From the memories of contemporaries about A. A
The theme of repression in A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”
Literature and library science
Akhmatova began writing her poem Requiem in 1935 when her only son Lev Gumilyov was arrested. Like other mothers, Akhmatova’s sister’s wife stood for many hours in the silent line that led to the St. Petersburg Kresta prison. Only in 1940 did Akhmatova complete her work; it was published in 1987, many years after the death of the author. Akhmatova talks about the history of the creation of the poem.
9. The theme of repression in A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”
A. Akhmatova began writing her poem “Requiem” in 1935, when her only son Lev Gumilev was arrested. He was soon released, but was arrested, imprisoned and exiled twice more. These were the years of Stalinist repressions. Like other mothers, wives, and sisters, Akhmatova stood for many hours in the silent line that led to the St. Petersburg Kresty prison. The most important thing is that she was “ready” for all this, ready not only to experience it, but also to describe it. Akhmatova’s early poem “Walked Silently Around the House...” has the lines: “Tell me, can’t you forgive?” And I said: “I can.” The last words of the text for the poem written in 1957 (“Instead of a preface”) are a direct quote from this poem. When one of the women standing next to A. Akhmatova in line barely audibly asked: “Can you describe this?” She replied: “I can.” Gradually, poems were born about the terrible time that was experienced together with all the people. It was they who composed the poem “Requiem,” which became a tribute to the mournful memory of the people killed during the years of Stalin’s tyranny. Only in 1940 did Akhmatova complete her work; it was published in 1987, many years after the death of the author. In 1961, after the completion of the poem, an epigraph was written for it. These are compressed, strict four lines, striking in their severity: “No, and not under an alien firmament, And not under the protection of alien wings, I was then with my people, Where my people, unfortunately, were.”
“Requiem” is a work about the death of people, a country, and the foundations of existence. The most common word in the poem is “death.” It is always close, but never accomplished. A person lives and understands that he must move on, live and remember. The poem consists of several poems related to each other by one theme, the theme of memory of those who found themselves in prison dungeons in the thirties, and of those who courageously endured the arrests of their relatives, the death of loved ones and friends, who tried to help them in difficult times . In the preface, A. Akhmatova talks about the history of the creation of the poem. An unfamiliar woman, just like Akhmatova, who was standing in prison lines in Leningrad, asked her to describe all the horrors of the Yezhovshchina. In the “Introduction,” Akhmatova paints a vivid image of Leningrad, which seemed to her like a “dangling pendant” near the prisons, “convict regiments” that walked along the streets of the city, “death stars” standing above it. The bloody boots and tires of the black Marus (the so-called cars that came at night to arrest townspeople) crushed “innocent Rus'.” And she just writhes under them. Before us passes the fate of a mother and son, whose images are correlated with gospel symbolism. Akhmatova expands the temporal and spatial framework of the plot, showing a universal tragedy. We either see a simple woman whose husband is arrested at night, or a biblical Mother whose Son was crucified. Here before us is a simple Russian woman, in whose memory the crying of children, the melting candle at the shrine, the mortal sweat on the brow of a loved one who is being taken away at dawn will forever remain. She will cry for him just as the Streltsy “wives” once cried under the walls of the Kremlin. Then suddenly we see the image of a woman so similar to Akhmatova herself, who does not believe that everything is happening to her - the “mockery”, “the favorite of all friends”, “the cheerful sinner of Tsarskoye Selo”. Could she ever have thought that she would be three hundredth in line at Kresty? And now her whole life is in these queues. I have been screaming for seventeen months, calling you home, throwing myself at the feet of the executioner, you are my son and my horror. It’s impossible to make out who is the “beast” and who is the “man,” because innocent people are being arrested, and all the mother’s thoughts involuntarily turn to death. And then the sentence “stone word” sounds, and you have to kill your memory, petrify your soul and learn to live again. And the mother thinks about death again, only now about her own. It seems to her like salvation, and it doesn’t matter what form it takes: “a poisoned shell”, “a weight”, “a typhoid child” - the main thing is that it will save you from suffering and from spiritual emptiness. These sufferings are comparable only to the suffering of the Mother of Jesus, who also lost her Son. @But the Mother understands that this is only madness, because death will not allow him to take away with him Neither the terrible eyes of his son, Petrified suffering, nor the day when the thunderstorm came, nor the hour of the prison meeting, nor the sweet coolness of hands, nor the excited shadows of linden trees, nor the distant light sound Words of last consolation. So we have to live. To live in order to name those who died in Stalin’s dungeons, to remember, to remember always and everywhere who stood “both in the bitter cold and in the July heat under the blinding red wall.” There is a poem in the poem called "The Crucifixion". It describes the last minutes of Jesus' life, his appeal to his mother and father. There is a misunderstanding of what is happening, and the reader comes to the realization that everything that is happening is senseless and unfair, because there is nothing worse than the death of an innocent person and the grief of a mother who has lost her son. Biblical motives allowed her to show the scale of this tragedy, the impossibility of forgiving those who committed this madness, and the impossibility of forgetting what happened, because we were talking about the fate of the people, about millions of lives. Thus, the poem “Requiem” became a monument to innocent victims and those who suffered with them. In the poem, A. Akhmatova showed her involvement in the fate of the country. The famous prose writer B. Zaitsev, after reading “Requiem,” said: “Could it be imagined... that this fragile and thin woman would utter such a cry - a feminine, maternal cry, not only for herself, but also for all those suffering - wives, mothers, brides , in general, about all those crucified?” And it is impossible for the lyrical heroine to forget the mothers who suddenly turned gray, the howl of an old woman who lost her son, the rumble of the black marus. And the poem “Requiem” sounds like a memorial prayer for all those who died in the terrible time of repression. And as long as people hear her, because the whole “hundred-million-strong nation” is screaming with her, the tragedy that A. Akhmatova talks about will not happen again. A.A. Akhmatova entered literature as a lyrical, chamber poet. Her poems about unrequited love, about the heroine’s experiences, her loneliness among people and a bright, imaginative perception of the world around her attracted the reader and made him feel the author’s mood. But it took time and terrible events that shook Russia, war, revolution, for the poems of A.A. Akhmatova developed a civic, patriotic feeling. The poetess has compassion for her homeland and her people, considering it impossible for herself to leave it during the difficult years of trials. But the years of Stalinist repressions became especially difficult for her. For the authorities, Akhmatova was an alien person, hostile to the Soviet system. The 1946 decree confirmed this officially. She was not forgotten either that her husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 for participating in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy (according to the official version), or the proud silence since the late 20s of that unofficial “internal emigration” that she chose for herself poetess. Akhmatova accepts her fate, but this is not humility and indifference; she is ready to stand and endure everything that befell her. “We did not deflect a single blow,” Akhmatova wrote. And her “Requiem”, written from 1935 to 1940 not for publication for herself, “for the table” and published much later, is evidence of the courageous civic position of both the lyrical heroine of the poem and its author. It reflects not only the personal tragic circumstances of A.’s life. A. Akhmatova arrest of her son, L.N. Gumilev, and husband, N.N. Punin, but also the grief of all Russian women, those wives, mothers, sisters who stood with her for 17 terrible months in prison lines in Leningrad. The author speaks about this in the preface to the poem about the moral duty to his “sisters in misfortune”, about the duty of memory to the innocent dead. The grief of a mother and wife is common to all women of all eras, all troubled times. Akhmatova shares it with others, speaking about them as about herself: “I will, like the Streltsy wives, howl under the Kremlin towers.” The mother’s suffering, her inescapable grief, loneliness emotionally colors events in black and yellow colors - colors traditional for Russian poetry, symbols of grief and illness. Terrible loneliness sounds in these lines, and it seems especially piercingly sharp in contrast to the happy, carefree past: “I wish I could show you, the mocking one and the favorite of all friends, the cheerful sinner of Tsarskoye Selo, what will happen to your life Like the three hundredth, with the transfer, Under the Crosses You will stand and burn through the New Year's ice with your hot tears. Grief fills the consciousness, the heroine is on the verge of madness: “I have been screaming for seventeen months, Calling you home, Throwing myself at the feet of the executioner, You are my son and my horror. Everything is forever mixed up, And I can’t figure out now who is the beast, who is the man, And how long will it be to wait for the execution.” The most terrible thing in this whole nightmare is the feeling that the victims are innocent and in vain, because it is no coincidence that the white nights, according to the author, speak to the son “about your high cross and about death.” And the sentence of the innocent sounds like a “stone word” and falls like the sword of unjust justice. How much courage and perseverance is required from the heroine! She is ready for the worst, for death “I don’t care now.” As a person of Christian culture, Akhmatova’s poems often contain those concepts that the Soviet government tried to erase as socially alien: soul, God, prayer. It turned out that the authorities were unable to deprive a person of faith, brought up over centuries, because, like women from the people, the heroine in difficult times turns to images that are holy for Russian people - the Mother of Christ, the personification of all maternal grief and maternal suffering. “Magdalene fought and sobbed, The beloved disciple turned to stone, And where the Mother stood silently, No one dared to look. And this brings the heroine closer to her people, makes her feel her responsibility as a Poet for ensuring that everything that happens is preserved in the people’s memory, came to the court of History.
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Lamentation
Worship the Lord
In His holy court.
The holy fool is sleeping on the porch
A star is looking at him.
And, touched by an angel's wing,
The bell spoke
Not in an alarming, menacing voice,
And saying goodbye forever.
And they leave the monastery,
Having given away the ancient vestments,
Miracle workers and saints,
Leaning on the sticks.
Seraphim - to the forests of Sarov
Graze the rural herd,
Anna - to Kashin, no longer a prince,
Tugging at prickly flax.
The Mother of God sees off
He wraps his son in a scarf,
Dropped by an old beggar woman
At the Lord's Porch.
Excerpt from the article by V. G. Morov “St. Petersburg Exodus”,
dedicated to the analysis of Akhmatov's poem
On May 21, old style, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the feast of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, established in the 16th century in memory of the deliverance of Moscow from the invasion of the Crimean Tatars in 1521.
In the middle of the 16th century, surrounded by Metropolitan Macarius, evidence of this miracle was compiled into the story of “the newest miracle...”, which was included as an integral part in the “Russian Time Book”, “Nikon’s (Patriarchal) Chronicle” and in the “Book of the Degrees of the Royal Genealogy”.
“The Newest Miracle...”, depicting the events celebrated by the Church on May 31, sets the religious, historical and literary background of Akhmatova’s “Lamentations”. The memory of the Moscow sign not only suggests the name of Akhmatova’s holy fool (“the holy fool sleeps on the porch”—isn’t that the holy god-walker Vasily?), but also indirectly evokes the lines: “And touched by an angelic wing, / The bell began to speak...” - And abie hears, "to the great noise and the terrible swirl and ringing, "to the square bells...
Akhmatova’s treatment of chronicle evidence is alien to attempts to rehash an ancient legend, a romantic (ballad) retelling of the wonders and signs of 1521. Akhmatova is not “transported” anywhere and does not “get used to” anything; she remains faithful to her time and her destiny. The hidden conjugation of the saint’s exodus, separated by several centuries (1521-1922), is achieved in “Lamentation” by means that make Akhmatova’s poetic experience related to the techniques of medieval scribes: the poet borrows the plot frame of the chronicle narrative (more precisely, its fragment) and reveals in its forms the providential event of his era. The sources of binding symbolic dependencies are not only the coincidences and parallels of “The Miracle...” and the “Lamentation,” but also their oppositions, plot “twists” that separate the narratives: in Akhmatova’s sign, the host of saints and wonderworkers does not return to the abandoned monastery in which they remain The Virgin Mary with the Eternal Child. In addition to the first plan - an “artless” cry on the haystacks of an orphaned city, Akhmatov’s poem contains a second, symbolic plan, covertly testifying to the tragic breakdown of Russian life.
While maintaining a genetic connection with the funeral lament (and, consequently, with the oral folklore tradition), hagiographic and chronicle laments experienced the transformative influence of Christian views. Without denying the “legitimacy” and naturalness of crying for the dead, Christ himself shed tears at the tomb of Lazarus. The Church never tired of condemning the frenzied, screaming contrition for the departed. For a Christian, the death of a loved one is not only a personal loss, but also a reminder of the sin that once “conceived” death. The death of a neighbor should awaken repentant feelings in Christians and evoke tears of repentance for their own sins. “Why shouldn’t the Imam cry when I think about death, when I see my brother lying in the grave, inglorious and ugly? What do I miss and what do I hope for? Just grant me, Lord, before the end, repentance.” Often, book lamentations transformed the funeral lament into a tearful prayer, which made it easier to acquire the firstfruits of the Christian life of unceasing repentance.
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The proximity in the “Lamentation” of the Sarov miracle worker and the blessed Tver princess is justified not only chronologically (the time of glorification of the saints), but also biographically (their place in the poet’s life). Akhmatova’s great-grandfather on the maternal side, Yegor Motovilov, belonged to the same family as Simbirsk conscience judge Nikolai Aleksandrovich Motovilov - “a servant of the Mother of God and Seraphim,” a zealous admirer of the Sarov ascetic, who left the most valuable testimonies about him. At the beginning of the 20th century, during the days of preparation for the canonization of St. Seraphim, the surviving papers of N. A. Motovilov were the most important source for the life of the saint.
A clear biographical motif, permeating the six-century historical layer, connects Akhmatova’s life with the fate of St. Anna Kashinskaya. The poet's birthday (July 11, old style) differs by only one day from the day of remembrance of the blessed Tver princess (July 12, old style), and the life destiny of the saint. Anna, who lost her husband and two sons in the Golden Horde, was perceived in 1922 (several months after the execution of N.S. Gumilev) as a tragic proclamation of the fate of Akhmatova herself.
The historical allusions that permeate “The Lamentation” are not limited to glances at the story of the “Newest Miracle...” and indirect allusions to the canonizations of the beginning of the century. Lines characteristic of Akhmatova’s poetry:
And they leave the monastery,
Having given away the ancient vestments,
Miracle workers and saints,
Leaning on the sticks
sounded in the fifth year of the revolution not so much in the lyrical, but in the “propaganda” register. By the end of 1921, famine, turned into an instrument of civil war, engulfed 23 million residents of Crimea and the Volga region. The Russian Orthodox Church and POMGOL, created with the participation of the “bourgeois” intelligentsia, rushed to help the suffering. Church and public charity, escaping the control of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), did not correspond to the views of the Bolshevik leadership. In an effort to curb the seditious initiative of the Church, on February 6 (19), 1922, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution on the forced confiscation of church valuables, including sacred vessels and bowls used in worship. February 15 (28), 1922 St. Patriarch Tikhon said - ... From the point of view of the Church, such an act is an act of sacrilege, and We considered it our sacred duty to find out the Church’s view of this act, and also to notify Our faithful spiritual children about this...”
The very first lines of the “Lamentation” suggest what kind of “monastery” Akhmatova meant in her lament. Verse XXVIII of Psalm: Worship the Lord in His holy courtyard (slightly paraphrased in the beginning of Akhmatova’s poem) was inscribed on the pediment of the Vladimir Cathedral in St. Petersburg. (“The inscriptions taken down a long time ago: To this house befits the sanctity of the Lord in the length of days on the Engineering Castle, worship the Lord in His holy courtyard at the Vladimir Cathedral appeared on the pediments,” Akhmatova wrote in a prose sketch in 1962). Consecrated in honor of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, the temple built by Starov embodied Moscow legends on the banks of the Neva, and, linking her “Lamentation” with it, Akhmatova initially, with the opening lines of the poem, indirectly pointed to the chronicle source of her lament.
Compared to the story of the miraculous salvation of Moscow through the prayerful intercession of the Cathedral of Saints, the opening of Akhmatova’s “Lamentation” looks much darker: the heavenly patrons of Russia are leaving the monastery, and no one is preventing their outcome. However, this night procession of miracle workers, filled with tragedy, still remains for Akhmatova a conditional (“unless you repent...”) prophetic sign, and not a fulfilled sign of an inevitable apocalyptic execution.
In Akhmatova’s lament, the saints and wonderworkers, leaving the monastery, do not shake the dust of the earthly world from their feet, entrusting Russia to its fatal fate. “Acmeistic” concreteness of Akhmatova’s “Lamentation”:
Seraphim in the forests of Sarov...
Anna in Kashin...
transforms the night exodus of the miracle workers into a saving mission, with which the patron saints of Russia are coming across Russian soil. The Mother of God herself remains in the suffering city ( The Mother of God sees off /He wraps his son in a scarf...), without taking away from Russia its intercession and protection...
What prompted Akhmatova, using the traditional poetic genre (lamentation), to revise the plot of “The Newest Miracle...” that lies at the heart of the poem? The narrative of the 16th century, attested by Church Tradition, makes it difficult to transform its plot in some other poetic text (especially one built on the biblical reminiscences of “Worship the Lord...”). The plot metamorphosis accomplished in Akhmatova’s “Lamentation” will be hardly acceptable poetic license if it is not will be justified by some other (recent) revelation that took place in the poet’s memory.
The heavenly signs of the revolutionary era mystically justified Akhmatova’s rethinking of the plot. On March 2, 1917, the day of the abdication of the last Russian sovereign, a miraculous image of the Sovereign Mother of God was found in the village of Kolomenskoye near Moscow. In the icon, the Mother of God appeared in a royal crown with a scepter and an orb in her hands, visibly testifying to the world that She, the Lady of Heaven, accepted the insignia of royal power over Russia, torn apart by turmoil. The concern of the Mother of God for the fate of the people possessed by revolutionary madness, clear to millions of Orthodox Christians, imparted providential significance to the ending of Akhmatova’s “Lamentation”, completed by the vision of the sovereign patroness of Russia on the hundred squares of the Neva capital.
The above judgments do not allow us to judge with decisive certainty how consciously Akhmatova connected her “Lamentation” with the Sovereign image of the Mother of God. However, any diligent research into Akhmatova’s innermost intentions is unlikely to require continuation. The true poetic word testifies to more than the poet intends to say. Already the ancients indisputably understood that it is not so much the poet who pronounces the word, but rather the word that is spoken through the poet. A poetic word once spoken is revealed in a horizon of semantic connections over which the author has no control. And, having seen the Virgin Mary seeing off a host of saints (among them St. Seraphim and St. Anna), Akhmatova gave her poem “the seventh and twenty-ninth meanings,” turning the “lost” on the pages of “Anno Domini” “Lamentation” into a lament for Russia and to her Martyr King.
Many of Akhmatova’s poems are an appeal to the tragic destinies of Russia. The First World War in Akhmatova’s poetry marked the beginning of difficult trials for Russia. Akhmatova’s poetic voice becomes the voice of people’s sorrow and at the same time hope. In 1915, the poetess wrote “Prayer”:
Give me the bitter years of illness,
Choking, insomnia, fever,
Take away both the child and the friend,
And mysterious
gift of song -
So I pray at Your liturgy
After so many tedious days,
So that a cloud over dark Russia
Became a cloud in the glory of the rays.
The revolution of 1917 was perceived by Akhmatova as a disaster. The new era that came after the revolution was felt by Akhmatova as a tragic time of loss and destruction. But revolution for Akhmatova is also retribution, retribution for a past sinful life. And even though the lyrical heroine herself did not do evil, she feels her involvement in the common guilt, and therefore is ready to share the fate of her homeland and her people, and refuses to emigrate. For example, the poem “I had a voice.” (1917):
He said: "Come here,
Leave your land deaf and sinful,
Leave Russia forever.
I will wash the blood from your hands,
I will take the black shame out of my heart,
I'll cover it with a new name
The pain of defeat and resentment."
But indifferent and calm
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that with this speech unworthy
The mournful spirit was not defiled.
“There was a voice for me,” it is said as if we are talking about divine revelation. But this is obviously both an inner voice, reflecting the heroine’s struggle with herself, and the imaginary voice of a friend who left his homeland. The answer sounds conscious and clear: “But indifferently and calmly.” “Calmly” here only means the appearance of indifference and calmness; in fact, it is a sign of the extraordinary self-control of a lonely but courageous woman.
The final chord of Akhmatova’s theme of the homeland is the poem “Native Land” (1961):
And there are no more tearless people in the world,
More arrogant and simpler than us.
We don’t carry them on our chests in our treasured amulet,
We don’t write poems about her sobbingly,
She doesn't wake up our bitter dreams,
Doesn't seem like the promised paradise.
We don’t do it in our souls
Subject of purchase and sale,
Sick, in poverty, speechless on her,
We don’t even remember about her.
Yes, for us it’s dirt on our galoshes,
Yes, for us it's a crunch in the teeth.
And we grind, and knead, and crumble
Those unmixed ashes.
But we lie down in it and become it,
That’s why we call it so freely – ours.
The epigraph is based on lines from his own poem written in 1922. The poem is light in tone, despite the premonition of imminent death. In fact, Akhmatova emphasizes the loyalty and inviolability of her human and creative position. The word “earth” is polysemantic and meaningful. This is the soil (“dirt on galoshes”), and the homeland, and its symbol, and the theme of creativity, and the primal matter with which the human body is united after death. The collision of different meanings of the word along with the use of a variety of lexical and semantic layers (“galoshes”, “sick”; “promised”, “silent”) creates the impression of exceptional breadth and freedom.
In Akhmatova’s lyrics, the motif of an orphaned mother appears, which reaches its peak in “Requiem” as the Christian motif of the eternal maternal fate - from era to era, giving up sons as a sacrifice to the world:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
And here again Akhmatova’s personal is combined with a national tragedy and the eternal, universal. This is the uniqueness of Akhmatova’s poetry: she felt the pain of her era as her own pain. Akhmatova became the voice of her time; she was not close to power, but she also did not stigmatize her country. She wisely, simply and mournfully shared her fate. Requiem became a monument to a terrible era.
3. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A.A.’S WORKS AKHMATOVA
The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by the appearance in Russian literature of two female names, next to which the word “poetess” seems inappropriate, for Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva are Poets in the highest sense of the word. It was they who proved that “women’s poetry” is not only “poems for an album,” but also a prophetic, great word that can contain the whole world. It was in Akhmatova’s poetry that a woman became taller, purer, wiser. Her poems taught women to be worthy of love, equal in love, to be generous and sacrificial. They teach men to listen not to “love babble,” but to words that are as hot as they are proud.
And as if by mistake
I said: “You...”
The shadow of a smile lit up
Cute features.
From such reservations
Every eye will flash...
I love you like forty
Affectionate sisters.
The debate is still ongoing and, perhaps, will continue for a long time: who should be considered the first female poet - Akhmatova or Tsvetaeva? Tsvetaeva was an innovative poet. If poetic discoveries were patented, she would be a millionaire. Akhmatova was not an innovator, but she was a guardian, or rather, a savior of classical traditions from desecration by moral and artistic permissiveness. She retained Pushkin, Blok, and even Kuzmin in her verse, developing its rhythm in “Poem without a Hero.”
Akhmatova was the daughter of a naval engineer and spent most of her childhood in Tsarskoe Selo, and perhaps that is why her poems have a stately regal quality. Her first books ("Evening" (1912) and "Rosary" (1914) were reprinted eleven times) placed her on the throne of the queen of Russian poetry.
She was the wife of N. Gumilev, but, unlike him, she was not involved in the so-called literary struggle. Subsequently, after the execution of Gumilyov, their son, Lev, was arrested, who managed to survive and become an outstanding orientalist. This maternal tragedy united Akhmatova with hundreds of thousands of Russian mothers, from whom the “Black Marusi” took their children away. "Requiem" was born - Akhmatova's most famous work.
If you arrange Akhmatova’s love poems in a certain order, you can build a whole story with many mise-en-scenes, twists and turns, characters, random and non-random incidents. Meetings and separations, tenderness, guilt, disappointment, jealousy, bitterness, languor, joy singing in the heart, unfulfilled expectations, selflessness, pride, sadness - in which facets and kinks we do not see love on the pages of Akhmatova’s books.
In the lyrical heroine of Akhmatova’s poems, in the soul of the poetess herself, there constantly lived a burning, demanding dream of truly high love, undistorted in any way. Akhmatova’s love is a formidable, commanding, morally pure, all-consuming feeling that makes one remember the biblical line: “Love is strong as death - and its arrows are fiery arrows.”
The epistolary heritage of Anna Akhmatova has not been collected or studied. Some scattered publications are of undoubted biographical, historical and cultural interest, but do not yet allow us to speak with confidence about the significance of the letters in Akhmatova’s handwritten heritage, or about the features of her epistolary style. Identification and publication of Akhmatova's letters located in archives and in personal collections is an urgent and priority task. It should be noted that Akhmatova’s notebooks contain drafts of several dozen of her letters from recent years.
One of the peculiar features of Akhmatova’s early lyrics is the appearance of recognizable folklore motifs. Already, contemporaries were struck by the features of Akhmatova’s poetics, which made it possible, in the words of O. Mandelstam, “to discern a woman and a peasant woman in a literary Russian lady of the twentieth century.” Despite the fact that the most famous works of this sound belong to the collection "Evening", folklore traditions are also highlighted in "Rosary" and "White Flock".
A special attitude towards the folk poetic tradition distinguished Akhmatova in the Acmeist circle. In the poetic system of Acmeism, a change occurred in the functional role of folklore. In a certain way, this was connected with the declaratively declared Western orientation. Unlike the “younger” symbolists, who appealed to national roots in their work, Acmeism emphasized the continuity with the traditions of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Villon, and T. Gautier. According to A. Blok’s characterization, Acmeism “did not contain any native “storm and stress”, but was an imported “foreign thing.” Apparently, this partly explains the fact that Russian folklore did not become one of the organic elements of the artistic system Acmeists.
Against this background, the poetic face of Anna Akhmatova stood out especially clearly with her artistic searches, inextricably linked with the heritage of national culture. It is no coincidence that A. Blok, speaking against the aestheticism and formalism of the Acmeists, singled out Akhmatova as an “exception.” V.M. turned out to be right. Zhirmunsky, who already in 1916 connected the future of Russian poetry not with Acmeism, but with overcoming it: “We dream that new poetry can become broader - not individualistic, literary and urban, but nationwide, national, that it will include everything the diversity of forces dormant in the people, in the provinces, estates and villages, and not just in the capital, that it will be nourished by all of Russia, its historical traditions and its ideal goals, the joint and connected life of all people living not in a solitary cell, but in friendly connection with each other and with the native land" Zhirmunsky V.M. Overcoming symbolism. // Russian Thought, 1916, No. 12. It was along the line of overcoming Acmeism, from the subjectivity and isolation of the lyrical diary through the difficult search for an epic form to themes of great civil sound, that the evolution of Akhmatova’s lyrics took place.
Akhmatova's poetry is an unusually complex and original fusion of traditions of Russian and world literature. Researchers saw in Akhmatova a successor of Russian classical poetry (Pushkin, Baratynsky, Tyutchev, Nekrasov) and a recipient of the experience of older contemporaries (Blok, Annensky), and put her lyrics in direct connection with the achievements of psychological prose of the 19th century (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Leskov). But there was another, no less important for Akhmatova, source of her poetic inspiration - Russian folk art.
Folk poetic culture was refracted in a very specific way in Akhmatova’s poetry, perceived not only in its “pure form,” but also through the literary tradition (primarily through Pushkin and Nekrasov). The interest that Akhmatova showed in folk poetics was strong and stable, the principles of selection of folklore material changed, reflecting the general evolution of Akhmatova’s lyrics. This gives grounds to talk about folklore traditions in Akhmatova’s poetry, the adherence to which was a conscious and purposeful process. V.M. Zhirmunsky, pointing to the need for a “more in-depth special study” of the role of folk poetic traditions in the development of Akhmatova as a national poet, warned against classifying her “in the category of poets of a specifically Russian “folk style.” “And yet it is not by chance,” the researcher notes, “ “songs” as a special genre category, emphasized by the title, run through all of her work, starting with the book “Evening”:
I'm at sunrise
I sing about love.
On my knees in the garden
Swan field
The folk song element turned out to be close to the poetic worldview of the early Akhmatova. The leitmotif of Akhmatova’s first collections is a woman’s fate, the sorrows of a woman’s soul, told by the heroine herself. The highlighting of the female poetic voice is a characteristic feature of the era, which uniquely reflected the general trend in the development of Russian poetry at the beginning of the 20th century - the strengthening of the lyrical principle in poetic creativity.
The desire to portray a female lyrical character with a special emphasis on the national, with an emphasized appeal to the folk principle, at first glance, is more characteristic of M. Tsvetaeva with her bright “Russian style” of the late 10s and early 20s. Not so obviously, but deeper and more seriously, similar processes took place in Akhmatova’s poetic thinking. Her lyrical “I” seems to split into two; the heroine, associated with the refined atmosphere of literary salons, has a “folklore reflection”. As L. Ginzburg notes, “Akhmatova’s urban world has... a double that arises from song, from Russian folklore... These song parallels are important in the general structure of the lyrical image of early Akhmatova. Psychological processes occurring in the specifics of the urban way of life occur simultaneously and in the forms of folk consciousness, as if primordial, universal" Chervinskaya O. Acmeism in the context of the Silver Age and tradition. - Chernivtsi, 1997. P.124. For example, this is clearly visible in the poem “You know, I am languishing in captivity”:
You know I'm languishing in captivity
I pray for the death of the Lord.
But I remember everything painfully
Tver meager land.
Crane at an old well
Above him, like boiling clouds,
There are creaky gates in the fields,
And the smell of bread, and melancholy.
And judgmental glances
Calm tanned women.
It is no coincidence that Akhmatova uses here the technique of contrasting a restless, “languishing” heroine and “calm tanned women” - through kinship with the land, Akhmatova tries to bridge this gap and show its relativity.
This is the main thing in the interpretation of the lyrical character of the early Akhmatova, who lives in two worlds: the metropolitan noble and the rural. Akhmatova’s method of constructing a lyrical image cannot be called a “folkloristic mask.” And already because her “folklore” heroine is devoid of declarative conventions. On the contrary, the poetess tries to emphasize the internal kinship and spiritual community of her heroines.
This unexpected duality provides the key to understanding the peculiarities of Akhmatova’s folklorism. The richest imagery and symbolism of folk song, folk-poetic linguistic element, folklore allusions and reminiscences (“Lullaby” (1915), “I will serve you faithfully...”) are refracted through the prism of individual poetic thinking, combined with the emotional anguish characteristic of the young Akhmatova , fractured, sometimes refined aestheticism.
Akhmatov's allusions are most often associated with folklore and religious motifs - stylistic figures that hint through a similar-sounding word or mention of a well-known real fact, historical event, or literary work. Russia's past, its spiritual history inspire the poet to recreate pictures of the past:
Dry lips are tightly closed,
The flame of three thousand candles is hot.
This is how Princess Evdokia lay
On fragrant sapphire brocade.
And, bending over, she prayed tearlessly
She's talking about the blind boy's mother,
Trying to catch the air with your lips.
And the one who came from the southern region
Black-eyed, hunchbacked old man,
As if to the door of heavenly paradise,
I approached the darkened step.
Here, as in many of her poems, Akhmatova contrasts the luxury of the prince’s bed (sapphire brocade, three thousand candles) and the squalor of those who came to him (a blind boy, a hunchbacked old man).
And in the poem “Confession,” Akhmatova turns to biblical motifs, drawing an analogy between the miraculous resurrection of a girl performed by Christ and her own spiritual renewal after communion.
He who forgave my sins fell silent.
The purple twilight extinguishes the candles,
And a dark stole
She covered her head and shoulders.
Heart beats faster, faster,
Touching through the fabric
Hands absentmindedly making the sign of the cross.
But Akhmatova’s allusions are not limited to Russian folklore - in one of the poems in the collection “The Rosary,” she turns to the European folklore tradition in order to, through a subtle allusion to the unfulfilled happy fairy tale about Cinderella, talk about her love sorrows and doubts.
And meet you on the steps
They didn't come out with a flashlight.
In the wrong moonlight
I entered a quiet house.
Under the green lamp,
With a lifeless smile,
A friend whispers: “Cendrillona,
The fire goes out in the fireplace,
Tomya, the cricket is cracking.
Oh! someone took it as a souvenir
My white shoe
And he gave me three carnations,
Without looking up.
Oh sweet clues,
Where should I hide you?
And it’s hard for the heart to believe,
That the time is near, the time is near,
What will he measure for everyone?
My white shoe.
The tetrameter song trochee, firmly associated in the literary tradition with folk themes, is indirectly associated with Akhmatova; again the parallel with the spiritual world and emotional state of the folklore heroine comes to the fore.
Akhmatova's early work is, first of all, the lyrics of love, often unrequited. The semantic accents that appear in Akhmatova’s interpretation of the love theme turn out to be in many ways close to the traditional lyrical song, in the center of which is the failed fate of a woman. Often in folk lyrics, passionate love is presented as a disease induced by divination, bringing death to a person. According to V.I. Dahl, “what we call love, the common people call corruption, dryness, which... is put on.” The motif of love-misfortune, love-obsession, misfortune, characteristic of a folk song, in Akhmatova acquires that spiritual breakdown and passion that the folklore heroine, restrained in expressing her feelings, does not know.
Akhmatova’s folklore motifs often take on a specific religious connotation and echo prayer, which is also reminiscent of folk songs. A sad song - Akhmatova’s complaint is filled with a vague threat, a bitter reproach:
You will live without knowing any trouble,
Rule and judge
With my quiet friend
Raise sons.
And good luck to you in everything,
Honor from everyone
You don't know that I'm crying
I'm losing count of the days.
There are many of us homeless,
Our strength lies in
What for us, blind and dark,
God's house is shining,
And for us, bowed down,
The altars are burning
In this poem, the appeal to God as the final judge emphasizes the hopelessness of grief and the heroine’s cruel resentment. There is an almost mystical belief in the highest justice.
The manifestation of folklore motifs is especially noticeable in the themes of bitter fate, mourning: a mother’s cry for her son, for her husband - these lines are almost prophetic, they will also echo in the “Requiem” with a bitter woman’s cry “Husband in the grave, son in prison // Pray for me.” And in the collection “White Flock” it is still a song of pity about a ruined young life.
Is that why I carried you
I was once in your arms,
That's why the power shined
In your blue eyes!
He grew up slim and tall,
Sang songs, drank Madeira,
To distant Anatolia
He drove his own destroyer.
On Malakhov Kurgan
The officer was shot.
Twenty years without a week
He looked at the white light
But, in addition, Akhmatova has noticeable tendencies towards laconic poetic expression of events in mental life, noted by the first critics; one of its manifestations was found in Akhmatova’s appeal to aphoristic genres of folklore - proverbs, sayings, proverbs. The poetess either includes them in the structure of the verse itself (“And here we have peace and quiet, God’s grace”; “And around is the old city of St. Petersburg, Which wiped the sides of the people (As the people said then)”), or by means of her verse she tries to convey the syntactic and the rhythmic organization of folk speech (two-part construction, internal rhyme, consonance of endings), a special, proverbial type of comparisons and comparisons, and in this case it only starts from the folklore model.
And here we have peace and quiet,
God's grace.
And we have bright eyes
No order to rise.
The creatively assimilated experience of Russian classical literature and folklore, loyalty to the best traditions of Russian culture contributed to the emergence of Akhmatova as a national poet. This path was long and difficult, marked by crisis doubts and creative ups. Without losing her own individuality, Akhmatova sought to give her searches a direction inherent in the main lines of development of Soviet poetry. And the guiding thread for her was the theme of the Motherland, which she reverently carried, the beginning of which was laid by her early lyrical works, including the collections "Rosary" and "White Flock", which was continued in other, later collections of A. Akhmatova.
The outstanding poetess Anna Akhmatova had the opportunity to experience the oppression of Soviet repression beyond measure. She and her family were constantly out of favor with the authorities.
Her first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot without trial, her son Lev spent many years in the camps, and her second husband, Nikolai Punin, was arrested twice. The apartment in the Fountain House was continuously bugged and monitored. Akhmatova was persecuted and, having been expelled from the Writers' Union, was practically declared an outlaw. In addition, as is already known today, final, physical reprisal was prepared for the poetess. Report “On the need to arrest the poetess Akhmatova” No. 6826/A dated June 14, 1950 was handed over to Stalin by the USSR Minister of State Security Abakumov. “To Comrade STALIN I.V. I report that the USSR MGB has received intelligence and investigative materials regarding the poetess A. A. AKHMATOVA, indicating that she is an active enemy of the Soviet government. AKHMATOVA Anna Andreevna, born in 1892 (in fact, she was born in 1889), Russian, comes from the nobility, non-party, lives in Leningrad. Her first husband, the poet-monarchist GUMILEV, as a participant in the White Guard conspiracy in Leningrad in 1921, was shot by the Cheka. AKHMATOVA is exposed as an enemy by the testimony of her son L.N. GUMILEV, who before his arrest was a senior researcher at the State Ethnographic Museum of the Peoples of the USSR, and her ex-husband N.N. PUNINA, a professor at Leningrad State University, who were arrested at the end of 1949. The arrested PUNIN, during interrogation at the USSR Ministry of State Security, showed that AKHMATOVA, being from a landowner family, was hostile to the establishment of Soviet power in the country and until recently carried out hostile work against the Soviet state. As PUNIN showed, even in the first years after the October Revolution, AKHMATOVA spoke with her poems of an anti-Soviet nature, in which she called the Bolsheviks “enemies tormenting the earth” and declared that “she was not on the same path with Soviet power.”
Beginning in 1924, AKHMATOVA, together with PUNIN, who became her husband, grouped hostile literary workers around her and organized anti-Soviet gatherings in her apartment. On this occasion, the arrested PUNIN testified: “Due to anti-Soviet sentiments, AKHMATOVA and I, talking with each other, more than once expressed our hatred of the Soviet system, slandered the leaders of the party and the Soviet government and expressed dissatisfaction with various measures of the Soviet government... Anti-Soviet gatherings were held in our apartment, which were attended by literary workers from among those dissatisfied and offended by the Soviet regime... These persons, together with me and AKHMATOVA, discussed events in the country from enemy positions... AKHMATOVA, in particular, expressed slanderous fabrications about the alleged the cruel attitude of the Soviet authorities towards the peasants, was indignant at the closure of churches and expressed her anti-Soviet views on a number of other issues.”
As the investigation established, in these enemy gatherings in 1932–1935. AKHMATOVA’s son, GUMILEV, at that time a student at Leningrad State University, took an active part. About this, the arrested GUMILEV testified: “In the presence of AKHMATOVA, we at gatherings without hesitation expressed our hostile sentiments... PUNIN made terrorist attacks against the leaders of the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government... In May 1934, PUNIN, in the presence of AKHMATOVA, figuratively showed how he would have committed a terrorist act against the leader of the Soviet people.” Similar testimony was given by the arrested PUNIN, who admitted that he harbored terrorist sentiments against Comrade Stalin, and testified that these sentiments were shared by AKHMATOVA: “In conversations, I made all sorts of false accusations against the Head of the Soviet State and tried to “prove” that the existing situation in the Soviet Union can be changed in the direction desired for us only through the violent elimination of Stalin... In frank conversations with me, AKHMATOVA shared my terrorist sentiments and supported malicious attacks against the Head of the Soviet State. Thus, in December 1934, she sought to justify the villainous murder of S. M. KIROV, regarding this terrorist act as a response to the excessive, in her opinion, repressions of the Soviet government against Trotskyist-Bukharin and other hostile groups.” It should be noted that in October 1935, PUNIN and GUMILEV were arrested by the NKVD Directorate of the Leningrad Region as members of an anti-Soviet group. However, soon, at the request of AKHMATOVA, they were released from custody.
Speaking about his subsequent criminal connection with AKHMATOVA, the arrested PUNIN testified that AKHMATOVA continued to conduct hostile conversations with him, during which she expressed malicious slander against the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government. PUNIN also showed that AKHMATOVA was hostile to the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”, which rightfully criticized her ideologically harmful work. This is also confirmed by the available intelligence materials. Thus, a source from the UMGB of the Leningrad Region reported that AKHMATOVA, in connection with the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”, stated: “Poor things, they don’t know anything or have forgotten. After all, all this has already happened, all these words have been spoken and retold and repeated from year to year... Nothing new has been said now, all this is already known to everyone. For Zoshchenko this is a blow, but for me it’s just a repetition of moral teachings and curses I once heard.” The USSR MGB considers it necessary to arrest AKHMATOV. I ask for your permission. ABakumov"
In 1935, Akhmatova managed to rescue her arrested son and husband after a personal meeting with Stalin. But before this happened, both were interrogated “with partiality” and were forced to sign false testimony against Akhmatova - about her “complicity” in their “crimes” and about her “enemy activities.” The security officers manipulated the facts masterfully. Numerous intelligence denunciations and eavesdropping materials were also constantly collected against Akhmatova. The “operational development case” was opened against Akhmatova in 1939. The special equipment in her apartment had been working since 1945. That is, the case has long been concocted, all that remains is to bring it to its logical conclusion - arrest. All that is required is the go-ahead from the Kremlin Master. In 1949, Nikolai Punin and Lev Gumilev were arrested once again. And the head of the MGB, Abakumov, was already rubbing his hands, but for some reason Stalin did not give permission for Akhmatova’s arrest. Abakumov’s report contains his own resolution: “Continue to develop”... Why didn't the well-oiled mechanism work? The point here is the behavior of Akhmatova herself. No, she knew nothing about Abakumov’s report and was least worried about herself. But she desperately wanted to save her son. Therefore, she wrote and published a cycle of loyal poems, “Glory to the World,” including an anniversary ode to Stalin (No. 14 of Ogonyok magazine, 1950). And at the same time she sent a letter to Joseph Vissarionovich with a prayer for a son (“Motherland”, 1993, No. 2, p. 51). In fact, for the sake of saving her son, Akhmatova threw the last victim at the feet of the supreme executioner - her poetic name. The executioner accepted the victim. And that settled everything. Lev Gumilyov, however, was still not released, but Akhmatova was not arrested either. 16 painful years of loneliness awaited her ahead.
