Poetry female soul. She was considered perfect. People read her poems, Her hook-nosed, surprisingly harmonious profile evoked comparisons with ancient sculpture. In her later years she received an honorary doctorate from Oxford. This woman's name is Anna Akhmatova. “Akhmatova is a jasmine bush, charred by gray fog,” this is what her contemporaries said about her. According to the poetess herself, Alexander Pushkin and Benjamin Constant, the author of the sensational novel XIX century "Adolf". It was from these sources that Akhmatova drew the subtlest psychologism, that aphoristic brevity and expressiveness that made her lyrics the object of endless love from readers and the subject of research by several generations of literary scholars.
I learned to live simply and wisely, -
Look at the sky and pray to God,
And long before wander around in the evening,
To relieve unnecessary anxiety.
This is the result of this wise, suffering life.
She was born at the turn of two centuries - the nineteenth, “iron” according to Blok’s definition, and the twentieth century, which had no equal in fear, passions and suffering in the history of mankind. She was born at the turn of the century to connect them with the living, trembling thread of her destiny.
A great influence on her poetic development was had by the fact that Akhmatova spent her childhood years in Tsarskoe Selo, where the very air was saturated with poetry. This place became one of the most dear to her on earth for the rest of her life. Because “here lay his (Pushkin’s) cocked hat and the disheveled volume of Guys.” Because for her, seventeen years old, it was there that “the dawn was all itself, in April the smell of prey and earth, and the first kiss. " Because there, in the park, there were dates with Nikolai Gumilyov, another tragic poet era, which became Akhmatova’s fate, about which she would later write in lines that were terrible in their tragic sound:
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
Akhmatova's poetry is the poetry of the female soul. And although literature is universal to humanity, Akhmatova could rightfully say about her poems:
Could Beach, like Dante, create?
Or will Laura glorify the heat of love?
I taught women to speak.
In her works there is a lot of personal, purely feminine things that Akhmatova experienced in her soul, which is why she is dear to the Russian reader.
Akhmatova's first poems are love lyrics. In them, love is not always bright; it often brings grief. More often than not, Akhmatova’s poems are psychological dramas with poignant plots based on tragic experiences. The lyrical heroine A Shatova is rejected and falls out of love. But he experiences this with dignity, with proud humility, without humiliating either himself or his beloved.
In the fluffy muff, my hands were cold.
I felt scared, I felt somehow vague.
Oh how to get you back, quick weeks
His love, airy and momentary!
The swarm of Akhmatova's poetry is complex and multifaceted. He is a lover, a brother, a friend, appearing in different situations. Then a wall of misunderstanding arises between Akhmatova and her lover and he leaves her; then they separate because they cannot see each other; then she mourns her love and grieves; but he always loves Akhmatova.
All for you: and daily prayer,
And the melting heat of insomnia,
And my poems are a white flock,
And my eyes are blue fire.
But Akhmatova’s poetry is not only the confession of a female soul in love, it is also the confession of a person living with all the troubles and passions of the 20th century. And also, according to O. Mandelstam, Akhmatova “brought to Russian lyrics all the enormous complexity and psychological richness of the Russian novel of the 20th century”:
I accompanied my friend to the front hall,
Stood in the golden dust
From the nearby bell tower
Important sounds flowed.
Abandoned! Made up word -
Am I a flower or a letter?
And the eyes are already looking sternly
Into the darkened dressing table.
Most main love in the life of A. Akhmatova there was love for native land, about which she will write later that “we lie down in it and become it, that’s why we call it so freely ours.”
IN difficult years revolution, many poets emigrated from Russia abroad. No matter how hard it was for Akhmatova, she did not leave her country because she could not imagine her life without Russia.
I had a voice. He called comfortingly,
He said: "Come here,
Leave your land deaf and sinful,
Leave Russia forever."
But Akhmatova “indifferently and calmly closed her ears with her hands” so that “the sorrowful spirit would not be defiled by this unworthy speech.”
Akhmatova’s love for the Motherland is not a subject of analysis or reflection. There will be a Motherland - there will be life, children, poetry. Without her, there is nothing. Akhmatova was a sincere spokesman for the troubles and misfortunes of her century, which she was ten years older than.
Akhmatova was concerned about both the fate of the spiritually impoverished people and the anxieties Russian intelligentsia after the Bolsheviks seized power in the country. She conveyed psychological condition intellectuals in those inhuman conditions:
In a bloody circle day and night
A cruel languor hurts...
Nobody wanted to help us
Because we stayed at home.
During Stalinism, Akhmatova was not subjected to repression, but these were difficult years for her. Her only son was arrested, and she decided to leave a monument to him and all the people who suffered at this time. This is how the famous “Requiem” was born. In it Akhmatova talks about difficult years, about the misfortunes and suffering of people:
Death stars stood above us
And innocent Rus' writhed
Under bloody boots
And under the black tires there is marusa.
Despite all the severity and tragic life, all the horror and humiliation she experienced during the war and after, Akhmatova did not have despair and confusion. No one had ever seen her with her head down. Always direct and strict, she was a person of great courage. In her life, Akhmatova knew fame, infamy and glory again.
I am your voice, the heat of your breath,
I am the reflection of your face.
This is Akhmatova’s lyrical world: from confession woman's heart, offended, indignant, but loving, to the soul-shaking “Requiem”, with which “a hundred million people” shout.
Once in her youth, clearly anticipating her poetic destiny, Akhmatova said, addressing the Tsarskoye Selo statue of A. S. Pushkin:
Cold, white, wait,
I, too, will become marble.
And, probably, opposite the Leningrad prison - where she wanted - there should be a monument to a woman holding in her hands a bundle with a package for her only son, whose only fault was that he was the son of Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova - two great poets who did not please the authorities.
Or maybe there is no need for marble sculptures at all, because there are already miraculous monument, which she erected for herself after her Tsarskoye Selo predecessor - these are her poems.
Akhmatova’s poems reveal the world of a woman’s soul, passionate, tender and proud. The framework of this world was outlined by love - a feeling that constitutes the content of Akhmatova’s poems human life. There seems to be no shade of this feeling that would not be mentioned here: from accidental slips of the tongue that reveal something deeply hidden (“And as if by mistake I said: “You...” to “white-hot passion.”
ABOUT state of mind Akhmatova’s poems do not tell it - it is reproduced as something experienced now, albeit experienced in memory. It is reproduced accurately, subtly, and every detail, even the most insignificant, is important here, allowing, by capturing, to convey the overflow of emotional movement, which might not have been directly mentioned. These details, these details are sometimes defiantly noticeable in the poems, speaking about what is happening in the heart of their heroine more than lengthy descriptions could say. An example of such an amazing psychological richness of a verse, the capacity of a verse word, can be the lines of “Song of the Last Meeting”:
My chest was so helplessly cold,
But my steps were easy.
I'm on right hand put it on
Glove from the left hand.
Akhmatova’s poetry is like a novel, saturated with the finest psychologism. There is a “plot” here, which is not difficult to restore by tracing how it arises, develops, resolves with a gust of passion and goes away, the feeling that in Akhmatova’s early poems determines the main thing in a person’s life becomes a memory. Here is just a premonition of love, a still unclear yearning that makes the heart tremble: “The Eyes are asking for mercy. What should I do with them, When they say a short, sonorous name in front of me? It is replaced by another feeling, which sharply increases the beating of the heart, already ready to flare up with passion: “It was stuffy from the burning light, And his glances were like rays. I just shuddered: this one can tame me.” This state is conveyed with physical palpability, the burning light here has a strange - and frightening - attractive force, and the last word in the verses betrays the extent of helplessness in front of it. The angle of vision in these verses is perhaps not wide, but the vision itself is concentrated. And that's because here we're talking about about what constitutes the value of human existence; human dignity is tested in a love match. Humility will also come to the heroine of the poems, but first she will burst out proudly: “You submissive? You are crazy! I am submissive to the Lord's will alone. I don’t want either trembling or pain, My husband is an executioner, and his house is a prison.” But the main words here are those that appear after those just given: “But you see! After all, I came on my own...” Submission - and in love too - is possible in Akhmatova’s lyrics only by one’s own will.
Much has been written about Akhmatova’s love, and, probably, no one in Russian poetry has recreated this sublime and beautiful feeling so completely, so deeply.
In the early poems of the poetess, the power of passion turned out to be irresistible, fatal, as they liked to say then. Hence the piercing sharpness of the words that escape from a heart scorched by love: “Don’t you love, don’t you want to look? Oh, how beautiful you are, damn you!” And then here: “My eyes are filled with fog.” And there are many of them, lines that capture the almost woeful helplessness that replaces defiant defiance, comes in spite of the obvious. How it is seen - mercilessly, precisely: “Half-affectionately, half-lazyly I touched my hand with a kiss...”, “How unlike an embrace the Touch of these hands is.”
And this is also about love, which is spoken about in Akhmatova’s lyrics with that boundless frankness that allows the reader to treat the poems as lines addressed to him personally.
Akhmatova’s love bestows both joy and sorrow, but it is always happiness, because it allows you to overcome everything that separates people (“You breathe the sun, I breathe the moon, But we live by love alone”), allows their breath to merge, echoing in the poems born of this :
Only your voice sings in my poems,
My breath blows in your poems.
And there is a fire that does not dare
Touch neither oblivion nor fear.
And if you knew how much I love you now
Your dry, pink lips.
In Akhmatova’s poems, life unfolds, the essence of which in her first books is love. And when she leaves a person, leaves, even fair reproaches of conscience cannot stop her: “My flesh languishes in a sorrowful illness, But my free spirit will already rest serenely.” Only this apparent serenity is devastating, giving rise to the sad realization that in a house abandoned by love, “things are not entirely safe.”
Akhmatova does not seek to evoke sympathy in the reader, much less pity: the heroine of her poems does not need this. “Abandoned! Invented word - Am I a flower or a letter? And this is not at all a matter of the notorious strength of character - in Akhmatova’s poems, every time a moment is captured: not stopped, but fleeting. A feeling, a state, only having become apparent, changes. And perhaps it is precisely in this change of states - their fragility, instability - that the charm, the charm of what is embodied in early lyrics Akhmatova’s character: “Joyful and clear Tomorrow will be morning. This life is beautiful, Heart, be wise.” Even the appearance of the heroine of the poems is outlined with a light touch, barely perceptible: “I have one smile. So, the movement of the lips is slightly visible.” But this instability and uncertainty is balanced by an abundance of details, details that belong to life itself. The world in Akhmatova’s poems is not conventionally poetic - it is real, written out with tangible authenticity: “The worn rug under the icon, It’s dark in the cool room...”, “You smoke a black pipe, How strange is the smoke above it. I put on a tight skirt to make myself look even slimmer.” And the heroine of the poems appears here “in this gray everyday dress, on worn-out heels...”. However, a feeling of grounding does not arise - here is something else: “...There is no earthly thing from the earth And there was no liberation.”
Immersing the reader in life, Akhmatova allows you to feel the passage of time, powerfully determining the fate of a person. However, at first this found expression in Akhmatova’s so-frequent attachment of what was happening to a precisely - by the clock - designated moment: “I’ve gone crazy, oh strange boy, I’m coming at three o’clock.” Later, the sensation of moving time will truly materialize:
What is war, what is plague? They see the end soon;
Their verdict is almost pronounced.
But what should we do with the horror that
Was once called the run of time.
Akhmatova spoke about how poetry is born in the series “Secrets of Craft.” The combination of these two words is remarkable, the combination of the sacred and the ordinary - one of them is literally inseparable from the other when it comes to creativity. For Akhmatova, it is a phenomenon of the same order as life, and its process occurs according to the will of the forces that dictate the course of life. The verse appears like a “roll of subsiding thunder,” like a sound that triumphs “in the abyss of whispers and ringings.” And the poet’s task is to catch it, to hear the signal bells breaking through from somewhere “words and light rhymes.”
The creative process, the birth of Akhmatova’s poetry, is equated to the processes that occur in life, in nature. And the poet’s duty, it would seem, is not to invent, but only, having heard, to write down. But it has long been noted that the artist in his work does not strive to do as in life, but creates as life itself. Akhmatova also enters into competition with life: “I have not settled my scores With flame and wind and water...” However, here, perhaps, it is more accurate to speak not about competition, but about co-creation: poetry allows you to get to hidden meaning of what is done and done by life. It was Akhmatova who said: “If only you knew from what rubbish poems grow, without knowing shame, how yellow dandelion by the fence, Like burdocks and quinoa.” But the earth's rubbish becomes the soil on which poetry grows, lifting a person with it: “...My slumbers suddenly open the gates for me And lead me beyond morning star" That is why in Akhmatova’s lyrics the poet and the world have an equal relationship - the happiness of being gifted by him is inseparable in poetry from the awareness of the opportunity to give generously, royally:
He probably wants a lot more
To be sung by my voice:
That which is wordless rumbles,
Or in the darkness the underground stone wears away,
Or breaks through the smoke.
For Akhmatova, art is capable of absorbing the world and thereby making it richer, and this determines its effective force, the place and role of the artist in people's lives.
With a feeling of this power given to her, Akhmatova lived her life in poetry. “We are condemned - and we know this ourselves - to waste, not to accumulate,” she said at the very beginning poetic path, in the fifteenth year. This is what allows the verse to gain immortality, as it is said aphoristically precisely:
Gold rusts and steel decays,
Marble is crumbling. Everything is ready for death.
The most durable thing on earth is sadness
And more durable is the royal word.
When meeting with Akhmatova’s poems, the name of Pushkin is involuntarily recalled: the classical clarity, intonational expressiveness of Akhmatova’s verse, a clearly expressed position of acceptance of the world opposing man - all this allows us to speak about the Pushkin principle, which clearly reveals itself in Akhmatova’s poetry. The name of Pushkin was the most dear to her - the idea of what constitutes the essence of poetry was associated with it. There are almost no direct echoes of Pushkin’s poems in Akhmatova’s poetry; Pushkin’s influence is felt here on a different level - the philosophy of life, the persistent desire to be faithful only to poetry, and not to the power of power or the demands of the crowd.
It is with the Pushkin tradition that Akhmatova’s characteristic scale of poetic thought and harmonic precision of verse is associated, the ability to identify the universal significance of a unique emotional movement, to correlate the sense of history with the sense of modernity, and finally, the variety of lyrical themes, held together by the personality of the poet, who is always a contemporary of the reader.
The world of the female soul is most fully revealed in the love lyrics of A. Akhmatova and occupies a place in her poetry central place. The genuine sincerity of Akhmatova’s love lyrics, combined with strict harmony, allowed her contemporaries to call her the Russian Sappho immediately after the release of her first poetry collections.
Anna Akhmatova's early love lyrics were perceived as a kind of lyrical diary. However, the depiction of romantically exaggerated feelings is not typical of her poetry. Akhmatova speaks about simple human happiness and about earthly, ordinary sorrows: about separation, betrayal, loneliness, despair - about everything that is close to many, that everyone is able to experience and understand.
Love in A. Akhmatova’s lyrics appears as a “fatal duel”; it is almost never depicted serenely, idyllically, but, on the contrary, in an extremely crisis expression: at the moment of breakup, separation, loss of feeling or the first violent blindness of passion.
Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama or its climax. Her lyrical heroine pays for love with “torment of a living soul.” The combination of lyricism and epicness brings A. Akhmatova’s poems closer to the genres of the novel, short story, drama, and lyrical diary.
One of the secrets of her poetic gift lies in her ability to fully express the most intimate things in herself and the world around her. In her poems, one is struck by the string tension of experiences and the unmistakable accuracy of their sharp expression. This is Akhmatova’s strength.
The theme of love and the theme of creativity are closely intertwined in Anna Akhmatova’s poems. In the spiritual appearance of the heroine of her love lyrics one can discern “wingedness” creative personality. The tragic rivalry between Love and the Muse was reflected in many works, starting from the early years of 1911. However, Akhmatova foresees that poetic glory cannot replace love and earthly happiness.
A. Akhmatova’s intimate lyrics are not limited to just depicting loving relationships. It always shows the poet’s inexhaustible interest in the inner world of man. The originality of Akhmatova's poems about love, the originality of the poetic voice, conveying the most intimate thoughts and feelings lyrical heroine, the filling of poems with the deepest psychologism cannot but arouse admiration.
Like no one else, Akhmatova knows how to reveal the most hidden depths inner world a person, his experiences, states, moods. Amazing psychological persuasiveness is achieved by using a very succinct and laconic technique of eloquent details (a glove, a ring, a tulip in a buttonhole...).
“Earthly love” by A. Akhmatova also implies love for the person around him “ earthly world" Image human relations inseparably from love for the native land, for the people, for the fate of the country. The idea of a spiritual connection with the Motherland that permeates the poetry of A. Akhmatova is expressed in the readiness to sacrifice for it even happiness and closeness with the most dear people(“Prayer”), which later came true so tragically in her life.
It rises to biblical heights in the description mother's love. The suffering of a mother doomed to see her son suffer on the cross is simply shocking in “Requiem”:
Chorus of Angels great hour glorified
And the skies melted in fire.
He said to his father: “Why did you leave me!”
And to the Mother: “Oh, don’t cry for Me...”
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
Thus, the poetry of A. Akhmatova is not only the confession of a woman in love, it is the confession of a person living with all the troubles, pains and passions of his time and his land.
Anna Akhmatova, as it were, combined “women’s” poetry with the poetry of the mainstream. But this unification is only apparent - Akhmatova is very smart: retaining the theme and many techniques women's poetry, she radically reworked both of them in the spirit of not feminine, but universal poetics.
The world of deep and dramatic experiences, charm, wealth and uniqueness of personality are imprinted in the love lyrics of Anna Akhmatova.
Solving eternal problems human existence in the lyrics of A. A. Akhmatova: motives of memory, life and death
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is an artist of a truly philosophical bent, since it is philosophical motives that form the ideological and meaningful core of all her poetry. Whatever topic the poetess touches on, whatever form she uses to create her poetic images, everything bears the imprint of the author’s deep thoughts.
However, attention is drawn to the fact that the term “philosophical” in relation to Akhmatova’s poetry is introduced by literary scholars very carefully. Thus, analyzing the category of memory, E. S. Dobin notes: “Memory has become, I would say, a philosophical value for Akhmatova. If only this word had not been devalued by critics who sometimes see “philosophy” in the most simple maxim. At the same time, the scientific world persistently supports the idea of the undoubted importance of studying this lyrical layer. A. I. Pavlovsky states in this regard: “They haven’t written seriously about the philosophical side of Akhmatova’s lyrics... Meanwhile, it is of undoubted interest.” At the same time, only Akhmatova’s late poetry is often declared philosophical, excluding the thought-forming factors of the earlier period. This is the position of V. Ozerov. “But, giving these truly new and heartfelt poems their due,” the critic emphasized, “it is impossible to single out or, even more so, contrast them with the later philosophical lyrics A. Akhmatova."
All of the above indicates that the designated layer of A. Akhmatova’s lyrics still remains a “blank spot” in Akhmatova studies, therefore we consider it necessary to dwell on the analysis of the main philosophical motives poetesses.
Her view of the world was unique and quite consistent. As an Acmeist, in my early period she was opposed to the dissolution of the living, thing-corporeal and material world in those mystical categories that were characteristic of the symbolists. Akhmatova recognized the world as really and objectively existing. For her it was specific and multi-colored; it had to be transferred into the lines of poetry, while trying to be accurate and truthful. Therefore, she considered it suitable for artistic image literally everything that makes up daily life and surrounds a person: a midnight vault, a tiny blade of grass, a chamomile or a burdock. The same is true of feeling - any of human emotions can be artistically explored, enshrined in words and passed on to future centuries. The power and might of art seemed enormous to her and hardly even foreseeable. Akhmatova loved to convey this surprise to the reader when she had the opportunity to once again be convinced of the fantastic incorruptibility of human culture, especially such a fragile and imperishable material as the word.
Of course, in to a greater extent early love lyrics are deeply intimate. However, it already outlines trends of immersion and deepening into the world of reflection on the foundations of human existence. We first hear them in the poem “I learned to live simply, wisely...”:
I learned to live simply and wisely,
Look at the sky and pray to God,
And wander for a long time before evening,
To tire out unnecessary anxiety.
The lyrical heroine reflects on the perishability and transience of life. In this poem, Akhmatova uses the technique of describing the hero’s inner world through surrounding nature. The tenderly purring fluffy cat and the fire that lit up the sawmill tower reflect the heroine’s clear and “wise” worldview, and the signs of autumn (a drooping bunch of rowan berries, rustling burdocks) reflect a light melancholy and sadness associated with the awareness of the perishability of all things. The whole poem is like an answer to the question: how should a person live? You can even derive a formula: nature, faith and solitude.
The poem “Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold” can be called a turning point in the work of A. A. Akhmatova. It testifies to the author’s final transition from the psychology of a love “novel in verse” to philosophical and civic motives. The personal pain and tragedy of A. Akhmatova’s wounded soul merges with the fate of the entire Russian people. Seeing the bitterness and injustice of the era, the author tries to show a way out, a path to the revival of spirituality. This is how the motives of faith in immortality and the highest justice, the motive of Christian forgiveness, as well as hope for a bright and wonderful future, for the eternal renewal of life and the victory of spirit and beauty over weakness, death and cruelty appear.
In more late period creativity, A. Akhmatova places the idea of the need for harmony between the world and man, society and man, man and time at the center of her artistic worldview. At the same time, the poetess “does not abstract from objective reality, but goes to new level artistic representation, concentrates the action, layers on it dialogues with his opponents, monologues-appeals to the world, time, people."
More and more often, A. Akhmatova thinks about the problems of our time. The tragedy of modernity, according to the poetess, lies in the interrupted connection of times, in the oblivion of the previous era:
When an era is buried
The funeral psalm does not sound,
Nettle, thistle
It has to be decorated...
And the son will not recognize his mother,
And the grandson will turn away in anguish.
Under these conditions, the poet’s task is not only to state the fatal break in times, but also to glue “the vertebrae of two centuries with his own blood.”
Akhmatova’s basis for the connection between the past and the present is memory, not only as something in a person that allows him to be correlated with history, but also as a deeply moral principle, opposed to oblivion, unconsciousness and chaos. Thus, the motive of memory becomes a kind of prism through which key ideas and the images of her poetry.
It is not for nothing that this word appears in the titles of many poems: “The memory of the sun in the heart is weakening...”; "Voice of Memory"; “You are heavy, love memory...”; “I will take this day out of your memory...”; "In Memory of a Friend"; “And in memory, as if in a patterned arrangement...”; “And in the black memory, rummaging, you will find...”; "Memory Cellar"
Let us emphasize that in Akhmatova’s poetry the semantics of “memory” covers a wide semantic space, all manifestations of memory: from memory as an individual, “psychophysiological” gift, to memory as historical and moral category. It is no coincidence that K. Chukovsky, Yu. Levin, V. Toporov considered the memory motif fundamental to Akhmatova’s work.
In early lyrics, memory is realized as a natural, organic property human consciousness, allowing the poet to artistically capture the world (“I see everything. I remember everything”), to embody the past, as a lasting and emotionally experienced being, in the present. Its “mechanisms” serve as the plot framework for “lyrical short stories.”
In the late Akhmatova, the memory motif becomes the semantic basis that holds together the disparate episodes of one human destiny, and episodes of the fate of the people, which reunites the broken connection of times, that is, serves the purpose of “gathering” the world together.
Let us characterize the main trends in the implementation of the memory motif in the poems of A. A. Akhmatova.
In the poem “A dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys,” the poetess talks about Pushkin and his time, with the motif of memory being the meaning-forming concept. For Akhmatova, memory is what resists decay, death, and oblivion. Memory is synonymous with fidelity.
In the poem “It’s getting dark, and in the dark blue sky...” memory acts as a catalyst for the joys of life.
And if hard way I will have to,
Here's a light load that I can handle
Take with you so that in old age, in illness,
Perhaps in poverty - to remember
The sunset is frantic, and the fullness
Spiritual strength, and the charm of a sweet life.
The poem is marked 1914-1916. At that time, Akhmatova was not even thirty years old. What would be stored in memory seemed like a light comforting burden. I wanted the memory to turn out to be only a beneficial side. Only the keeper of the cloudless, joyful things that can be gleaned from existence. Memory - faithful companion, the “guardian angel” of existence.
But memory is not only a keeper. She discovers things in a new way, reevaluates. Memory is the wise sister of life, sharing its burden.
How White stone in the depths of the well,
One memory lies within me.
I cannot and do not want to fight:
It is fun and it is suffering.
And the poet values this duality. In the distance of time, sadness is purified, and I want to preserve it: “So that wondrous sorrows may live forever, you have been turned into my memory.”
Memory becomes a comforter for all those who mourn and a kind of “law of preservation of phenomena,” but only phenomena that have been experienced and passed through feeling.
It's like everything I have inside of me
I fought all my life, I got my life
Separate and embodied in these
Blind walls, into this black garden...
E. S. Dobin called Akhmatova’s category of memory “an analogue of the folk fairytale “living water.” This is the gift of returning life to phenomena, events, feelings that have become a thing of the past.
Memory is conceptualized by Akhmatova as a kind of generalizing figurative category. This is the continuous life of the soul. It can be called the spontaneously creative side of the spirit, every minute reviving the past. But besides this, memory also has a second side - a dramatic one. It turns out that the burden of memory is not so light. And not only “completeness mental strength and the charm of a sweet life” it includes. According to Akhmatova, memory is diverse and quite often traces of the past remain like scars from wounds.
Oh, who would have told me then,
That I inherit all this:
Felitsa, swan, bridges,
And all the Chinese ideas,
Palace through galleries
And linden trees of wondrous beauty.
And even own shadow,
All distorted with fear,
And a penitential shirt,
And sepulchral lilacs.
However, it is even more tragic when “he sank iron curtain changing times and blocked the path of life-giving memory of the past.”
And once we wake up, we see that we forgot
Even the path to that house is secluded,
And, choking with shame and anger,
We run there, but (as happens in a dream)
Everything is different there: people, things, walls,
And no one knows us - we are strangers.
We didn't get there...
For Akhmatova, memory here is a mirror of existence, illuminating the tragic side of the irreversible course of life, but at the same time, losses enhance the sense of the values of what has been experienced, the immortal values.
Thus, memory becomes, as it were, a through thread of existence. It projects endless connections with time and environment. A continuous line connects the stages of human ascent and descent. What is gained and lost, what is achieved and what disappears is recorded. E. S. Dobin notes that “Akhmatova’s memory is not a tape of frames that simply capture pieces of the past. This is the synthetic activity of the soul, analyzing, comparing, evaluating, which in equally it is in the sphere of feelings and in the sphere of thoughts. Memory is an accumulator of experience and experiences.”
It is worth noting that the motive of memory, being the leading one in the creative concept of A. A. Akhmatova, is nevertheless close to such eternal categories as life, death, love, I and the world, I and we.
Most vividly in late creativity The poetess reveals the motive of death, one way or another present in many of her poems: funerals, graves, suicides, the death of the gray-eyed king, the dying of nature, the burial of an entire era.
Akhmatova interprets death in the Christian and Pushkin traditions. In Christian ones - as a natural act of being, in Pushkin's - as the final act of creativity. For Akhmatova, creativity is a feeling of unity with the creators of the past and present, with Russia, with its history and the fate of the people. Therefore, in the poem “Late Response,” dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, it reads:
We are with you today, Marina,
We walk through the capital at midnight,
And behind us there are millions of them,
And there is no more silent procession,
And all around there are death knells
Yes Moscow wild moans
Blizzards, our trail.
In some of Akhmatova’s works dedicated to the motif of death, the image of a staircase appears:
As if there wasn't a grave ahead
And the mysterious staircase takes off.
This is how the theme of immortality is outlined in the poetess’s works. This motif appears in poems about victory and is further strengthened. Indicative, for example, is the poem “And the room in which I am sick,” ending with the lines:
My soul will take off to meet the sun,
And the mortal will destroy the dream.
In later poems, the motif of immortality is revealed in poems about music:
And the listener then in his immortality
Suddenly he begins to believe unconditionally.
But this motive is revealed especially clearly in a poem about one’s own painful state at the end of life:
The disease languishes in bed for three months,
And I don’t seem to be afraid of death.
A random guest in this terrible body
As if in a dream, I seem to myself.
It is worth noting that in late lyric poetry Akhmatova most stable motive- farewell to the entire past, not even to life, but precisely to the past: “I have given up on the black past...”. In the poem “At the Smolensk Cemetery” she seems to sum up the past era. The main thing here is the feeling of the great divide that lies between two centuries: past and present. Akhmatova sees herself standing on this shore, on the shore of life, not death:
This is where it all ended: dinners at Danon’s,
Intrigues and ranks, ballet, current account...
These lines talk about an imaginary human existence, limited by an empty, fleeting minute. This one phrase captures the essence of imaginary, not genuine, human life. This “life,” Akhmatova argues, is equal to death. True life appears in her, as a rule, when a sense of the history of the country and people enters the poem.
One of best works period of the 1950s-60s is the poem “Seaside Sonnet”, in which, according to researchers, “the classical transparency of the form, the “lightness” felt in the verbal texture almost physically, indicates defeated suffering, about the comprehension of the highest harmony of natural and human existence."
“Seaside Sonnet” is a work about death, in which Akhmatova sums up her life. The lyrical heroine perceives death without a tragic strain: not as a deliverance from the unbearable torments of life (cf. “Requiem”), but as a “call of eternity”, an “easy road”, reminiscent of one of the most dear places on earth to her - “an alley near Tsarskoye Selo pond" and. The proximity of death (“Everything here will outlive me, / Everything, even the old birdhouses”) creates in her a special existential mood, in which the world – in its most everyday manifestations – is perceived as a “God-given palace,” and every moment lived as a gift.
To summarize, we consider it important to note that Akhmatova’s lyrics can undoubtedly be considered philosophical. The poetess is characterized not by a list of well-known truths, but by a desire for deep, effective knowledge of the human essence and the universe. In her work, “scattered grains of material and spiritual are fused, different-sized phenomena are built together, in unity and consonance.” The motive of memory, being cross-cutting, meaning-forming, as well as the motives of life and death allow Akhmatova to “go far beyond the immediate visible horizon and embrace vast expanses of experience, looking into the unknown lands of feelings and thoughts.”
Akhmatova writes about herself - about the eternal...
M. Tsvetaeva.
Anna Akhmatova's lyrics are a confession of the female soul in its maximum embodiment. The poet writes about the feelings of his lyrical heroine, her work is as intimate as possible and, at the same time, it is an encyclopedia of the female soul in all its forms.
In 1912, Akhmatova’s first collection, “Evening,” was published, where the heroine’s youthful romantic expectations were embodied. A young girl has a presentiment of love, speaks of its illusions, unfulfilled hopes, “graceful sadness”:
Gasping for breath, I shouted: “It’s a joke.
All that has gone before. If you leave, I’ll die.”
Smiled calmly and creepily
And he told me: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
In the second collection of poetry, “The Rosary,” which brought Akhmatova real fame, the image of the lyrical heroine develops and transforms. Already here the versatility of Akhmatov’s heroine is manifested - she is both a girl and adult woman, and wife, and mother, and widow, and sister. The poet takes a particularly close look at the “love” female roles. The lyrical heroine of Akhmatova can be a beloved, a lover, a homewrecker, a harlot. Her “social range” is also wide: wanderer, Old Believer, peasant woman, etc.
It seems that such a “branching” of the heroine is connected with the poet’s desire to reveal not so much individuality, but general female psychology. Therefore we can say that for female images Akhmatova is characterized by a timeless “universality of feelings and actions”:
How many requests does your beloved always have!
A woman who has fallen out of love has no requests.
I'm so glad there's water today
It freezes under the colorless ice.
The events of the First World War and revolutions change the tonality of Akhmatova’s lyrics and add new touches to the image of her lyrical heroine. Now she is not only a private person living with personal joys and sorrows, but also a person involved in the destinies of the country, people, and history. In the collection " White flock“The motives of the heroine’s tragic premonition of the bitter fate of an entire generation of Russian people are strengthened:
We thought: we are beggars, we have nothing,
And how they began to lose one after another,
So that became every day
Memorial day -
They began to compose songs about the great generosity of God
Yes about our former wealth.
Akhmatova did not accept the 1917 revolution. Her heroine of the 1920s desperately yearns for bygone but irrevocable times. And that is why the present becomes even more unattractive and the future of the entire country, the entire nation even more cloudy:
Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashes,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy...
Furthermore, October events are perceived by the heroine Akhmatova as punishment for an unrighteous, sinful life. And even though she herself did not do evil, the heroine feels involved in the life of the entire country, the entire people. Therefore, she is ready to share their common sad fate:
I am your voice, the heat of your breath,
I am the reflection of your face...
Thus, after the revolution, the image of a loving woman in Akhmatova’s lyrics recedes into the background, while the roles of a patriot, a poetess, and a little later, a mother who wholeheartedly cares not only for her child, but also for all those who suffer, come forward:
No, and not under an alien sky,
And not under the protection of alien wings, -
I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.
The grief of Akhmatova’s mother merges with the grief of all mothers and is embodied in universal human grief. Mother of God:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
Thus, A. Akhmatova’s lyrics reveal all the hypostases of the female soul. In the early lyrics of the poetess, her heroine is, first of all, loving woman in a variety of roles. In more mature creativity Akhmatova’s emphasis shifts towards the role of a woman-mother, patriot and poetess, who sees her duty in sharing the fate of her people and her homeland. .
