It is difficult to imagine the period of the Silver Age in Russian poetry without such a big name as Anna Akhmatova. The biography of this outstanding man is not at all easy. Akhmatova's personality is shrouded in an aura of mystery. In her personal life there was glory, love, but also great sorrow. This will be discussed in the article.
Biography of Akhmatova: complete
Anna Akhmatova (Gorenko) was born on June 23, new style, 1889 into a noble family. Her biography began in Odessa. Her father worked as a mechanical engineer, her mother belonged to the creative intelligentsia.
A year later, the Gorenko family moved to St. Petersburg, where his father received a higher position. All Anna's childhood memories were connected with this wonderful city on the Neva. The girl's upbringing and education was, of course, at the highest level. She and her nanny often walked in Tsarskoye Selo Park and enjoyed the beautiful creations of talented sculpture masters.
She began to be taught lessons in social etiquette early on. In addition to Anya, the family had five more children. She listened to the governess teach French to the older children and taught herself the language that way. The girl also learned to read and write on her own by reading Leo Tolstoy’s books.
When Anna was ten years old, she was sent to the Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium. She studied reluctantly. But she loved the summer holidays that the family spent near Sevastopol. There, according to her own recollections, the girl shocked the local young ladies by walking without a hat, barefoot, sunbathing to such an extent that her skin began to peel off. From that time on, Anna fell in love with the sea, once and for all.
Perhaps this love for the beauty of nature gave rise to poetic inspiration in her. Anna wrote her first poem at the age of eleven. The poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov, Derzhavin, Nekrasov served as role models for her.
After Anna's parents divorced, she moved with her mother and other children to Evpatoria, and then to Kyiv. I had to finish my last year at the gymnasium there. Then she entered the Higher Women's Courses at the Faculty of Law. But, as it turned out, jurisprudence is not her calling. Therefore, Anna chose Women's literary and historical courses in St. Petersburg.
The beginning of a creative journey
No one in the Gorenko family ever wrote poetry. The father forbade the young poetess to sign the name Gorenko, so as not to disgrace their family. He considered her passion for poetry to be something unacceptable and frivolous. Anna had to come up with a pseudonym.
It turned out that in their family there was once upon a time the Horde Khan Akhmat. The aspiring poetess began to be called after him.
When Anna was still studying at the gymnasium, a young man named Nikolai Gumilyov met her. He also wrote poetry, even published his own magazine, Sirius. The young people began to meet, and after Anna moved they corresponded. Nikolai highly appreciated the girl’s poetic talent. He was the first to publish her poems in his magazine under the signature of Anna G. This was in 1907.
In 1910-1912, Anna Akhmatova traveled through European countries. She was in Paris, Italy. There there was a meeting with the Italian impressionist artist Amadeo Modigliani. This acquaintance, which turned into a whirlwind romance, left a noticeable mark on her creative biography.
But, unfortunately, the lovers could not be together. They separated in 1911 and never met again. Soon the young artist died of tuberculosis. Love for him and worry about his untimely death were reflected in the work of the young poetess.
Akhmatova's first poems are lyrical. They reflect the poetess’s personal life, her love, and experiences. They are passionate and tender, full of feelings, a little naive, as if written in an album. The poetess herself called the poems of that time “the poor poems of an empty girl.” They are a little similar to the early work of another outstanding poetess of that time - Marina Tsvetaeva.
In 1911, Anna Akhmatova, for the first time in her creative biography, decided to independently send her poems to the judgment of professionals in the then popular Moscow monthly magazine “Russian Thought”.
She asked if she should have continued writing poetry. The answer was positive. Her poems were published.
Then the poetess was published in other famous magazines: Apollo, General Journal and others.
Popular recognition of the poetess' talent
Soon Akhmatova becomes famous in literary circles. Many famous writers and poets of that time noticed and appreciated her talent. Everyone is also amazed by the extraordinary beauty of the poetess. Her oriental nose with a pronounced hump, half-closed eyes with large clouds, which sometimes had the ability to change color. Some said that her eyes were gray, others said they were green, and others said they were sky blue.
Also, her sedateness and royal bearing spoke for themselves. Despite the fact that Anna was quite tall, she never hunched over and always stood very straight. Her manners were refined. Mystery and uniqueness reigned throughout the appearance.
They say that in her youth Anna was very flexible. Even ballerinas were jealous of her extraordinary plasticity. Her thin hands, aquiline nose, and misty, cloudy eyes were sung by many poets, including, of course, Nikolai Gumilyov.
In 1912, Anna Akhmatova’s first book, entitled “Evening,” was published. These poems were exclusively lyrical, touching and melodious. The collection immediately found its admirers. It was a burst of fame in the life of the young poetess. She is invited to perform her poems, many artists paint her portraits, poets dedicate poems to her, composers write musical works to her.
In bohemian circles, Anna met the poet Alexander Blok. He was delighted with her talent and beauty. And of course, he dedicated his poems to her. Many have already talked about the secret romance of these outstanding people. But no one knows whether this was true. She was also friends with the composer Lurie and the critic N. Nedobrovo. She also had affairs with them, according to rumors at the time.
Two years later, the poetess’s second book, called “The Rosary,” was published. This was already poetry of the highest professional level, compared to her first book. The established “Akhmatovian” style can already be felt here.
In the same year, Anna Akhmatova wrote her first poem, “Near the Sea.” In it, the poetess reflected her impressions of her youth, memories of the sea, and love for it.
At the beginning of World War I, Akhmatova curtailed her public appearances. Then she fell ill with a terrible disease - tuberculosis.
But there was no break in her personal poetic life. She continued to write her poetry. But then the poetess was more fascinated by her love of reading classics. And this affected her work of that period.
In 1717, the poetess’s new book, “The White Flock,” was published. The book was published in a huge circulation - 2 thousand copies. Her name became louder than the name of Nikolai Gumilev. By that time, Akhmatova’s own style was clearly visible in her poems, free, individual, integral. Another famous poet Mayakovsky called it “a monolith that cannot be broken by any blows.” And this was the true truth.
More and more philosophy appears in her poems, less and less naive youthful expressions. Before us is a wise, mature woman. Her life experience, deep intelligence and at the same time simplicity are clearly visible in the lines. The theme of faith in God and Orthodoxy is also an integral part of her work. The words “prayer”, “God”, “faith” can often be found in her poems. The poetess is not shy about her faith, but speaks openly about it.
Terrible years
After the October revolution in the country, terrible times began not only for Russia, but also for Akhmatova herself. She did not even imagine what torment and suffering she would have to endure. Although in his youth, during a visit to the elder’s cell, he predicted a martyr’s crown for her and called her “Christ’s Bride,” promising a Heavenly crown for her patience with suffering. Akhmatova wrote about this visit in her poem.
Of course, the new government could not like Akhmatova’s poems, which were immediately called “anti-proletarian”, “bourgeois”, etc. In the 20s, the poetess was under constant supervision of the NKVD. She writes her poems “on the table” and is forced to give up public speaking.
In 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov was arrested for “anti-Soviet propaganda” and sentenced to death. Akhmatova is having a hard time with his death.
Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov
In 1921, Alexander Blok died. She is divorcing her second husband. This whole series of tragic events did not break this woman, strong in spirit. She resumes work in literary societies, publishes again and speaks to the public. A new book of her poems, “Plantain,” is being published.
Then, six months later, Akhmatova’s fifth book, AnnoDomini MCMXXI, was published. This name is translated from Latin - in the summer of the Lord 1921. After that, it was not published for several years. Many of her poems from that time were lost during travel.
At the height of the repressions in 1935, two people close to her were arrested: her husband (Nikolai Punin) and son. She wrote to the government about their release. A week later they were released.
But the troubles didn't end there. Three years later, Lev Gumilyov's son was arrested again and sentenced to five years of hard labor at hard labor. The unfortunate mother often visited her son in prison and gave him parcels. All these events and bitter experiences were reflected in her poem “Requiem”.
In 1939, Akhmatova was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers. In 1940, “Requiem” was written. Then the collection “From Six Books” was published.
At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Akhmatova lived in Leningrad. Her health condition deteriorated sharply. On the advice of doctors, she left for Tashkent. A new collection of her poems was published there. In 1944, the poetess decided to return to Leningrad.
After the war in 1946, her work was heavily criticized along with the work of M. Zoshchenko in the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”. They were expelled in disgrace from the Writers' Union.
In 1949, Akhmatova’s son was arrested again. She asked for her son, wrote to the government, but she was refused. Then the poetess decides to take a desperate step. She wrote an ode to Stalin. The cycle of poems was called “Glory to the World!”
In 1951, Fadeev proposed reinstating the poetess in the Writers' Union, which was carried out. In 1954, she took part in the second congress of the Writers' Union.
In 1956, her son was released. He was angry with his mother because, as it seemed to him, she did not seek his release.
In 1958, her new collection of poems was published. In 1964 she received the Italian Etna-Taormina Prize. The following year, in England, the poetess was awarded a doctorate from Oxford University. In 1966, the last collection of her poems was published. On March 5 of the same year, while in a sanatorium, she died.
On March 10, Akhmatova’s funeral service was held in an Orthodox church in Leningrad. She was buried in a cemetery in Komarovo, Leningrad region.
Personal life of Akhmatova
The personal life of Anna Akhmatova interests many. She was officially married twice.
The first husband was Nikolai Gumilyov. They met and corresponded for a long time. Nikolai had been in love with Anna for a long time, and proposed marriage to her many times. But she refused. Then Anya was in love with her classmate. But he didn't pay any attention to her. Anna, in despair, tried to commit suicide.
Anna's mother, seeing Gumilyov's persistent courtship and endless marriage proposals, called him a saint. Finally, Anna broke down. She agreed to the marriage. The young people got married in 1910. They went on their honeymoon to Paris.
But, since Anna could not reciprocate her husband in any way and agreed to the marriage solely out of pity, very soon the young artist Amadeo Modigliani took a place in her heart. She met the ardent Italian in Paris. Then Anna came to him again.
He painted her portraits, she wrote poetry to him. The stormy, beautiful romance was forced to end in the midst of it, since it would not have led to anything good.
Soon Anna and Gumilev broke up. Anna Akhmatova's personal life changed in 1818: she married the scientist Vladimir Shileiko for the second time. But she divorced him three years later.
Changes in Anna Akhmatova’s personal life occurred in ’22. She became the common-law wife of N. Punin. I broke up with him in 1938. Then she had an intimate relationship with Garshin.
Celebrity biography - Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova (Anna Gorenko) is a Russian and Soviet poetess.
Childhood
Anna was born into a large family on June 23, 1889. She will take the creative pseudonym “Akhmatova” in memory of the legends about her Horde roots.
Anna spent her childhood in Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg, and every summer the family went to Sevastopol. At the age of five, the girl learned to speak French, but studying at the Mariinsky Gymnasium, where Anna entered in 1900, was difficult for her.
Akhmatova's parents divorced when she was sixteen years old. Mom, Inna Erasmovna, takes the children to Evpatoria. The family did not stay there long, and Anna finished her studies in Kyiv. In 1908, Anna began to become interested in jurisprudence and decided to study further at the Higher Women's Courses. The result of her studies was knowledge of Latin, which later allowed her to learn Italian.
Children's photographs of Anna Akhmatova
The beginning of a creative journey
Akhmatova’s passion for literature and poetry began in childhood. She composed her first poem at the age of 11.
Anna's works were first published in 1911 in newspapers and magazines, and a year later her first collection of poems, “Evening,” was published. The poems were written under the influence of the loss of two sisters who died of tuberculosis. Her husband Nikolai Gumilyov helps publish poetry.
Young poetess Anna Akhmatova
Career
In 1914, the collection “Rosary Beads” was published, which made the poetess famous. It is becoming fashionable to read Akhmatova’s poems; young Tsvetaeva and Pasternak admire them.
Anna continues to write, new collections “White Flock” and “Plantain” appear. The poems reflected Akhmatova’s experiences of the First World War, revolution, and civil war. In 1917, Anna fell ill with tuberculosis and took a long time to recover.
Beginning in the twenties, Anna's poems began to be criticized and censored as inappropriate for the era. In 1923, her poems stopped being published.
The thirties of the twentieth century became a difficult test for Akhmatova - her husband Nikolai Punin and son Lev were arrested. Anna spends a long time near the Kresty prison. During these years, she wrote the poem “Requiem”, dedicated to the victims of repression.
In 1939, the poetess was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers.
During the Great Patriotic War, Akhmatova was evacuated from Leningrad to Tashkent. There she creates poems with military themes. After the blockade is lifted, he returns to his hometown. During the move, many of the poetess’s works were lost.
In 1946, Akhmatova was removed from the Writers' Union after sharp criticism of her work in a resolution of the organizing bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. At the same time as Anna, Zoshchenko is also criticized. Akhmatova was reinstated in the Writers' Union in 1951 at the instigation of Alexander Fadeev.
The poetess reads a lot and writes articles. The time in which she worked left its mark on her work.
In 1964, Akhmatova was awarded the Etna-Taormina Prize in Rome for her contribution to world poetry.
The memory of the Russian poetess was immortalized in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Tashkent. There are streets named after her, monuments, memorial plaques. During the life of the poetess, her portraits were painted.
Portraits of Akhmatova: artists Nathan Altman and Olga Kardovskaya (1914)
Personal life
Akhmatova was married three times. Anna met her first husband Nikolai Gumilev in 1903. They got married in 1910 and divorced in 1918. The marriage to her second husband, Vladimir Shileiko, lasted 3 years; the poetess’s last husband, Nikolai Punin, spent a long time in prison.
In the photo: the poetess with her husband and son
Levushka with his famous mother
Son Lev was born in 1912. Spent more than ten years in prison. He was offended by his mother, believing that she could have helped avoid imprisonment, but did not do so.
Lev Gumilyov spent almost 14 years in prisons and camps; in 1956 he was rehabilitated and found not guilty on all counts.
Among the interesting facts, one can note her friendship with the famous actress Faina Ranevskaya. On March 5, 1966, Akhmatova died in a sanatorium in the Moscow region, in Domodedovo. She was buried near Leningrad at the Komarovskoye cemetery.
Anna Akhmatova's grave
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 World War II, 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 the 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 struck by the undeniable talent and high degree of 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 of a woman’s 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 nature of her poems, bearing in mind the fact that in many of Akhmatova’s poems, life situations are depicted, as in the short story, 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 a purely narrative genre, which implies 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 natural world 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 “Stuffy 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.
There are many epithets in Akhmatova’s poems, 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 her 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 imparts 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:
The last time we met was 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 there is a 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, images, 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.
The First World War caused serious changes in Akhmatova’s poetic development. 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, during the years of the October Revolution, every artist of words was faced with the question: whether to stay in their 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.
The 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 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 a 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.
Her lyrics, dedicated to the theme of the Great Patriotic War, are permeated with the pathos of a high civil sound. 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 of mortal danger, Akhmatova makes a call to transform pain and suffering into 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 away//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 my 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 varied 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 Akhmatova’s best works of 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 give up her 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 have no need for odic hosts...”, 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 “perky, 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 the best poems by the poetess of the post-war years is “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 your dreams.
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 must 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 represent my connection with time, with the new life of 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.” This is 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.
5 / 5. 1
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (Gorenko) is a talented and world-recognized poetess, whose biography tells the story of the tragic fate of the generation of the last representatives of the noble class of the Russian Empire, complemented by the drama characteristic of the lives of many creative individuals.
Years of life: 1889 - 1966.
Having been persecuted for most of her literary life, and repeatedly experiencing repression against her loved ones, Anna Akhmatova did not stop writing even in the most difficult moments.
The imprint of tragedy left on the poetess’s work gave it special spiritual strength and anguish.
The best poems of Anna Akhmatova
Many of the poet’s works have earned worldwide recognition.
Each was born for a special occasion, becoming a logical continuation of the events of her life:
- The poetess's first collection of poems was published in 1912 under the title "Evening", shortly before the birth of her son. It already contained many poems that made Akhmatova’s name immortal: “Muse”, “Garden”, “Grey-Eyed King”, “Love”.
- The second collection was published already in 1414, before the start of World War I, under the title “Rosary Beads”. It was published in a much larger circulation, but would have been republished several times. Critics' reviews noted the poetess's noticeable creative growth. They emphasized the persuasiveness of the poetic language, many successful literary devices, rhythm and the rare style of the poetess (“Alexander Blok”, “In the evening”, “I learned to live simply, wisely”).
- Three years later, a month before the terrible revolutionary events of 1917, the collection “The White Flock” was published. In his lines, written during the years of Russia’s participation in World War I, the shades of the intimate experiences of the lyrical heroine, which abounded in the poems of previous collections, are already faintly heard. Akhmatova becomes stricter, more patriotic, more tragic, the appeal to the Divine is noticeably manifested (“In Memory of July 19, 1914”, “Your spirit is darkened by arrogance”). The poetic style is noticeably improved. It was the best time of her life, giving complete freedom for creativity.
- The collection “Plantain” was published in one of the most difficult years for the poetess - in 1921, when she learned about the suicide of her brother, about the shooting of her ex-husband and father of her child Nikolai Gumilyov, about the death of her friend A. Blok. It includes poems written mainly in the 17-20s. The poetess put into the title the idea that the revolution, having destroyed the country’s cultural heritage and made it impossible for the growth of “cultivated plants,” doomed its future to desolation—to “weeds.” The theme of a blooming garden, the warm lyrics of previous collections are almost never found, the mood is minor and thoughtful (“And now I was the only one left”, “Immediately it became quiet in the house”). Pain and condemnation can be heard in the verses from the fact that the flower of the nation is leaving the country in a wide emigration stream (“You are an apostate: for the green island”).
- There are very few joyful lines in the collection “Anno Domini MCMXXI”. He was born after the shocks Anna experienced, so he leads the reader along the path of sadness and hopelessness (“Slander”, “Prediction”), which the poetess herself walked.
- And the apotheosis of the tragic pages of Akhmatova’s work is the poem “Requiem”, dedicated to the repressions of the 30s. The suffering of a mother whose son is suffering in prison is just an episode in the global grief of an entire people, whose sons and daughters are being crushed by a soulless state machine.
Brief biography of Anna Akhmatova
The future poetess was born in 1889 in the Russian Empire, in Odessa. Of the 6 children of the Gorenko family of hereditary nobles, no one wrote poetry except Anna.
After moving to St. Petersburg, Anna at the age of 10 entered the Tsarskoye Selo Mariinsky Gymnasium, at the age of 17 - the Fundukleevskaya Gymnasium in Kyiv, and 1908-10. – graduated from the Higher Women's Historical and Literary Courses.
early years
Already in early childhood she learned French, and at the age of 11 she composed her first poem.
In the summer months, the Gorenko family took children suffering from tuberculosis to the sea - they had a house in Crimea.
Anna on the sea coast was known as a “wild young lady” because she did not feel burdened with secular demands - she swam, sunbathed, and ran barefoot, just like ordinary children of “ignoble blood.”
Subsequently, she will remember her free childhood in the poem “By the Sea” and will return to this topic later.
Personal life
An unhappy female fate haunted her all her life, despite the abundance of male attention. The first union was without love, with a difficult and troubled family life, a short second and painful third marriages that ended in divorce.
At the same time, the poetess’s charm, intelligence and talent not only earned her literary fame, but also provided her with many fans. The famous sculptor and artist Amadeo Modigliani was captivated by the young poetess even on her first trip to Europe with Gumilyov.
At the same time, the first, most famous, portrait of Akhmatova appeared - a sketch of several strokes, which she valued more than all the others.
She kept the fiery letters addressed to Anna Modigliani, and one day she allowed Gumilyov to discover them - as revenge for his betrayal. This helped her speed up the divorce.
Another admirer is the artist and writer Boris Anrep, whom she especially singled out from the crowd of others. The poetess dedicated several dozen poems to him.
Composer and music critic Arthur Lurie, philosopher and diplomat Isaiah Berlin also left their mark on the life of the Russian poetess, adding to the list of her fans. Berlin even contributed to Akhmatova receiving a doctorate from Oxford University, many years later - already at the end of her life.
Akhmatova's husbands
Anna married Nikolai Gumilyov, her first husband, while in love with another. She resigned herself to fate, giving in to the long courtship of an exalted admirer, who made several suicide attempts due to unrequited love. The groom's relatives disapproved of this marriage so much that they did not even appear at the wedding ceremony.
Gumilyov, being a talented poet, researcher and extraordinary personality, was not ready for family life. Despite his passionate love for young Anna before the wedding, he did not try to make his wife happy. Creative jealousy, betrayal on both sides, and lack of spiritual intimacy did not contribute to the preservation of the family. Only Gumilyov’s long absences made it possible to delay the divorce for as much as 8 years.
They broke up because of his next hobby, but continued to maintain friendly communication. The marriage produced Anna’s only son, Lev Gumilyov. Three years after the divorce, N. Gumilyov was shot by the Soviet authorities as a convinced monarchist, for failure to report an alleged counter-revolutionary conspiracy.
The second husband, with whom Anna married immediately after her divorce from Gumilyov, Vladimir Shileiko, was a talented scientist and poet. But, being very jealous of his wife, he limited her freedom, burned her correspondence, and did not allow her to write poetry. In the tragic year for Anna, 1921, they separated.
Akhmatova lived in a civil marriage with her third husband for 15 years, since 1922. Nikolai Punin also did not “come from the people” - he was a major scientist, art historian, critic, and held significant positions in government structures.
But, like her two previous husbands, he was also jealous of Anna’s creativity and tried in every possible way to belittle her poetic talent. Akhmatova had to live with her son at Punin’s house, where his first wife and daughter also lived. The children were not in equal conditions; preference was always given to Nikolai’s daughter, which greatly offended Anna.
When Punin was arrested for the first time, Akhmatova managed to secure his release. After some time, he broke up with Anna, starting a family with another woman. After living in a new marriage for several years, he was arrested again and never returned from prison.
Akhmatova's creativity
The Silver Age of Russian poetry was rich in talents and literary movements. Akhmatova’s work is a vivid example of such an original movement in literature as Acmeism, the founder and main authority of which was N. Gumilyov.
It is interesting that the public, while not particularly fond of Gumilyov’s own poems, was enthusiastic about the new representative of the movement, who quickly became a full-fledged participant in the “Workshop of Poets.”
The world of early Akhmatova’s poems consists of clear forms, bright emotions, achieved by imagery and rhythm of language, without leading into symbolism, blurriness and incomprehensibility of mystical images.
Clear narrative phrases made the lines written by her close and understandable to the reader, without forcing them to guess hidden meanings and subtexts.
The creative path of the poetess is divided into two periods. The first is built around the image of a lyrical heroine, loving, sensitive and suffering.
In the second period, the heroine undergoes metamorphosis, and life trials are to blame for this. Now she is a grieving mother, a woman, a patriot, acutely feeling the pain of the suffering of her people. Sometimes the line in her work is drawn according to the Great Patriotic War, but this is not entirely correct.
There is no clear division between these periods - with each collection, starting with “The Plantain,” the heroine becomes more and more clearly a citizen of her fatherland, and the patriotic intensity in the poems grows stronger. Indeed, it reaches its apogee in the early 40s (“Oath”, “Courage”), the impetus for its emergence is the October Revolution, and it is consolidated by the tragic year of 1921 (“Anno Domini MCMXXI”).
After 1924, her poems stopped being published, and the Russian reader saw the official publication of the famous “Requiem” only towards the end of the 80s, just a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After evacuation from besieged Leningrad to Tashkent, she writes many poems that do not reach the public. She is surrounded on all sides by censorship and prohibitions, and lives only by earning money from literary translations.
Last years of life and death
Only towards the end of her life, from 1962, the ice around the poetess begins to gradually melt. A new generation of readers has emerged. Disgrace with Akhmatova is a thing of the past - she speaks at author's evenings, her poems are quoted in literary circles.
A year before her death, the poetess was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The poetess’s son did not communicate with her for the last 10 years before his mother’s death. As a result, Akhmatova, being famous and beloved by the literary public, died alone, undergoing sanatorium treatment, at the venerable age of 76 years. The reason is another heart attack.
The poetess was buried near St. Petersburg, at the Komarovskoye cemetery. She bequeathed a wooden cross to be placed on her grave.
Lev Nikolaevich arranged the place of her burial himself, with the help of students, by building a fragment of a camp wall with a prison window from cobblestones. Anna came to such a wall for 1.5 years to deliver parcels to her son.
Interesting facts from the biography of Anna Akhmatova
Having listed the most important things, let’s add a few more interesting facts from the life and work of the poetess:
- The father of the future poetess, Andrei Antonovich, a naval officer and nobleman, did not approve of her poetic experiments, demanding not to disgrace his name with her poems. Anna Andreevna was offended, so from the age of 17 she began to sign as Akhmatova, taking the surname of her maternal great-grandmother, the successor of the old family of the Chagadayev princes and the Tatar branch of the Akhmatovs. Subsequently, after the first divorce, the poetess will take her pseudonym as her surname, officially. When asked about her nationality, she always answered that she came from a Tatar family that originated from Khan Akhmat.
- In 1965, the Nobel Prize Committee, considering two candidates from Russia - Akhmatova and Sholokhov, was inclined to divide the amount equally between the nominees. But in the end, preference was given to Sholokhov.
- After the death of A. Modigliani, several previously unknown sketches were found. The image of the model is very reminiscent of the image of young Anna, which can be judged from her photo.
- The poetess's son did not forgive his mother for not releasing him, accusing her of narcissism and lack of maternal love. Anna herself always admitted that she was a bad mother. An incredibly gifted man, charismatic and passionate about scientific activities, Lev Nikolaevich experienced the full power of the repressive state machine, which deprived him of his health and almost completely broke him. He was sure that his mother could, but was not particularly eager to help him with his release from prison. He especially hated the poem "Requiem", believing that a requiem is not dedicated to those who are still alive, and his mother was too hasty in burying him.
- Akhmatova died on the day of Stalin’s death - March 5.
We learn about the details of the life of this unique woman from her diary, which she did not part with throughout her adult life. The works written by Akhmatova also help to reconstruct the events of those years related to the life not only of her own, but also of her contemporaries - people who were close to her to varying degrees.
The history of the 20th century, grinding the fates of many talented people, caused indelible damage to the Russian culture of the Silver Age. Based on Akhmatova’s play “Prologue, or a Dream within a Dream,” the series “The Moon at its Zenith” was even filmed, where the most important narrative line is the biographical memoirs of the poetess.
Akhmatova Anna Andreevna (1889-1966) - Russian and Soviet poetess, literary critic and translator, occupies one of the significant places in Russian literature of the twentieth century. In 1965 she was nominated for the Nobel Literary Prize.
Early childhood
Anna was born on June 23, 1889 near the city of Odessa; at that time the family lived in the Bolshoi Fontan area. Her real name is Gorenko. In total, six children were born in the family, Anya was the third. Father - Andrei Gorenko - was a nobleman by birth, served in the navy, mechanical engineer, captain of the 2nd rank. When Anya was born, he was already retired. The girl’s mother, Stogova Inna Erasmovna, was a distant relative of Russia’s first poetess, Anna Bunina. Her maternal roots went deep to the legendary Horde Khan Akhmat, which is where Anna took her creative pseudonym.
The next year after Anya was born, the Gorenko family left for Tsarskoe Selo. Here, in a small region of the Pushkin era, she spent her childhood. Exploring the world around her, from an early age the girl saw everything that the great Pushkin described in his poems - waterfalls, green magnificent parks, a pasture and a hippodrome with small colorful horses, an old train station and the wonderful nature of Tsarskoye Selo.
Every year for the summer she was taken to Sevastopol, where she spent all her days with the sea; she adored this Black Sea freedom. She could swim during a storm, jumped from a boat into the open sea, wandered along the shore barefoot and without a hat, sunbathed until her skin began to peel off, which incredibly shocked the local young ladies. For this she was nicknamed the “wild girl.”
Studies
Anya learned to read using the alphabet of Leo Tolstoy. At the age of five, listening to a teacher teach French to older children, she learned to speak it.
Anna Akhmatova began her studies in Tsarskoe Selo at the Mariinsky Gymnasium in 1900. In elementary school, she studied poorly, then improved her performance, but she was always reluctant to study. She studied here for 5 years. In 1905, Anna’s parents divorced, the children suffered from tuberculosis, and their mother took them to Evpatoria. Anya remembered this city as foreign, dirty and rude. She studied at a local educational institution for a year, after which she continued her studies in Kyiv, where she went with her mother. In 1907 she completed her studies at the gymnasium.
In 1908, Anna began to study further at the Kyiv Higher Women's Courses, choosing the legal department. But Akhmatova did not turn out to be a lawyer. The positive side of these courses for Akhmatova was that she learned Latin, thanks to which she subsequently mastered the Italian language and could read Dante in the original.
The beginning of the poetic path
Literature was everything to her. Anna composed her first poem at the age of 11. While studying in Tsarskoe Selo, she met the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who had a significant influence on her choice of her future. Despite the fact that Anna's father was skeptical about her passion for poetry, the girl did not stop writing poetry. In 1907, Nikolai helped in the publication of the first poem, “There are many shining rings on his hand...” The poem was published in the Sirius magazine published in Paris.
In 1910, Akhmatova became Gumilyov's wife. They got married in a church near Dnepropetrovsk and went on their honeymoon to Paris. From there we returned to St. Petersburg. At first, the newlyweds lived with Gumilyov’s mother. Only a couple of years later, in 1912, they moved to a small one-room apartment on Tuchkov Lane. The small cozy family nest was affectionately called “cloud” by Gumilyov and Akhmatova.
Nikolai helped Anna in publishing her poetic works. She did not sign her poems with either her maiden name Gorenko or her husband’s name Gumilev; she took the pseudonym Akhmatova, under which the greatest Russian poetess of the Silver Age became known throughout the world.
In 1911, Anna's poems began to appear in newspapers and literary magazines. And in 1912, her first collection of poems entitled “Evening” was published. Of the 46 poems included in the collection, half are dedicated to partings and death. Before this, Anna’s two sisters died from tuberculosis, and for some reason she was firmly convinced that she would soon suffer the same fate. Every morning she woke up with a feeling of imminent death. And only many years later, when she is over sixty, will she say:
“Who knew that I was planned for so long.”
The birth of his son Lev in the same year, 1912, pushed thoughts of death into the background.
Recognition and glory
Two years later, in 1914, after the release of a new collection of poems called “The Rosary,” recognition and fame came to Akhmatova, and critics warmly accepted her work. Now it has become fashionable to read her collections. Her poems were admired not only by “schoolgirls in love”, but also by Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, who entered the world of literature.
Akhmatova’s talent was publicly recognized, and Gumilyov’s help no longer had such significant significance for her; they increasingly disagreed about poetry, and there were many disputes. Contradictions in creativity could not but affect family happiness, discord began, and as a result, Anna and Nikolai divorced in 1918.
After the divorce, Anna quickly tied herself into a second marriage with the scientist and poet Vladimir Shileiko.
The pain of the tragedy of the First World War ran like a thin thread through the poems of Akhmatova’s next collection, “The White Flock,” which was published in 1917.
After the revolution, Anna remained in her homeland, “in her sinful and remote land,” and did not go abroad. She continued to write poetry and released new collections "Plantain" and "Anno Domini MCMXXI".
In 1921, she separated from her second husband, and in August of the same year, her first husband Nikolai Gumilyov was arrested and then shot.
Years of repression and war
Anna's third husband in 1922 was art critic Nikolai Punin. She stopped publishing completely. Akhmatova worked hard for the publication of her two-volume collection, but its publication never took place. She began a detailed study of the life and creative path of A.S. Pushkin, and she was also incredibly interested in the architecture of the old city of St. Petersburg.
In the tragic years of 1930-1940 for the whole country, Anna, like many of her compatriots, survived the arrest of her husband and son. She spent a lot of time under the “Crosses,” and one woman recognized her as the famous poetess. The grief-stricken wife and mother asked Akhmatova if she could describe all this horror and tragedy. To which Anna gave a positive answer and began work on the poem “Requiem”.
Then there was a war that found Anna in Leningrad. Doctors insisted on her evacuation for health reasons. Through Moscow, Chistopol and Kazan, she finally reached Tashkent, where she stayed until the spring of 1944 and published a new collection of poems.
Post-war years
In 1946, Anna Akhmatova's poetry was sharply criticized by the Soviet government and she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.
In 1949, her son Lev Gumilyov was arrested again and sentenced to 10 years in a forced labor camp. The mother tried in any way to help her son, knocked on the doorsteps of political figures, sent petitions to the Politburo, but everything was to no avail. When Leo was released, he believed that his mother had not done enough to help him, and their relationship would remain strained. Only before her death will Akhmatova be able to establish a connection with her son.
In 1951, at the request of Alexander Fadeev, Anna Akhmatova was reinstated in the Writers' Union, she was even given a small country house from the literary fund. The dacha was located in the writer's village of Komarovo. Her poems began to be published again in the Soviet Union and abroad.
The outcome of life and departure from it
In Rome in 1964, Anna Akhmatova was awarded the Etna-Taormina Prize for her creativity and contribution to world poetry. The following year, 1965, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at Oxford University, and at the same time her last collection of poems, The Passage of Time, was published.
In November 1965, Anna had her fourth heart attack. She went to a cardiological sanatorium in Domodedovo. On March 5, 1966, doctors and nurses came to her room to do an examination and a cardiogram, but in their presence the poetess died.
There is a Komarovskoe cemetery near Leningrad, where an outstanding poetess is buried. Her son Lev, a doctor at Leningrad University, together with his students collected stones throughout the city and laid a wall on his mother’s grave. He made this monument himself, as a symbol of the Wall of Crosses, under which his mother stood in line for days with parcels.
Anna Akhmatova kept a diary all her life and just before her death she wrote:
“I regret not having a Bible nearby.”
