At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps the most significant “female” poetry in all world literature of modern times arose in Russia - the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova's lyrics immediately occupied a special place with their balance of tone and clarity of mental expression. It was felt that the young poet had his own voice, his own intonation inherent in this voice.
Akhmatova's poems from the period of her first books ("Evening", "Rosary", "White Flock") are almost exclusively love lyrics. Her innovation as an artist initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeatedly and seemingly played out to the end theme.
Often, Akhmatova’s miniatures were, in accordance with her favorite style, fundamentally unfinished and resembled not so much a small novel in its, so to speak, traditional form, but rather a randomly torn page from a novel, or even part of a page that has neither beginning nor end and forcing the reader to think about what happened between the characters before.
Almost immediately after the appearance of the first book, and after “The Rosary” and “The White Flock” in particular, people began to talk about the “mystery of Akhmatova.” In the complex music of Akhmatova’s lyrics, in her subconscious, a special, frightening disharmony constantly lived and made itself felt, which embarrassed Akhmatova herself. She wrote later in “Poem Without a Hero” that she constantly heard an incomprehensible hum, as if some kind of underground bubbling, shifting and friction of those original solid rocks on which life had been eternally and reliably based, but which began to lose stability and balance.
Akhmatova is, indeed, the most characteristic heroine of her time, revealed in the endless variety of women's destinies: lover and wife, widow and mother, cheating and abandoned. “Great earthly love” is the driving principle of all Akhmatova’s lyrics. It was she who made us see the world differently - no longer symbolist and not Acmeist, but rather realistically.
The tonality of that love story, which before the revolution at times covered almost the entire content of Akhmatova’s lyrics and which many wrote about as the main discovery and achievement of the poetess, changed noticeably in the 20-30s in comparison with the early books. The love story, without ceasing to be dominant, now occupied only one of the poetic territories in it. But the lyrics also retain the utmost concentration of the content of the episode itself, which lies at the heart of the poem. Akhmatova never wrote limp, amorphous or descriptive love poems. They are always dramatic and extremely tense and confused. Akhmatova's love lyrics of the 20s and 30s, to an incomparably greater extent than before, are addressed to the inner, secret spiritual life.
The theme of the Motherland is also very significant for Akhmatova’s lyrics. She always connected her fate with the fate of her native land. After the revolution, she refused to emigrate, remaining with her country, declaring this in the poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly...” But she did not accept the revolution and did not share the ideas of the victorious class. She recognized the greatness of the revolution, but believed that the affirmation of its great goals cannot go through cruelty and desecration of humanity. Her poems of this time are filled with bitterness and pain from the fact that in the name of high ideals many human lives were senselessly destroyed. But the world war and national disasters exacerbate Akhmatova’s sense of involvement in the destinies of the country, people, and history. The thematic range of her lyrics is expanding, and the motives of the tragic premonition of the bitter fate of an entire generation of Russian people are strengthened.
Due to the poet’s rejection of the new government, her poetry is declared a heritage of the past, and it is no longer published. Over the years, Akhmatova’s sense of the transience of life intensified; this caused not only sadness, but a feeling of joyful amazement at her ageless beauty. This is expressed with great force in her poem “Seaside Sonnet.”
The thought of the inevitability of parting with everything that is so dear to the heart causes a bright sorrow, and this feeling is generated not only by faith, but also by the feeling of one’s blood involvement in an eternally living life.
Poetry of the female soul. She was considered perfect. People read her poems, Her hook-nosed, surprisingly harmonious profile evoked comparisons with ancient sculpture. In her later years she received an honorary doctorate from Oxford. This woman's name is Anna Akhmatova. “Akhmatova is a jasmine bush, charred by gray fog,” this is what her contemporaries said about her. According to the poetess herself, Alexander Pushkin and Benjamin Constant, the author of the acclaimed 19th century novel “Adolphe,” had a huge influence on her. It was from these sources that Akhmatova drew the subtlest psychologism, that aphoristic brevity and expressiveness that made her lyrics the object of endless love from readers and the subject of research by several generations of literary scholars.
I learned to live simply and wisely, -
Look at the sky and pray to God,
And wander for a long time before evening,
To relieve unnecessary anxiety.
This is the result of this wise, suffering life.
She was born at the turn of two centuries - the nineteenth, “iron” according to Blok’s definition, and the twentieth century, which had no equal in fear, passions and suffering in the history of mankind. She was born at the turn of the century to connect them with the living, trembling thread of her destiny.
A great influence on her poetic development was had by the fact that Akhmatova spent her childhood years in Tsarskoe Selo, where the very air was saturated with poetry. This place became one of the most dear to her on earth for the rest of her life. Because “here lay his (Pushkin’s) cocked hat and the disheveled volume of Guys.” Because for her, seventeen years old, it was there that “the dawn was all itself, in April the smell of prey and earth, and the first kiss. " Because there, in the park, there were meetings with Nikolai Gumilyov, another tragic poet of the era, who became Akhmatova’s fate, about whom she would later write in lines that were terrible in their tragic sound:
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
Akhmatova's poetry is the poetry of the female soul. And although literature is universal to humanity, Akhmatova could rightfully say about her poems:
Could Biche, like Dante, create?
Or will Laura glorify the heat of love?
I taught women to speak.
In her works there is a lot of personal, purely feminine things that Akhmatova experienced in her soul, which is why she is dear to the Russian reader.
Akhmatova's first poems are love lyrics. In them, love is not always bright; it often brings grief. More often than not, Akhmatova’s poems are psychological dramas with poignant plots based on tragic experiences. The lyrical heroine A Shatova is rejected and falls out of love. But he experiences this with dignity, with proud humility, without humiliating either himself or his beloved.
In the fluffy muff, my hands were cold.
I felt scared, I felt somehow vague.
Oh how to get you back, quick weeks
His love, airy and momentary!
The swarm of Akhmatova's poetry is complex and multifaceted. He is a lover, a brother, a friend, appearing in various situations. Either a wall of misunderstanding arises between Akhmatova and her lover and he leaves her; then they separate because they cannot see each other; then she mourns her love and grieves; but he always loves Akhmatova.
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.
But Akhmatova’s poetry is not only the confession of a female soul in love, it is also the confession of a person living with all the troubles and passions of the 20th century. And also, according to O. Mandelstam, Akhmatova “brought to Russian lyrics all the enormous complexity and psychological richness of the Russian novel of the 20th century”:
I accompanied my friend to the front hall,
Stood in the golden dust
From the nearby bell tower
Important sounds flowed.
Abandoned! Made up word -
Am I a flower or a letter?
And the eyes are already looking sternly
Into the darkened dressing table.
The most important love in A. Akhmatova’s life was the love for her native land, about which she would write later that “we lie down in it and become it, that’s why we call it ours so freely.”
During the difficult years of the revolution, many poets emigrated from Russia abroad. No matter how hard it was for Akhmatova, she did not leave her country because she could not imagine her life without Russia.
I had a voice. He called comfortingly,
He said: "Come here,
Leave your land deaf and sinful,
Leave Russia forever."
But Akhmatova “indifferently and calmly closed her ears with her hands” so that “the sorrowful spirit would not be defiled by this unworthy speech.”
Akhmatova’s love for the Motherland is not a subject of analysis or reflection. There will be a Motherland - there will be life, children, poetry. Without her, there is nothing. Akhmatova was a sincere spokesman for the troubles and misfortunes of her century, which she was ten years older than.
Akhmatova was concerned about both the fate of the spiritually impoverished people and the worries of the Russian intelligentsia after the Bolsheviks seized power in the country. She conveyed the psychological state of intellectuals in those inhuman conditions:
In a bloody circle day and night
A cruel languor hurts...
Nobody wanted to help us
Because we stayed at home.
During Stalinism, Akhmatova was not subjected to repression, but these were difficult years for her. Her only son was arrested, and she decided to leave a monument to him and all the people who suffered at this time. This is how the famous “Requiem” was born. In it, Akhmatova talks about the difficult years, the misfortunes and suffering of people:
Death stars stood above us
And innocent Rus' writhed
Under bloody boots
And under the black tires there is marusa.
Despite all the severity and tragic life, despite all the horror and humiliation she experienced during the war and after, Akhmatova did not have despair and confusion. No one had ever seen her with her head down. Always direct and strict, she was a person of great courage. In her life, Akhmatova knew fame, infamy and glory again.
I am your voice, the heat of your breath,
I am the reflection of your face.
Such is Akhmatova’s lyrical world: from the confession of a woman’s heart, insulted, indignant, but loving, to the soul-shaking “Requiem”, with which “a hundred million people” shout.
Once in her youth, clearly anticipating her poetic destiny, Akhmatova said, addressing the Tsarskoye Selo statue of A. S. Pushkin:
Cold, white, wait,
I, too, will become marble.
And, probably, opposite the Leningrad prison - where she wanted - there should be a monument to a woman holding in her hands a bundle with a package for her only son, whose only fault was that he was the son of Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova - two great poets who did not please the authorities.
Or maybe there is no need for marble statues at all, because there is already a miraculous monument that she erected for herself following her Tsarskoye Selo predecessor - these are her poems.
Akhmatova writes about herself - about the eternal...
M. Tsvetaeva.
Anna Akhmatova's lyrics are a confession of the female soul in its maximum embodiment. The poet writes about the feelings of his lyrical heroine, her work is as intimate as possible and, at the same time, it is an encyclopedia of the female soul in all its forms.
In 1912, Akhmatova’s first collection, “Evening,” was published, where the heroine’s youthful romantic expectations were embodied. A young girl has a presentiment of love, speaks of its illusions, unfulfilled hopes, “graceful sadness”:
Gasping for breath, I shouted: “It’s a joke.
All that has gone before. If you leave, I’ll die.”
Smiled calmly and creepily
And he told me: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
In the second collection of poetry, “The Rosary,” which brought Akhmatova real fame, the image of the lyrical heroine develops and transforms. Already here the versatility of Akhmatov’s heroine is manifested - she is a girl, an adult woman, a wife, a mother, a widow, and a sister. The poet takes a particularly close look at the “love” female roles. The lyrical heroine of Akhmatova can be a beloved, a lover, a homewrecker, a harlot. Her “social range” is also wide: wanderer, Old Believer, peasant woman, etc.
It seems that such “ramifications” of the heroine are connected with the poet’s desire to reveal not so much individuality as the general female psychology. Therefore, we can say that Akhmatova’s female images are characterized by a timeless “universality of feelings and actions”:
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.
The events of the First World War and revolutions change the tonality of Akhmatova’s lyrics and add new touches to the image of her lyrical heroine. Now she is not only a private person living with personal joys and sorrows, but also a person involved in the destinies of the country, people, and history. The collection “The White Flock” reinforces the motives of the heroine’s tragic premonition of the bitter fate of an entire generation of Russian people:
We thought: we are beggars, we have nothing,
And how they began to lose one after another,
So that became every day
Memorial day -
They began to compose songs about the great generosity of God
Yes about our former wealth.
Akhmatova did not accept the 1917 revolution. Her heroine of the 1920s desperately yearns for bygone but irrevocable times. And that is why the present becomes even more unattractive and the future of the entire country, the entire nation even more cloudy:
Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashes,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy...
Moreover, the October events are perceived by the heroine Akhmatova as punishment for her unrighteous, sinful life. And even though she herself did not do evil, the heroine feels involved in the life of the entire country, the entire people. Therefore, she is ready to share their common sad fate:
I am your voice, the heat of your breath,
I am the reflection of your face...
Thus, after the revolution, the image of a loving woman in Akhmatova’s lyrics recedes into the background, while the roles of a patriot, a poetess, and a little later, a mother who wholeheartedly cares not only for her child, but also for all those who suffer, come forward:
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 grief of Akhmatova’s mother merges with the grief of all mothers and is embodied in the universal sorrow of the Mother of God:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
Thus, A. Akhmatova’s lyrics reveal all the aspects of the female soul. In the early lyrics of the poetess, her heroine is, first of all, a loving woman in all the variety of roles. In Akhmatova’s more mature work, the emphasis shifts towards the role of a woman-mother, patriot and poetess, who sees her duty in sharing the fate of her people and her homeland.
Municipal educational institution "Boldyrevskaya secondary school"
on literature on the topic
"The Lyrical World of Anna Akhmatova"
I've done the work:
Serov Evgeniy
Supervisor:
With. Boldyrevo, 2007
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….3
Chapter I. Akhmatova’s first steps……………………………………6
Chapter II. Lyrics by Akhmatova……………………………………………..7
2.1. The theme of the homeland in the poetess’s lyrics………………………………….10
2.2. War lyrics…………………………………12
2.3. “Great earthly love” in Akhmatova’s lyrics……………….13 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..15
Literature……………………………………………………………......16
INTRODUCTION.
Having become acquainted with Akhmatova’s work, my interest in poetry in general awoke, and Akhmatova became my most favorite poet. Only one thing was surprising: how could such a poet go unpublished for so long and not be studied at school for so long! After all, Akhmatova, in terms of the strength of her talent, skill and talent, stands next to the brilliant Pushkin, whom she so jealously loved, understood and felt.
Akhmatova herself lived for many years in Tsarskoe Selo, which became for her one of the most expensive places on earth for the rest of her life. And because “here lay his cocked hat and a disheveled volume of “The Boyfriend,” and because for her, seventeen years old, it was there that “the dawn was at its finest, in April the smell of prey and earth, and the first kiss...”, and because there, in the park, there were meetings with Nikolai Gumilyov, another tragic poet of the era, who became the fate of Akhmatova, about whom she would later write in lines that were terrible in their tragic sound:
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
Perhaps the fact that Akhmatova spent her childhood years in Tsarskoye Selo, where the very air was saturated with poetry, had a great influence on her poetic development.
A dark-skinned boy wandered through the alleys,
The lake shores were sad,
And we cherish the century
A barely audible rustle of footsteps.
“Barely audible” for us. And although it is also not loud for Akhmatova, it leads her along the right path, helping to penetrate the human soul, especially the female one. Her poetry is the poetry of the female soul. Can we separate: “female” poetry from “male” poetry? After all, literature is universal to humanity. But Akhmatova could rightfully say about her poems:
Could Biche create the word Dante,
Or will Laura glorify the heat of love?
I taught women to speak...
Akhmatova's first poems are love lyrics. In them, love is not always bright; it often brings grief. More often than not, Akhmatova’s poems are psychological dramas with poignant plots based on tragic experiences. The lyrical heroine of the early Akhmatova is rejected, fell out of love, but experiences this with dignity, with proud humility, without humiliating either herself or her lover.
In the fluffy muff, my hands were cold.
I felt scared, I felt somehow vague.
Oh how to get you back, quick weeks
His love, airy and momentary!
The hero of Akhmatov's poetry is complex and multifaceted. He is a lover, a brother, a friend, appearing in various situations.
Each of her poems is a small novel:
I accompanied my friend to the front hall,
Stood in the golden dust
From the nearby bell tower
Important sounds flowed.
Abandoned! Made up word-
Am I a flower or a letter?
And the eyes are already looking sternly
Into the darkened dressing table.
But the most important love in A. Akhmatova’s life was the love for her native land, about which she would write later that “we lie down in it and become it, that’s why we call it ours so freely.”
During the difficult years of the revolution, many poets emigrated from Russia abroad. No matter how hard it was for Akhmatova, she did not leave her country because she could not imagine her life without Russia.
Akhmatova’s love for the Motherland is not a subject of analysis or reflection. There will be a Motherland - there will be life, children, poetry.
Without her, there is nothing. Akhmatova was an honest spokesman for the troubles and misfortunes of her age, which she was ten years older than. Her fate is tragic:
And I go - trouble follows me,
Not straight and not oblique,
And to nowhere and never,
Like trains falling off a slope.
These poems were written during Stalinism. And although Akhmatova was not subjected to repression, it was a difficult time for her. Her only son was arrested, and she decided to leave a monument to him and all the people who suffered at this time. This is how the famous “Requiem” was born. In it, Akhmatova talks about the difficult years, the misfortunes and suffering of people:
The death stars stood above us
And innocent Rus' writhed
Under bloody boots
And under the black tires there is Marussia.
But in none of her books, despite all the hard and tragic life, all the horror and humiliation she experienced, was there any despair and confusion. No one had ever seen her with her head down. Always direct and strict, she was a person of great courage. In her life, Akhmatova knew fame, infamy and glory again.
I am the reflection of your face.
The war found Akhmatova in Leningrad. In July 1941, she wrote a poem that spread throughout the country:
And she, 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.
The national grief is the poet’s personal grief.
The feeling of belonging to the native land becomes almost physical: the Motherland is the “soul and body” of the poet. Great lines were born, which were uttered in the famous poem “Courage” in February 1942.
Such is Akhmatova’s lyrical world: from the confession of a woman’s heart, insulted, indignant, but loving, to the soul-shaking “Requiem”, which shouts “A people of a hundred million...”
I would erect more than one monument to Akhmatova: a barefoot seaside girl in Kherson, a lovely Tsarskoye Selo schoolgirl, a sophisticated, beautiful woman with a thread of black agate around her neck in the summer garden, “where statues remember her young.”
Or maybe there is no need for marble statues, because there is a miraculous monument that she erected for herself following her great Tsarskoye Selo predecessor - these are her poems...
ChapterI. ANNA AKHMATOVA'S FIRST STEPS
At the turn of the last and present centuries, although not literally chronologically, on the eve of the revolution, in an era shaken by two world wars, perhaps the most significant “female” poetry in all world literature of modern times arose in Russia - the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. The closest analogy, which arose among her first critics, was the ancient Greek love singer Sappho: the Russian Sappho was often called the young Akhmatova. Anna Andreevna Gorenko was born on June 11 (23), 1889 near Odessa. As a one-year-old child, she was transported to Tsarskoye Selo, where she lived until she was sixteen years old. Akhmatova’s first memories were of Tsarskoye Selo: “... the green, damp splendor of the parks, the pasture where my nanny took me, the hippodrome where little colorful horses galloped, the old train station...” Anna studied at the Tsarskoye Selo girls’ gymnasium. He writes about it this way: “I studied poorly at first, then much better, but always reluctantly.” In 1907, Akhmatova graduated from the Fundukleevsky gymnasium in Kyiv, then entered the law faculty of the Higher Women's Courses. The beginning of the 10s was marked by important events in Akhmatova’s life: she married Nikolai Gumilev, found friendship with the artist Amadeo Modigliani, and in the spring of 1912 her first collection of poems, “Evening,” was published, which brought Akhmatova instant fame. She was immediately ranked by critics among the greatest Russian poets. Her books became a literary event. Chukovsky wrote that Akhmatova was greeted with “extraordinary, unexpectedly noisy triumphs.” Her poems were not only heard, they were widely accepted, quoted in conversations, copied into albums, and even explained to lovers. “All of Russia,” noted Chukovsky, “remembered the glove that Akhmatova’s rejected woman talks about when leaving the one who pushed her away”:
My chest was so helplessly cold,
But my steps were light.
I put it on my right hand
The glove from the left hand."
ChapterII. AKHMATOVA'S LYRICS
Akhmatova forever linked her fate with the fate of her native land, and when - after the revolution - the time came to choose, she did not hesitate with her native country, with the people, declaring this decisively, loudly in the poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly...” But Akhmatova did not intend to become a singer of the winning class.
Her poems, generated by a time when in the name of high ideals, many human destinies were senselessly destroyed and lives were trampled, are filled with inescapable bitterness:
You weren't alive
You can't get up from the snow.
Twenty-eight bayonets,
Five gunshots.
Bitter update
I sewed another one.
Loves, loves blood
Russian land.
Akhmatova’s poems clearly did not correspond to ideas about the meaning of existence and the purpose of poetry, which were increasingly asserted in the post-revolutionary era: her poetry is declared to be a property of the past, hostile to revolutionary reality. And soon her poems stopped being published altogether, and even her name appeared occasionally only in a sharply critical context.
Time treated Akhmatova extremely cruelly.
At the end of August 1921 Nikolai Gumilyov was shot on a monstrously unfair charge of involvement in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Their life paths had diverged by that time, but he was never erased from her heart: too much connected them. The grief she experienced then and remained with her for the rest of her life will be echoed in her poems again and again:
On the threshold of white paradise,
Looking around, he shouted:
I called death to my dear ones,
And they died one after another.
Akhmatova, according to her own testimony, learned about Gumilyov’s death from newspapers. A widow's cry, grief for the untimely and innocent death of a person who continues to remain dear, is cast in a poem that belongs to the masterpieces of Akhmatov's lyric poetry:
Tear-stained autumn, like a widow
Dressed in black, all hearts are clouded...
Going through my husband's words,
She won't stop crying.
And it will be so until the quietest snow
He will not take pity on the mournful and tired...
Oblivion of pain and oblivion of negligence
To give a lot of life for this.
There are many beautiful descriptions of autumn in Russian poetry. Akhmatova does not describe, she recreates the internal, mental state, which in everyday life is often characterized by the word autumn: here bitterness and melancholy merge together, developing into a feeling of hopelessness, which, with the regularity embodied in the change of seasons, also passes and is replaced by an all-consuming unconsciousness. The entire system of artistic means is subordinated to the expression of this state. Words with great emotional intensity are abundantly represented here: widow, pain, oblivion, bliss, weep, take pity, fog. This is especially noticeable when referring to epithets: tear-stained, black, quiet, mournful and tired. Each of them has an extremely broad content and at the same time is specific, serving to characterize what is happening in the human soul, in the heart.
The allegorical figure of autumn, associated with an inconsolable widow, acquires features characteristic of both a natural phenomenon (season) and a person (everyday): tear-stained autumn, dressed in black. Poetic allegory is combined with the prose of life, an always solemn natural phenomenon - with mournful everyday life. Already with the first line and the comparison it contains (“Tear-stained autumn, like a widow”), a majestic picture of one of the seasons is combined with a genre picture. But there is no feeling of diminished, groundedness in the verse: what happens in a person’s life reveals involvement in what is happening in the world.
Akhmatova retained the amazing freshness of her perception of life until the end of her days, being able to see how “linden and maple trees burst into the room, the green camp is buzzing and rioting,” how “...Again autumn is falling like Tamerlane, There is silence in the Arbat alleys, Behind the stop or behind the fog The impassable road is black,” to feel that “The song is weak, the music is mute, But the air is burning with their fragrance...”. And every time what is acutely perceived now is coupled with what has already been and will be - a glance thrown towards the fence of the house in Komarovo, where Akhmatova lived for a long time in her last years, makes you shudder:
In the thickets of strong raspberries
Dark fresh elderberry branch...
This is a letter from Marina.
The reminder of Marina Tsvetaeva with her tragic fate expands the time frame of the poem, unpretentiously titled “Komarov’s Sketches” and reminding that “We are all a little guests of life, Living is just a habit.”
Akhmatova’s habit of living did not weaken over the years, and the ever-increasing sense of the transience of life caused not only sadness, but also a feeling of joyful amazement at her (life’s) ageless beauty. This is expressed with great force in the “Seaside Sonnet”:
And it seems so easy
Whitening in the emerald thicket,
The road, I won’t tell you where...
Everything here will outlive me,
Everything, even dilapidated birdhouses
And this air, spring air,
A seafarer who has completed a flight.
It's even brighter there among the trunks
And everything looks like an alley
With an unearthly irresistibility,
And over the cherry blossoms
The radiance of the light month is pouring.
The “voice of eternity” in the poem is by no means an allegory: the time comes for a person when he hears it more and more clearly. And in the uncertain light of the “light month,” the world, while remaining real, loses something in this reality, becomes illusory, like the road that leads from Komarov’s house (Akhmatova called it a “booth”), “I won’t say where.”
The image in the verse balances on the precarious edge of the real and what lies beyond the world perceived by a living person. The road that awaits a person at the end of his life suddenly connects the inevitable tomorrow with the poetess’s native Tsarskoye Selo yesterday: that is why it, the road, seems “not at all difficult.”
The feeling of eternity arises here surprisingly naturally - by a simple comparison of the terms allotted to a person and such, in general, a short-lived object as a “dilapidated birdhouse.” And the sorrowful road ahead of a person turns out to be bright here, not only because he is internally ready to walk along it with dignity to the end, but also because of the radiance of the trunks, evoking the thought of the original Russian tree, the birch.
The thought of the inevitability of parting with everything that is so dear to the heart evokes a bright sorrow, and this feeling is generated not only by faith (Akhmatova was always a deeply religious person), but by the feeling of her blood involvement in an eternally living life. The realization that “everything here will outlive me” does not generate bitterness, but, on the contrary, a state of peace.
Let us pay attention to one more point. The night is associated with ideas of completion, the end, with spring - the beginning, the beautiful time of the primrose. Here, in Akhmatova’s poem, these two points, two states, two ideas are combined: the “blooming cherry tree” is bathed in the radiance of the “light moon.”
Is this a poem about facing death? Yes. And about the triumph of life that goes into eternity.
Thoroughly earthly, Akhmatova’s poetry does not look down-to-earth anywhere, not in any of the poems she wrote. This is due to the high spirit of the soul, the conviction in the high destiny of man that has always lived in verse. The small things in human relationships, the details of everyday life remain outside the boundaries of lyric poetry or turn out to be the soil on which the miracle of verse grows - “to the joy of you and me.” Akhmatova’s verse is by no means ethereal, but the particulars, the details of everyday life, are here the basis for the rise of human thought, appearing in an indispensable - although not always open - correlation with the ethical (and aesthetic) ideals persistently affirmed by Akhmatova.
2.1. THE THEME OF THE MOTHERLAND IN THE LYRICS OF THE POETESS
In Akhmatova’s lyrics one cannot encounter a state of mental calm and relaxation: the level of demands remains extremely high even in poems about love, where the feeling that connects two people breaks out into the wide expanses of human existence: “And we live solemnly and difficultly, And we honor the rituals of our bitter meetings " That is why in Akhmatova’s poems there is always such a great intensity of feelings, in the atmosphere of which it is not at all easy to live. But just living is not for her, who said: “What it is. I wish you another - Better." It’s not pride that’s showing here, although Akhmatova always had a lot of pride, there’s something else here - a feeling of spiritual freedom.
The native land has always remained the fulcrum for Akhmatova. It is worth repeating that throughout her life she was connected with St. Petersburg, with Tsarskoe Selo. Her heart was forever attached to the majestic city on the Neva, about which she once said:
Was my blessed cradle
Dark city by the menacing river
And the solemn wedding bed,
Over which they held wreaths
Your young seraphim, -
A city loved with bitter love.
The homeland has never been an abstract concept for Akhmatova. Over the years, when turning to the theme of the homeland, the scale of the poet’s thoughts becomes different and more significant. One of the proofs of this is the poem “Native Land”.
Love for her is tested throughout life, but death, Akhmatova is convinced, is not capable of breaking the connection between a person and his native land:
She doesn't wake up our bitter dreams,
Doesn't seem like the promised paradise.
We don’t do it in our souls
Subject of purchase and sale,
sick, in poverty, speechless on it,
We don't even remember her.
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.
Here - and this is typical of Akhmatova’s poetry - two semantic planes intersect, reinforcing two meanings of the word, two ideas about the earth. The simplest meaning is literally realized: a pinch of native land sewn into the amulet, the crunch of dust on the teeth, dirt on the galoshes. And the attitude towards the earth that lies under our feet is quite prosaic: they grind it, knead it, crumble it. A different, sublime attitude towards it, when it is perceived as the Fatherland, is demonstratively rejected:
We don’t carry them on our chests in our treasured amulet,
We don’t write poems about her sobbingly,
it does not seem like a “promised paradise.” But this series of denials, openly addressed to those who left the earth (they carried her away in amulet, they wrote poems about her to the point of sobbing), when continued, suddenly introduces the movement of thought in the opposite direction: “We don’t do it.”<...>subject to purchase and sale." And the more persistently the words are repeated, seemingly demonstrating indifference to the native land, the more obvious it becomes that a negative attitude towards external - feigned, effect-oriented - manifestations of feelings is revealed here. In the final couplet, the idea of the unity of man and earth is amazingly simply reflected, the sublime and the earthly appear as a whole. The word “dust” that ends the previous line now applies equally to both the earth and man: born on earth, he goes into it, and both of these acts are the most significant thing that happens in life.
2.2. MILITARY LYRICS by A. A. AKHMATOVA
Akhmatova’s love for the Motherland is not a subject of analysis, reflection or calculating calculations. There will be life, children, poetry. If she doesn't exist, there's nothing. This is why Akhmatova wrote during the war, already the Great Patriotic War:
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.
And Akhmatova’s “military” poems began the way any soldier’s service begins - with an oath:
And the one who today says goodbye to her beloved, -
Let her pain melt into strength,
We swear to the children, we swear to the graves,
That nothing will force us to submit.
July 1941 Leningrad .
In the “military” poems, she is struck by the amazing organicity, the absence of a shadow of reflection, uncertainty, doubt, seemingly so natural in such difficult conditions in the mouth of the creator, as many believed, only refined “ladies’” poems. But this is also because the character of Akhmatova’s heroine or heroines is based on another principle, also directly related to the people’s perception of the world. This is an awareness of the share, but the readiness to accept here does not at all mean what could be called fatalistic passivity and humility, if not indifference. For Akhmatova, the consciousness of fate and fate gives birth, first of all, to the readiness to endure and persevere; It does not come from a loss of strength, but from their awakening.
There is a truly remarkable quality in the sense of fate that already appeared in the early Akhmatova and which became one of the main guarantees of Akhmatova becoming mature. It is based on the primordial national peculiarity - a sense of belonging to the world, empathy with the world and responsibility towards it - which in new social conditions receives a sharp moral meaning: my fate is the fate of the country, the fate of the people is history. In an autobiographical passage in the third person, already as if looking at herself as an outsider and thinking about herself in history, Akhmatova said: “... the late A[khmatova] comes out of the genre of the “love diary” (“Rosary”) -: the genre, in which she knows no rivals and which she left, perhaps, even with some apprehension and caution, and turns to thinking about the role and fate of the poet, about the craft, on easily sketched wide canvases. There is a keen sense of history.” It is this feeling that permeates Akhmatova’s “late” books, “books of the female soul,” books of the human soul.
2.3. “GREAT EARTHLY LOVE” IN AKHMATOVA’S LYRICS
Akhmatova is, indeed, the most characteristic heroine of her time, revealed in the endless variety of women's destinies: lover and wife, widow and mother, cheating and abandoned. According to A. Kollontai, Akhmatova gave “a whole book of the female soul.” Akhmatova “poured into art” the complex history of the female character of a turning point, its origins, breakdown, and new formation.
The hero of Akhmatov's lyrics (not the heroine) is complex and multifaceted. In fact, it is even difficult to define him in the same sense as, say, the hero of Lermontov’s lyrics is defined. It is he who is a lover, a brother, a friend, presented in an infinite variety of situations: insidious and generous, killing and resurrecting, first and last.
But always, with all the variety of life’s collisions and everyday incidents, with all the unusual, even exotic characters, the heroine or heroines of Akhmatova carry something important, primordially feminine, and a poem makes its way to it in a story about some rope dancer, for example, going through the usual definitions and learned statements (“My beloved friend left me on the new moon. Well, so what!”) to the fact that “the heart knows, the heart knows”: the deep melancholy of an abandoned woman. This ability to reach what “the heart knows” is the main thing in Akhmatova’s poems. "I see everything, I remember everything." But this “everything” is illuminated in her poetry by one thing.
There is a center that, as it were, brings the rest of the world of her poetry to itself, turns out to be its main nerve, its idea and principle. This is Love. The element of the female soul inevitably had to begin with such a declaration of itself in love. Herzen once said that a woman is “driven into love” as a great injustice in the history of mankind. In a certain sense, all the lyrics (especially the early ones) of Anna Akhmatova are “driven into love.” But here, first of all, the possibility of exit opened up. It was here that truly poetic discoveries were born, such a view of the world that allows us to speak of Akhmatova’s poetry as a new phenomenon in the development of Russian poetry of the twentieth century. There is both “divinity” and “inspiration” in her poetry. While maintaining the high significance of the idea of love associated with symbolism, Akhmatova returns it to a living and real, not at all abstract, character. The soul comes to life "Not for passion, not for fun, For great earthly love."
“Great earthly love” is the driving principle of all Akhmatova’s lyrics. It was she who made us see the world differently - no longer symbolist and not Acmeist, but, to use the usual definition, realistically.
"That fifth time of the year,
Just praise him.
Breathe the last freedom
Because it's love.
The sky flew high
The outlines of things are light,
And the body no longer celebrates
The anniversary of your sadness.
In this poem, Akhmatova called love the “fifth season of the year.” From this unusual, fifth time, she saw the other four, ordinary ones. In a state of love, the world is seen anew. All senses are heightened and tense. And the unusualness of the ordinary is revealed. A person begins to perceive the world with tenfold force, truly reaching the heights of his sense of life. The world opens in additional reality:
After all, the stars were larger
After all, the herbs smelled different.
That’s why Akhmatova’s verse is so objective: it returns things to their original meaning, it draws attention to what we are normally able to pass by indifferently, not appreciate, not feel. “A bee floats softly over a dried dodder” - this is seen for the first time.
Therefore, the opportunity opens up to experience the world in a childish way. Poems such as “Murka, don’t go, there’s an owl” are not thematically defined poems for children, but they have a feeling of completely childish spontaneity.
And one more feature related to the same. There are many epithets in Akhmatova’s love poems, which the famous Russian philologist once called syncretic and which are born from a holistic, inseparable, fused perception of the world, when the eye sees the world inseparably from what the ear hears in it; when feelings are materialized, objectified, and objects are spiritualized. “In white-hot passion,” Akhmatova will say. And she sees the sky, “wounded by yellow fire” - the sun, and “the lifeless heat of the chandeliers.”
CONCLUSION
If you arrange Akhmatova’s poems in a certain order, you can build a whole story with many mise-en-scenes, twists and turns, characters, random and non-random incidents. Meetings and separations, tenderness, guilt, disappointment, jealousy, bitterness, languor, joy singing in the heart, unfulfilled expectations, selflessness, pride, sadness - in which facets and kinks we do not see love on the pages of Akhmatova’s books.
In the lyrical heroine of Akhmatova’s poems, in the soul of the poetess herself, there constantly lived a burning, demanding dream of truly high love, undistorted in any way.
Akhmatova’s love is a formidable, commanding, morally pure, all-consuming feeling that makes one remember the biblical line: “Love is strong as death - and its arrows are fiery arrows.”
Anna Akhmatova lived a long and happy life. How happy? Isn’t it blasphemous to say this about a woman whose husband was shot and whose son was shot, went from prison to exile and back, who was persecuted and persecuted and on whose head a bit of blasphemy and punishment fell, who almost always lived in poverty and died in poverty, knowing , perhaps, all the deprivations, except the deprivation of the Motherland - exile.
And yet - happy. She was a poet: “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.”
Throughout her life, Akhmatova never ceases to worry and suffer for Russia. She accepts everything that happens to Russia with Christian humility, not regretting that she did not leave the country. Akhmatova believes that you can only be a poet and create in your homeland.
Literature.
1. A. Naiman “Stories about Anna Akhmatova” M., “Fiction” 1989
3. Anna Akhmatova. Works in two volumes. M., "Pravda" 1990
4. Pavlovsky Akhmatova: Essay on creativity. – L.: Lenizdat, 1982.
5. Urban A. The image of Anna Akhmatova // Star. - No. 6. – 1989.
6. Height A. Anna Akhmatova. Poetic journey. M.: Raduga, 1991.
The world of the female soul is most fully revealed in the love lyrics of A. Akhmatova and occupies a central place in her poetry. The genuine sincerity of Akhmatova’s love lyrics, combined with strict harmony, allowed her contemporaries to call her the Russian Sappho immediately after the release of her first poetry collections.
Anna Akhmatova's early love lyrics were perceived as a kind of lyrical diary. However, the depiction of romantically exaggerated feelings is not typical of her poetry. Akhmatova speaks about simple human happiness and about earthly, ordinary sorrows: about separation, betrayal, loneliness, despair - about everything that is close to many, that everyone is able to experience and understand.
Love in A. Akhmatova’s lyrics appears as a “fatal duel”; it is almost never depicted serenely, idyllically, but, on the contrary, in an extremely crisis expression: at the moment of breakup, separation, loss of feeling or the first violent blindness of passion.
Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama or its climax. Her lyrical heroine pays for love with “torment of a living soul.” The combination of lyricism and epicness brings A. Akhmatova’s poems closer to the genres of the novel, short story, drama, and lyrical diary.
One of the secrets of her poetic gift lies in her ability to fully express the most intimate things in herself and the world around her. In her poems, one is struck by the string tension of experiences and the unmistakable accuracy of their sharp expression. This is Akhmatova’s strength.
The theme of love and the theme of creativity are closely intertwined in Anna Akhmatova’s poems. In the spiritual appearance of the heroine of her love lyrics one can discern the “wingedness” of the creative personality. The tragic rivalry between Love and the Muse was reflected in many works, starting from the early years of 1911. However, Akhmatova foresees that poetic glory cannot replace love and earthly happiness.
A. Akhmatova’s intimate lyrics are not limited to just depicting loving relationships. It always shows the poet’s inexhaustible interest in the inner world of man. The originality of Akhmatova's poems about love, the originality of the poetic voice, conveying the most intimate thoughts and feelings of the lyrical heroine, the filling of the poems with the deepest psychologism cannot but arouse admiration.
Like no one else, Akhmatova knows how to reveal the most hidden depths of a person’s inner world, his experiences, states, and moods. Amazing psychological persuasiveness is achieved by using a very capacious and laconic technique of eloquent detail (glove, ring, tulip in a buttonhole...).
“Earthly love” in A. Akhmatova also implies love for the “earthly world” around a person. The depiction of human relations is inseparable from love for the native land, for the people, for the fate of the country. The idea of a spiritual connection with the Motherland that permeates the poetry of A. Akhmatova is expressed in the readiness to sacrifice for her sake even happiness and closeness with the most dear people (“Prayer”), which later came true so tragically in her life.
She rises to biblical heights in her description of maternal love. The suffering of a mother doomed to see her son suffer on the cross is simply shocking in “Requiem”:
The choir of angels praised the great hour,
And the skies melted in fire.
He said to his father: “Why did you leave me!”
And to the Mother: “Oh, don’t cry for Me...”
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
Thus, the poetry of A. Akhmatova is not only the confession of a woman in love, it is the confession of a person living with all the troubles, pains and passions of his time and his land.
Anna Akhmatova, as it were, combined “women’s” poetry with the poetry of the mainstream. But this unification is only apparent - Akhmatova is very smart: while retaining the themes and many techniques of women's poetry, she radically reworked both in the spirit of not women's, but universal poetics.
The world of deep and dramatic experiences, charm, wealth and uniqueness of personality are imprinted in the love lyrics of Anna Akhmatova.