The poetry of Anna Akhmatova is peculiar. The theme of love occupies a central place in her work. But, this love is expressed not only in manifestations of feelings for a man. In Akhmatova's poems, these are both maternal feelings and love for Russia, expressed in deep feelings.
The time in which Akhmatova lived was not easy for Russia. And a difficult fate befell the poetess. All this is reflected in her poems.
Works devoted to love themes, Anna never wrote with the idea of their serene course. Her poems are always a surge of feelings, whether it is love or parting. They always appear in their very apogee, or else this is the beginning of a tragedy.
Akhmatova's early poems are perceived as a diary, the entries in which are presented in poetic form. Creative muse and simple earthly love are in them an endless struggle.
The poetess shows great interest in the spiritual world of man. Her poems are frank and sincere. Poetic language is strict, concise and, at the same time, capacious.
Drawing pictures of simple human happiness and sorrows, Anna combined classics and innovation in her lines. And the manifestations of love feelings are so strong that they make the whole world around us freeze.
A difficult time for the country and the people always leaves its mark on the work of writers and poets. So Akhmatova writes about it. In "Prayer" she requests that this cloud pass over Russia faster. Anna dedicates a whole cycle of poems besieged Leningrad. Folk tragedy is reflected in her work. She is part of this people, part of the country and suffers the same way.
The personal tragedies of the poetess also find their expression in the works. Many of her close people suffered a sad fate. In one of the poems, Akhmatova writes that she called death to the dear ones. Awareness of the coming fate makes her consider herself the cause of the ill-fated fate of loved ones. In another poem, she bitterly writes lines about the need to part with her loved one. After all, otherwise, as Anna writes, he will not be alive. These lines show both bitterness, and hopelessness, and subordination to fate.
The strongest of all is maternal love and, most terrible of all, maternal grief. Before this misfortune, even mountains bend, as Akhmatova writes in Requiem. Her only son spent more than 10 years in prison. This lyric is dedicated to him. And the beginning was given to him by a meeting with one woman in a prison queue with a poetess. The conversation that arose between them prompted Anna to describe her mother's grief.
The "Requiem" shows all the pain and tension in which a woman is in anticipation of what will become of her child. Experience, despair, uncertainty of the future - all this makes the mother's heart suffer and ache. And the meeting described in the dedication emphasizes the fact that there were a lot of such unfortunate mothers in the country at that time, that this grief is nationwide.
In the lyrics of Akhmatova, both love and suffering, both national and personal, are all there. All this is conveyed to her with great depth and conciseness in a simple and, at the same time, comprehensive language.
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Creativity of Anna Akhmatova.
- The beginning of Akhmatova's work
- Features of Akhmatova's poetry
- The theme of St. Petersburg in the lyrics of Akhmatova
- The theme of love in the work of Akhmatova
- Akhmatova and the revolution
- Analysis of the poem "Requiem"
- Akhmatova and the Second World War, blockade 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 can hardly 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 work.
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 a retired Navy mechanical engineer at the time. 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 Women's Gymnasium... The last class was held in Kyiv, at the Fundukleev Gymnasium, which I graduated in 1907.
Akhmatova began to write while studying at the gymnasium. 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 Russia during the Horde invasion. “That’s why it occurred to me to take a pseudonym for myself,” the poetess later explained, “that dad, having learned about my poems, said:“ Do not shame my name.
Akhmatova had practically no literary apprenticeship. Her very first collection of poems, Evening, which included poems from her gymnasium 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 the word, sharply distinguishing her from other acmeist poets. Contemporaries were struck by indisputable talent, high degree creative originality of the young poetess. characterizes the hidden state of mind of an abandoned woman. “Glory to you, hopeless pain,” for example, the poem “The Gray-Eyed King” (1911) begins with such words. Or here are the lines from the poem “I left on a new moon” (1911):
The orchestra plays merrily
And the lips are smiling.
But the heart knows, the heart knows
That the fifth box is empty!
Being a master of intimate lyrics (her poetry is often called " intimate diary”, “female confession”, “confession of the female soul”), Akhmatova recreates emotional experiences with the help of everyday words. And this gives her poetry a special sound: everyday life only enhances the hidden psychological meaning. Akhmatova's poems often capture the most important, and even turning points in life, the culmination of spiritual tension associated with a 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 poems by Akhmatova life situations are depicted, as in the short story, at the most critical moment of their development. The "novelism" of Akhmatov's lyrics is enhanced by the introduction of live colloquial speech, pronounced aloud (as in the poem “She 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 unions “a” or “and” at the beginning of the line :
Don't like, don't want to watch?
Oh, how beautiful you are, damned!
And I can't fly
And from childhood she was winged.
Akhmatova's poetry, with its colloquial intonation, is characterized by the transfer of an unfinished phrase from one line to another. No less characteristic of her 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 from your beloved always!
A loved one does not have requests.
How glad I am that today the water
Freezes under colorless ice.
Akhmatova also has poems where the narration is not only from the point of view of the lyrical heroine or hero (which, by the way, is also very remarkable), but from the third person, more precisely, 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 narrative and even descriptiveness. But even in such verses, she still prefers lyrical fragmentation and reticence:
Came up. I didn't show any excitement.
Looking indifferently out the window.
village. Like a porcelain idol
In a pose chosen by her for a long time ...
The psychological depth of Akhmatova's lyrics is created by a variety of techniques: subtext, external gesture, detail, conveying depth, confusion and inconsistency of feelings. Here, for example, are lines from the poem "The Song of the Last Meeting" (1911). where the emotion of the heroine is conveyed through an external gesture:
So helplessly my chest went cold,
But my steps were light.
I'm on right hand put on
Left hand glove.
Akhmatov's metaphors are bright and original. Her poems are literally full of their diversity: “tragic autumn”, “shaggy smoke”, “the quietest snow”.
Very often, Akhmatova's metaphors are poetic formulas of love feelings:
All to you: and a daily prayer,
And insomnia melting heat,
And my white flock of poems,
And my eyes are blue fire.
2. Features of Akhmatova's poetry.
Most often, the metaphors of the poetess are taken from the world of nature, they personify her: “Early autumn hung / / Yellow flags on elms”; "Autumn is red in the hem / / Brought red leaves."
Among the notable features of Akhmatova’s poetics is also the unexpectedness of her comparisons (“High in the sky, a cloud was gray, / / Like a squirrel’s vegetable skin” or “Stuffy heat, like tin, / / It pours from heaven to the withered earth”).
Often she also uses such a type of trope as an oxymoron, that is, a combination of contradictory definitions. It is also a means of psychology. A classic example of Akhmatov's oxymoron is the lines from her poem "The Tsarskoye Selo Statue*" (1916): Look, it's fun for her to be sad. So pretty naked.
A very large role in Akhmatova's verse belongs to the detail. Here, for example, is a poem about Pushkin "In Tsarskoye Selo" (1911). Akhmatova wrote more than once about Pushkin, as well as about Blok - both were her idols. But this poem- one of the best in Akhmatov's Pushkiniana:
A dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys,
At the lake shores sad,
And we cherish a century
Barely audible rustle of steps.
Pine needles thick and prickly
Lights up low...
Here lay his cocked hat
And the disheveled Tom 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, features of gait, etc. In this regard - the active use of details - Akhmatova also goes in line with creative pursuits prose writers of the early 20th century, who gave the details a greater semantic and functional load than in the previous century.
There are many epithets in Akhmatova's poems, which once the famous Russian philologist A. N. Veselovsky called syncretic, because 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 “wounded by yellow fire”, that is, the sun, she sees “chandeliers of lifeless heat”, etc. and depth of thought. The poem "Song" (1911) begins as an unpretentious 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 a stone instead of bread
I'm rewarded with Evil.
All I need is the sky
The desire for artistic laconism and at the same time for the semantic capacity of the verse was also expressed in the wide use of aphorisms by Akhmatova in depicting phenomena and feelings:
One less hope has become -
There will be one more song.
From others I praise that ash.
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, which enhances the feeling of sadness and longing. There is also a contrasting combination of these colors, shading 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 is sharpened, but also hearing and even smell.
The music rang in the garden
Such unspeakable grief.
Fresh and pungent smell of the sea
Oysters on ice on a platter.
Due to the skillful use of assonances and alliterations, the details and phenomena of the surrounding world appear as if renewed, primordial. The poetess gives the reader to feel “a barely audible smell of tobacco”, to feel how “a sweet smell flows from a rose”, etc.
In its syntactic structure, Akhmatova's verse gravitates towards a concise, complete phrase, in which not only 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 stands a wealth of emotional experiences, high skill.
3. The theme of St. Petersburg in the lyrics of Akhmatova.
Along with the main theme - the theme of love, in early lyrics the poetess also outlined another theme - the theme of St. Petersburg, the people who inhabit 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, statues of St. Petersburg. Very often these two themes are combined in her lyrics:
The last time we met then
On the embankment where we always met.
There was high water in the Neva
And the floods in the city were afraid.
4. The theme of love in the work of Akhmatova.
The image of love, for the most part unrequited love and full of drama, is the main content of all the early poetry of A. A. Akhmatova. But this lyrics is not narrowly intimate, but large-scale in its meaning and meaning. It reflects richness and complexity human feelings, an inextricable connection with the world, because the lyrical heroine does not close only on her suffering and pain, but sees the world in all its manifestations, and he is infinitely dear and dear to her:
And the boy who plays the bagpipes
And the girl who weaves her wreath.
And two crossed paths in the forest,
And in the far field a distant light, -
I see everything. I remember everything
Lovingly briefly in the heart of the coast ...
("And the boy who plays the bagpipes")
In her collections, there are a lot of lovingly drawn landscapes, everyday sketches, paintings of rural Russia, will accept the “meager land of Tver”, where she often visited the estate of N. S. Gumilyov Slepnevo:
Crane at the old well
Above him, like boiling, clouds,
In the fields creaky gates,
And the smell of bread, and longing.
And those dim expanses
And judgmental eyes
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 the crucified Lord,
In each ear is the body of Christ,
And prayers are a pure word
Heals aching flesh.
The arsenal of Akhmatova's artistic thinking was ancient myths, folklore, and sacred history. All this is often passed through the prism of a 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 early years the poetess was characterized by a 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, waiting for the "last judgment". At the same time, Akhmatova firmly believed that all fallen and sinful, but suffering and repentant people will find understanding and forgiveness of Christ, for "only the blue / / Heavenly and mercy of God is inexhaustible." Her lyrical heroine “languishes about immortality” and “believes in it, knowing that “souls are immortal”. Abundantly used by Akhmatova religious vocabulary - lampada, prayer, monastery, liturgy, mass, icon, vestments, bell tower, cell, temple, images, etc. - creates a special flavor, the 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 a pronounced biblical content. Such are the poems "Prediction", "Lamentation", a cycle of her "Bible verses", inspired by Old Testament and etc.
Especially often she turned to the genre of prayer. All this gives her work a truly national, spiritual, confessional, soil character.
Serious changes in the poetic development of Akhmatova were caused by the First World War. Since that time, the motifs of civic consciousness, the theme of Russia, her native land, have been included in her poetry even more widely. 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.
Soldiers are moaning over the guys,
The widow's weeping rings through the village.
In the poem "Prayer" (1915), which strikes with the power of self-denying feelings, she prays to the Lord for the opportunity to sacrifice everything she has to the Motherland - both her life and the life of her loved ones:
Give me bitter years of sickness
Breathlessness, insomnia, fever,
Take away both the child and the friend,
And a mysterious song gift
So I pray for Your liturgy
After so many agonizing days
To cloud over dark Russia
Became a cloud in the glory of rays.
5. Akhmatova and the revolution.
When, during the years of the October Revolution, every artist of the word faced the question: whether to stay in their homeland or leave it, Akhmatova chose the first. In the 1917 poem "I had a voice..." she wrote:
He said "Come here
Leave your land, native and sinful,
Leave Russia forever.
I will wash the blood from your hands,
I will take out black shame from my heart,
I will cover with a new name
The pain of defeat and resentment.
But indifferent and calm
I covered my ears with my hands
So that this speech is 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, however, does not mean that Akhmatova unconditionally accepted the revolution. A 1921 poem testifies to the complexity and inconsistency of her perception of events. “Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold”, where despair and pain over the tragedy of Russia is combined with a hidden hope for its revival.
years of revolution and civil war were very difficult for Akhmatova: a semi-beggarly life, life from hand to mouth, the execution of N. Gumilyov - she experienced all this very hard.
Akhmatova did not write very much in the 20s and 30s. Sometimes it seemed to her that the Muse had completely abandoned her. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the critics of those years treated her as a representative of salon noble culture, alien to the new system.
The 30s turned out to be for Akhmatova sometimes the most difficult trials and experiences in her life. The repressions that hit almost all of Akhmatova's friends and like-minded people also affected her: in 1937, their son Lev, a student at Leningrad University, was arrested with Gumilyov. Akhmatova herself lived all these years in anticipation of a 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, and Mandelstam, and Zamyatin, Akhmatova felt like a hunted wolf. She more than once compared herself to a beast, torn to pieces and hung up on a bloody hook.
You me, like a killed animal, Raise the hook on the bloody one.
Akhmatova was well aware of her rejection in the “dungeon state”:
Not the lyre of a lover
I'm going to captivate the people -
Ratchet of the Leper
Sings in my hand.
You manage to get laid
And howling and cursing
I will teach you to shy
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 mixed bread with my mud?
Why the last freedom
Are you turning into a nativity scene?
Because I didn't bully
Over the bitter death of friends?
For the fact that I remained faithful
My sad homeland?
Let it be. Without executioner and chopping block
There will be no poet on earth.
We have penitential shirts.
Us with a candle to go and howl.
(“Why did you poison the water…”)
6. Analysis of the poem "Requiem".
All these poems prepared the poem "Requiem" by A. Akhmatova, which she created in the 1935-1940s. She kept the contents of the poem in her head, trusting only her closest friends, and wrote down the text only in 1961. The poem was first published 22 years after. 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 by the author “Instead of a preface”, 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: “In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. Somehow, someone "recognized" me. Then the blue-eyed woman standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard my name in her life, woke up from the stupor characteristic of all of us and asked in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper):
Can you describe this? And I said
Then something like a smile flickered across what had once been her face.
Akhmatova complied with this request, creating a work about the terrible time of repression of the 30s (“It was when only the dead smiled, I am glad for peace”) and about the immeasurable grief of relatives (“Mountains bend before this grief”), who daily came to prisons, to the State Security Department, in a vain hope to learn something about the fate of their loved ones, to give them food and linen. In the introduction, the image of the City appears, but it now differs sharply from the former Akhmatov's Petersburg, for it is devoid of the traditional "Pushkin" splendor. This is a city attached to a giant prison that spread its gloomy buildings over a dead and motionless river (“The great river does not flow ...”):
It was when I smiled
Only the dead, happy with peace.
And dangled with an unnecessary pendant
Near the prisons of their Leningrad.
And when, mad with torment,
There were already condemned regiments,
And a short parting song
Locomotive whistles sang,
The death stars were above us
And innocent Russia writhed
Under the bloody boots
And under the tires of black marus.
The specific theme of the requiem sounds in the poem - lamentation for a son. Here, the tragic image of a woman is vividly recreated, from whom the person dearest to her is taken away:
They took you away at dawn
Behind you, as if walking away,
Children were crying in the dark room,
At the goddess, the candle swam.
Icons on your lips are cold
Death sweat on the brow... Don't forget!
I will be like archery wives,
Howl under the Kremlin towers.
But the work depicts not only the personal grief of the poetess. Akhmatova conveys the tragedy of all mothers and wives, both in the present and in the past (the image of "streltsy wives"). From specific real fact the poetess proceeds to large-scale generalizations, referring to the past.
In the poem, not only maternal grief sounds, but also the voice of a Russian poet, brought up on the Pushkin-Dostoevsky traditions of universal responsiveness. Personal misfortune helped to feel more acutely the misfortunes of other mothers, the tragedies of many people around the world in different historical eras. The tragedy of the 30s. associated in the poem with gospel events:
Magdalene fought and sobbed,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And to where silently Mother stood,
So no one dared to look.
The experience of a personal tragedy became for Akhmatova the comprehension of the tragedy of the whole 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, blinded wall -
she writes in the epilogue of the work.
The poem passionately appeals to justice, to ensure that the names of all the innocently convicted and dead become widely known to the people:
I would like to call everyone by name, Yes, they took away the list, and there is nowhere to find out. Akhmatova's work is truly a folk requiem: weeping 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 vivid evidence of the citizenship 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 then put these lines as an epigraph to the poem "Requiem".
A. Akhmatova lived 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 flutter in vain, -
But still, I'm with you to the end ...
7. Akhmatova and the Second World War, blockade of Leningrad, evacuation.
The pathos of high civic sound permeated her lyrics dedicated to the theme of Patriotic War. She considered the beginning of the Second World War as a stage of a world 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”, “To Londoners”, “In the fortieth year” and others.
Enemy Banner
Melts like smoke
The truth is behind us
And we will win.
O. Bergholz, 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 precho, she was on duty as an ordinary firefighter.”
A. Akhmatova perceived the war as a heroic act of the world drama, when people, drained of blood by an internal tragedy (repressions), were forced to enter into deadly fight with external world evil. In the face of mortal danger, Akhmatova makes an appeal to melt pain and suffering through the power of spiritual courage. It is about this - the poem "The Oath", written in July 1941:
And the one that today says goodbye to the dear, -
Let her melt her pain into strength.
We swear to children, we swear to graves,
That no one will force us to submit!
In this small but capacious poem, the lyrics develop into an epic, the personal becomes common, female, maternal pain is melted into a force that resists evil and death. Akhmatova is addressing women here: both to those with whom she stood at the prison wall before the war, and to those who now, at the beginning of the war, say goodbye to their husbands and loved ones, it is not for nothing that this poem begins with the repeated union “and” - it means continuation of the story about the tragedies of the century (“And the one that says goodbye to the dear today”). On behalf of all women, Akhmatova swears to her children and loved ones to be persistent. The graves represent the sacred sacrifices of the past and present, while the children symbolize the future.
Akhmatova often talks about children in her wartime poems. Children for her are young soldiers going to their death, and the dead Baltic sailors who hurried to the aid of besieged Leningrad, and a neighbor’s boy who died in the blockade, and even the statue “Night” from the Summer Garden:
Night!
In a starry veil
In mourning poppies, with a sleepless owl ...
Daughter!
How did we hide 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 that need to be preserved are also contained in the “great Russian word”, primarily in Russian literature.
Akhmatova writes about this in the 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 clocks,
And courage will not leave us.
It's not scary to lie dead under the bullets,
It is not bitter to be homeless, -
And we will save you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
We will carry you free and clean,
And we will give to our grandchildren, and we will save from captivity
Forever!
During the war years, 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. Third?//And it seems to me that she//Will be the last…”, she writes in the poem “I meet the third spring in the distance…”.
In the poems of Akhmatova of the Tashkent period, alternate and varying, now Russian, then Central Asian landscapes appear, imbued with a sense of national life going deep into the times, 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 war years in Akhmatova's work. These are her poems "Under 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 time, history in today's people's lives.
In the very first post-war year A. Akhmatova suffered a cruel blow from the authorities. In 1946, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks issued a resolution “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad”, in which the work of Akhmatova, Zoshchenko and some other Leningrad writers was subjected to annihilating criticism. In his speech to the Leningrad cultural figures, the secretary of the Central Committee A. Zhdanov attacked the poetess with a hail of rude and insulting attacks, stating that “the range of her poetry, an enraged lady, rushing between the boudoir and the chapel, is limited to squalor. The main thing in her is love-erotic motifs intertwined with motifs of sadness, longing, death, mysticism, 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!
I've been forgotten a hundred times
A hundred times I lay in the grave
Where, perhaps, I am now.
And the Muse was both deaf and blind,
In the ground decayed with grain,
So that after, like a Phoenix from the ashes,
On the air rise blue.
("Forget - that's what surprised!")
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 writers and past eras, and completes work on her largest work - “A Poem Without a Hero”, on which she worked intermittently from 1940 to 1961 years. The poem consists of three parts: "Petersburg Tale" (1913)", "Tails" and "Epilogue". It also includes several dedications relating to different years.
"A poem without a hero" is a work "about time and about myself." Everyday pictures of life are intricately intertwined here with grotesque visions, fragments of dreams, with memories displaced in time. Akhmatova recreates St. Petersburg in 1913 with its varied life, where bohemian life is mixed with worries about the fate of Russia, with grave forebodings of social cataclysms that began from the moment of the First World War and the revolution. The author pays much attention to the theme of the Great Patriotic War, as well as to the theme Stalinist repressions. The narrative in "A Poem without a Hero" ends with the image of 1942 - the most difficult, turning point year of the war. But there is no hopelessness in the poem, but, on the contrary, faith in the people, in the future of the country sounds. This confidence helps the lyrical heroine overcome the tragic perception of life. She feels her involvement in the events of the time, in the deeds and accomplishments of the people:
And towards myself
Relentless, in the terrible darkness,
Like from a mirror in reality
Hurricane - from the Urals, from Altai
Faithful, young,
Russia went 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 belonging to his native land is broadly and philosophically
sounds in the poem "Native Land" (1961) - one of the best works Akhmatova in recent years:
Yes, for us it is dirt on galoshes,
Yes, for us it is a crunch on the teeth.
And we grind, and knead, and crumble
That unmixed dust.
But we lay down in it and become it,
That is why we call it so freely - ours.
Until the end of her days, A. Akhmatova did not leave creative work. She writes about her beloved St. Petersburg and its environs (“Tsarskoye Selo Ode”, “To the City of Pushkin”, “Summer Garden”), reflects on life and death. She continues to create works about the secret of creativity and the role of art (“I don’t need odic rati ...”, “Music”, “Muse”, “Poet”, “Listening to singing”).
In each poem by A. Akhmatova, we feel the heat of inspiration, the flood of feelings, a touch of mystery, without which there cannot be emotional tension, the movement of thought. In the poem “I don’t need odic ratis…”, dedicated to the problem of creativity, both the smell of tar, and the touching dandelion by the fence, and “the mysterious mold on the wall” are captured by one harmonizing glance. And their unexpected neighborhood under the artist's pen turns out to be a commonwealth, folds into a single musical phrase, into a verse that is "fervent, gentle" and sounds "to the delight" of everyone.
This idea of the joy of being is characteristic of Akhmatova and is one of the main through-cut motifs of her poetry. There are many tragic and sad pages in her lyrics. But even when circumstances demanded that the “soul be petrified,” another feeling inevitably arose: “We must learn to live again.” To live even when it seems that all the forces have 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 did not stop writing about love, about the need for spiritual unity of two hearts. In this sense, one of the best poems of the poetess post-war years- "In a dream" (1946):
Black and lasting separation
I carry with you on a par.
Why are you crying? Give me a better hand
Promise to come again in a dream.
I am with you, like grief with a mountain ...
I have no meeting with you.
If only you at midnight sometimes
He sent me greetings through the stars.
8. Death of Akhmatova.
A. A. Akhmatova died on May 5, 1966. Once Dostoevsky said to the young D. Merezhkovsky: "A young man must suffer in order to write." The lyrics of Akhmatova poured out of suffering, from the heart. Conscience was the main motivating force of her creativity. In a 1936 poem, “Some look into affectionate eyes ...” Akhmatova wrote:
Some look into gentle eyes,
Others drink until the sun's rays
And I'm negotiating all night
With an indomitable conscience.
This indomitable conscience forced her to create sincere, sincere poems, gave her strength and courage in the darkest days. In a brief autobiography written in 1965, Akhmatova admitted: “I did not stop writing poetry. For me, they are my connection with the time, with the new life of my people. When I wrote them, I lived by those rhythms that sounded in the heroic history of my country. I am happy that I lived in these years and saw events that had no equal. This is true. Not only in the love poems that brought A. Akhmatova the well-deserved fame, the talent of this outstanding poetess manifested itself. Her poetic dialogue with the World, with nature, with people was diverse, passionate and truthful.
5 / 5. 1
Lyrical hero in the work of A. A. Akhmatova
A. A. Akhmatova occupies an exceptional place in Russian poetry of the 20th century. A contemporary of the great poets of the period of the so-called silver age, she stands far above many of them. What is the reason for such an amazing power of Anna Akhmatova's poems? In my opinion, in that chaotic and terrible time in which the poetess happened to live, at a time when much needed to be rethought and evaluated in a new way, it is at such moments in history that a woman can most deeply feel the whole depth of life. The poetry of Anna Akhmatova is, after all, poetry for women, and her lyrical hero- a person with the deepest intuition, the ability to subtly feel and empathize with everything that happens around.
Love is a theme that from the very beginning creative way poetess became one of the leading in the lyrics of A. A. Akhmatova. “She had the greatest talent to feel loved, unloved, unwanted, rejected,” said K. Chukovsky about A. Akhmatova. And this is very clearly expressed in the verses of the early period: “I do not ask for your love .... ”,“ Confusion ”,“ I walked a friend to the front .... ". Love in Akhmatova's early poems is always unrequited, unrequited, tragic. The heartache of her lyrical heroine is unbearable, but she, like the poetess herself, always endures the blows of fate with dignity. In the period from 1911 to 1917, the theme of nature was more and more insistently manifested in the lyrics of A. Akhmatova, which was partly due to the fact that she spent this period of her life in the estate of her husband Slepnevskoye. Russian nature is described in Akhmatova's lyrics with amazing tenderness and love:
Before spring there are days like this:
Meadow rests under dense snow,
The trees rustle cheerfully - dry,
And the warm wind is gentle and resilient.
During this period, the lyrical heroine Anna Akhmatova comes closer to the world around her, which becomes closer, understandable, native, infinitely beautiful and harmonious - the world to which her soul aspires. However, for the hero of the works of A. Akhmatova, love for the nature of his native land is inseparable from a feeling of love for the Motherland-Russia as a whole. And therefore in the work of the poetess there can be no indifference to the fate of her people, the lyrical heroine is seized by feelings of pain, longing for the fate of the people. Akhmatova's heroine every year becomes closer to the people and gradually absorbs all the bitter feelings of her generation, feels guilty for everything that happens around her:
I am not with those who left the earth
At the mercy of enemies.
I will not heed their rude flattery,
I won't give them my songs...
In the poems of the period of the First World War and the Russian revolutions, peace and bright joy in the soul of Akhmatova's heroine change into a constant feeling of an impending catastrophe:
Smells like burning. four weeks
Dry peat burns in swamps.
Even the birds didn't sing today
And the aspen no longer trembles ....
In this difficult time for the country, the time of a radical change in the life of the whole country and the Akhmatov generation, the personal problems of the lyrical heroine fade into the background, the main problems are universal, problems that awaken in the soul feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, feelings of catastrophic and ambiguity of being. Suffice it to recall such verses as “Slander”, “Fear, sorting through things in the darkness…. ”,“ A monstrous rumor ”and many others:
And everywhere slander accompanied me.
Her creeping step I heard in a dream
And in a dead city under a merciless sky
Wandering at random for shelter and for bread.
The enormous pain for the suffering of Russia was most fully expressed in the poem "Requiem", written in 1935 - 1940. The creation of the poem is largely connected with the personal experiences of Akhmatova, with the arrest of her son, but more importantly, the lyrical heroine of this poem absorbs all the pain and suffering that befell millions of Russian people. Therefore, each of the mothers, wives, standing in long lines in the hope of learning at least something about the fate of their loved ones, each of the survivors of a terrible tragedy, speaks in the voice of a lyrical heroine. The cycle of poems "Wind of War" - one of the last in the work of A. A. Akhmatova - includes works of the war and post-war years. War 1941 - 1945 -another ordeal that befell the Akhmatov generation, and the lyrical heroine of the poetess is again with her people. The poems of this period are full of patriotic enthusiasm, optimism, faith in victory:
And the one that today says goodbye to the dear, -
Let her melt her pain into strength.
We swear to children, we swear to graves,
That no one will force us to submit!
Post-war poems by A. A. Akhmatova (collection "Odd") is the result of her work. These verses combine all the topics that worried Anna Akhmatova throughout her life, but now they are illuminated by the wisdom of a person who lived a rich, bright, difficult life. They are full of memories, but they also contain hope for the future. For the lyrical heroine, this time is marked by a return to the feeling of love, and this theme receives a more general, philosophical disclosure:
You're right that you didn't take me with you
And I didn't call my friend
I became a song and destiny
Through insomnia and blizzard ....
What is the essence of the female soul? Love. It is from the position of love that Anna Akhmatova paints the quivering world with the finest colors. Her poetry is an endless story about how diverse the world is and how beautiful it is, even when filled with tragedy.
The lyrics of A. Akhmatova are called confessional, because it is in confession that a person is extremely sincere and open. This is her poetry. Her poems begin as naturally as a frank conversation with a loved one: “Do you want to know how it all was?” And then the verses seem to gradually draw the female soul into the emotional world. Akhmatova's poems are surprisingly in tune with different life moments, because they contain reflections on the life of a sensitive and wise person:
I learned to live simply, wisely, Look at the sky and pray to God, And wander long before evening, To tire unnecessary anxiety.
The poetry of Anna Akhmatova changed over time, as the girl grows older, getting older:
The poet's voice is firmer and more resolute when it comes to citizenship: "I am not with those who threw the earth to be torn to pieces by enemies." And she, having survived everything that befell her and the country, proudly had the right to say that "then she was with my people, where my people, unfortunately, were." The poetry of Anna Akhmatova has a wonderful property: her words emotionally accurately name those feelings and experiences that are familiar to many. Akhmatova's poetry makes us admire the beauty of the world, love people, love life. And all the hardships seem temporary, remain in the past when you read these lines:
And I'm going to own a wonderful garden, Where the rustle of grasses and exclamations of muses...
