What is the poetic originality of crying. Lamentations

The genre of crying in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova

This genre of traditional Russian folk art, such as crying, became an important source of inspiration for Anna Akhmatova and found its refraction in her poetry.

Lamentation (crying) is an archaic genre of folklore associated with funeral rites. V.G. Bazanov notes the characteristic features of crying: “In form, crying is a hard-won and deeply sincere confession. Lamentations can be considered as a special kind of lyric poetry, however, their lyricism is “hard”, knowing no calm, full of sorrow, excited and tearful pathos.”

Akhmatova, whose lyrics are characterized by high tragic pathos, repeatedly turned to folk lamentations, each time finding new points of contact with this genre of oral poetry. Even the titles of the poems “And now I am left alone...” (1916), “Lamentation” (1922), “Lamentation” (1944) speak of this closeness.

The type of intonation of folk lamentation, which brings some poems closer to recitative folklore, is found in Akhmatova in different forms. This intonation sounds especially clear in the poem on the death of A. Blok, “And Smolenskaya is now a birthday girl.”:

We brought to the Smolensk intercessor, We brought to the Most Holy Theotokos In our arms in a silver coffin, Our sun, extinguished in agony, Alexander, a pure swan.

Emotional tension determines linguistic poetics: unity of beginning, expressive word formation, the use of allegory (Our sun, extinguished in agony) and poetic comparison (Alexander, the pure swan).

Anna Akhmatova's visit to the Optina Hermitage in 1922 (shortly after the death of N. Gumilyov) became a significant event in the poet's spiritual self-determination. In the poem "Lamentation" she refers to this important event in her biography, recalling the revolutionary devastation of the country, including Optina Pustyn.

Worship the Lord in His holy court. The holy fool is sleeping on the porch, a star is looking at him. And touched by an angelic wing, the Bell spoke, not in an alarming, menacing voice, but saying goodbye forever. And they leave the monastery, having given away the ancient vestments, the miracle workers and saints, leaning on their sticks. Seraphim - to graze the rural herd in the forests of Sarov, Anna - to Kashin, no longer a prince, to tug at the thorny flax. The Mother of God sees off, wraps her Son in a scarf, dropped by an old beggar woman at the Lord's porch.

By using in the first line of the poem such a form of intertextuality as a quotation from the Psalter (“...worship the Lord in His holy court” (Psalm XXVIII, 2 and KhSU, 9), the author consciously emphasizes the commonality of “his” and “alien” texts, creating impression of lamentation style.

The possibility of projecting the dates of Akhmatova’s biography and life situations onto other cultural and historical events through the use of proper names takes “The Lamentation” beyond a specific time space. Let us remember that Seraphim, a monk of the Sarov Hermitage, was canonized in 1903; Anna, the wife of the Grand Duke of Tver Mikhail Yaroslavich, after the execution of her husband in 1318, became a nun and moved to Kashin to live with her son, and was canonized in 1909. Thus, the correlation between the beginning of the 20th and the beginning of the 14th centuries represents “one of the rings of return” of the symbolist idea of “eternal return”.

People of the Silver Age lived with a sense of the co-presence of other centuries and cultures in their lives.

Traces of two terrible wars of the 20th century are on almost every page of the poems of Anna Akhmatova, accustomed to losses, courageously ready for trials.

The tragedies that befell the people were always perceived by the poetess as personal. This was her position during the period of the imperialist war, when she created a number of poems ("July 1914", "Consolation", "Prayer"), imbued with sincere pain and compassion, taking the form of laments and prayers. Pictures of the people's grief experienced by her ("July 1914") are written with soul-touching lyricism:

The sweet smell of juniper flies from the burning forests. Soldiers are moaning over the guys, A widow's cry is ringing through the village.

During the Great Patriotic War, this genre again turns out to be emotionally and aesthetically significant for the poet. Laments are specifically women's poetry, so they are constructed as a monologue on behalf of a simple Russian woman, whose life has been invaded by the war. The biographical basis of Akhmatova’s “cries” makes the lamentation dramatically rich, filled with heartfelt feeling. Voplenitsa usually acts as an “interpreter of someone else’s grief,” and in this sense, Akhmatova turned out to be close in spirit to the poetics of this particular folklore genre. The process of revival of crying (lamentation) during the war years occurred because it turned out to be the form that could express and accommodate emotions understandable to all the people. Filled with high pathos, “Lamentation” (1944) by Akhmatova was a poetic monument to the fallen Leningraders:

I won’t wash away the Leningrad misfortune with my hands, I won’t wash it away with tears, I won’t bury it in the ground.<...>Not with a glance, not with a hint, Not with a word, not with a reproach, I will remember with a bow to the ground In a green field.

The poem is built on the traditional image of inescapable grief, “grief”, traditional for folk poetics.

Of particular importance in lamentations are the motives of fate, grief, death, and separation. But at the same time, lamentation as a genre contains a certain

division, concreteness, this is a lyrical monologue about the present. Akhmatova’s “Lamentation” was also written in this stylistic vein. The “timeless” motif of misfortune acquires a local and temporal correlation: “I will not separate the Leningrad misfortune with my hands.” Starting from the imagery of the folk proverb “I’ll sweep away someone else’s misfortune with my hand, but I won’t put my mind to mine,” Akhmatova creates an image of the people’s grief at the same time as her own.

A poem dedicated to Leningrad children sounds like a folk cry.

Cries and lamentations were performed by people who were called mourners. These were predominantly women, although among the Kurds and Serbs the cries were performed exclusively by men. They were specifically invited to mourn a deceased relative or express grief over the outbreak of a war or natural disaster (drought, flood, etc.). Crying and lamentation have existed since ancient times: they are mentioned in the Bible and took place in Ancient Greece.

How did the ritual of crying originate?

Mourning is a whole ritual. The mourning tradition was especially developed in the North of Rus'. There are funeral lamentations, recruitment lamentations, and wedding lamentations. Funeral and memorial laments and recruitment laments are close to each other in content. They mourn a relative who has died or is leaving for military service. At the same time, leaving for military service was analogous to the death of a person during his lifetime, because they were taken into service for almost their entire life. Funeral lamentations expressed the grief of relatives who had lost a deceased person.

In wedding lamentations, the bride mourns her maiden will, which she is deprived of when she gets married. These are conditional laments. It was believed that the bride must cry before the wedding: she was burying her former unmarried life. The ceremony required the tears of the bride.

There are also everyday laments and lamentations, in which one laments, for example, a crop failure, the consequences of a fire, flood, etc.

Examples of crying in literature

An example of crying is Yaroslavna’s crying on the walls of Putivl, described in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” where the princess mourns the dead soldiers who did not return from a military campaign. Lamentations are a pagan tradition in which ideas about death do not correspond to similar ideas in Christianity. After death, the human soul turns into a “little bird”, the person rests in a coffin, soars in the clouds, etc. Dying is conveyed in the images of a freezing tree or a sunset. That is why the church has been struggling with mourning for a long time, trying to eradicate among the people the habit of greatly mourning the dead. However, it was not possible to eradicate the crying at all.

Plachi first began to study V.A. Dashkov. A well-known collection of laments is the collection of Rybnikov “Songs” (part III), Metlinsky “South Russian Songs”, 1854. However, the collection of E.V. is recognized as the most complete collection of lamentations. Barsova “Lamentations of the Northern Region”, 1872; “Funeral, funerary and gravestone laments”, 1882 and many others. E.V. Barsov recorded cries and lamentations from the dictation of one of the most skilled “prisoners” of the Russian North, Irina Fedosova.

What is "Crying"? How to spell this word correctly. Concept and interpretation.

Cry- represents a series of modified respiratory movements with accompanying special facial expressions and lacrimation...

Lamentations (lamentation, lamentation, lamentation, howling, howling, screaming, golosba, golosba) is a genre of ritual folklore consisting of complaints and laments, which were considered traditionally obligatory elements of some family rituals, mainly associated with tragic circumstances.
Lamentations express grief over a specific event (the death of a loved one, war, natural disaster, etc.). The lamentations reflected the ritual itself, during which lamentations were performed and expressed the emotional state of its participants. The content of lamentations could include a request, a command, a reproach, a spell, thanksgiving, an apology, a lament. The role of lamentation, which helped to vent feelings of grief, was especially important.
In most cultures, lamentations were performed only by women (solo or alternately), although some peoples (Kurds, Serbs) had specific male laments. From time immemorial, special experts in chanting have stood out among the people - voplenitsy (other names: mourners, lamenters, chanters, chanters, poets). Performing lamentations became their profession.
In the Russian folk tradition, lamentations form a vast area of “weeping culture” (T. A. Bernshtam), genetically correlated with rites of passage.

Emergence

The genre of lamentations appeared in an era when people were characterized by mythological, animistic and magical ideas, which formed the basis of the specific poetics of lamentations. Over time, such ideas underwent changes or were completely lost, remaining at the level of poetic imagery and symbolism. Some researchers believe that lamentations had a magical meaning and purpose - to protect oneself from the mysterious existence of death, from the harmful effects of the deceased (or “liminal creature”), and later began to serve the expression of human feelings. Thus, the parable loses its mythological and epic character, acquiring lyrical elements mixed with everyday phenomena. The genre of lamentations is genetically linked to ancient customs and originally arose in funeral rites. This is explained by the understanding of the wedding ceremony as a “conventional funeral”, which is based on the idea of the death of the bride in one capacity and rebirth in another. V.Ya. Propp pointed out this: “The fairy tale retained traces of a once widespread rite of passage for youth. Its main content was, as it were, a transition to a new state, to a different, more mature age category, and this in a number of cases was understood as temporary death.”

Object of lamentation

The object of the lamentation is the tragic in life, therefore the lyrical principle is strongly expressed in them. Emotional tension determined the peculiarities of the poetics: the abundance of exclamatory-interrogative constructions, exclamatory particles, synonymous repetitions, stringing of similar syntactic structures, unity of beginnings, expressive word formations, etc. The melody in lamentations is poorly expressed, but sobs, groans, bows, etc. played a big role. Lamentations were created on behalf of the person to whom the ceremony is dedicated (bride, recruit), or on behalf of his relatives. In form they were a monologue or a lyrical address.

Types of lamentations

Funeral lamentations- lamentations for the deceased. Even within the same people they are not homogeneous. Olonets funeral lamentations are rich in epic elements, while Siberian ones are more lyrical. The themes of funeral lamentations are grief for the deceased, mostly a relative, and sometimes not a relative (about a neighbor, an orphan, etc.). The content of lamentations is a poeticized description of the deceased, memories of him, poeticization of nature, symbolism of death, soul, grief, share, a story about one’s own misfortunes, loneliness, the melancholy of the mourner or the family of the deceased. Among the lamentations there are different: gravestone, funeral and gravestone lamentations.
The main context of lamentations is the funeral rite, which sets the basic parameters of the genre and, above all, its poetic and sound symbolism - the most important property of lamentations is that they are clearly audible to the world of the dead. From this point of view, “the performance of lamentations in other rites and ritualized situations is always, to a certain extent, a reference to a funeral” (Bayburin 1985, p. 65).
In folk culture, there were stable prohibitions and regulations regulating the execution of lamentations over the deceased. One of the most important is temporary: it was believed that wailing could only be done during daylight hours. Excessive crying for the dead was also limited, since inconsolable sobs “flood” the dead in the “other” world. The performance of lamentations by children and unmarried girls (with the exception of the daughter of the deceased) was prohibited.

Wedding lamentations
Wedding lamentations are texts sung by the bride, her parents and relatives, covering a range of topics close to her (during betrothal, sewing a dowry, at gatherings, while unbraiding her braids, especially just before the wedding), describing her experiences and feelings.
Wedding lamentations are more diverse in theme (themes of separation, memories of girlhood, sadness about the future) and are strongly associated with song lyrics. They are distinguished from funeral ones by the greater convention and variability of stereotypical formulas and themes within the same text and ritual. This is due to the fact that they were not only a natural expression of tragic experiences, but also a way of expressing a certain ritual role. Focusing on the ritual side of the ritual, K.V. Chistov subdivided the first type of lament into conspiratorial lamentation, guest lamentation, bath lamentation, wedding lamentation itself, and lamentation of farewell to “beauty.”

Recruit, soldier's lamentations, i.e. lamentations for a husband, son, or brother being given up as a soldier. Russian recruitment lamentations, created by the terrible conditions first of Peter the Great, and later of the 25-year Nicholas military service, are a continuous groan, expressing the horror of the peasants at the recruitment, cruel treatment of the soldier, shackles - a frequent companion of the soldiery - bars, judges, people's assessors and everything apparatus of the tsarist regime. In this regard, recruit laments are expressions of sharp social protest.

Everyday extra-ritual lamentations, which could have been formed by women in difficult situations (for example, after a fire, during hard work).

Method of performing lamentations

The method of performing lamentations was based on improvisation, since each time the lamentation was addressed to a specific person and was supposed to reveal specific features of his life in its content. Lamentations functioned as one-time texts, created anew with each performance. However, they actively used verbal formulas accumulated by tradition, individual lines or groups of lines. Traditional images of oral poetry, stable stereotypes passed from one work to another, reflected the mental mood of a person in moments of grief and sadness. Lamentation is an improvisation using stable, traditional forms and under the influence of content that is homogeneous in idea, once cast into these forms.

Contrary to the opinion of some researchers, lamentations are not free improvisation, although they allow for a large share of individual creativity of the lamenters.
They are built from two or three parts (“conception” and “offensive verses”, according to the terminology of the lamenters themselves), are rich in general cliched formulas, use comparison and inversion as the predominant methods, and are always composed of verses. The lamentations are performed in a drawn-out, recitative monotonous melody with a long fermato at the end of each verse, and the end of the verse ends with a sob, natural or skillfully imitated.

An important feature of lamentations is improvisation. Lamentations are always performed differently, and in this case we are not talking about the usual variation of a stable text in traditional culture. Each lament is formed simultaneously during the ritual. Although the mourner actively uses “commonplaces” characteristic of the local tradition of lamentations, each cry she generates is unique. The ritual context of funeral laments determined the specific nature of their poetic language. Lamentations had to simultaneously express a high degree of emotional stress (inconsolable grief, intensity of mournful feelings), have the characteristic appearance of a spontaneous speech act, and satisfy cruel ritual regulations.

Lamentation is a genre of folklore and literature. Its theme is the death of a loved one (a funeral lament), any sad event (including a national one), a dramatic change in life circumstances (wedding laments in folklore, soldiers' laments, soldiers' lamentations). Crying is a memory. The poetic genre of elegy is closely related to this genre. Crying is less common in religious poetry, including Russian spiritual poetry. There is no specific poetic form assigned to this genre.

Crying is present in all cultures without exception from ancient times to the present day. In a number of cases in literature, it is based on the repetition of the same words by analogy with folklore lament, which in the Russian tradition is also called “lamentation” (lamentation). There are also warning signs.

There is a point of view according to which “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (XII century) is a “male lament” for Igor’s army: it is a syncretic genre of “lament-glory”, which was transformed into a folklore “heroic song” and a literary “heroic poem”. In this sense, the funeral song is a specifically “female” type of lament. “Women mourn every dead person or woman. Men - only men who died in battle or under particularly tragic circumstances. The lamentations of the male cycle are characterized by the presence of heroic-epic elements in them; they speak of the masculine valor of the deceased, of decisive battles and battles...” (Rudenko M. B. Kurdish ritual poetry. Funeral lamentations. M., 1982. P. 12).

In a number of national cultures, the genre that interests us occupies one of the fixed places in the genre hierarchy. Thus, in French courtly poetry, lament coexists with canzona (song), alba (morning song), tenzona (argument), pastorella (the same as the later pastoral), ballad (within the framework of this culture - a dance song), sirventes (strophic a song dedicated to political and social topics). Apparently, literary sirventes is closely connected with folklore “male laments” and is one of the first attempts to combine the folklore basis with the requirements of a literary work.

Interesting cases of crying are found in the poetry of A. A. Akhmatova. The contamination of elements of “male” and “female” crying lies at the genre basis of the poem “Requiem”, and the dialogue of both principles is present in adjacent stanzas, forming the architectonics of the poem.