said
But maybe poetry itself -
One great quote.
The embryo of the plot of the first part of the "Poem" is the suicide of a hussar (later dragoon) cornet because of the "Columbine of the Tens". She recognizes Akhmatova's friend actress O.A. Glebov-Sudeikin, in it - the young poet Vs. Knyazev, who committed suicide in 1913, is unlikely because of Sudeikina, but Akhmatova thought so. For her, this episode was a full-fledged manifestation of a disastrous era, when “the silver month was bright / Over the silver age was cold” (Akhmatov’s characteristic oxymoron). The hussar is also "ready for death." And the heroine of the “Poem” does not condemn her friend, she takes on the whole burden of memories as being involved in what is happening: “I am not executing you, but myself”, “You are one of my doubles! ..”
“The second part of the poem - “Tails” is a kind of poetic apology for Akhmatova”, ironic over the editor, who did not understand anything in the first part. Everything has to come out: she has "applied / Sympathetic ink" and writes in "mirror writing". In Tashkent, the third part is being created - "Epilogue", which speaks of the abandoned city, which "turned pale, dead, calmed down." The heroine still feels herself there, in her beloved city, among other things - "on the old Volkovo field, / Where can I cry in the wild / In the thicket of your new crosses" (later - "Over the silence of mass graves"); Obviously, it was the Volkovo cemetery that was remembered thanks to its “Literary bridge”, meaning not just an abundance of new deaths, but also new losses of poetry and culture. At the end of the “Tashkent” edition, the heroine hears how “returning to her native air” “Seventh” - “the famous Leningrad girl” (symphony by D.D. Shostakovich, who was evacuated at the same time as Akhmatova).
Akhmatova continued to work on Poem for a quarter of a century. The last additions and amendments were made in 1965. But there is no canonical text of the "Poem", the author changed something all the time, and did not include some stanzas for censorship and other reasons. The work has approximately doubled, overgrown with variants, epigraphs, dedications, "Prose about the Poem". The mystical principle was reinforced, as it were, by theatrical remarks. "The nine hundred and thirteenth year" received the subtitle of Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman" - "Petersburg Tale", became more clearly correlated with the works of Gogol, Dostoevsky, poets and prose writers " silver age”,“ The Master and Margarita ”Bulgakov, etc. Motivation for the suicide of the dragoon has been supplemented love triangle- "Demon himself with Tamara's smile" becomes his rival. The connection of everything that happens with the era is clearly stated:
“And along the legendary embankment / Not a calendar one was approaching - / The real Twentieth Century.” The suicide did not wait for the probable imminent death: "How many deaths went to the poet ... He did not know on what threshold / He stands and what road / The view will open before him." In "Reshka" there appeared a designation of missing stanzas with dots, in which, for example, there were such lines: "And decades pass, / Torture, exile and execution - I can't sing / In this horror," "And we will tell you, / How in They lived in unconscious fear, / As they raised children for the scaffold, / For dungeons and for prison. In the Epilogue, the image of his own double was also created, led to interrogation and from interrogation. The former finale of the Epilogue, just like the previous one, passed into a footnote, and the last lines were about Russia, which “went east before me” (to Siberia) “wronging its hands”, but also “knowing the time for vengeance”; there was also a more optimistic version, where after these words it was said about the movement "to meet itself" true duty of young Russia "from the Urals, from Altai" into battle: "Russia went to save Moscow."
The ambiguity of the images of the "Poem" gave rise to the most diverse attempts to decipher it, to determine the prototypes of the characters. Akhmatova once admitted in "Prose about the Poem": "The demon has always been Blok, the Milestone - a Poet in general, a Poet with a capital letter (something like Mayakovsky), etc.", but added: "Characters developed, changed , life brought new actors. Someone left." In the poem itself, "Akhmatova strives with all her might to remind the reader of the duality, trinity, multiplicity, and vagueness of her images," and their "identification" is "a game that has no end." Anna Andreevna herself in 1962 declared to L.K. Chukovskaya in connection with the misunderstanding of the readers of the “Poem”: “- And I am an acmeist, not a symbolist. I am for clarity. The secret of poetry is inspiration and depth, and not that the reader does not understand the action. At the same time, she placed her poem "between the Symbolists ... and the Futurists." Vyach. Sun. Ivanov refers it to "fantastic realism" in the spirit of Dostoevsky and Bulgakov - in "Northern Elegies".
In the post-war poetry of Akhmatova, writes R.D. Timenchik, "innuendo" became not only its principle, but also one of the topics. “Akhmatova’s lyrics are waiting for a central event that would again unite individual poems, creating a second (after the “novel-lyrics” of early books), if I may say so, “lyrical epic”. In November 1945, such an event for her was the visit to her by the English diplomat Isaiah Berlin, who had emigrated from Riga with his family in his adolescence. Akhmatova talked to him all night and morning, inquiring about friends and acquaintances who lived in the West, leading a free dialogue about literature. “One can imagine how painfully Akhmatova perceived, with her openness to world culture and the world in general, this cut off, which for her turned into a tight cage, where she was fenced off not only from friends abroad, but also from the closest people at home” . “And that door that you opened a little / I don’t have enough strength to slam shut,” she wrote in the cycle “Cinque” (“five” in Italian), created from November 1945 to January 1946 (January 5, I. Berlin entered to Akhmatova to say goodbye). The heroine of the cycle sees herself as if she is walking, “like with the sun in her body”, “working miracles”, although the meeting took place on the “bittest day”, since separation immediately followed, she “did not have time / To tell about someone else's love”. “And what invisible glow / We were driven crazy before the light?” - Akhmatova is amazed in the finale of "Cinque".
Akhmatova's visits by a foreigner did not go unnoticed by the authorities. In 1965 at Oxford she spoke to Berlin about Stalin's reaction. “... It turns out that our nun receives visits from foreign spies,” Stalin remarked (as they said), and burst out at Akhmatova with a set of ... obscene curses ... ”“ She also believed that Stalin was jealous of her applause: in In April 1946, Akhmatova read her poems in Moscow and the audience gave a standing ovation. In any case, this was the reason, not the reason for the ensuing punishment. The reason was the onset of the Cold War and the corresponding tightening of the ideological screws. It was necessary to frighten and completely subordinate the intelligentsia to Stalinist dogmas, who felt some spiritual freedom during Patriotic War and in the first post-war year. The primary victims were M.M. Zoshchenko and A.A. Akhmatova. They were the central figures in the first of a series of post-war resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on issues of literature and art - "On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad" dated August 14, 1946 - and in the report of the Secretary of the Central Committee A.A. Zhdanov about this decision. Both documents contained simply area abuse. Criticism immediately joined in the persecution of the "vulgar and scum of literature" Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. Akhmatova was accused of lack of ideas, individualism and belonging to the old salon poetry. Even her military poems became the object of unabashed twitching. A 1944 poem “To the Winners”, where with unprecedented warmth it was said about those who gave “their Life for their friends” (then Biblicalism also said goodbye): “Unpretentious boys - / Vanka, Vaska, Alyoshka, Grishka, - / Grandchildren, brothers , sons! ”, - was exposed general secretary Board of the Union of Writers A.A. Fadeev. “In one of his speeches, he stated that in these verses there is a lordly, almost serf-like attitude towards the people: “Vanki. Vaska. Alyoshka, Grishka ... So the lady calls the yard ... "
Expelled from the Writers' Union, Akhmatova was initially deprived of her livelihood. Later, as in the 1930s, translations began to help out, which, however, prevented me from writing my own poems. In 1949, L.N. was arrested again. Gumilyov (during the war he moved from the settlement to the front and reached Berlin as a soldier). Fearing for his life, in 1950 Anna Andreevna wrote and printed a series of semi-official poems “Glory to the World!”, In which there are also glorifying Stalin. poems by the author of the "Requiem" could influence the fate of a person. But Lev Gumilyov was released only three years after Stalin's death, in May 1956 (with the help of Fadeev). In the summer, when Akhmatova was in Moscow, I. Berlin, who was there, called her and asked for a meeting. Akhmatova, breaking herself, refused, not being sure that the fate of her son was finally decided. As early as January 5, on the tenth anniversary of her farewell, she wrote the "third and last" dedication to "A Poem Without a Hero", with poetic hyperbole, generated by the belief that her meetings with Berlin were the cause, if not of the "cold war", then of the persecution of Soviet intelligentsia: "He will not become my dear husband, / But we will deserve such a thing, / That the Twentieth Century will be embarrassed." Now, the tragic “non-meeting” for Akhmatova has become the source of many poems, primarily included in the cycles “Rosehip is blooming. From a Burnt Notebook” (to the poems of 1946 were added those written in 1956 and after) and “Midnight Poems. Seven Poems" (1963-1965). In "Cinque", "Rosehip" and other "masterpieces of gentle and superstitious love lyrics of the mid-twentieth century, again, as in Akhmatova's old poems, love appears as a fatal duel, as a struggle between two worthy rivals, one of which is "a European alien, a guest from Future, and the second - a Russian poet. However, in Rosehip "another theme appears - moral victory, triumph over fate, as the poetess assesses this voluntary" non-meeting "".
I. Berlin was twenty years younger than Akhmatova. If you can talk about her love for him, then this love is purely poetic. In an English diplomat, philosopher and philologist with Russian roots, all the people dear to her were embodied for her, moreover, all the life that she voluntarily lost, forever leaving the thought of emigration and accepting her cross in her homeland. In “Another Song” (summer 1957), recalling the “miracle” of a long-standing meeting and its bitter consequences (“She spoke to whom it was not necessary, / She spoke for a long time”), Akhmatova even contrasts him and herself with those in love:
Let passions strangle lovers,
Demanding an answer
We, darling, are only souls
At the edge of the world.
In 1958 and 1961, Akhmatova published books of selected poems, and in 1965, in many respects, the final book "The Run of Time", however, in the form conceived by the author, with poems from the 30s and excerpts from the "Requiem", they did not allow it to be printed. The Flight of Time was originally conceived as the seventh book of poetry. In 1946, after a decision of the Central Committee, Akhmatova's newly typed book Odd was put under the knife. Six years later, the manuscript was returned to the author, and subsequently, continuing to work on it, Akhmatova again began to form the seventh book. The number "seven" is not accidental in "Midnight Poems". It “means perfect, self-contained fullness and bears the seal of biblical sacred symbolism - from the seven days of creation to the repeated use of this image in the Revelation of John the Theologian ... Akhmatova summed up her fate and creativity through this number: “The Seventh Book” is exorbitant has grown in comparison with the previous ones, because Akhmatova did not want to allow the formation of the eighth; The cycle “Northern Elegies”, which did not take place in full, was conceived as a sevenfold one: “There will be seven of them, I decided so.” In the end, under the title “The Run of Time”, not a new book was published, but a collection of all seven books, including two not published separately.
Akhmatova's late poems, collected by her in several cycles, are thematically very diverse. Here is the philosophical, aphoristic “String of quatrains”, and “A wreath for the dead” (from the “teacher” I. Annensky to N. Punin), and the aforementioned “Northern Elegies”, begun back in 1921, and “Antique Page” (“ The Death of Sophocles", "Alexander at Thebes", 1958-1961) with the idea of the deepest respect that in ancient times had for poets, and "Secrets of the Craft" of the 40-50s, opening with the famous "Creativity" (1936), and poems about Tsarskoye Selo, and three poems about Blok, and the folklore cycle "Songs", and much more. Seaside Sonnet (1958) is permeated with a peaceful sense of satisfaction with the life lived in the face of death that is already close. "Native Land" (1961) is a poem about death, and about genuine, not state-owned patriotism, and about dust and dirt underfoot, which suddenly turn into "unmixed dust", into a criterion of ethical evaluation.
The last in a series of her poems, standing "after everything", Akhmatova, according to the original plan of "Running Time", wanted to see the 1945 poem "Who once called people ..." - about Christ and those who executed him, then disappeared. During the life of Akhmatova, only his separate final quatrain was published (in 1963), however, it is quite self-sufficient and really final:
Gold rusts and steel rots,
Marble crumbles - everything is ready for death.
Sadness is the strongest thing on earth
And more durable is the royal Word.
The later poems of A. Akhmatova are an example of a thoughtful and solemn, truly regal word, sometimes extremely clear, sometimes ambiguous, shimmering with shades of meaning. There are no dramatic scenes, as in early lyrics, now, the psychological action has been replaced by emotional and intellectual tension. There is also no former diversity of the lyrical subject. The heroine of Akhmatova in later poems is more autobiographical and more autopsychological, although she often speaks on behalf of many, almost everyone. Since a number of large works have been created since 1940, “by contrast, small lyrical works become shorter: in the early Akhmatova, their length is 13 lines, in the late one, 10. This does not harm monumentality, the emphasized fragmentation makes them seem like fragments of monuments.” " Early periods correspond to the “simple”, “material” style of the acmeist Akhmatova, the later ones correspond to the “dark”, “bookish” style of the old Akhmatova, who feels herself the heiress of a bygone era and alien to the literary environment.
In the crowd participating on June 2, 1960. at the funeral of B.L. Pasternak, someone’s “voice said softly:
So the last great Russian poet died.
No, there is one left.
I waited, growing cold, without turning around, - writes L.K. Chukovskaya.
Anna Akhmatova".
And in 1966 N.A. Struve responded to Akhmatova’s death in the following way: “Not only did the “unique voice” that until the last days brought into the world ... the secret power of harmony, ended its circle with him, and all the unique Russian culture, having existed from the first songs of Pushkin to the last songs of Akhmatova exactly one and a half years." Later, thirty years later, only one poet, supported and blessed by Akhmatova in his youth, - I.A. Brodsky.
Born near Odessa (Big Fountain). Daughter of mechanical engineer Andrey Antonovich Gorenko and Inna Erazmovna, nee Stogova. As a poetic pseudonym, Anna Andreevna took the name of the great-grandmother of the Tatar Akhmatova.
In 1890, the Gorenko family moved to Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg, where Anna lived until the age of 16. She studied at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium, in one of the classes of which her future husband Nikolai Gumilyov studied. In 1905, the family moved to Evpatoria, and then to Kyiv, where Anna graduated from the gymnasium at the Fundukleevskaya gymnasium.
Akhmatova's first poem was published in Paris in 1907 in the Sirius magazine, published in Russian. In 1912, her first book of poems, Evening, was published. By this time, she was already signing herself with the pseudonym Akhmatova.
In the 1910s Akhmatova's work was closely connected with the poetic group of acmeists, which took shape in the fall of 1912. The founders of acmeism were Sergei Gorodetsky and Nikolai Gumilyov, who since 1910 became the husband of Akhmatova.
Thanks to her bright appearance, talent, sharp mind, Anna Andreevna attracted the attention of poets who dedicated poems to her, artists who painted her portraits (N. Altman, K. Petrov-Vodkin, Yu. Annenkov, M. Saryan, etc.) . Composers created music for her works (S. Prokofiev, A. Lurie, A. Vertinsky and others).
In 1910 she visited Paris, where she met the artist A. Modigliani, who painted several of her portraits.
Along with loud fame, she had to experience many personal tragedies: in 1921 her husband Gumilyov was shot, in the spring of 1924 a decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued, which actually prohibited Akhmatova from being published. In the 1930s repression fell upon almost all of her friends and like-minded people. They also affected the people closest to her: first, her son Lev Gumilyov was arrested and exiled, then her second husband, art critic Nikolai Nikolaevich Punin.
AT last years life, living in Leningrad, Akhmatova worked a lot and intensively: in addition to poetry, she was engaged in translations, wrote memoirs, essays, prepared a book about A.S. Pushkin. The recognition of the great merits of the poet to world culture was the award to her in 1964 of the international poetic prize "Etna Taormina", and her scientific work received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Oxford.
Akhmatova died in a sanatorium in the suburbs. She was buried in the village of Komarovo near Leningrad.
The life of Anna Akhmatova is no less interesting and eventful than her work. The woman survived the revolution, civil war, political persecution and repression. She also stood at the origins of modernism in Russia, becoming a representative of the innovative movement "Acmeism". That is why the story of this poetess is so important for understanding her poems.
The future poetess was born in Odessa in 1889. The real name of Anna Andreevna is Gorenko, and later, after her first marriage, she changed it. Anna Akhmatova's mother, Inna Stogova, was a hereditary noblewoman and had a large fortune. It was from her mother that Anna inherited her willful and a strong character. Akhmatova received her first education at the Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo. Then the future poetess studied at the Kyiv gymnasium and graduated from the Kyiv higher education courses.
Akhmatova's parents were intelligent people, but not without prejudices. It is known that the poet's father forbade her to sign poems with her last name. He believed that her passion would bring shame to their family. The gap between generations was very noticeable, because new trends came to Russia from abroad, where the era of reformation began in art, culture, and interpersonal relations. Therefore, Anna believed that writing poetry was normal, and the Akhmatova family categorically did not accept her daughter's occupation.
History of success
Anna Akhmatova lived a long and difficult life, went through a thorny creative path. Many close and dear people around her became victims of the Soviet regime, and because of this, the poetess herself, of course, suffered. At various times, her writings were banned for publication, which could not but affect the state of the author. The years of her work fell on the period when there was a division of poets into several currents. She approached the direction of "acmeism" (). The originality of this trend was that the poetic world of Akhmatova was arranged simply and clearly, without abstract and abstract image-symbols inherent in symbolism. She did not saturate her poems with philosophy and mysticism; there was no place for pomposity and zaumi in them. Thanks to this, readers who were tired of puzzling over the content of poems understood and loved her. She wrote about feelings, events and people in a feminine way, softly and emotionally, openly and weightily.
The fate of Akhmatova led her to the circle of acmeists, where she met her first husband, N. S. Gumilyov. He was the ancestor of a new trend, a noble and authoritative man. His work inspired the poetess to create acmeism in the female dialect. It was within the framework of the St. Petersburg circle "Sluchevsky Evenings" that her debuts took place, and the public, coolly reacting to Gumilev's work, enthusiastically accepted his lady of the heart. She was "spontaneously talented," as critics of those years wrote.
Anna Andreevna was a member of the "Workshop of Poets", the poetic workshop of N. S. Gumilyov. There she met the most famous representatives of the literary elite and became a member of it.
Creation
In the work of Anna Akhmatova, two periods can be distinguished, the boundary between which was the Great Patriotic War. So, in the love poem "An Unprecedented Autumn" (1913), she writes about peace and about the tenderness of meeting with a loved one. This work reflects a milestone of calmness and wisdom in Akhmatova's poetry. In 1935-1940. she worked on a poem consisting of 14 poems - "Requiem". This cycle became a kind of reaction of the poetess to family upheavals - the departure of her husband and beloved son from home. Already in the second half of his work, at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, such strong civil poems as "Courage" and "Oath" were written. The features of Akhmatov's lyricism lie in the fact that the poetess tells a story in her poems, you can always notice a certain narrative in them.
The themes and motifs of Akhmatova's lyrics also differ. Starting his creative path, the author talks about love, the theme of the poet and poetry, recognition in society, interpersonal relations between the sexes and generations. She subtly feels the nature and the world of things; in her descriptions, each object or phenomenon acquires personality traits. Later, Anna Andreevna is faced with unprecedented difficulties: the revolution sweeps away everything in its path. New images appear in her poems: time, revolution, new government, war. She breaks up with her husband, later he was sentenced to death, and their common son spends his whole life in prisons because of his origin. Then the author begins to write about maternal and female grief. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, Akhmatova's poetry acquires citizenship and patriotic intensity.
The lyrical heroine herself does not change over the years. Of course, grief and loss left scars on her soul, the woman eventually writes even more piercingly and harshly. The first feelings and impressions are replaced by mature reflections on the fate of the fatherland in difficult times for it.
First verses
Like many great poets, Anna Akhmatova wrote her first poem at the age of 11. Over time, the poetess developed her own unique poetic style. One of the most famous Akhmatov details, appearing in the poem "Song last meeting» - right and left hand and a twisted glove. Akhmatova wrote this poem in 1911, at the age of 22. In this poem, the work of details is clearly visible.
Akhmatova's early lyrics are part of the golden fund of Russian classics dedicated to the relationship between a man and a woman. It is especially valuable that the reader has finally seen a woman's view of love, until the end of the 19th century there were no poetesses in Russia. For the first time, conflicts of the female vocation and her social role in family and marriage.
Collections of poems and cycles
In 1912, the first collection of poems by Akhmatova "Evening" was published. Almost all the poems included in this collection were written by the author at the age of twenty. Then the books "Rosary", "White Flock", "Plantain", "ANNO DOMINI" are published, each of which has a certain general focus, main theme and compositional connection. After the events of 1917, she can no longer publish her works so freely, the revolution and Civil War lead to the formation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, where the hereditary noblewoman is attacked by critics and completely forgotten in the press. The last books "Reed" and "The Seventh Book" were not printed separately.
Akhmatova's books were not published until perestroika. This was largely due to the poem "Requiem", which was leaked to foreign media and was published abroad. The poetess hung in the balance from arrest, and only the admission that she knew nothing about the publication of the work saved her. Of course, her poems after this scandal could not be published for a long time.
Personal life
Family
Anna Akhmatova was married three times. Married to Nikolai Gumilyov, her first husband, she gave birth to her only child, Leo. Together, the couple made two trips to Paris and also traveled around Italy. Relations with the first husband were not easy, and the couple decided to leave. However, despite this, after the breakup, when N. Gumilyov went to war, Akhmatova devoted several lines to him in her poems. A spiritual bond continued to exist between them.
Akhmatova's son was often separated from his mother. As a child, he lived with his paternal grandmother, saw his mother very rarely, and in the conflict between his parents, he firmly took the position of his father. He did not respect his mother, spoke abruptly and abruptly to her. As an adult, due to his background, he was considered an unreliable citizen in a new country. He received prison terms 4 times and always not deservedly. Therefore, his relationship with his mother could not be called close. In addition, she remarried, and the son took this change hard.
Other novels
Akhmatova was also married to Vladimir Shileiko and Nikolai Punin. Anna Akhmatova was married to V. Shileiko for 5 years, but they continued to communicate by letters until Vladimir's death.
The third husband, Nikolai Punin, was a representative of the reactionary intelligentsia, in connection with which he was arrested several times. Thanks to the efforts of Akhmatova, Punin was released after his second arrest. A few years later, Nikolai and Anna broke up.
Characteristics of Akhmatova
Even during her lifetime, Akhmatova was called the "Ladies' decadent poetess." That is, her lyrics were characterized by extreme individualism. Speaking about personal qualities, it is worth saying that Anna Andreevna had a caustic, unfeminine humor. For example, when meeting with Tsvetaeva, an admirer of her work, she talked very coldly and bitterly with the impressionable Marina Ivanovna, which offended her interlocutor very much. Anna Andreevna also found it difficult to find mutual understanding with men, and her relationship with her son did not work out. Another woman was very suspicious, everywhere she saw a dirty trick. It seemed to her that her daughter-in-law was a sent agent of the authorities, who was called upon to follow her.
Despite the fact that the years of Akhmatova's life fell on such terrible events as the Revolution of 1917, the First and Second World Wars, she did not leave her homeland. Only during the Great Patriotic War the poetess was evacuated in Tashkent. Akhmatova reacted negatively and angrily to emigration. She made her civic position very clear by declaring that she would never live or work abroad. The poetess believed that her place is where her people are. She expressed her love for the Motherland in poems that were included in the collection "White Pack". Thus, Akhmatova's personality was multifaceted and rich in both good and dubious qualities.
- Anna Andreevna did not sign her poems with her maiden name Gorenko, as her father forbade her. He was afraid that his daughter's freedom-loving writings would bring the wrath of the authorities on the family. That is why she took her great-grandmother's surname.
- It is also interesting that Akhmatova professionally studied the works of Shakespeare and Dante and always admired their talents, translating foreign literature. It was they who became her only income in the USSR.
- In 1946, party leader Zhdanov spoke at a congress of writers with sharp criticism of Akhmatova's work. Features of the author's lyrics were designated as "poetry of an enraged lady, rushing between the boudoir and the prayer room."
- Mother and son did not understand each other. Anna Andreevna herself repented that she was a "bad mother." Her only son spent all his childhood with his grandmother, and saw his mother only occasionally, because she did not indulge him with her attention. She did not want to be distracted from creativity and hated everyday life. Interesting life in the capital captured it completely.
- It must be remembered that N. S. Gumilyov starved the lady of the heart, because, because of her numerous refusals, he attempted suicide and actually forced her to agree to marry him. But after the marriage, it turned out that the spouses were not suitable for each other. Both husband and wife began to cheat, be jealous and quarrel, forgetting all their vows. Their relationship was full of mutual reproaches and resentment.
- Akhmatova's son hated the work "Requiem", because he believed that he, who survived all the trials, should not receive funeral lines addressed to him from his mother.
- Akhmatova died alone; five years before her death, she broke all ties with her son and his family.
Life in the USSR
In 1946, the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks issued a decree on the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad. This decision was primarily directed against Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. She could no longer print, and it was also dangerous to communicate with her. Even his own son blamed the poetess for his arrests.
Akhmatova earned money by translations and odd jobs in magazines. In the USSR, her work was recognized as "far from the people", and, therefore, not needed. But new talents gathered around her literary figure, the doors of her house were open to them. For example, it is known about her close friendship with I. Brodsky, who recalled their communication in exile with warmth and gratitude.
Death
Anna Akhmatova died in 1966 in a sanatorium near Moscow. The cause of death of the poetess is serious heart problems. She lived a long life, in which, nevertheless, there was no place for a strong family. She left this world alone, and after her death, the inheritance left to her son was sold in favor of the state. He, an exile, was not supposed to do anything according to Soviet laws.
From her notes it turned out that during her lifetime she was a deeply unhappy, hunted person. To make sure that no one reads her manuscripts, she left a hair in them, which she always found shifted. The repressive regime was slowly and surely driving her crazy.
Places of Anna Akhmatova
Akhmatova was buried near St. Petersburg. Then, in 1966, the Soviet authorities were afraid of the growth of the dissident movement, and the body of the poetess was quickly transported from Moscow to Leningrad. At the grave of mother L.N. Gumilyov installed stone wall, which became a symbol of the inseparable connection between son and mother, especially during the period when L. Gumilyov was in prison. Despite the fact that a wall of misunderstanding separated them all their lives, the son repented that he contributed to her erection, and buried her along with her mother.
Museums of A. A. Akhmatova:
- St. Petersburg. The memorial apartment of Anna Akhmatova is located in the Fountain House, in the apartment of her third husband, Nikolai Punin, where she lived for almost 30 years.
- Moscow. In the house of the antique book "In Nikitsky", where the poetess often stopped when she came to Moscow, a museum dedicated to Anna Akhmatova was opened not so long ago. It was here that she, for example, wrote "A Poem without a Hero."
Anna Akhmatova is the literary pseudonym of A.A. Gorenko, who was born on June 11 (23), 1889 near Odessa. Soon her family moved to Tsarskoe Selo, where the future poetess lived until she was 16 years old. Akhmatova's early youth is studying at Tsarskoye Selo and Kyiv gymnasiums. Then she studied law in Kyiv and philology at the Higher Courses for Women in St. Petersburg. The first poems, in which the influence of Derzhavin is tangible, were written by the high school student Gorenko at the age of 11. The first publications of poems appeared in 1907.
From the very beginning of the 1910s. Akhmatova begins to be published regularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow publications. Since the formation of the literary association "Workshop of Poets" (1911), the poetess has served as secretary of the "Workshop". From 1910 to 1918 she was married to the poet N.S. Gumilyov, whom she met in the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium. In 1910-1912. made a trip to Paris (where she became friends with the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, who created her portrait) and to Italy.
In 1912, a significant year for the poetess, two big events took place: her first collection of poems, Evening, was published, and her only son, the future historian Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov, was born. The poems of the first collection, clear in composition and plastic in the images used in them, forced critics to talk about the emergence of a new strong talent in Russian poetry. Although the immediate "teachers" of Akhmatova the poetess were the masters of the Symbolist generation I.F. Annensky and A.A. Blok, her poetry was from the very beginning perceived as acmeistic. Indeed, together with N.S. Gumilyov and O.E. Mandelstam, Akhmatova composed in the early 1910s. the core of a new poetic trend.
The first collection was followed by the second book of poems - "Rosary" (1914), and in September 1917 the third Akhmatova collection - "The White Flock" was published. The October Revolution did not force the poetess to emigrate, although her life changed dramatically, and her creative fate was especially dramatic. She now worked in the library of the Agronomic Institute, managed in the early 1920s. publish two more collections of poems: Plantain (1921) and Anno Domini (In the Year of the Lord, 1922). After that, for a long 18 years, not a single of her poems appeared in print. The reasons were different: on the one hand, the execution of her ex-husband, the poet N.S. During these years of forced silence, the poetess was engaged in Pushkin's work a lot.
In 1940, a collection of poems "From Six Books" was published, which for a short period of time returned the poetess to her contemporary literature. The Great Patriotic War found Akhmatova in Leningrad, from where she was evacuated to Tashkent. In 1944 Akhmatova returned to Leningrad. Subjected to cruel and unfair criticism in 1946 in the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad”, the poetess was expelled from the Writers' Union. For the next decade, she focused primarily on literary translation. Her son, L.N. Gumilyov, at that time was serving his sentence as a political criminal in forced labor camps. Only from the second half of the 1950s. the return of Akhmatova's poems to Russian literature began, since 1958 collections of her lyrics began to be published again. In 1962, "Poem without a Hero" was completed, which had been in the making for 22 years. Anna Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966, she was buried in Komarov near St. Petersburg.
She learned from the Symbolists and became a strict, plastic, acmeistic "reaction" to them. Chamber singing - about the broadest. Fragile, thin - with the masculine power of verse. This is all about Anna Andreevna Gorenko, known under the literary pseudonym - Akhmatova.
Instruction
- Akhmatova was born on June 11, 1889 near Odessa. Her youth was spent in Tsarskoe Selo, where she lived until the age of 16. Anna studied at the Tsarskoye Selo and Kyiv gymnasiums, and then studied law in Kyiv and philology in St. Petersburg. In the first poems written by a schoolgirl at the age of 11, Derzhavin's influence was felt. The first publications came in 1907.
- From the beginning of the 1910s, Akhmatova was 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 - the years of marriage to Nikolai Gumilyov, an acquaintance of Akhmatova since her studies at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium. In 1910-1912, Anna Akhmatova traveled to Paris, where she met the artist Amedeo Modigliani, who painted her portrait, and also to Italy.
- The year 1912 was the most significant and fruitful for the poetess. This year saw the release of "Evening", her first collection of poems, and a son, Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov, was born. In the poems of "Evening" there is a chased accuracy 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 "super-real", metaphorical, ambiguous and fluid illustrations, Akhmatova restores the original meaning of the word. The fragility of spontaneous and fleeting "signals" sung by symbolist poets gave way to precise verbal images and strict compositions.
- I.F. are considered mentors of the poetic style of Akhmatova. Annensky and A.A. Blok, master symbolists. However, Anna Andreevna's poetry was immediately perceived as original, different from symbolism, acmeistic. N.S. Gumilyov, O.E. Mandelstam and A.A. Akhmatova became the fundamental core of the new trend.
- In 1914, a second collection of poems called "Rosary" was published. In 1917, The White Flock, Akhmatova's third collection, was published. The October Revolution greatly influenced the life and attitude of the poetess, as well as her creative destiny. Working in the library of the Agronomic Institute, Anna Andreevna managed to publish more collections "Plantain" (1921) and "Anno Domini" ("In the summer of the Lord", 1922). In 1921, her husband was shot, accused of participating in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Soviet criticism did not accept Akhmatova's poems, and the poetess plunged into a period of forced silence.
- Only in 1940, Anna Akhmatova published the collection "From Six Books", which for a short time returned her "face" as a writer of our time. 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 decree “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad”. She was expelled from the Writers' Union and denied the right to publish. Her only son served his sentence in penal camps as a political prisoner.
- "A Poem Without a Hero", created by the poetess for 22 years and which became the central link in Akhmatov's lyrics, reflecting the tragedy of the era and her personal tragedy, was completed in 1962. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966 and was buried near St. Petersburg.
- A tragic hero, consonant with her time, St. Petersburg, the Empire, Pushkin, suffering, the Russian people - she lived these themes and sang about them, being a silent witness to the terrible and monstrously unfair pages of Russian history. Anna Akhmatova carried these “tones” through her whole life: both personal pain and a “socially significant” cry are heard in them.
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