Anna Akhmatova, whose life and work we will present to you, is the literary pseudonym with which she signed her poems. This poetess was born in 1889, June 11 (23), near Odessa. Her family soon moved to Tsarskoe Selo, where Akhmatova lived until she was 16 years old. The work (briefly) of this poetess will be presented after her biography. Let's first get acquainted with the life of Anna Gorenko.
Early years
Young years were not cloudless for Anna Andreevna. Her parents separated in 1905. The mother took her daughters, sick with tuberculosis, to Evpatoria. Here, for the first time, the “wild girl” encountered the life of rough strangers and dirty cities. She also experienced a love drama and attempted to commit suicide.
Education at Kyiv and Tsarskoye Selo gymnasiums
The early youth of this poetess was marked by her studies at the Kyiv and Tsarskoye Selo gymnasiums. She took her last class in Kyiv. After this, the future poetess studied jurisprudence in Kyiv, as well as philology in St. Petersburg, at the Higher Women's Courses. In Kyiv she learned Latin, which later allowed her to become fluent Italian, read in the original Dante. However, Akhmatova soon lost interest in legal disciplines, so she went to St. Petersburg, continuing her studies in historical and literary courses.
First poems and publications
The first poems, in which Derzhavin’s influence is still noticeable, were written by the young schoolgirl Gorenko, when she was only 11 years old. The first publications appeared in 1907.
In the 1910s, from the very beginning, Akhmatova regularly began to publish in Moscow and St. Petersburg publications. After the “Workshop of Poets” was created (in 1911), a literary association, she served as its secretary.
Marriage, trip to Europe
Anna Andreevna was married to N.S. from 1910 to 1918. Gumilev, also a famous Russian poet. She met him while studying at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium. After which Akhmatova committed in 1910-1912, where she became friends with the Italian artist who created her portrait. Also at the same time she visited Italy.
Appearance of Akhmatova
Nikolai Gumilyov introduced his wife to the literary and artistic environment, where her name acquired early significance. Not only Anna Andreevna’s poetic style became popular, but also her appearance. Akhmatova amazed her contemporaries with her majesty and royalty. She was shown attention like a queen. The appearance of this poetess inspired not only A. Modigliani, but also such artists as K. Petrov-Vodkin, A. Altman, Z. Serebryakova, A. Tyshler, N. Tyrsa, A. Danko (the work of Petrov-Vodkin is presented below) .
The first collection of poems and the birth of a son
In 1912, a significant year for the poetess, two important events occurred in her life. The first collection of Anna Andreevna’s poems, entitled “Evening,” was published, which marked her work. Akhmatova also gave birth to a son, the future historian, Nikolaevich - an important event in her personal life.
The poems included in the first collection are flexible in the images used in them and clear in composition. They forced Russian criticism to say that a new talent had arisen in poetry. Although Akhmatova’s “teachers” are such symbolist masters as A. A. Blok and I. F. Annensky, her poetry was perceived from the very beginning as Acmeistic. In fact, together with O. E. Mandelstam and N. S. Gumilev, the poetess at the beginning of 1910 formed the core of this new movement in poetry that had emerged at that time.
The next two collections, the decision to stay in Russia
The first collection was followed by a second book entitled “The Rosary” (in 1914), and three years later, in September 1917, the collection “The White Flock” was published, the third in her work. The October Revolution did not force the poetess to emigrate, although mass emigration began at that time. One after another, people close to Akhmatova left Russia: A. Lurie, B. Antrep, as well as O. Glebova-Studeikina, her friend from her youth. However, the poetess decided to stay in “sinful” and “deaf” Russia. A sense of responsibility to her country, connection with the Russian land and language prompted Anna Andreevna to enter into dialogue with those who decided to leave her. For many years, those who left Russia continued to justify their emigration to Akhmatova. In particular, R. Gul argues with her, V. Frank and G. Adamovich turn to Anna Andreevna.
Difficult time for Anna Andreevna Akhmatova
At this time, her life changed dramatically, which reflected her work. Akhmatova worked in the library at the Agronomic Institute, and in the early 1920s she managed to publish two more collections of poetry. These were "Plantain", released in 1921, as well as "Anno Domini" (translated - "In the Year of the Lord", released in 1922). For 18 years after this, her works did not appear in print. There were various reasons for this: on the one hand, this was the execution of N.S. Gumileva, ex-husband, who was accused of participating in a conspiracy against the revolution; on the other hand, the rejection of the poetess’s work by Soviet criticism. During the years of this forced silence, Anna Andreevna spent a lot of time studying the work of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
Visit to Optina Pustyn
Akhmatova associated the change in her “voice” and “handwriting” with the mid-1920s, with a visit to Optina Pustyn in May 1922 and a conversation with Elder Nektariy. Probably this conversation greatly influenced the poetess. Akhmatova was related on her mother’s side to A. Motovilov, who was a lay novice of Seraphim of Sarov. She accepted through generations the idea of redemption and sacrifice.
Second marriage
The turning point in Akhmatova’s fate was also associated with the personality of V. Shileiko, who became her second husband. He was an orientalist who studied the culture of such ancient countries as Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt. Her personal life with this helpless and despotic man did not work out, but the poetess attributed to his influence the increase in philosophical, restrained notes in her work.
Life and work in the 1940s
A collection entitled "From Six Books" appeared in 1940. He returned to a short time into modern literature of that time such a poetess as Anna Akhmatova. Her life and work at this time were quite dramatic. Akhmatova was found in Leningrad by the Great Patriotic War. She was evacuated from there to Tashkent. However, in 1944 the poetess returned to Leningrad. In 1946, subjected to unfair and cruel criticism, she was expelled from the Writers' Union.
Return to Russian literature
After this event, the next decade in the poetess’s work was marked only by the fact that at that time Anna Akhmatova was engaged in literary translation. The Soviet authorities were not interested in her creativity. L.N. Gumilyov, her son, was serving his sentence in forced labor camps at that time as a political criminal. The return of Akhmatova’s poems to Russian literature took place only in the second half of the 1950s. Since 1958, collections of this poetess's poetry begin to be published again. “Poem Without a Hero” was completed in 1962, having been created over the course of 22 years. Anna Akhmatova died in 1966, on March 5th. The poetess was buried near St. Petersburg, in Komarov. Her grave is shown below.
Acmeism in the works of Akhmatova
Akhmatova, whose work today is one of the pinnacles of Russian poetry, later treated her first book of poetry rather coolly, highlighting only a single line in it: “... drunk with the sound of a voice similar to yours.” Mikhail Kuzmin, however, ended his preface to this collection with the words that a young, new poet is coming to us, having all the data to become real. In many ways, the poetics of "Evening" predetermined the theoretical program of Acmeism - a new movement in literature, to which such a poet as Anna Akhmatova is often attributed. Her work reflects many of the characteristic features of this direction.
The photo below was taken in 1925.
Acmeism arose as a reaction to the extremes of the Symbolist style. For example, an article by V. M. Zhirmunsky, a famous literary scholar and critic, about the work of representatives of this movement was called as follows: “Overcoming Symbolism.” They contrasted the mystical distances and “purple worlds” with life in this world, “here and now.” Moral relativism and various shapes new Christianity were replaced by "values of an unshakable rock."
The theme of love in the poetess’s work
Akhmatova came to the literature of the 20th century, its first quarter, with the most traditional theme for world poetry - the theme of love. However, its solution in the work of this poetess is fundamentally new. Akhmatova’s poems are far from the sentimental female lyrics represented in the 19th century by such names as Karolina Pavlova, Yulia Zhadovskaya, Mirra Lokhvitskaya. They are also far from the “ideal”, abstract lyricism characteristic of the love poetry of the Symbolists. In this sense, she relied mainly not on Russian lyrics, but on the prose of the 19th century by Akhmatov. Her work was innovative. O. E. Mandelstam, for example, wrote that Akhmatova brought the complexity of the 19th century Russian novel to the lyrics. An essay on her work could begin with this thesis.
In “Evening,” love feelings appeared in different guises, but the heroine invariably appeared rejected, deceived, and suffering. K. Chukovsky wrote about her that the first to discover that being unloved is poetic was Akhmatova (an essay on her work, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” created by the same author, largely contributed to her persecution when the poems of this poetess not published). Unhappy love was seen as a source of creativity, not a curse. The three parts of the collection are named respectively “Love”, “Deception” and “Muse”. Fragile femininity and grace were combined in Akhmatova’s lyrics with a courageous acceptance of her suffering. Of the 46 poems included in this collection, almost half were dedicated to separation and death. This is no coincidence. In the period from 1910 to 1912, the poetess was possessed by a feeling of short life, she had a presentiment of death. By 1912, two of her sisters had died of tuberculosis, so Anna Gorenko (Akhmatova, whose life and work we are considering) believed that the same fate would befall her. However, unlike the Symbolists, she did not connect separation and death with feelings of hopelessness and melancholy. These moods gave rise to the experience of the beauty of the world.
They took shape in the collection “Evening” and were finally formed, first in “Rosary”, then in “White Flock” distinctive features style of this poetess.
Motives of conscience and memory
Anna Andreevna’s intimate lyrics are deeply historical. Already in “The Rosary” and “Evening”, along with the theme of love, two other main motives arise - conscience and memory.
The “fateful minutes” that marked our country’s history (the First World War, which began in 1914) coincided with a difficult period in the life of the poetess. She developed tuberculosis in 1915, a hereditary disease in her family.
"Pushkinism" by Akhmatova
The motives of conscience and memory in “The White Flock” become even stronger, after which they become dominant in her work. The poetess's poetic style evolved in 1915-1917. Akhmatova’s peculiar “Pushkinism” is increasingly mentioned in criticism. Its essence is artistic completeness, precision of expression. The presence of a “quotation layer” with numerous echoes and allusions to both contemporaries and predecessors: O. E. Mandelstam, B. L. Pasternak, A. A. Blok is also noted. All the spiritual wealth of the culture of our country stood behind Akhmatova, and she rightly felt like its heir.
The theme of the homeland in Akhmatova’s work, attitude to the revolution
The dramatic events of the poetess’s life could not help but be reflected in her work. Akhmatova, whose life and work took place during a difficult period for our country, perceived the years as a disaster. The old country, in her opinion, no longer exists. The theme of the homeland in Akhmatova’s work is presented, for example, in the collection “Anno Domini”. The section that opens this collection, published in 1922, is called “After Everything.” The epigraph to the entire book was the line “in those fabulous years...” by F. I. Tyutchev. There is no longer a homeland for the poetess...
However, for Akhmatova, the revolution is also retribution for the sinful life of the past, retribution. Even though the lyrical heroine did not do evil herself, she feels that she is involved in a common guilt, so Anna Andreevna is ready to share the difficult share of her people. The homeland in Akhmatova’s work is obliged to atone for its guilt.
Even the title of the book, translated as “In the Year of the Lord,” suggests that the poetess perceives her era as God’s will. Usage historical parallels and biblical motifs becomes one of the ways to comprehend artistically what is happening in Russia. Akhmatova increasingly resorts to them (for example, the poems “Cleopatra”, “Dante”, “Bible Verses”).
In the lyrics of this great poetess, “I” at this time turns into “we”. Anna Andreevna speaks on behalf of “many”. Every hour not only of this poetess, but also of her contemporaries, will be justified precisely by the word of the poet.
These are the main themes of Akhmatova’s work, both eternal and characteristic of the era of this poetess’ life. She is often compared to another - Marina Tsvetaeva. Both of them are today the canons of women's lyrics. However, the work of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva not only has much in common, but also differs in many ways. Schoolchildren are often asked to write essays on this topic. In fact, it is interesting to speculate about why it is almost impossible to confuse a poem written by Akhmatova with a work created by Tsvetaeva. However, this is another topic...
AKHMATOVA, ANNA ANDREEVNA(real name Gorenko) (1889–1966) – Russian poetess.
Born on June 11 (23), 1889 near Odessa in the family of a hereditary nobleman, retired naval mechanical engineer A.A. Gorenko. On the side of her mother I.E. Stogova, A. Akhmatova was distantly related to Anna Bunina, the first Russian poetess. Akhmatova considered the legendary Horde Khan Akhmat to be her maternal ancestor, on whose behalf she formed her pseudonym.
Akhmatova spent her childhood and adolescence in Tsarskoye Selo, the town of young Pushkin. Here Akhmatova found “the edge of the era in which Pushkin lived”: she saw the Tsarskoye Selo waterfalls, sung by the “swarthy youth”, “the green, damp splendor of the parks”. She also remembered St. Petersburg in the 19th century. - “pre-tram, horse-drawn, horse-drawn, horse-drawn, rumbling and grinding, covered from head to toe with signs.” Her childhood remained in her memory with the splendor of Tsarskoye Selo and the freedom of the Black Sea (she spent every summer near Sevastopol, where she received the nickname “wild girl” for her courage and willfulness).
“The last great representative of the great Russian noble culture, Akhmatova absorbed all this culture and transformed it into music,” N. Struve responded to her death.
The years of childhood and adolescence were not cloudless for Akhmatova: in 1905 her parents separated, her mother took her daughters with tuberculosis to Yevpatoria, and here the “wild girl” encountered the life of “foreign, rough and dirty cities,” experienced a love drama, and tried to commit suicide. Akhmatova took her last year at the gymnasium in Kyiv, then entered the law faculty of the Higher Women's Courses, where she learned Latin, which later allowed her to become fluent in Italian and read Dante in the original. Akhmatova soon lost interest in legal disciplines and continued her education at Raev’s Higher Historical and Literary Courses in St. Petersburg.
In 1910, Akhmatova married Nikolai Gumilev and went to Paris for a month. This was her first acquaintance with Europe, from which, after the October Revolution, Akhmatova found herself cut off for many decades, without ceasing to talk with her contemporaries in the pan-European intellectual space. “Space and time were taken away from us,” she told N. Struve in 1965. However, Akhmatova herself never left the “airways” of European culture, its space and time, and did not weaken the “roll call of voices.”
Nikolai Gumilyov introduced Akhmatova to the literary and artistic environment of St. Petersburg, in which her name early gained significance. Not only Akhmatova’s poetic style became popular, but also her appearance: she amazed her contemporaries with her royalty, majesty, and, as a queen, she was given special attention. Akhmatova’s appearance inspired artists: A. Modigliani, N. Altman, K. Petrov-Vodkin, Z. Serebryakova, A. Danko, N. Tyrsa, A. Tyshler.
Akhmatova's first collection Evening appeared in 1912 and was immediately noticed by critics. Also in 1912, Akhmatova’s only son, Lev Gumilev, was born.
The years of Akhmatova’s entry into literature were a time of crisis in symbolism. “In 1910, a crisis of symbolism clearly emerged and aspiring poets no longer joined this movement. Some went to Acmeism, others to Futurism. I became an Acmeist. Our rebellion against symbolism is quite legitimate, because we felt like people of the twentieth century and did not want to remain in the previous one,” Akhmatova wrote, adding that Acmeism grew out of Nikolai Gumilyov’s observations of her poetry. Akhmatova's choice in favor of the Acmeist school was a choice in favor of a new, more alarming and dramatic and, ultimately, more humane worldview. In the very first collection, in the “poor poems of an empty girl” - as Akhmatova, who had gone through the horrors of Soviet reality, spoke of them in her declining years, the Eternal Femininity of the Symbolists was replaced by earthly femininity. “She writes poetry as if in front of a man, but it should be as if in front of God,” commented A. Blok on the release of Akhmatova’s poems.
Love feelings appeared in Evening in different guises, but the heroine invariably turned out to be suffering, deceived, rejected. “She was the first to discover that it is poetic to be unloved,” K. Chukovsky wrote about Akhmatova. Akhmatova’s unhappy love was seen not as a curse, but as a source of creativity: the three parts of the collection were called Love, Deception, Muse. Grace and fragile femininity were combined in Akhmatova’s poetry with an unfemininely masculine acceptance of suffering. In a prayerfully focused atmosphere Evenings pain and grace merged: the poet gave thanks for what is usually cursed. Hamlet's words ( Hamlet), driving Ophelia “to a monastery or to marry a fool”, are perceived with resentment, vindictive memory ( Princes always say this...), but a different note immediately sounds - admiration for the royalty of this unjust speech: But I remember this speech - / Let it flow for a hundred centuries in a row / Like an ermine robe from the shoulders. The glorification of pain opened and famous poem Gray-Eyed King: Glory to you, hopeless pain! / The gray-eyed king died yesterday.
One of the demands of Acmeists is to look at the world through the eyes of a discoverer. But in Evening there was no rejoicing of the first man surveying his possessions: Akhmatova’s gaze was not welcoming, but farewell. By 1912, she had lost two sisters to tuberculosis, and young Anna Gorenko had every reason to believe that the same fate awaited her. “And who would have believed that I was planned for such a long time, and why I didn’t know this,” she admitted, having crossed the sixty-year mark. But in 1910–1912, Akhmatova was possessed by a feeling of short days, she lived with a premonition of imminent death. Not only the popular poem, but all the lyrics of that time glorified the “last meeting.” Of the 46 poems included in Evening, almost half is devoted to death and separation. But, unlike the symbolist poets, Akhmatova did not associate death and separation with feelings of melancholy and hopelessness. The expectation of death was born in Evening not inconsolable grief, but a sunset experience of the beauty of the world, the ability to “notice everything as new.” “In a moment of extreme danger, in one short second, we remember as much as our memory cannot imagine in a long hour,” prefaced Evening M. Kuzmin. Everyday little things turned into “spiritualized objectivity” in Akhmatova’s poetry; in amazingly accurate, capacious details “the pulse of living human destiny began to beat” (Vyach. Ivanov). The most famous of these parts is the glove in Song of the last meeting, which embodied an internally dramatic gesture. “Akhmatova gives with one blow all feminine and all lyrical confusion - all empiricism! – with one stroke of the pen perpetuates the primordial first gesture of a woman and a poet,” wrote about Song last meeting M. Tsvetaeva. The origins of Akhmatova’s sharp and unique poetic form are in the “psychological symbolism” of In. Annensky, in Russian psychological prose of the 19th century - Anna Karenina L. Tolstoy, Noble nest I. Turgenev, novels by F. Dostoevsky.
In May 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Akhmatova’s second collection was published Beads. She considered 1914 a turning point in the fate of Russia, the beginning of “not the calendar, the real twentieth century.” “It seemed like a small book love lyrics the aspiring author had to drown in world events. Time decreed otherwise,” she wrote in her autobiographical notes. From its introduction in 1914 to 1923 Beads reprinted 9 times - a rare success for a “beginning author.” The collection continued the line Evenings: great internal concentration, tension in the psychological pattern, laconicism, accuracy of observations, refusal to sing verse, commitment colloquial speech, muted colors, restrained tones. The name itself Beads indicated an “overwhelm” of mental states that acquired completeness and tension in prayer. In many poems Rosary– generalization of personal experiences in an epigrammatic formula close to an aphorism: How many requests does your beloved always have! / A woman who has fallen out of love has no requests, Real tenderness cannot be confused with anything, and it is quiet, And not to know that from happiness and glory / Hearts become hopelessly decrepit. As in Evening, V Rosary The heroine’s spiritual drama - her abandonment, loneliness - was not revealed, nor was it transformed into a detailed story: Akhmatova spoke more about the situation of what was happening, thereby solving the most difficult task of combining lyrics and a psychological story. The feeling was embodied in the phenomena of the external world; details, details became evidence of emotional experiences.
Akhmatova’s attraction to the “gift of heroic illumination of man,” to the strict form and restraint of the narrative was noted by one of her first critics, N. Nedobrovo. In 1915 he wrote about the author Evenings And Rosary: “The abundance of poetically translated torments does not indicate tearfulness over the trivialities of life, but reveals a lyrical soul, rather hard than too soft, rather cruel than tearful, and clearly dominant rather than oppressed.” Akhmatova highly appreciated this remark, which predicted her future fate: a woman who wrote mainly about unhappy love, in the “frenzied years” of Stalin’s terror, proudly and selflessly spoke on behalf of the “hundred-million-strong people.”
After N. Gumilev left for the front in 1914, Akhmatova spent a lot of time in the Tver province on the Gumilevs’ Slepnevo estate. Here the Old Russian, Orthodox fold characteristic of her nature became more clearly visible. Previously unfamiliar with the village, she first “came out under open sky”, came into contact with the “scarce land”, the peasantry, and the “dim expanses” of Russian nature.
For Gumilyov, Slepnevo is “such a boring, not golden antiquity.” Akhmatova compared Slepnevo to an arch in architecture through which she entered the life of her people: “At first small, then more and more...”. Slepnev’s solemn simplicity did not relieve suffering and the tragic perception of reality: in a poem of that time, “the smell of bread” and “melancholy” are in the same line. Sorrow increasingly took possession of Akhmatova; it is no coincidence that her appearance was perceived by her contemporaries as the personification of sadness and suffering. In Slepnev, Akhmatova wrote most of the poems included in the collection White flock.
White flock opened with a poem They thought we were beggars...(1915), inspired by the first military shocks and losses: the lost wealth was the feeling of the strength of life, the inviolability of its foundations. Main note White flock- pure joy of sadness. Inescapable suffering gave birth in the heroine’s soul not to despair, but to enlightenment. The epigraph from John also pointed to the enlightenment of the path of loss. Annensky: I'm burning and the road is bright at night.
IN White pack The acmeistic detail acquired a new meaning: it became a “point of departure” into the sphere of the unclear and unsaid. Akhmatova called symbolism “a phenomenon of the 19th century”; she was unaware of the disease of the Symbolists - “dropsy of large themes.” However, starting from 1914, her poetry led to “mysterious, dark villages” and delved deeper into the realm of the spirit and intuitive insights. The path of imagist objectivity turned out to be alien to the Acmeists: Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam remained faithful to the idea of high, mystical art in its essence.
IN White pack The appearance of the heroine also became different: she was given prophetic, visionary features: And for a long time my lips / Do not kiss, but prophesy. Akhmatova considered the prophetic poems in the collection Prayer, June 1914 etc. Many poems White flock had specific addressees: 17 poems were dedicated to Akhmatova’s beloved Boris Anrep, two were addressed to N.V.N. - Nikolay Nedobrovo. But unrequited love for them and earthly suffering appeared as episodes of religious ascent.
The transformation of an abandoned woman into a “prophesying wife”, the “Muse of Lamentation” was correctly assessed in 1922 by I. Ehrenburg: “The young ladies who diligently imitated Akhmatova did not understand what these folds in the bitterly clenched mouth meant. They tried on a black shawl that fell from their slightly hunched shoulders, not knowing that they were trying on a cross.” Akhmatova’s further path is a path of heavy losses and trials, the path of Yaroslavna of the 20th century, who mourned the death of Russia and her best contemporaries.
Akhmatova’s time covers the period from the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. until the mid-1960s. It was her lot to be a reliable witness to the events of the 20th century that turned the world upside down, unparalleled in their cruelty: two world wars, revolution, terror, the Leningrad blockade. Before Akhmatova’s eyes, an entire era sank into oblivion, the peaceful, pre-war, pre-revolutionary existence of Russia ceased. “In essence, no one knows what era they live in. So we didn’t know in the early 1910s that we were living on the eve of the First European War and the October Revolution,” she wrote in her autobiographical notes. Ruthless history has left no trace of the Russia that young Akhmatova knew. “We have nowhere to go back,” she said about the people of the 1910s. The Liteiny Bridge, opened in broad daylight, where, according to Akhmatova, her youth ended, separated two eras. Despite this tragic break, Akhmatova was a living symbol of the connection of times, acted as the guardian of a lost culture, and connected the 19th and 20th centuries in Russian poetry. She constantly descended into the “cellars of memory,” and in her work the pre-revolutionary era and the majestic appearance of the Neva capital came to life. But Akhmatova’s poetry did not remain chained to the 1910s: she herself repeatedly resisted attempts to “wall her up in the tens” and turn her into a decadent poetess. No, not under an alien firmament, / And not under the protection of alien wings, / I was then with my people, / Where my people, unfortunately, were"- Akhmatova defined the essence of her poetry after 1917. Poems became for her a connection with time, with new life people.
In 1918, mass emigration began: one after another, people close to Akhmatova left Russia: B. Anrep, A. Lurie, and her youth friend O. Glebova-Sudeikina. Akhmatova’s choice was different - she remained in “deaf and sinful” Russia. A feeling of connection with the Russian land, responsibility towards Russia and its language prompted her to enter into dialogue with those who abandoned the earth. Akhmatova addressed the emigrants with anger: I am not with those who abandoned the earth / To be torn apart by enemies. Self-justification of emigration to Akhmatova continued long years: R. Gul argues with Akhmatova in the book “I Carried Away Russia”, G. Adamovich and V. Frank address her. In 1917, the officer and artist B. Anrep emigrated to England, commenting on his departure: “I love the late English civilization, and not religious and political nonsense.” Akhmatova called these words “undignified speech” ( When in the anguish of suicide...). From the Tver village of Slepnevo, she answered Anrep on behalf of those remaining: You say, my country is sinful, / And I will say - your country is godless, / Even though the guilt still lies with us, / Everything can be redeemed and everything can be corrected. On January 21, Akhmatova read these lines at the matinee “About Russia,” where, against the backdrop of a statement of dishonor and shame in Russia, they struck the audience with hope for repentance and purification. Subsequently, the addressee of these verses, B. Anrep, had no doubts about the mission of Akhmatova, who recklessly remained in Bolshevik Russia: he depicted her in the image of Compassion on a mosaic in the London National Gallery and gave her features to St. Anne in the Cathedral of Christ the Master in the Irish town of Mullingar.
Among the people close to Akhmatova who remained in Russia, almost all of them joined the list of victims of the Red Terror. Nikolai Gumilyov was shot in 1921 on trumped-up charges of involvement in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The place of his burial was unknown, and Akhmatova, looking at the numerous islands on the seashore, mentally searched for his grave. Akhmatova’s only son, Lev Gumilyov, was arrested three times. O. Mandelstam, B. Pilnyak, philologist G. Gukovsky, V. Narbut, N. Punin (Akhmatova’s third husband) were innocently convicted and died in the camps. “No generation had such a fate,” Akhmatova wrote in January 1962. “Blok, Gumilev, Khlebnikov died almost simultaneously. Remizov, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich went abroad, Chaliapin, M. Chekhov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and half of the ballet were also there "
Generous in misfortune, 1921 was fruitful for Akhmatova. The St. Petersburg publishing house "Petropolis" published two of her collections - Plantain(design by M. Dobuzhinsky) and Anno Domini MSMXXI(Summer of the Lord 1921). In them, mournful solemnity, prophetic intonation and Nekrasov-like sympathy become more and more noticeable. Behind many seemingly abstract images one can read the terrible realities of revolutionary times. So in the poem Everything is plundered, betrayed, Sales…“Hungry melancholy” is not just a symbol, but a very specific reference to the “clinical famine” that gripped Petrograd in 1918–1921. But unlike Iv. Bunin, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius Akhmatova does not send loud curses to the “rabid Russia”: a plantain leaf - an offering of the northern meager land - is placed on the “black ulcer”. Putting it in the title of the collection Anno Domini date, Akhmatova emphasized the lyrical chronicle of her poems, their involvement great history. The sophisticated St. Petersburg woman conveyed the worldview of a person “not of the 20th century,” suppressed by fear, violence, and the need to live “after everything.” Akhmatova considered one of the key poems in her work To many, in which the poet’s destiny was recognized as a burden - to be the voice of many, to voice their secret thoughts. However, the man of the “era of fabrication of souls” is shown in Akhmatova’s poetry not in the worthlessness of endless humiliation and abuse, but in the biblical aura of purifying suffering: prayer, lamentation, epic and biblical verses, ballads - forms that emphasize the drama and greatness of an individual human destiny. “Time, death, repentance - this is the triad around which Akhmatova’s poetic thought revolves,” wrote philosopher V. Frank.
From 1923 to 1935, Akhmatova created almost no poetry; from 1924 she was no longer published - her persecution in criticism began, involuntarily provoked by an article by K. Chukovsky Two Russias. Akhmatova and Mayakovsky. The contrast between the guardian of the outgoing culture, Akhmatova, and the right-flank new art of Mayakovsky, on which K. Chukovsky’s article was based, turned out to be fatal for Akhmatova. Critics B. Arvatov A. Selivanovsky, S. Bobrov, G. Lelevich, V. Pertsov declared her a salon poetess, “an element ideologically alien to young proletarian literature.” During the years of forced silence, Akhmatova was engaged in translations, studied the works and life of Pushkin, and the architecture of St. Petersburg. She has carried out outstanding research in the field of Pushkin studies ( Pushkin and Nevskoe seaside, Death Pushkin and etc.). For many years, Pushkin became for Akhmatova a salvation and refuge from the horrors of history, the personification of a moral norm and harmony. Akhmatova will remain faithful to Pushkin’s behest to the artist to the end for power, for livery / Don’t bend your conscience, your thoughts / your neck- a fact that is especially noteworthy against the backdrop of the deals between Soviet writers and the authorities. Akhmatova was distinguished from many of her contemporaries by her rare ability not to succumb to the mass hypnosis of power and the illusions of the cult of personality.
She associated the change in her “handwriting” and “voice” with the mid-1920s. In May 1922 she visited Optina Pustyn and talked with Elder Nektarios. This conversation probably greatly influenced Akhmatova. On her maternal side, Akhmatova was related to A. Motovilov, a lay novice of S. Sarovsky. Through generations, she embraced the idea of sacrifice, of atonement. The turning point in Akhmatova’s fate was also connected with the personality of V. Shileiko, her second husband, an orientalist scholar who studied the culture of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. Personal life with Shileiko, despotic and helpless in everyday affairs, did not work out, but Akhmatova attributed to his influence the increase in restrained philosophical notes in her work. Shileiko brought Akhmatova to the Fountain House (Sheremetyevsky Palace), under whose roof she lived for several years.
Akhmatova called Petersburg her city. In 1915 in a poem After all somewhere there is simple life and light... Akhmatova swore love and loyalty to the “city of glory and misfortune”, its “sunless gardens”, and spoke of her readiness to share the “solemn and difficult” fate of St. Petersburg.
In the fall of 1935, when N. Punin and L. Gumilev were arrested almost simultaneously, Akhmatova began writing Requiem(1935–1940). Personal biography facts in Requiem acquired the grandeur of biblical scenes, Russia in the 1930s was likened to Dante’s Inferno, Christ was mentioned among the victims of terror, Akhmatova called herself, “the three-hundredth with the transfer,” “the archer’s wife.” Requiem occupies a special place among anti-totalitarian works. Akhmatova did not go through the camp, was not arrested, but for thirty years she “lived under the wing of death,” in anticipation of an imminent arrest and in constant fear for the fate of her son. “Shakespearean dramas - all these spectacular villainies, passions, duels - are trifles, children's games compared to the life of each of us,” Akhmatova said about her generation. IN Requiem the atrocities of the executioners or the “steep route” of the prisoner are not depicted. Requiem- a monument to Russia, in the center of the cycle is the suffering of the mother, crying for the innocent dead, the oppressive atmosphere that reigned during the years of the Yezhovshchina. At a time when in Russia, through the efforts of the authorities, a new type of woman-comrade, woman-worker and citizen was being formed, Akhmatova expressed the age-old consciousness of the Russian woman - grieving, protecting, mourning. Addressing her descendants, she bequeathed to erect a monument to her not where her happy, creative years passed, but under the “red, blind wall” of the Crosses.
In 1939, Akhmatova’s name was returned to literature for 7 years. At a reception in honor of awarding writers, Stalin asked about Akhmatova, whose poems his daughter Svetlana loved: “Where is Akhmatova? Why doesn’t he write anything?” Akhmatova was accepted into the Writers' Union, and publishing houses became interested in her. In 1940, after a 17-year break, her collection was published From six books. Akhmatova considered the sixth book not released separately Cane, which included poems 1924–1940. 1940, the year of her return to literature, was unusually fruitful for Akhmatova: a poem was written The path of all the earth (Kitezhanka), started Poem without a hero, work continued on the poem about Tsarskoye Selo Russian Trianon.“I can be called a poet of 1940,” said Akhmatova.
The war found Akhmatova in Leningrad. Together with her neighbors, she dug cracks in the Sheremetyevsky Garden, was on duty at the gates of the Fountain House, painted beams in the attic of the palace with fireproof lime, and saw the “funeral” of statues in Summer Garden. The impressions of the first days of the war and the blockade were reflected in poems First long-range in Leningrad, The birds of death stand at their zenith…, Nox. At the end of September 1941, Akhmatova was evacuated outside the blockade ring. Poem by Akhmatova Courage was published in Pravda and then reprinted many times, becoming a symbol of resistance and fearlessness. In 1943, Akhmatova received the medal “For the Defense of Leningrad.”
Akhmatova’s poems during the war period are devoid of images of front-line heroism, written from the perspective of a woman who remained in the rear. Compassion and great sorrow were combined in them with a call to courage, a civic note: pain was melted into strength. “It would be strange to call Akhmatova a war poet,” wrote B. Pasternak. “But the predominance of thunderstorms in the atmosphere of the century gave her work a touch of civic significance.”
During the war years, a collection of Akhmatova’s poems was published in Tashkent, and a lyrical and philosophical tragedy was written Enuma Elish (When at the top...), which tells about the cowardly and mediocre arbiters of human destinies, the beginning and end of the world.
In April 1946 she performed in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. Her appearance on stage caused an ovation that lasted 15 minutes. The audience gave a standing ovation. Akhmatova was not only returned to literature - she personified what was saved from captivity Russian word, the unbending Russian spirit. The Victory, paid for by millions of lives, gave people hope for the beginning of a new page in the history of the country. At the same time, the post-war respite was ending: the “summer of illusions” was followed by the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) About the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”.
The resolution marked the “siege” of the intelligentsia, who felt a hint of spiritual freedom during the war years. The report on this resolution was made by the Secretary of the Central Committee A. Zhdanov, M. Zoshchenko and A. Akhmatova were chosen as victims. Akhmatova called September 1946 the fourth “clinical famine”: she was expelled from the joint venture. The resolution was included in school curriculum, and several generations read that Akhmatova was “either a nun or a harlot.” In 1949, Lev Gumilyov, who went through the war and reached Berlin, was again arrested. Akhmatova wrote a cycle of poems praising Stalin Glory to the world(1950). Such poems were sincerely created by many, including talented poets - K. Simonov, A. Tvardovsky, O. Berggolts. Akhmatova had to step over herself. She expressed her true attitude towards Stalin in a poem:
I will dream of you as a black sheep,
On unsteady, dry feet,
I’ll come up and bleat and howl:
“Did you have a sweet dinner, padishah?
You hold the universe like beads
We preserve the bright will of Allah...
And did my son like it?
For you and your children?”
But the sacrifice was not accepted: Lev Gumilev was released only in 1956.
The last years of Akhmatova’s life after her son’s return from prison were relatively prosperous. Akhmatova, who never had her own shelter and wrote all her poems “on the edge of the windowsill,” finally received housing. An opportunity has arisen to publish a large collection Time running, which included Akhmatova’s poems spanning half a century. She decided to trust paper Requiem, kept in her memory and in the memory of close friends for twenty years. By the early 1960s, a “magic choir” of Akhmatova’s students had formed, making her last years happy: around her they read new poems, talked about poetry. Akhmatova’s circle of students included E. Rein, A. Naiman, D. Bobyshev, I. Brodsky. Akhmatova was nominated for the Nobel Prize. In 1964, in Italy, she was awarded the Etna-Taormina literary prize, and six months later in London, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Abroad, Russian culture, the great Russia of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were seen and celebrated in Akhmatova.
IN last decade Akhmatova’s life was occupied with the theme of time - its movement, running. “Where does the time go?” - a question that sounded special for the poet, who outlived almost all his friends, pre-revolutionary Russia, the Silver Age. What is war, what is plague? - the end is imminent to them, / They have almost pronounced the sentence. / But who will protect us from the horror that / Was once called the run of time?– wrote Akhmatova. This philosophical attitude was not understood by many of her contemporaries, who focused on the bloody events of the recent past. In particular, N.Ya. Mandelstam accused Akhmatova of “abandoning our earthly affairs” and “senile reconciliation” with the past. But Akhmatova’s last poems were not inspired by “senile reconciliation”; what was always characteristic of her poetry emerged more clearly: secret knowledge, faith in the priority of unknown forces over the material appearance of the world, the discovery of the heavenly in the earthly.
Akhmatova’s later work is a “procession of shadows.” In a loop The rose hips are blooming, Midnight verses, Wreath of the Dead Akhmatova mentally evokes the shadows of her friends - living and dead. The word "shadow", often found in early lyrics Akhmatova, was now filled with a new meaning: freedom from earthly barriers, partitions of time. A meeting with the “lovely shadows of the distant past,” a providential lover never met on earth, and comprehension of the “secret of secrets” are the main motives of her “fruitful autumn.” Since 1946, many of Akhmatova’s poems are dedicated to Isaiah Berlin, an English diplomat, philologist and philosopher, who visited her in 1945 at the Fountain House. Conversations with Berlin became for Akhmatova an outlet into the living intellectual space of Europe, they set in motion new creative forces, she mythologized their relationship, and associated the beginning of the Cold War with their meeting.
For twenty-two years, Akhmatova worked on the final work - A poem without a hero. The poem led back to 1913 - to the origins of Russian and world tragedy, drawing a line under the events of the 20th century. In the poem, Akhmatova distinguished three layers, calling it “a box with a triple bottom.” The first layer is a date with the past, mourning the dead. On a magical, cherished night, the heroine calls together “lovely shadows.” The main participants of the St. Petersburg masquerade of the 1910s take the stage - O. Glebova-Sudeikina, Vs. Knyazev, who shot himself because of his love for her, A. Blok. The death of the cornet (Vs. Knyazev) is a crime for which the blame is placed on the “Petersburg devil”. In the poem, Akhmatova reflects on what overtook Russia in the 20th century. retribution and is looking for the reason in the fateful 1914, in that mystical sensuality, tavern frenzy into which the artistic intelligentsia and people of its circle plunged. The second plot is the sound of time, sometimes the barely audible, sometimes heavy steps of the Commander. The main character of the poem is time, which is why it remains without a hero. But on a deeper reading Poem without a hero appears as a philosophical and ethical work about the cosmic paths of the soul, about the theosophical triangle “God - time - man”. The musicality of the poem, its symbolic imagery, and the richness of cultural reminiscences allow us to see in it “the fulfillment of the dream of the symbolists” (V. Zhirmunsky).
Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966. Akhmatova’s death in Moscow, her funeral service in St. Petersburg and her funeral in the village of Komarovo caused numerous responses in Russia and abroad. “Not only did the unique voice fall silent, but last days“who brought the secret power of harmony into the world,” N. Struve responded to Akhmatova’s death, “with him the unique Russian culture, which existed from Pushkin’s first songs to Akhmatova’s last songs, completed its circle.”
Tatiana Skryabina
Literature:
Naiman A. Stories about Anna Akhmatova. – M., 1989
Pavlovsky A. Anna Akhmatova: Life and Work. – M., 1991
A. Akhmatova. Collected Works in 6 volumes. – M., 1998
Kormilov S. Poetic creativity of A. Akhmatova. – M., 2000
Akhmatova A. Pro et contra. – St. Petersburg, 2001
COURSE WORK
"The Poetic World of Akhmatova"
INTRODUCTION
1. BIOGRAPHICAL PATH OF ANNA AKHMATOVA
1.1 Brief biographical information
1.2 Features of A. Akhmatova’s creativity
2. FEATURES OF ANNA AKHMATOVA’S POETIC WORD
2.1 Akhmatova’s love lyrics
2.2 “Things and persons” in Akhmatova’s poetry
2.3 Features of Akhmatova’s language
3. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A. AKHMATOVA’S CREATIVITY
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anna Akhmatova is a Russian poetess who gained fame even before the outbreak of the First World War, as if she was chosen by fate itself to experience the unconscious and simply inherited from the past by her contemporaries system of values, first under the influence of that wave of enthusiasm that swept the masses in anticipation of the coming communist paradise, and then under the conditions of an insane repressive regime - the Stalinist totalitarian state.
Like some other poets of her generation, Anna Akhmatova found herself in a position where writing poetry threatened her very existence. Questions that at other times were mere topics for intellectual speculation have become matters of life and death. To write or not to write - both decisions could equally result in prison and death for her, or, worse, for her son, because it had already turned from a fact of personal life into a political act. The fact that, contrary to all logic, the poet came to the understanding that at such a time he had no other choice - he must continue to practice his craft even against his own will, and also the fact that this greatest test once again confirmed the life-saving power of the poetic word, can serve a response to those who question the role of literature.
Anna Akhmatova's life and work reflect the growth of her understanding and self-knowledge. If for a moment she had lost the ability to transform the raw materials of her life into a poetic biography, she would have been broken by the chaos and tragedy of what was happening to her. The triumphal march across Europe at the end of her life - Taormina and Oxford - was for Akhmatova not so much a personal victory as a recognition of the poet’s inner rightness, which she and others defended. And the honors that were showered on her in Sicily and England were perceived by her not only as personal - they were also given to those who did not live to see this, like Mandelstam and Gumilyov. She accepted them as a poet who had learned what it really meant to be a Russian poet in an era she called the “Real Twentieth Century.”
The relevance of the topic of the course work lies in the fact that Akhmatova’s voice as a poet was not heard for a long time, although the poet did not interrupt his activities. The work of the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, A. Akhmatova, has only recently come to the reader in full. Now we can imagine Akhmatova’s creative path without cuts and exceptions, to truly feel the drama and intensity of her quest in literature.
The purpose of the course work is to consider and analyze the features of the poetic world of Anna Akhmatova.
During the work you should perform a number of tasks:
Consider a brief biographical path of the author;
Analyze the features of the poetess’s work;
Note the significance of Anna Akhmatova’s work.
The object of the course work is the work of Anna Akhmatova.
The subject of the course work is an analysis of the poetic world of A. Akhmatova.
We used teaching aids on literature, literary theory, materials from print media, as well as the author’s own developments.
The course work consists of three chapters, a conclusion and a list of references.
Akhmatova Anna Andreevna (real name Gorenko) was born into the family of a marine engineer, retired captain of the 2nd rank at the station. Big Fountain near Odessa. A year after the birth of their daughter, the family moved to Tsarskoe Selo. Here Akhmatova became a student at the Mariinsky Gymnasium, but spent every summer near Sevastopol.
She noted more than once that in the same year, Charlie Chaplin and Gabriela Mistral, Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and the Eiffel Tower in Paris were born... Anna was the third of six children in the family of a retired naval mechanical engineer, a conservative man, later a member "Union of the Russian People". Her mother, apparently, was a person of a more democratic type - in her youth she was even a member of the People's Will organization. It is likely that it was from her parents that the daughter inherited both her love of freedom and her commitment to old Russia.
In 1905, after her parents’ divorce, Akhmatova and her mother moved to Yevpatoria. In 1906 - 1907 she studied in the graduating class of the Kiev-Fundukleevskaya gymnasium, in 1908 - 1910. - at the legal department of the Kyiv Higher Women's Courses. On April 25, 1910, “beyond the Dnieper in a village church,” she married N.S. Gumilev, whom she met in 1903. In 1907, he published her poem “There are many shiny rings on his hand...” in the Sirius magazine he published in Paris. The style of Akhmatova’s early poetic experiments was noticeably influenced by her acquaintance with the prose of K. Hamsun and the poetry of V.Ya. Bryusov and A.A. Blok.
At the beginning of the last century, publishing one’s poems for a noblewoman was considered a very dubious matter. In order not to compromise the good name of the family, young Anya Gorenko, a recent graduate of the gymnasium, was forced to choose a pseudonym for herself. Since my great-grandmother on my mother’s side was the Tatar princess Akhmatova (which, according to family tradition, was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan himself), “her surname,” as Anna Andreevna later wrote, “not realizing that I was going to be a Russian poet, I made it my literary name.” . But it would not have cost an aspiring poetess anything to turn her attention to her Greek grandmother on her father’s side - she, who loved her native Black Sea region so much. However, the choice fell on this name, “Tatar, dense...”.
In 1962, Akhmatova was awarded the International Poetry Prize "Etna-Taormina" - in connection with the 50th anniversary of her poetic activity and the publication in Italy of a collection of selected works by Akhmatova. The award ceremony took place in the ancient Sicilian city of Taormina, and a reception was given in her honor at the Soviet embassy in Rome.
In the same year, Oxford University decided to award Anna Andreevna Akhmatova an honorary doctorate of literature. In 1964, Akhmatova visited London, where the solemn ceremony of putting on her doctor’s robe took place.
In the last years of her life, she was surrounded by numerous friends, admirers, students, among whom there were many young people - it is enough to mention only Joseph Brodsky, a poet and future Nobel Prize laureate. Her authority is indisputable, her aphorisms and witticisms are no worse than the aphorisms and witticisms of her friend, the brilliant Faina Ranevskaya...
Akhmatova’s creativity as the largest cultural phenomenon of the 20th century. received worldwide recognition. On March 5, 1966, Akhmatova died in the village of Domodedovo; on March 10, after a funeral service in the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral, her ashes were buried in a cemetery in the village of Komarovo near Leningrad.
After her death, in 1987, during Perestroika, the tragic and religious cycle “Requiem”, written in 1935 - 1943 (added 1957 - 1961), was published.
Akhmatova’s work is usually divided into only two periods – early (1910–1930s) and late (1940–1960s). There is no impassable border between them, and the watershed is a forced “pause”: after the publication of her collection “Anno Domini MCMXXI” in 1922, Akhmatova was not published until the end of the 30s. The difference between the “early” and “late” Akhmatova is visible both at the content level (the early Akhmatova is a chamber poet, the later one is increasingly drawn to socio-historical themes) and at the stylistic level: the first period is characterized by objectivity, the word is not restructured by metaphor, but dramatically transformed by the context. In Akhmatova’s later poems, figurative meanings dominate, the word in them becomes emphasized symbolic. But, of course, these changes did not destroy the integrity of her style.
Once upon a time, Schopenhauer was indignant at women’s talkativeness and even proposed extending the ancient saying to other areas of life: “taceat mulier in ecclesia.” What would Schopenhauer say if he read Akhmatova's poems? They say that Anna Akhmatova is one of the most silent poets, and this is true, despite her femininity. Her words are stingy, restrained, chastely strict, and it seems that they are only conventional signs, inscribed at the entrance to the sanctuary...
Akhmatova’s strict poetry amazes the “zealot of the artistic word”, to whom multi-colored modernity gives such generously euphonious verbosity. The flexible and subtle rhythm in Akhmatova’s poems is like a stretched bow from which an arrow flies. An intense and concentrated feeling is contained in a simple, precise and harmonious form.
Akhmatova's poetry is the poetry of strength, her dominant intonation is strong-willed intonation.
It is common for everyone to want to be with their own people, but between wanting and being there was an abyss. And she was no stranger to:
“Over how many abysses she sang...”
She was a born ruler, and her “I want” actually meant: “I can,” “I will make it happen.”
Akhmatova was an artist of love incomparable in her poetic originality. Its innovation initially manifested itself precisely in this traditional eternal theme. Everyone noted the “mystery” of her lyrics; Despite the fact that her poems seemed like pages of letters or torn diary entries, the extreme laconicism and sparingness of speech left the impression of muteness or interception of the voice. “Akhmatova does not recite in her poems. She simply speaks, barely audible, without any gestures or postures. Or he prays almost to himself. In this radiantly clear atmosphere that her books create, any declamation would seem unnaturally false,” wrote her close friend K.I. Chukovsky.
Each exam question may have multiple answers from different authors. The answer may contain text, formulas, pictures. The author of the exam or the author of the answer to the exam can delete or edit a question.
reference (Acmeism (“Adamism”) (from the Greek άκμη - “peak, maximum, flowering, blooming time”) is a literary movement that opposed symbolism and arose at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia. Acmeists proclaimed materiality, objectivity of themes and images, accuracy words.
The formation of Acmeism is closely connected with the activities of the “Workshop of Poets”, the central figures of which were the founders of Acmeism N. S. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova (who was its secretary and active participant) and S. M. Gorodetsky.
The term “acmeism” was proposed in 912 by N. Gumilev and S. M. Gorodetsky: in their opinion, symbolism, which was experiencing a crisis, is being replaced by a direction that generalizes the experience of its predecessors and leads the poet to new heights of creative achievements.)
(!information for reading! Anna Andreevna Gorenko took the pseudonym “Akhmatova” from her great-grandmother, Tatar princess Akhmatova. According to information from the autobiographical note “Briefly about myself,” the poetess was born on June 11 (23), 1889 in the village of Bolshoi Fontan, half Odessa in the family retired naval mechanical engineer. As a one-year-old child, she was transported to Tsarskoe Selo, where she studied at the gymnasium until she was sixteen. In 1905, her parents separated, the mother and children moved to Yevpatoria, where Anna “at home took the course of the penultimate class of the gymnasium, yearned for Tsarskoe Selu and wrote a great many helpless poems." In 1907, she graduated from the Fundukleevsky gymnasium in Kiev. Subsequently she studied at the law faculty of the Higher Women's Courses in Kiev and the Higher Historical and Literary Courses of Raen in St. Petersburg. After her wedding in Kiev with Nikolai Gumilyov (1910) took him on a honeymoon to Paris. She visited Paris again in 1911, and in Italy in 1912. The impression of Italian painting and architecture was “like a dream that you remember all your life.”)
Fame came to Akhmatova unusually early. Her first collection, “Evening” (1912), was published with a foreword by the recognized poetic master Mikhail Kuzmin and brought her a strong reputation in the capital’s literary circle. Her second book, “The Rosary” (1914), made her an all-Russian celebrity. Subsequent books "The White Flock" (1917), "Plantain" (1921) and "Anno Domini" (1922) established her in the eyes of the Russian reader as national symbol Russia.
Akhmatova's early work is usually associated with Acmeism, literary direction, which arose in the early 10s of our century, the theorists of which Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky called for turning from the cosmic “correspondences” of symbolism and mystical love to the reality of the surrounding world.
In Akhmatova’s early lyrics, the manifestation of feelings is always limited, fixed in time and space. Hence the plot, the narrative nature of many poems.
Akhmatova’s poems were often called short stories, lyrical narratives, and people tried to find in them the real details of the poetess’s life.
Six decades of Russian poetry are associated with the name of Akhmatova. She entered literary life in the 1910s, when the poetic process was distinguished by its extraordinary diversity and intensity of development, and participated in it until the mid-1960s.
Being a member of the “Workshop of Poets,” which formed the core of the literary movement “Acmeism,” she stood out even among the talented people around her. This exclusivity was emphasized by Blok in his article “Without Deity, Without Inspiration” (1920), which was generally sharply critical of this literary group and Gumilyov, who led it.
She traced her poetic ancestry to Derzhavin and Nekrasov. Indeed, her girlish hobbies were not accidental. The inherent desire for the harsh truth, selfless service to the fatherland, and trust in the reader are characteristic of these poets - this is what Akhmatov’s Muse has always strived for. At the end of the journey, Akhmatova summarized her poetic fate: “When I wrote them (poems), 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 have no equal.”
Akhmatova’s voice already sounded confidently and fully in her first collections “Evening” (1912) and “Rosary” (1914). A woman's soul was revealed from the pages of poetry books. Artistry, subtle and accurate observations are combined in her poetry with high spirituality. Following his teacher (Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky. He was an excellent expert and translator ancient literature and mythology, an original poet, author of the poetry collections “Quiet Songs” (1904), “Cypress Casket” (1910), as well as the famous literary-critical “Books of Reflections” (1906-1909), in which he created expressive portraits poets of the 19th and 20th centuries), the poetess turned in poetry to the details of the domestic world, vigilantly noticed an instant gesture, and recreated an impulsive act. Many of Akhmatova’s “little things” became famous and formed her poetic reputation. The poems of the first collections are mostly devoted to love experiences, but the heroine’s love is not closed on itself. The context of surrounding life, everyday life, art is very wide. This gives scope for succinct generalizations and helps the reader imagine what is being discerned behind the immediate scene or picture. Only a few poems convey the delight of happiness. A great feeling, as a rule, takes the heroine “from joy and from peace” (“Love”, 1911).
The genre structure of Akhmatova’s early lyrical works is characterized by an apparent and sometimes deliberately incompleteness. At the same time, the author chooses such moments when “the heart is in half,” and through piercing pain new knowledge is revealed, which in its own way enriches the heroine and becomes the property of the reader.
(from the textbook by Krementsov, Alekseev “Russian Literature”)
The years of Akhmatova's entry into literature were a time of crisis in symbolism. “In 1910, a crisis of symbolism clearly emerged and aspiring poets no longer joined this movement. Some went to Acmeism, others to Futurism. I became an Acmeist. Our rebellion against symbolism is quite legitimate, because we felt like people of the twentieth century and did not want to remain in the previous one,” Akhmatova wrote, adding that Acmeism grew out of Nikolai Gumilyov’s observations of her poetry. Akhmatova's choice in favor of the Acmeist school was a choice in favor of a new, more alarming and dramatic and, ultimately, more humane worldview. In the very first collection, in the “poor poems of an empty girl” - as Akhmatova, who had gone through the horrors of Soviet reality, spoke of them in her declining years, the Eternal Femininity of the Symbolists was replaced by earthly femininity. “She writes poetry as if in front of a man, but it should be as if in front of God,” A. Blok commented on the release of Akhmatova’s poems.
Love feelings appeared in her first collection, “Evening” (1912), in different guises, but the heroine invariably found herself suffering, deceived, and rejected. “She was the first to discover that it is poetic to be unloved,” K. Chukovsky wrote about Akhmatova. Akhmatova’s unhappy love was seen not as a curse, but as a source of creativity: the three parts of the collection were called Love, Deception, and Muse. Grace and fragile femininity were combined in Akhmatova’s poetry with an unfemininely masculine acceptance of suffering. In the prayerfully focused atmosphere of the Evening, pain and grace merged: the poet gave thanks for what is usually cursed. The words of Hamlet (Hamlet), driving Ophelia “to a monastery or to marry a fool,” are received with resentment, vengeful memory (Princes always say that...), but a different note immediately sounds - admiration for the royalty of this unfair speech: But I remembered this speech, - / Let it flow for a hundred centuries in a row / Like an ermine robe from the shoulders. The famous poem The Gray-Eyed King opened with a glorification of pain: Glory to you, hopeless pain! / The gray-eyed king died yesterday.
One of the demands of Acmeists is to look at the world through the eyes of a discoverer. But in the Evening there was no rejoicing of the first man surveying his possessions: Akhmatova’s gaze was not welcoming, but farewell. By 1912, she had lost two sisters - they died of tuberculosis - and young Anna Gorenko had every reason to believe that the same fate awaited her. “And who would have believed that I was planned for such a long time, and why I didn’t know this,” she admitted, having crossed the sixty-year mark. But in 1910-1912, Akhmatova was possessed by a feeling of short days, she lived with a premonition of imminent death. Not only the popular poem, but all the lyrics of that time glorified the “last meeting.” Of the 46 poems included in the Evening, almost half are dedicated to death and parting. But, unlike the symbolist poets, Akhmatova did not associate death and separation with feelings of melancholy and hopelessness. The expectation of death gave birth in the Evening not to inconsolable grief, but to a sunset experience of the beauty of the world, the ability to “notice everything as new.” “In a moment of extreme danger, in one short second, we remember as much as our memory cannot imagine in a long hour,” M. Kuzmin introduced the Evening. Everyday little things turned into “spiritualized objectivity” in Akhmatova’s poetry; in amazingly accurate, capacious details “the pulse of living human destiny began to beat” (Vyach. Ivanov). The most famous of these details is the glove in the Song of the Last Meeting, which embodied an internally dramatic gesture. “Akhmatova gives with one blow all feminine and all lyrical confusion - all empiricism! - with one stroke of the pen perpetuates the primordial first gesture of a woman and a poet,” M. Tsvetaeva wrote about the Song of the Last Meeting. The origins of Akhmatova’s sharp and unique poetic form are in the “psychological symbolism” of In. Annensky, in the Russian psychological prose of the 19th century - Anna Karenina by L. Tolstoy, The Noble Nest of I. Turgenev, and the novels of F. Dostoevsky.
In May 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Akhmatova’s second collection, “The Rosary,” was published. She considered 1914 a turning point in the fate of Russia, the beginning of “not the calendar, the real twentieth century.” “It seemed that a small book of love poetry by a novice author was about to drown in world events. Time decreed otherwise,” she wrote in her autobiographical notes. From its appearance in 1914 to 1923, the Rosary was reprinted 9 times - a rare success for a “beginning author.” The collection continued the line of the Evening: great internal concentration, tension in the psychological pattern, laconicism, accuracy of observations, refusal to sing verse, adherence to colloquial speech, muted colors, restrained tones. The very name of the Rosary indicated an “oversupply” of mental states that acquired completeness and intensity of prayer. In many of the poems, the Rosary is a generalization of personal experiences in an epigrammatic formula close to an aphorism: How many requests does the beloved always have! / A woman who has fallen out of love has no requests, True tenderness cannot be confused / with anything, and it is quiet, And one does not know that from happiness and glory / Hearts are hopelessly decrepit. As in the Evening, in the Rosary the spiritual drama of the heroine - her abandonment, loneliness - was not revealed, nor was it transformed into a detailed story: Akhmatova spoke more about the situation of what was happening, thereby solving the most difficult task of combining lyrics and a psychological story. The feeling was embodied in the phenomena of the external world; details, details became evidence of emotional experiences.
Akhmatova’s attraction to the “gift of heroic illumination of a person”, to the strict form and restraint of the narrative was noted by one of her first critics - N. Nedobrovo. In 1915, he wrote about the author of the Evening and the Rosary: “The abundance of poetically translated torments does not indicate tearfulness over the trivialities of life, but reveals a lyrical soul, rather hard than too soft, rather cruel than tearful, and clearly dominant, rather than oppressed." Akhmatova highly appreciated this remark, which predicted her future fate: a woman who wrote mainly about unhappy love, in the “frenzied years” of Stalin’s terror, proudly and selflessly spoke on behalf of the “hundred-million-strong people.”
After N. Gumilev left for the front in 1914, Akhmatova spent a lot of time in the Tver province on the Gumilevs’ Slepnevo estate. Here the Old Russian, Orthodox fold characteristic of her nature became more clearly visible. Previously unfamiliar with the village, she for the first time “went out into the open sky”, came into contact with the “scarce land”, the peasantry, and the “dim expanses” of Russian nature.
For Gumilyov, Slepnevo is “such a boring, not golden antiquity.” Akhmatova compared Slepnevo to an arch in architecture through which she entered the life of her people: “At first small, then more and more...”. Slepnev’s solemn simplicity did not relieve suffering and the tragic perception of reality: in a poem of that time, “the smell of bread” and “melancholy” are in the same line. Sorrow increasingly took possession of Akhmatova; it is no coincidence that her appearance was perceived by her contemporaries as the personification of sadness and suffering. In Slepnev, Akhmatova wrote most of the poems included in the collection “The White Flock” (1917)
The White Flock opened with the poem We thought we were beggars... (1915), inspired by the first military shocks and losses: the lost wealth was the feeling of the strength of life, the inviolability of its foundations. The main note of the White Flock is the pure joy of sadness. Inescapable suffering gave birth in the heroine’s soul not to despair, but to enlightenment. The epigraph from John also pointed to the enlightenment of the path of loss. Annensky: I’m burning and the road is bright at night.
In the White Flock, the acmeistic detail acquired a new meaning: it became the “point of departure” into the sphere of the unclear and unsaid. Akhmatova called symbolism “a phenomenon of the 19th century”; she was unaware of the disease of the Symbolists - “dropsy of large themes.” However, starting from 1914, her poetry led to “mysterious, dark villages” and delved deeper into the realm of the spirit and intuitive insights. The path of imagist objectivity turned out to be alien to the Acmeists: Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam remained faithful to the idea of high, mystical art in its essence.
In the White Flock, the appearance of the heroine also became different: she was given prophetic, visionary features: And for a long time my lips / Do not kiss, but prophesy. Akhmatova included Prayer, June 1914, etc. among the prophetic poems in the collection. Many of the poems of the White Flock had specific addressees: 17 poems are dedicated to Akhmatova’s beloved Boris Antrep, two are addressed to N.V.N. - Nikolai Nedobrovo. But unrequited love for them and earthly suffering appeared as episodes of religious ascent.
The transformation of an abandoned woman into a “prophesying wife”, the “Muse of Lamentation” was correctly assessed in 1922 by I. Ehrenburg: “The young ladies who diligently imitated Akhmatova did not understand what these folds in the bitterly clenched mouth meant. They tried on a black shawl that fell from their slightly hunched shoulders, not knowing that they were trying on a cross.” Akhmatova’s further path is a path of heavy losses and trials, the path of Yaroslavna of the 20th century, who mourned the death of Russia and her best contemporaries.
Generous in misfortune, 1921 was fruitful for Akhmatova. The St. Petersburg publishing house "Petropolis" published two of her collections - Plantain (design by M. Dobuzhinsky) (1921) and Anno Domini MSMXXI (Summer of the Lord 1921). In them, mournful solemnity, prophetic intonation and Nekrasov-like sympathy become more and more noticeable. Behind many seemingly abstract images one can read the terrible realities of revolutionary times. So in the poem Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold... “hungry melancholy” is not just a symbol, but a very specific reference to the “clinical famine” that gripped Petrograd in 1918-1921. But unlike Iv. Bunin, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius Akhmatova does not send loud curses to “the maddened Russia”: a plantain leaf - an offering of the northern meager land - is placed on the “black ulcer”. By adding the date to the title of the Anno Domini collection, Akhmatova emphasized the lyrical chronicle of her poems and their involvement in great history. The sophisticated St. Petersburg woman conveyed the worldview of a person “not of the 20th century,” suppressed by fear, violence, and the need to live “after everything.” Akhmatova considered the poem “To the Many” to be one of the key poems in her work, in which the poet’s destiny was recognized as a burden - to be the voice of many, to voice their secret thoughts. However, the man of the “era of fabrication of souls” is shown in Akhmatova’s poetry not in the worthlessness of endless humiliation and abuse, but in the biblical aura of purifying suffering: prayer, lamentation, epic and biblical verses, ballads - forms that emphasize the drama and greatness of an individual human destiny. “Time, death, repentance - this is the triad around which Akhmatova’s poetic thought revolves,” wrote philosopher V. Frank.