Target: To familiarize students with the features of A. A. Akhmatova’s creativity during the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war years; show how the history of the country is refracted and reflected in its creativity; improve the skills and abilities of analysis and interpretation of a lyrical work as an artistic whole; contribute to the enrichment of spiritual and moral experience and expansion of the aesthetic horizons of students. Equipment: Portraits of A. A. Akhmatova and her loved ones, collections of poems by A. A. Akhmatova, the text of the poem “Poem without”, poems by I. a. Brodsky, E. a. Evtushenko, M. I. Tsvetaeva (see in the lesson), Statements about A. A. Akhmatova (On the desk).

Projected

Results: Students expressively read the poems of A. A. Akhmatova, analyze them, revealing the depth and richness of the lyrical content; note the merits of poetic language, determine the motives and themes of A. A. Akhmatova’s work during the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war years; interpret poems; note the originality of the lyrical heroine in the poetry of A. A. Akhmatova.

Lesson type: Combined (lesson-dialogue).

DURING THE CLASSES

I . OrganizationalStage

II . UpdateSupportingKnowledge

Conversation

♦ What themes, images, conflicts attract the attention of A. A. Akhmatova in the early period of her creativity (collections “Evening”, “rosary”)? How did the themes, moods, and rhythms change in the poetess’s later works?

♦ What is unique about the poetic language of the poem “Confusion”? Note logical “glitches”, unexpected transitions, pauses, unusual choice of conjunctions, punctuation marks in this poem. how can they be justified?

♦ What is unique about the genre and composition of the poem “”? What role do “Epigraph”, “Dedication” and “Epilogue” play in it?

♦ Which lines of the poem “Requiem” most reminded you of the early work of A. A. Akhmatova?

III. StagingGoalsANDTasksLesson.

MotivationEducationalActivities

Teacher. The war found a. A. Akhmatova in Leningrad. Her fate at this time was still difficult: her son, who had been arrested for the second time, was in prison, and efforts to free him led nowhere. A certain hope for making life easier arose before 1940, when she was allowed to collect and publish a book of selected works. But A.A. could not include in it any of the poems that directly related to the painful events of those years. Meanwhile, creative growth continued to be very high, and, according to the poet, poetry

They walked in a continuous stream, “stepping on each other’s heels, hurrying and out of breath...”

Anna Andreevna wrote that it was precisely from 1940 - from the time of the poem “The Path of All the Earth” and work on the poem “Requiem” - that she began to look at everything through past events, as if from some high tower. During the war years, along with journalistic poems (“Oath”, “Courage”, etc.), the poetess also wrote several works of a larger scale, in which she comprehends the entire historical significance of the revolutionary time, again returns in memory to the era of 1913, and revises it anew , judges, many things - previously dear and close - are decisively rejected, looking for origins and consequences. This is not a departure into history, but an approach of history to the difficult and difficult day of the war, a unique historical and philosophical understanding of the war that unfolded before her eyes, characteristic not only of her.

The creative synthesis of A. A. Akhmatova’s poetic development is “Poem without a Hero,” on which she worked for more than twenty years (1940-1962). the personal fate of the poet and the fate of her “generation” received here artistic coverage and assessment in the light of the historical fate of not only her contemporaries, but also her homeland.

IV.JobAboveSubjectLesson

1. Listening to students' reports "war in fate and Akhmatova's poetry"

2. Teacher's word

During the Great Patriotic War, A. A. Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent, returning to Leningrad in 1944. During the war, her homeland became the leader in her lyrics. In the poem “Courage,” written in February 1942, the fate of the native land is associated with the fate of the native language, the native word, which serves as a symbolic embodiment of the spiritual principle of Russia:

We know what's on the scales now

And what is happening now.

The hour of courage has struck on our watch,

And courage will not leave us.

It's not scary to lie down dead under bullets,

It's not bitter to be left homeless, -

Great Russian word.

We will carry you free and clean,

We will give it to our grandchildren and save us from captivity

I. S. Turgenev and the poem “courage” by A. A. Akhmatova (in pairs)

♦ What feeling unites both works?

♦ What similar images and motifs are there in these poems?

5. teacher's generalization

The work of A. A. Akhmatova during the Great Patriotic War turned out to be in many ways consonant with the official Soviet literature of that time. The poet was encouraged for his heroic pathos: he was allowed to speak on the radio, published in newspapers and magazines, and promised to publish a collection. A. A. Akhmatova was confused, realizing that she had “pleasing” the authorities.

During the war years, St. Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad became the “cultural” hero of Akhmatova’s lyrics, the tragedy of which the poet experienced as deeply personal. A. A. Akhmatova thought that she would not survive the war. It was then that the poet wrote a lot about the End, the last term, the “last page” of fate. Time has taught her to be “courageously cruel” both in life and in her work. (L.K. Chukovskaya). In some poems, A. A. Akhmatova explores the dialectic of the End, which approaches gradually, but is not immediately recognized by people. The artist’s logic was close to the triad (the historical event in the poet’s mind simultaneously appeared as if in three projections - prehistory, “real” history and the Supreme Judgment over it). The end, according to A. A. Akhmatova, also comes in three stages; the process is inevitable, and the situation is insoluble because a person is not able to control it. The origins of the End are hidden from our eyes; we are passive witnesses of only the third stage - or the finale. During the evacuation and after returning to Leningrad, the poet writes “Three Autumns” (1943) and “There are three eras

At Memories...” (1945). The first is tragic reflections on the outcome of life, the second is one of the most courageous and cruel poems of the twentieth century. - dedicated to the end of memory. According to A. A. Akhmatova, the only thing worse than death is oblivion.

5. Listening to students report on “the work of the poetess in the first post-war decade”

6. Work on the ideological and artistic content of the poem “Poem without a Hero”

1) Teacher's story

- “A Poem without a Hero” was created over many years. “The first time she came to me at the Fountain House,” A. A. Akhmatova writes about her, “on the night of December 27, 1940, sending one small excerpt as a messenger in the fall. I didn't call her. I didn’t even expect her on that cold and dark day of my last Leningrad winter. Its appearance was preceded by several small and insignificant facts, which I hesitate to call events.

That night I wrote two parts of the first part (“1913”) and “Dedication.” At the beginning of January, almost unexpectedly for myself, I wrote “tails”, and in Tashkent (in two steps) I wrote “Epilogue”, which became the third part of the poem, and made several significant insertions into both first parts. “I dedicate this poem to the memory of its first listeners - my friends and fellow citizens who died in Leningrad during the siege. I hear their voices and remember their feedback now when I read the poem aloud, and this secret chorus has become for me forever the justification of this thing" ( A. A. Akhmatova).

This work is the poet’s thoughts about his era and his fate, about the past and present. the past helps Anna Andreeva comprehend the present. The poet plunges into the depths of memories; she, as it were, brings back to life phenomena, events and feelings that are a thing of the past. Memory for a poet is the continuous life of the soul, but often the resurrected past also carries with it internal drama, regret about what has not come true, about irreparable losses, to which the heart cannot be indifferent.

Composition

The theme of the Great Patriotic War runs through the work of many writers and poets. After all, many of them know firsthand about the horrors of war. For example, the poet Sergei Orlov, having started serving as a private, returned from the war as a senior sergeant. In his poems, he expressed the memory of the soldiers who died in battle. In the poem “He was buried in the globe,” the author told us about a simple guy who gave his life, fulfilling his duty to his Motherland. And even though he is one of many on a planetary scale, the established world will be his monument:

The earth is like a mausoleum to him. -

For a million centuries,

And the Milky Ways are gathering dust

Around him from the sides.

Having experienced the hardship of military everyday life, Orlov described them in his poems. Blood, pain, fear of imminent death haunted people in war constantly. But memories of their home and loved ones warmed the hearts of the fighters. “And your unforgettable and wicked gaze, the gaze that loves forever my fate” - this is what supported them in difficult moments.

K. M. Simonov was a front-line journalist during the war. That is why many of his works are dedicated to war. Many soldiers kept his famous poem “Wait for me and I will return” in the pockets of their tunics. And even now these lines are known to everyone, because the theme of love and fidelity is always relevant. In another poem, “The Major Brought a Boy on a Carriage,” the author tells how a major, retreating from the Brest Fortress, carries his little son tied to a cannon carriage. A gray-haired boy clutches a toy to himself. Addressing us, Simonov says:

You know this grief firsthand,

And it broke our hearts.

Who ever saw this boy,

He won't be able to come home until the end.

What could be more terrible than a child turning gray from grief and horror.

Other works by Simonov, such as “Death of a Friend”, “Three Brothers”, “Winter of '41” and many others, evoke in us sympathy for people who survived the war. But at the same time, we are proud and admire their courage, their unshakable faith in victory.

Anna Akhmatova did not have a chance to visit the front, but she tasted the bitterness of war in full - her son fought. In her poetry, she conveyed all the pain and grief of mothers, sisters, loved ones, while at the same time instilling faith in victory in their hearts:

And the one who says goodbye to her beloved today -

Let her transform her pain into strength.

We swear to the children, we swear to the graves,

That nothing will force us to submit.

These lines from the poem “The Oath” teach you not to give in to grief, forget about tears, and hope to meet your loved ones.

The most monstrous thing about the war was that innocent children died. This problem was especially close to Akhmatova, as a woman and mother. The poem “In Memory of Valya” evokes tears of compassion in us:

And from your golden head

I will wash away the bloody traces.

But even such a terrible grief did not break the will of the people. People selflessly fought for a just cause, for their native land. The idea of ​​the invincibility of the Russian people was reflected in many of Akhmatova’s war works. These are “Courage” and “In Memory of a Friend”, as well as “Victory”, “Lamentation”, etc.

"G. Ulyanovsk 2015 Contents Introduction..3-5 Chapter I. Anna Akhmatova: life and destiny. Akhmatova’s place in Russian poetry of the 20th century..5-7 First books..8-16 War and revolution (1914-1917) ... "

Methodological development

on the topic “Anna Akhmatova: life and fate.”

Work completed:

Demyachenkova Alexandra Mikhailovna,

teacher of Russian language and literature

Municipal educational institution Novoulyanovskaya secondary school No. 2

Ulyanovsk

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..3-5

Chapter I. Anna Akhmatova: life and fate.

Akhmatova’s place in Russian poetry of the 20th century. …………………………….5-7

First books………………………………………………………………………………..8-16

War and revolution (1914-1917) …………………………………………...17-19

Poem “Requiem”………………………………………………………………...20-25

During the Great Patriotic War………………………………………...26-30

Last years of life………………………………………………………..31-34

Introduction

This work is devoted to the study of the life and creative path of A.A. Akhmatova. Akhmatova's poetry has repeatedly become the object of study by critics and literary scholars for almost a hundred years. She came into the spotlight already in the 1910s. The poetess herself called N. Nedobroy’s article “Anna Akhmatova” (1915) prophetic. She considered V. Zhirmunsky’s work “Overcoming Symbolism” to be one of the most significant in her assessments and judgments. Before the revolution, M. Kuzmin (“Preface to the first book of poems by A.A. Akhmatova, “Evening,” 1912), V. Chudovsky (“About the poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1912), N. Gumilyov (“On the poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1912”) wrote about the peculiarities of the young poet’s artistic style before the revolution. Anna Akhmatova, “The Rosary”, 1914) and others. Since the 1920s, the work of A. Akhmatova has been studied by representatives of various literary schools and directions.

But due to the unspoken ban on A. Akhmatova’s poetry in the mid-1920s, and then in the 1940s, domestic criticism forgot it. After the Munich publication of “Requiem” (1963), interest in her work increased on the part of foreign translators and literary scholars, and they began to write about her in Russia. The “return” of A. Akhmatova to Russian poetry of the 20th century was accompanied by the revival of the “voices” of her era, encrypted in her texts. From the 1960s to the present day, the interest of researchers in the problem of intertextuality, the dialogue of the author with the entire previous culture, has not waned.

The scientific works of E. Donin, V.M. are considered classics of Akhmatova studies. Zhirmunsky, V.V. Vinogradov, A. Naiman, A.I. Pavlovsky, A. Heit and other literary scholars. The works of these outstanding scientists became the methodological basis of my work.

And yet, in literary studies about the life and work of Anna Akhmatova, there is still a lack of works devoted to the evolution of the poetess’s lyrical system and the analysis of her artistic thinking at different stages of creativity, especially in the 1940s - 1960s.

It should also be noted that the work corresponds to the content of the school curriculum in literature, which notes “the need to consider all the main streams of literature of the 19th-20th centuries as a high patriotic and humanistic unity.”

And the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, as you know, is a vivid example of love for the Motherland and is one of the pages of the spiritual experience of the great Russian culture.

The purpose of my work is to study the life and creative path of Anna Akhmatova through the ideological foundations of the poetess, to analyze her artistic thinking at different stages of creativity.

The implementation of this goal was carried out by sequentially solving the following tasks:

1) Study of literary sources about the life and work of A. Akhmatova by such authors as V.V. Vinogradov, E. Donin, V.M. Zhirmunsky, N. Leiderman, A. Naiman, A. Pavlovsky and others.

3) Study of Anna Akhmatova’s creativity in the last years of her life.

4) Development of one of the current topics in modern literature - “The image of the native land in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova.”

The work consists of an introduction, which indicates the relevance of the chosen topic, the main part, including chapter 1 “Anna Akhmatova: personality and destiny”, chapter 2 “From work experience. The theme of the Motherland in the works of A. Akhmatova” and Conclusions. In conclusion, conclusions are drawn about the work done on the topic, about the implementation of the goals and objectives.

The completed work has, in my opinion, great practical significance, since it widely presents and generalizes material about the life and work of A. Akhmatova through the ideological foundations of the poetess. The development of the theme of the Motherland in the works of Anna Akhmatova meets modern requirements for the implementation of national priorities in the context of second generation standards. This material can be used in preparing and conducting lessons, special courses, elective courses, elective classes, extracurricular activities dedicated to the life and work of Anna Akhmatova.

Akhmatova’s place in Russian poetry of the twentieth century.

She connected these times

into the foggy shadow center,

and if Pushkin is the sun, then she

in poetry there will be a white night...

And you, universal decay, do not kill

That connection of times - it will still help.

After all, there simply cannot be two Russias,

How can there be two Akhmatovs? E. Yevtushenko. In memory of Akhmatova.

Akhmatova’s poetry is an unprecedented synthesis of tender femininity and masculinity reaching the point of heroism, a subtle sense of deep thought, emotional expressiveness and figurativeness rare for lyricism, brevity and exceptional semantic capacity, extreme verbal precision and reticence, suggesting the broadest associations, a strict sense of modernity, “the passage of time.” ”, constant memory of the past and truly prophetic foresight, uniquely individual and social, of utmost importance for the people and all humanity, national and introducing to world culture, bold innovation and rooted in traditions. Such a multi-layered synthesis characterizes Akhmatova’s poetry as one of the pinnacle phenomena of twentieth-century literature, which made it possible to connect what previously seemed unconnected.

Marina Tsvetaeva called Akhmatova “Chrysostom Anna of All Rus'”. Tsvetaeva’s brilliant prophecy came true: Anna Akhmatova became not only a poetic, but also an ethical and moral banner of her century.

Outstanding contemporary poets immediately noted: she did not seem to have the imitation of others, the timid inexperience of the early period. Akhmatov’s poetic word was initially light, fragile, quivering, “brittle” and at the same time regal and majestic. Let us remember her understanding of the royalty of the Word:

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.

The complex unity of fragility, intimacy and royalty, sovereignty, strength was immediately emphasized by many in Akhmatova’s lyrics. Somehow, from the very beginning, it was felt that this poetess grew up in a great country. She, suffering from tuberculosis since childhood, admitted later: “And who would have believed that I was planned for so long, and why I didn’t know this.” Contemporaries noticed this extreme strength of her charming grace. They wrote about the “patrician profile”, about her exquisitely proud figure with a regal bearing, about her as the “Muse of St. Petersburg” (even Tsarsko-Selo), even about her Spanish shawl on her shoulders and much more:

You came so defenseless,

She kept armor made of fragile glass,

But they are trembling, anxious and winged,

Lightning…

(M. Kuzmin)

Half turn - oh sadness! –

I looked at the indifferent ones.

Falling off my shoulders, I became petrified

False classic shawl.

(O. Mandelstam)

At the beginning of the century the profile is strange

(He is thin and proud)

Originated from the lyre...

(S. Gorodetsky)

Akhmatova - jasmine bush,

Burnt by raw asphalt,

Have I lost the path to the caves?

Where Dante walked and the air is thick...

Among Russian women Anna distant

She passes through like a cloud

Evening gray hair hurts.

Sublime style is also present in the series of pictorial portraits of Akhmatova, created by K. Petrov-Vodkin, Yu. Annenkov, Italian A. Modigliani, N. Iltman, G. Vereisky.

Akhmatova rightfully took her special place in the brilliant ranks of Russian poets of post-bloc Russia, among her great contemporaries: Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Yesenin, Tsvetaeva, Gumilyov, Mandelstam.

First books.

Akhmatova began writing poetry as a child and, according to her, composed a great many of them. Almost nothing has survived from those poems, neatly written down on numbered pages, but those individual works that are known show very characteristic “Akhmatovian” features. The first thing that immediately catches your eye is the laconicism of the form, the severity and clarity of the drawing, as well as some kind of internal, almost dramatic intensity of feeling. There is also a purely Akhmatova understatement in these poems, perhaps her most famous feature as an artist. Her understatement paradoxically coexists with a completely clear and almost stereoscopic image.

I pray to the window ray -

He is pale, thin, straight.

Today I have been silent since the morning,

And the heart is in half.

On the washstands

The copper has turned green.

But this is how the ray plays on him,

What fun to watch.

So innocent and simple

In the evening silence,

But this temple is empty

It's like a golden holiday

And comfort to me.

(I pray to the window beam)

This poem is literally composed from everyday life, from simple everyday life - right down to the green washstand on which a pale evening ray plays. One involuntarily recalls the words spoken by Akhmatova in her old age, that poems “grow from rubbish,” that even a spot of mold on a damp wall, and burdocks, and nettles, and a gray fence, and dandelions can become the subject of poetic inspiration and depiction. It is unlikely that in those early years she tried to formulate her poetic credo, as she did later in the cycle. The secrets of the craft, but the most important thing in her “craft” - vitality and realism, the ability to see poetry in ordinary life - was already inherent in her talent by nature itself.

1910 and the next two to three years were for Akhmatova only the prehistory of her life. The beginning of the 10s was marked by Gumilyov, who found friendship with the artist Amadeo Modigliani and published her first book, “Evening,” which brought him fame.

She had known Gumilyov since her gymnastics years - in Tsarskoye Selo. Akhmatova named the year they met in 1903, when she was 14 and he was 17 years old. At first, Anya Gorenko was quite cold about the advances of the lanky teenager, calling them “pretensions,” only on April 25, 1910 in Nikolskaya Slobodka near Kiev, in the Nikolskaya Church. They were people apparently equal in poetic talent, which could not but complicate their lives.

The latter was published in 1910 and was dedicated to Akhmatova (“Pearl”). In literary circles he was already considered a master. Akhmatova was still unknown to anyone at that time; one of her poems was published in the Parisian magazine Sirius (under the initials A.G.) by Gumilyov. He also helped her select from 200 poems the 46 that made up Akhmatova’s first book, “Evening.”

In the same significant year of 1910, she left for Paris. There she met Modigliani, then a completely unknown young artist. In her memoirs about him, written in old age, Akhmatova uttered the phrase about the “light predawn hour.” This is what she called her poetic youth - the first poems, love, the premonition of glory.

There was a light pre-dawn hour, but it was as if it wasn’t: it should have been like youth, voiced and ennobled by the “mysterious gift of song,” which was still almost not painful at that time. According to the nature of her talent, Akhmatova discovered the world with the help of such a sensitive instrument, given to her by nature, that all the sounding and colorful details of things, gestures and events easily and naturally came to her in poetry, filling it with a lively, elastic and even semi-childishly festive force of life:

The stuffy wind blows hotly,

The sun burned my hands

Above me is a vault of air,

Like blue glass.

Immortels smell dry

In a scattered braid.

On the trunk of a gnarled spruce

Ant Highway.

The pond is lazily silvering,

Life is easier in a new way...

Who will I dream about today?

In a light hammock net?

(The stuffy wind is blowing hotly...)

The poetic word of the young Akhmatova, the author of the first book of poems “Evening” published in 1912, was very vigilant and attentive to everything that came into her field of vision. The colorful, material flesh of the world, its reading of material contours, colors, smells, strokes, everyday - fragmentary speech - all this was not only carefully transferred into poetry, but also constituted their own existence, gave them breath and vitality. Already contemporaries noticed what an unusually large role strict, deliberately localized everyday detail played in the poems of the young poetess. She was not only accurate, she sometimes carried out the entire plan of the verse, so that, like a castle, she supported the entire structure of the work. These details, the boldly introduced prosaisms, and most importantly, the internal connection that always shines through in her between the external environment and the constantly stormy life of the heart - everything vividly recalls the Russian realistic classics, not only novels, but also short stories, prose and poetry (Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, later Nekrasov).

The name of young Akhmatova is closely connected with Acmeism, a poetic movement that began to take shape in 1910, when she began publishing her poems. The founders of Acmeism were N. Gumilev and S. Gorodetsky, they were also joined by O. Mandelstam, V. Narbut, M. Zenkevich, N. Otsup and some other poets who proclaimed the need for a partial rejection of some of the precepts of symbolism. By 1909, the Symbolists had lost the community they had previously had and came to a severe and painful internal crisis, indicating the collapse of this once broad literary and social group. Individual major masters, who constituted the pride and strength of the school, followed such different paths that their unification under the name of one movement seemed more and more like pure convention.

The Acmeists set themselves the goal of reforming symbolism, the main problem of which, from their point of view, was that it “directed its main forces into the realm of the unknown.” The world must appear as it is - visible, material, carnal, living and mortal, colorful and sounding.

This first condition of Acmeistic art, that is, its sobriety and sound realistic view of the world, should, according to the founders of the new movement, also affect the form of their works. The vague instability, uncertainty and fluidity of the word, so characteristic of the symbolists, had to be replaced by the parity and certainty of verbal meanings; the word had to mean what it means in the real language of real people: specific objects and specific properties.

If the Symbolists, who professed Verlaine’s principle of “music first,” imbued their poems with an intense musical element, then the Acmeists did not recognize such an unlimited intrinsic value of poetry and verbal melody and carefully took care of the logical clarity and objective honesty of the verse. But the Acmeists recognized symbolism as their “worthy father” and opposed only what was hopelessly dilapidated in it, in particular, the deliberate obscurity and inarticulateness of the verse, enveloping the real world in a foggy veil of mystical allegories.

Previously, the work of Anna Akhmatova outwardly easily fit into the framework of Acmeism: in her poems it is easy to find the objectivity and evenness of outline that N. Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky, M. Kuzmin and others wrote about in their manifestos.

Akhmatova herself, until the last days of her life, highly valued the role of Acmeism both in her own life and in the literature of that era. She never stopped calling herself an Acmeist. She went in this group to support the most important side of her talent - realism, learned the accuracy of the poetic word and the polish of the verse itself.

Akhmetova’s lyrics from the period of her first books (“Evening”, “Rosary”, “White Flock”) are almost exclusively love lyrics. Her innovation as an artist initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeatedly and seemingly played out theme to the end.

The novelty of Akhmatova’s love lyrics caught the eye of her contemporaries almost from her first poems, published in Apollo. Each book of her poems was like a lyrical novel. It is no coincidence that Mandelstam traced the origins of her work not to poetry, but to the psychological prose of the 19th century, arguing that there would be no Akhmatova if it were not for Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, Turgenev with The Noble Nest, all of Dostoevsky and partly even Leskov.

Often, Akhmatova’s miniatures were, in accordance with her style, fundamentally unfinished and resembled not so much a small novel in its traditional form, but rather a randomly torn page from a novel or even part of a page that has neither beginning nor end, forcing the reader to think about it. what happened between the heroes before.

Do you want to know how it all happened? –

It struck three in the dining room,

And saying goodbye, holding the railing,

She seemed to have difficulty speaking."

“That’s all...Oh, no, I forgot,

I love you, I loved you

Already then!"

(Do you want to know how it all happened?)

Akhmatova often preferred a “fragment” to a coherent, consistent and narrative story, since it provided an excellent opportunity to saturate the poem with sharp and intense psychologism, in addition, the fragment gave the depicted a kind of documentary quality: before us is either an excerpt from a desperately overheard conversation, or a dropped note , not intended for prying eyes.

Often, Akhmatova’s poems resemble a quick and seemingly unprocessed entry in a diary.

He loved three things in the world:

Behind the evening singing, white peacocks

And erased maps of America.

Didn't like raspberry tea

And female hysteria.

...And I was his wife.

(He loved…)

Akhmatova’s love story included the era - she voiced and altered the poems in her own way, introducing into them a note of anxiety and sadness that had a broader meaning than her own fate. Akhmatova’s love poetry conquered more and more reader circles, never ceasing to be the object of admiring attention from discerning connoisseurs, and clearly came from a seemingly destined narrow circle of readers.

The young critic N.V. wrote in an article in 1915 that the love theme in Akhmatova’s works is much broader and more significant than its traditional framework. Nedobrovo. He was essentially the only one who understood before others the true scale of Akhmatova’s poetry, pointing out that the distinguishing feature of the poetess was not weakness and brokenness, as was usually believed, but, on the contrary, exceptional willpower. In Akhmatova’s poems, he saw “a lyrical soul that is rather hard than too soft, rather harsh than tearful, and clearly dominant rather than oppressed.”

Akhmatova spoke about the sorrows and wanderings, the insults of her love. These laconic confessions, full of inner expression, similar to the silent confession of a lonely suffering heart, narrated, regardless of the author’s intentions, about their era and became its documents.

Her main poetic feeling of those years was the feeling of the extreme fragility of existence, the proximity of an inevitably approaching catastrophe. The feeling of the fragility of existence is the main and determining factor in her lyrics of the pre-revolutionary years. Researchers have noticed that, for example, the word “stuffy” appears so often in her work, as if it were a permanent epithet, inseparable from the world itself, reproduced in poetry. It must be said that in general the motive of isolation, isolation and even, as it were, imprisonment is one of the loudest in her pre-revolutionary lyrics.

Windows are forever forgotten

What is there - drizzle or thunderstorm? –

(We are all hawkmoths here, harlots)

we read in one of the poems “Chyotoy”. And in another again:

You came to console me, darling,

The most gentle, the most meek.

There is no strength to rise from the pillow,

And there are frequent bars on the windows.

(You came to comfort me, darling)

It is characteristic that the image of Death, the deliverer, most often appears in Akhmatova’s imagination in the Noannovsky thunderstorm and storm, in the midst of almost apocalyptic disasters and general catastrophes.

It seemed to me that there was a cloud with a cloud

It crashes somewhere in the heights,

Like angels they will come to me.

(How terribly the body has changed...)

In her poems, tragic motifs arose of the instantaneousness and frailty of human life, sinful in its blind arrogance and hopelessly lonely in the great cold of infinity.

Pray for the poor, the lost,

About my living soul,

You, always confident in your ways,

The light seen in the hut...

(Pray for the poor, the lost.)

She sought salvation in the beauty of nature and in poetry, in the selflessness of the momentary vanity of life and in long journeys to great cities and imperishable treasures of culture.

Instead of wisdom - experience, insipidity,

Unquenchable drink...

(Instead of wisdom - experience...)

Her poems contain many lovingly painted Russian landscapes, warmed by touching and faithful affection, deep and acute feeling. The purely Russian theme of a wounded conscience often flares up and flares up in her precisely from the contact of an always intense poetic feeling with the landscape, alone with the Motherland, when, having left city events, she found herself alone with nature.

The theme of the Motherland became more and more powerful in her poetry. Beginning with half-confession voiced in Lermontov’s motifs of “strange love,” this theme becomes a constant companion of many stories told in the poems of “The White Flock,” “Plantain,” then “Anno Domino” and others - right up to the latest works.

The theme of the Motherland, which became more and more powerful year after year in her work, a theme that was, as time has shown, organic for her, helped her during the First World War to take a position that was noticeably different from official propaganda literature.

War and revolution (1914 – 1917)

In Akhmatova’s mind, war has always been a great disaster, tragedy and evil. The tragic time required the poetess to turn to the past, to world humanistic traditions, to the majestic and terrible history of Russia. The fate of the Motherland becomes the center of Akhmatova's grief. Pictures of the war are given through sparse sketches of fires: “the smell of juniper is sweet // from the burning forests flies.” The torment of the bloody earth is comparable only to the torment of Christian saints: “They wound their holy body, // They cast lots for your vestments.” And Akhmatova’s faith in Russia is correlated with the mercy of the Mother of God:

Only they won’t divide our land

For his own amusement, the adversary:

The Virgin Mary spreads the white

Over great sorrows.

In the poem “Prayer,” which amazes with the power of self-denial feeling, she prays to fate for the opportunity to sacrifice to Russia everything she has - her life and the lives of her loved ones:

Give me the bitter years of illness,

Choking, insomnia, fever,

Take away both the child and the friend,

And the 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 depth and richness of spiritual life, the seriousness and height of moral demands steadily led Akhmatova onto the path of public interests. The image of Russia appears more and more often in poetry.

Her poem “I Had a Voice,” written in 1917, is considered to be a kind of summary of the path Akhmatova traveled before the revolution. It immediately drew a clear line between Akhmatova and the emigrants who left Russia after October, as well as some of those who were called internal emigrants, that is, for some reason they did not leave, but were fiercely hostile towards Russia, which had taken a different path. . The main thing that separated Akhmatova from the emigrants was a sense of patriotism. She condemned the civil war, as she condemned any war, and this war seemed to her more terrible, which was combined with the intervention of foreign powers and was waged by people who belonged to the same fatherland.

The fact that a new world was being born, that a new Age had come, signified by a reassessment of values ​​and the creation of new relationships, was something Akhmatova and many other artists could not fully accept. Marina Tsvetaeva, like Akhmatova, refused to divide the people of a single nation into some “reds” and some “whites” - she preferred to cry and grieve for both.

In the poem “I Had a Voice,” Akhmatova appeared as a passionate civic poet with a bright patriotic sound. This is one of the most striking works of the revolutionary period. There is no understanding of it, no acceptance of it, but the voice of that intelligentsia who went through torment, made mistakes, doubted, searched, rejected, but in the midst of this cycle already made its main choice - remained with its country, its people, passionately sounded in it. .

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 strict, elevated biblical form of the poem, making one remember the prophets and preachers, and the very gesture of expelling from the temple (this gesture is almost visually created by the intonation of the verse) - everything in this case is surprisingly proportionate to its majestic and harsh era, which was beginning a new chronology. A. Blok loved this poem very much and knew it by heart. This was the pinnacle, the highest point reached by the poetess in the first era of her life.

Poem "Requiem"

Akhmatova’s main creative and civic achievement in the 30s was the creation of his poem “Requiem,” directly dedicated to the years of the “Great Terror” - the suffering of the repressed people.

“Requiem” consists of ten poems, a prosaic Preface, called “Instead of a Preface” by Akhmatova, a Dedication, an Introduction and a two-part Epilogue. The poem, in addition, is preceded by an epigraph from the poem “So it was not in vain that we suffered together”... Akhmatova resolutely refused to remove the epigraph, since it, with the force of a minted formula, uncompromisingly expressed the very essence of her behavior - as a writer and citizen, she really was together with people in their misfortune and never sought protection from “alien wings” - neither then, in the 30s, nor later, during the years of the Zhdanov massacre.

Akhmatova spoke about the vital basis of the “Requiem” and its internal purpose in a prosaic Prologue, entitled “Instead of a Preface.”

“During those years of the Yezhovshchina,” she writes, “I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad. One day someone “identified” me. Then the woman standing behind me with blue lips, who, of course, had never heard my name in her life, woke up from her characteristic stupor and asked me in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper):

Can you describe this?

And I said:

Then something like a smile slid across what had once been her face.”

In this small passage, the era visibly emerges, the vocabulary itself is characteristic: Akhmatova was not recognized, but “identified”, the woman’s lips are “blue” from hunger and nervous exhaustion, everyone speaks only in a whisper. The preface helps to understand that the poem was written, like Mozart’s “Requiem” once upon a time, “to order.” A woman with blue lips is a triumph of justice and truth. And Akhmatova takes on this order, this heavy duty, without any hesitation, because she will write about everyone, including herself.

"Requiem" was created over different years. The dates under the poems that make up the poem are different: “Dedication” is dated March 1940, two parts of the “Introduction” - in the fall of 1935, the second - sixth part of the same “Introduction” - 1939, “Verdict” - also 1939 , but with the indication of “veto”, “To death” - August 19, 1939; “Already Madness is on the Wing,” which is the ninth part of “Requiem,” is dated May 4, 1940, indicating “Fountain House”; “The Crucifixion”, published in “Requiem” without a date, has in some publications the date 1938 - 1939, since it consists, as is known, of two parts; finally, the “Epilogue”, which is also a two-part work, is designated March 1940 with the indication “ Fountain House" Thus, almost the entire "Requiem" was written in 1935 - 1940, only "Instead of the Preface" and the epigraph are marked with 1957 and 1961.

All these dates (except for the epigraph and the note “Instead of a Preface”) are associated by Akhmatova with the tragic peaks of the sad events of those years: the arrest of her son in 1935, the second arrest in 1939, the sentencing, the troubles of the case, the days of despair...

This monumental poem organically joins all the “laments”, mournful prayers of Akhmatova, and the chronicle of her losses. This is a poem with a unique composition, with strict precision in the alternation of epic and lyrical fragments, with a complex frame - “Epigraph”, “Instead of a Preface”, “Episode”. There are ten chapters in Requiem. It is also important that a mournful, tender lyrical chapter appears in the poem, a kind of “respite” after the initial thunderous, frightening chapters and lines:

The quiet Don flows quietly,

The yellow month is entering the house...

Yes, this is almost Mozar’s “Lacrimosa”, part of his “Requiem”, also following the formidable “Dies irae” (Day of Wrath). It is in this part that Akhmatova talks about her orphanhood:

This woman is sick

This woman is alone.

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

The entire first part of the great poem is built according to the laws of the requiem.

It is formed by “Dedications”, “Introduction” and fragments of “They took you away at dawn”... Akhmatova is laconic, she is able to catch the everyday conversations of life, in this part she recreates many strokes, stopped time. She spoke about the general numbness, freezing, about how everyone around was amazed by the enormity of universal grief and misfortune. “And Leningrad hung like an unnecessary pendant / Near your prisons” - this is an extremely pointed expression of withering away, stopping, the constraint of life. “Appendage” is something torn off, attached to the whole. Grief crushed and united everyone who had previously lived aloof and carefree. Some kind of cosmic whirlwind sweeps overhead, and there is nowhere to hide from it. Even the heavens disappeared: “The heavens melted in fire” (this is already in Chapter X). But this wind of death is not Mozart’s “Dies irae”, but something done by people, destroying them, turning Leningrad into an unnecessary “appendage” to the “underworld”, even stopping the Neva:

Mountains bend before this grief,

The great river does not flow

But the prison gates are strong,

And behind them are “convict holes”

And mortal melancholy.

The rhymes “gates - holes”, as well as the tires of “black marus” (i.e. arrest cars, “funnels”), and finally, the surprisingly colloquial self-reproach of the heroine from the queue in front of the prison (“I should show you, mocker”) - these are extremely earthly , precise signs of stopped time.

Stopped, frozen time is conveyed in the poem through the melody of deepest sadness and images of the opening abyss, expressed in apocalyptic details: “the hateful gnashing of keys,” “the wild capital,” “the rabid summers,” “the death stars stood above us,” “the goddess’s candle floated.” .

When creating the image of eternal Silence, Akhmatova departs from the traditions of the requiem - the mass: in her image of Silence, Peace there is almost no theme of humility, trying on the silence of eternal peace.

Anna Akhmatova creates two distinct countercurrents of feelings, two contradictions. On the one hand, she seems to follow the poetics of the requiem,” admits that the “eternal peace” that she begs for the martyrs also affects her. Hence the call, the self-order to calm down, to unconsciousness: “I have a lot to do today: / I need to completely kill my memory, / I need my soul to petrify...” This flow of feelings ultimately gives rise to a symbol of petrification, a frozen (and therefore indestructible) In memory. All lines of the lyrical plot ultimately converge in the image of a numb monument. This symbol of Grief is clearly visible from any point in the poem.

But on the other hand, Akhmatova’s monument, a cold stone, her silent monument is a groaning stone, angrily protesting. It retains the beating of life, only temporarily numb, all the power of hope. “Petrified suffering”, the stone word of a sentence are powerless before a moral feat, before the omnipotent element of life.

In the final chapters of Akhmatova’s poem, a picture of unusual grief emerges, albeit grandiose, and the grief associated with Russia’s criminal path is accompanied by “cries” that carry hope, a way out to the light. Akhmatova’s “crucifixion,” near which “a choir of angels glorified the great hour” (i.e., the hour of imminent resurrection), is the highest prayerful consolation, unexpected for the entire atheistic time of the 1930s. It is lyrical, intimate and epic at the same time. “The Crucifixion” can be considered the poetic and philosophical center of the entire work, although it is placed immediately before the “Epilogue”.

The “Epilogue,” consisting of two parts, confronts the reader with the melody and general meaning of the “Preface” and “Dedication.” Its second, final part develops the theme of the Monument, well known in Russian literature according to Derzhavin and Pushkin, but acquired under the pen of Akhmatova a completely unusual - deeply tragic - appearance and meaning. Never, neither in Russian nor in world literature, has such an unusual image appeared - the Monument to the Poet, standing, according to his will and testament, near the prison wall. This is truly a monument to all victims of repression who were tortured in the 30s and other terrible years:

...And if ever in this country

They are planning to erect a monument to me,

I give my consent to this triumph,

But only with a condition - do not put it

Not near the sea where I was born:

The last connection with the sea is severed,

Not in the royal garden near the treasured stump,

Where the inconsolable shadow is looking for me,

And here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they didn’t open the bolt for me.

Then, even in the blessed death I am afraid

Forget the rumble of the black marus,

To forget how hateful the door slammed,

And the old woman howled like a wounded animal.

And even from the still and bronze ages,

Melted snow flows like tears,

And let the prison dove drone in the distance,

And the ships sail quietly along the Neva.

(Requiem)

Akhmatova’s “Requiem” is a truly folk work, not only in the sense that it reflected and expressed a great folk tragedy, but also in its poetic form, close to a folk parable. Woven from simple, “overheard” words, he expressed his time and the suffering soul of the people with great poetic and civic power.

“Requiem” was not known either in the 30s or in subsequent years, just as many works of those years were not known. But he forever captured his time and showed that poetry continued to exist even when “the poet lived with his mouth clenched.” The strangled cry of a hundred million people was heard - this is Akhmatova’s great merit.

During the Great Patriotic War.

The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people, which they waged for four long years against German fascism, defending both the independence of their Motherland and the existence of the entire civilized world, was a new stage in the development of Soviet literature.

The war found Akhmatova in Leningrad, she saw the first cruel blows dealt to the city she had sung so many times. Already in July the famous oath appears:

And the one who says goodbye to her beloved today -

Let her transform her pain into strength.

We swear to the children, we swear to the graves,

That no one will force us to submit.

The Muse of Leningrad donned a military uniform in those difficult times, and she appeared to Akhmatova then in a stern, courageous guise.

The poetess did not want to leave Leningrad and, being evacuated and living for three years in Tashkent, did not stop thinking and writing about the abandoned city. Knowing about the torment of besieged Leningrad only from stories, letters and newspapers, the poetess felt, however, obliged to mourn the great victims of her beloved city. Some of her works of this time, in their high tragedy, echo the poems of Olga Berggolts and other Leningraders who remained in the ring of the blockade. The word “mourner” appeared in relation to Leningrad precisely from Akhmatova. She attached high poetic meaning to this word. Her poetic requiems included words of rage, anger and defiance:

And you, my friends of the last call!

In order to mourn you, my life has been spared.

Your memory is not as cold as a weeping willow,

And shout all your names to the whole world!

What names are there!

After all, it doesn’t matter - you are with us!..

Everyone on your knees, everyone!

Crimson light poured out!

And Leningraders again walk through the smoke in rows -

The living are with the dead: for glory there are no dead.

(And you, my friends of the last call!..)

Of course, Akhmatova does not have direct descriptions of the war - she did not see it. But her works are dear because they expressed feelings of compassion, love and sorrow that then came to Leningrad from all over the country.

It is characteristic that the word “we” dominates in her war lyrics. “We will preserve you, Russian speech”, “courage will not leave us”, “our homeland has given us shelter” - she has many such lines, testifying to the novelty of Akhmatova’s perception and the triumph of the people’s principle.

The homeland turned out to be not only St. Petersburg, not only Tsarskoe Selo, but also the entire huge country, spread across the boundless and saving Asian expanses:

We know what's on the scales today

And what is happening now.

The hour of courage has struck on our watch.

And courage will not leave us.

It's not scary to lie dead under the steering wheels,

It's not bitter to be homeless, -

And we will save you, Russian speech,

Great Russian word.

We will carry you free and clean,

We will give it to our grandchildren and save us from captivity

(Courage)

The “dispassion” of time is contrasted here with the tension of the will and feelings of people accepting the burden of responsibility and making choices. The word ours, highlighted with logical emphasis, reflects the inevitably approaching turning point in history. The repetition of words (hour-hours, courage-courage) emphasizes the interaction of different meanings of the word (hour - the time of choice and hour - an indication of the time on a symbolic clock; courage - fortitude in trouble, patience, as opposed to an indication, and courage - courage, fearlessness) . The poem contains negative evaluative constructions that reveal the nature of true fearlessness and determine the measure and price of true courage, which is based on self-denial. (“It’s not scary to lie dead under bullets, it’s not bitter to be left homeless...”) Here Akhmatova uses the technique of collapsed opposition, which is indicated by a dash.

A special role in the rhythmic, graphic semantic composition of the text is played by the last line, consisting of one, specially highlighted word forever. This word has no rhyme and therefore has special power. It is connected with the motif of time. Thus, the movement from the present to the future to the eternal is shown. This organization of the text emphasizes the poet’s faith in victory, in the salvation of the Motherland. Anna Akhmatova speaks about the universal and about her personal, contained in it: free and pure speech is the sphere of life and activity of the poet, this is his personal essence and this is the national culture of the people. This is how the personal merges with the public, and this is what colors the high structure of the poem with the pathos of genuine sincerity, devoid of any falsehood.

Akhmatova’s poems at the end of the war are filled with sunny joy and jubilation. But the poetess would not be herself if even in these happy days she did not remember the great sacrifices and sufferings made by the people in the name of the freedom of the Fatherland. From the poem “In Memory of a Friend” she wrote:

And on Victory Day, gentle and foggy,

When the dawn is red like a glow,

A widow at an unmarked grave

Late spring is busy.

She is in no hurry to get up from her knees,

It dies on a kidney and strokes the grass,

And he will drop a butterfly from his shoulder to the ground,

And the first dandelion will fluff up.

Apparently, this is one of the wisest, and in its wisdom, beautiful poems about our Victory. The spring, chilly air that shines through the lines of this eight-verse tells us about the refreshed space of that unforgettable time more than many other fanfare and loud poems. In the image of Victory - the Widow - doesn't he immediately refer to many, many millions of widows, orphans, cripples and unfortunates who endured concentration camps and prisons, occupation and blockade?

The war years became for Akhmatova a time of learning the true possibilities of her own poetry. Writing in one of her poems about Leningrad, she wrote:

I will mark that day with a white stone,

When I sang about victory,

When I'm about to win,

Overtaking the sun, it flew...

For hundreds of miles, for hundreds of miles,

For hundreds of kilometers

The salt lay, the feather grass rustled,

The groves of cedars turned black.

Like the first time I'm on her,

I looked at my homeland.

I knew it was all mine -

My soul and body.

(From an airplane)

This is a view from an airplane window, but it is something incomparably more: a view from that truly high point of view that Akhmatova acquired during the Great Patriotic War, from the point of view of a poet - citizen, poet - patriot.

“I knew: this is all mine...” - here is the starting position from which a new period in the poetess’s work began. An expanded range of lyrics, a new vision of the world, a time of high civic maturity - all this could not help but introduce new ideas and searches for new poetic forms into her work. When you read Akhmatova’s wartime poems, you involuntarily pay attention to how persistently and almost independently of the author they are united into separate lyric-epic groups reminiscent of poems. Such are, for example, “The Moon at its Zenith” or a small triptych dedicated to Blok and also begun during the war years. Akhmatova steadily moved towards new forms of epic appearance.

Last years

Anna Akhmatova was a great tragic poetess and a profound artist who witnessed a great era. She went through a long creative path and endured difficult adversities, which were reflected both in the “Requiem” and in some poems of the post-war years.

In the post-war years, she remembered a lot, but her memories were not like memoirs created in her leisure time; She uncompromisingly and severely condemned both in “Poem without a Hero” and in other works the once glorified era of his.

The wandering of Memory and Conscience through the utter distances of long-gone times invariably led her to today, to today's people. Historicism of thinking was the main character of poetic reasoning, the main starting point of all memoir associations.

At this time, Akhmatova began researching the work of A.S. Pushkin. She was proud that she belonged to the honorable cohort of creativity researchers, rightfully the author of scientific works on the life and work of Pushkin. The great poet appeared with extraordinary liveliness and novelty in Akhmatova’s light. Her creative intuition, the path to Pushkin not from the outside, but from within the creative world - this was a very human, sensitive Akhmatovian “Pushkinism”.

Akhmatova's later poems, enlightened and wise in Pushkin's style, are noticeably more harmonious and musical than the previous ones. They included a melodiousness that was previously unusual; there are, although rarely, even internal rhymes that make the verse light, as if smoothly gliding:

And the swan, as before, floats through the centuries,

I admire the beauty of my double.

And hundreds of thousands of steps sleep dead

Enemies and friends, friends and enemies.

And the march of shadows has no end in sight

You can't see the palace from the granite vase.

My white nights whisper there

About someone's high and secret love.

And everything burns with mother-of-pearl and jasper,

But the source of light is mysteriously hidden.

(Summer garden)

Akhmatova’s lyrics were characterized by a deep psychological subtext, which visibly brings her closer to certain artistic quests of the 20th century. But behind these Akhmatova searches and discoveries, the majestic ridge of Russian classical literature of the 19th century rises steadily and inexorably.

Pushkin, Baratynsky, Lermontov, Gogol, Nekrasov, Tolstoy - these are the main names and forerunners of Akhmatov’s poetry, which from the very beginning was closely attentive to the great heritage of human culture.

In the later lyrics, especially those that are almost diary in nature, Akhmatova’s fragmentation intensifies. Sometimes it seems that she is talking to a piece of paper, to herself, to heaven and God. She gets, with the help of her fragments and reticence, to the subconscious, to that area that she called the soul. The world has always been special to her - not the way everyone sees it. In old age, she sees him not just unstable, fraught and filled with troubles, but tragic and broken into pieces, into pieces, into blocks and fragments. Like none of the other poets, Akhmatova was destined to capture this fragmentation, the fragmentation of a world that may even no longer exist - it exists only in our inertial consciousness.

But maybe all this gloomy feeling, filled with painful forebodings, is just a far cry from age, when everything reminds only of death? All this is not accidental. Her confessions about “secret knowledge”, about the “last hour”, about the “invisible stream of being”, that the world seems strangely transparent to her, so that the darkness itself is transparent and therefore, as it were, light... She has too many such confessions . They seem to create the special music of Akhmatova’s late verse; they look like signs of some last knowledge about the world, bestowed on her at the end of her life.

Reading the poems of the late Akhmatova, we cannot help but feel that her darkness is not pessimistic, it is tragic. Her latest poems, especially those inspired by Komarov’s nature, always carefully and carefully dwell on those little things and signs of life where charm and charm shine through. She peers at these signs with sadness, but also with gratitude: after all, life still continues and, perhaps, according to some higher laws, it will not end, will not slip into the abyss already dug by human unreason.

Once in her youth, in “Epic Motives,” she wrote that in old age, in poverty, in illness, on the verge of death, she might remember the soft winter snow slowly rising upward:

...And I thought: it can’t be,

May I ever forget this.

And if a difficult path lies ahead of me,

Here's a light load that I can handle

Take it with you so that in old age, in illness,

Perhaps in poverty - remember

The sunset is frantic, and the fullness

Spiritual strength, and the charm of a sweet life

(Epic motives)

The charm of sweet life constantly overcame the darkness of her last poems. Perhaps, at the end of her life, she took with her a light load, the living outlines of the Tsarskoye Selo gardens, the Komarov pines. And she left us poetry, where there is everything - the darkness of life, and the dull blows of fate, and despair, and hope, and gratitude to the sun, and “the charm of a sweet life.”

In 1964, in Italy, Akhmatova was awarded the Etna Taormina Prize for a collection of poems, which consisted of poems from different years. In 1965 in London, Akhmatova was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University as the greatest modern Russian poet, whose poetry and her own fate reflected the fate of the Russian people.

Anna Akhmatova’s path was difficult and complex. In her life and work we feel the “passing of time”, we find not the external historical accessories of an experienced, living era, but the living feelings, foresights and insights of an insightful artist. And many still have this spiritual, historical necessity to discover Akhmatova for themselves.

Similar works:

“Speech by the Chairman of the Stavropol Regional Organization of the Trade Union of Public Education and Science Workers of the Russian Federation Lora Nikolaevna Manaeva at the regional August pedagogical conference at the round table on August 22, 2016.

The lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is bright and original. Along with her most widely known poems about love, Akhmatova’s poetry includes a whole layer of poetry containing patriotic themes.
In the collection “The White Flock” (1917), summing up the early work of the poetess, for the first time the lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is freed from constant love experiences. Biblical motifs appear in it, the concepts of freedom and death are comprehended. And already here we find Akhmatova’s first poems on the topic of patriotism. The first poems of historical content also appear in the collection.
The theme of the Motherland increasingly asserted itself in her poetry. This topic helped Anna Akhmatova take a position during the First World War that differed from the official point of view. She acts as a passionate opponent of war:
Juniper smell sweet
Flies from burning forests.
The soldiers are moaning over the guys,
A widow's cry rings through the village.
It was not in vain that prayer services were served,
The earth yearned for rain:
Warmly sprinkled with red moisture
Trampled fields.
Low, low empty sky,
And the voice of the beggar is quiet:
“They wound your holy body,
They are casting lots for your garments.”
In the poem “Prayer,” Anna Akhmatova prays to fate for the opportunity to sacrifice everything she has to Russia:
Give me the bitter years of illness,
Choking, insomnia, fever,
Take away both the child and the friend,
And the mysterious gift of song -
So I pray at my liturgy
After so many tedious days,
So that a cloud over dark Russia
Became a cloud in the glory of the rays.
Intuitively sensing the time shift, Anna Akhmatova cannot help but notice how her native country is being torn apart. Her lyrical heroine cannot rejoice when Russia cries. She feels this crisis in her soul:
I had a voice.
He called comfortingly,
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.
In this poem, Anna Akhmatova spoke as a citizen. She did not directly express her attitude towards the revolution. But this reflects the position of that part of the intelligentsia that remained with their homeland.
With the release of the collections “Podorozhnik” and “Appo Vogtsch”, the civil lyrics of Russian poetry were enriched with a new masterpiece, showing that the feeling that gave birth to the 1917 poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly...” not only did not disappear, but, on the contrary, became firmer:
I'm not with those who abandoned the earth
To be torn to pieces by enemies.
I don't listen to their rude flattery,
I won’t give them my songs.
But I always feel sorry for the exile,
Like a prisoner, like a patient,
Your road is dark, wanderer,
Someone else's bread smells like wormwood.
And here, in the depths of the fire
Losing the rest of my youth,
We don't hit a single beat
They didn’t turn away from themselves.
And we know that in the late assessment
Every hour will be justified...
But there are no more tearless people in the world,
More arrogant and simpler than us.
The pre-revolutionary world, dear to the poetess’s heart, was destroyed. For Akhmatova and many of her contemporaries, this was a real tragedy. And yet she finds the inner strength to bless the eternal newness of life:
Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashed,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy,
Why did I feel light?
During the day the breath of cherry blossoms blows
An unprecedented forest under the city,
At night it shines with new constellations
The depth of the transparent July skies, -
And the wonderful comes so close
To the collapsed old houses...
Unknown to anyone,
But from the ages we have desired.
In the poems of the 30s, created against the alarming background of the outbreak of the World War, A. Akhmatova turns to folklore - to people's crying, to lamentation. She already felt in her heart the upcoming tragedy:
When an era is buried,
The funeral psalm does not sound,
Nettles, thistles,
It has to be decorated.
And only gravediggers dashingly
They are working. Things don't wait!
And quietly, so, Lord, quietly,
You can hear time passing.
And then she swims out,
Like a corpse on a spring river, -
But the son does not recognize his mother,
And the grandson will turn away in anguish.
And their heads bow lower,
The moon moves like a pendulum.
So - over the deceased
Paris It's so quiet now.
The thirties were sometimes difficult life trials for Anna Akhmatova. She witnessed not only the Second World War unleashed by fascism, but also the beginning of the war between Soviet Russia and its people. The repressions of the 30s affected many of Akhmatova’s friends and like-minded people and destroyed her family. Despair and pain are heard in the lines from “Requiem”:
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
Akhmatova does not consider the troubles that have occurred in the country to be either temporary violations of the law that could be easily corrected, or the misconceptions of individuals. After all, it was not only about her personal fate, but about the fate of the entire people, about millions of innocent victims...
While remaining a preacher of universal moral norms, Anna Akhmatova understood her “untimeliness” and rejection in the prison state:
Not the lyre of a lover
I'm going to captivate the people -
Leper's Ratchet
Sings in my hand.
You will have time to find fault,
And howling and cursing.
I'll teach you to shy away
You, brave ones, from me.
In 1935, she wrote a poem in which the theme of the tragic fate of the poet and at the same time a challenge to the authorities sound:
Why did you poison the water?
And they mixed my bread with my dirt?
Why the last freedom
Are you turning it into a nativity scene?
Because I didn't mock
Over the bitter death of friends?
Because I remained faithful
My sad homeland?
So be it. Without executioner and scaffold
There will be no poet on earth.
We should go and howl with a candle.
The pinnacle of Anna Akhmatova’s civic poetry can be called her poem “Requiem,” which was published only in 1988. “Requiem,” “woven” from simple “overheard,” as Akhmatova writes, words, reflected its time and the suffering of the mother’s soul with great poetic and civil force:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
The poem shows the form of a parable, lamentation. This is the cry of a mother who has lost her son. The poem proves to us that the Stalinist regime did not crush the poetic word of Akhmatova, who speaks truthfully and openly about the tragedy of her generation.
During the war years, Akhmatova did not want to leave Leningrad and, being evacuated and then living in Tashkent, she did not stop thinking and writing about the abandoned city. Her poems contain maternal tears and compassion:
Knock with your fist and I'll open it.
I always opened up to you.
I'm now behind a high mountain,
Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,
But I will never betray you...
I didn't hear your moan.
You didn’t ask me for bread.
Bring me a maple twig
Or just blades of green grass,
Like you brought last spring.
Bring me a handful of clean ones,
Our Neva icy water,
And from your golden head
I will wash away the bloody traces.
Anna Akhmatova's lyrics during the war years are full of compassion for the fate of the country and faith in its future:
We know what's on the scales now
And what is happening now.
The hour of courage has struck on our watch.
And courage will not leave us.
It's not scary to lie dead under bullets,
It’s not bitter to be homeless, -
And we will save you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
We will carry you free and clean,
We will give it to our grandchildren and save us from captivity
Forever!
The lyrics of Anna Akhmatova, whose life was full of hard times tragedies, clearly conveys to us the feeling of that time. The lyrical heroine of the poetess is a passionate patriot of her homeland, a suffering mother, and a strong-willed woman who managed to bear the hardships of time on her shoulders. The history of Russia in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova is a heartfelt story of a brave woman who, during the years of universal silence, managed to tell the difficult truth about her country.

Essay on literature on the topic: The fate of Russia in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova

Other writings:

1. I am your voice, the heat of your breath, I am the reflection of your face. Vain wings flutter in vain, - After all, I’m with you to the end anyway. A. Akhmatova In 1946, the Russian intelligentsia was hit by the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” Read More ......
2. When I mention the name of Anna Akhmatova, I have an image of a royal lady, mistress of the muses. This woman lived a great, dramatic and at the same time happy life. Poets of the “Silver Age” often declared their love for this queen of Russian poetry in their poems. Read More......
3. Nna Akhmatova “stayed on earth” in a tragic era, tragic first of all for Russia. The theme of the Motherland undergoes a complex evolution in Akhmatova’s work. . The very concept of homeland changed in her poetry. At first, her homeland was Tsarskoe Selo, where she spent her childhood and Read More......
4. The theme of love, of course, occupies a central place in Anna Akhmatova’s poetry. The genuine sincerity of Akhmatova’s love lyrics, combined with strict harmony, allowed her contemporaries to call her the Russian Sappho immediately after the release of her first poetry collections. Anna Akhmatova's early love lyrics were perceived as Read More......
5. I want to talk about Anna Akhmatova, my favorite Russian poetess. The poetry of this amazing person hypnotizes with its simplicity and freedom. Akhmatova’s works will not leave anyone indifferent who has ever heard or read them. Akhmatova's skill was recognized almost immediately after Read More......
6. The first steps of Anna Akhmatova At the turn of the last and present centuries, although not literally chronologically, on the eve of the revolution, in an era shaken by two world wars, in Russia, perhaps the most significant “female” poetry arose and developed in all of the world literature of modern times. Read More......
7. The poetry of Anna Akhmatova is known to almost every Russian person. If we talk about historical motives in the poet’s work, we should remember that the beginnings of this poetry go back to the Tver region. Anna Andreevna became related to this region because of her husband Nikolai Gumilyov. The first time she Read More......

The fate of Russia in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova

The lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is bright and original. Along with her most widely known poems about love, Akhmatova’s poetry includes a whole layer of poetry containing patriotic themes.

In the collection “The White Flock” (1917), summing up the early work of the poetess, for the first time the lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is freed from constant love experiences. Biblical motifs appear in it, the concepts of freedom and death are comprehended. And already here we find Akhmatova’s first poems on the topic of patriotism. The first poems of historical content also appear in the collection.

The theme of the Motherland increasingly asserted itself in her poetry. This topic helped Anna Akhmatova take a position during the First World War that differed from the official point of view. She acts as a passionate opponent of war:

Juniper smell sweet

Flies from burning forests.

The soldiers are moaning over the guys,

A widow's cry rings through the village.

It was not in vain that prayer services were served,

The earth yearned for rain:

Warmly sprinkled with red moisture

Trampled fields.

They are casting lots for your garments.”

In the poem “Prayer,” Anna Akhmatova prays to fate for the opportunity to sacrifice everything she has to Russia:

Give me the bitter years of illness,

Choking, insomnia, fever,

Take away both the child and the friend,

And the mysterious gift of song - How I pray at my liturgy

After so many tedious days,

So that a cloud over dark Russia

Became a cloud in the glory of the rays.

Intuitively sensing the time shift, Anna Akhmatova cannot help but notice how her native country is being torn apart. Her lyrical heroine cannot rejoice when Russia cries. She feels this crisis in her soul:

He called comfortingly,

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.

In this poem, Anna Akhmatova spoke as a citizen. She did not directly express her attitude towards the revolution. But this reflects the position of that part of the intelligentsia that remained with their homeland.

With the release of the collections “Plantain” and “Anno Domini”, the civil lyrics of Russian poetry were enriched with a new masterpiece, showing that the feeling that gave birth to the 1917 poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly.” not only did it not disappear, but, on the contrary, became stronger:

I'm not with those who abandoned the earth

To be torn to pieces by enemies.

I don't listen to their rude flattery.

I won’t give them my songs.

But I always feel sorry for the exile,

Like a prisoner, like a patient,

Your road is dark, wanderer,

Someone else's bread smells like wormwood.

And here, in the depths of the fire

Losing the rest of my youth,

We don't hit a single beat

They didn’t turn away from themselves.

And we know that in the late assessment

Every hour will be justified.

But there are no more tearless people in the world,

More arrogant and simpler than us.

The pre-revolutionary world, dear to the poetess’s heart, was destroyed. For Akhmatova and many of her contemporaries, this was a real tragedy. And yet she finds the inner strength to bless the eternal newness of life:

Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,

The wing of the black death flashed, Everything was devoured by hungry melancholy,

Why did I feel light?

During the day, the breath of cherry trees blows through the forest like never before,

At night it shines with new constellations

The depths of the transparent July skies, - And the wonderful comes so close

To the collapsed old houses.

Unknown to anyone,

But from the ages we have desired.

In the poems of the 30s, created against the alarming background of the outbreak of the World War, A. Akhmatova turns to folklore - to people's crying, to lamentation. She already felt in her heart the upcoming tragedy:

When an era is buried,

The funeral psalm does not sound,

Nettles, thistles,

It has to be decorated.

And only the gravediggers work hard.

Things don't wait!

And quietly, so, Lord, quietly,

You can hear time passing.

And then she swims out,

Like a corpse on a spring river, -

But the son does not recognize his mother,

And the grandson will turn away in anguish.

And their heads bow lower,

The moon moves like a pendulum.

So - over the lost Paris

It's so quiet now.

The thirties were sometimes difficult life trials for Anna Akhmatova. She witnessed not only the Second World War unleashed by fascism, but also the beginning of the war between Soviet Russia and its people. The repressions of the 30s affected many of Akhmatova’s friends and like-minded people and destroyed her family. Despair and pain can be heard in the lines from “Requiem”:

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

Akhmatova does not consider the troubles that have occurred in the country to be either temporary violations of the law that could be easily corrected, or the misconceptions of individuals. After all, it was not just about her personal fate, but about the fate of the entire people, about millions of innocent victims.

While remaining a preacher of universal moral norms, Anna Akhmatova understood her “untimeliness” and rejection in the prison state:

Not the lyre of a lover

I'm going to captivate the people - Leper's Ratchet

Sings in my hand.

You will have time to find fault,

And howling and cursing.

I'll teach you to shy away

You, brave ones, from me.

In 1935, she wrote a poem in which the theme of the tragic fate of the poet and at the same time a challenge to the authorities sound:

Why did you poison the water?

And they mixed my bread with my dirt?

Why the last freedom

Are you turning it into a nativity scene?

Because I didn't mock

Over the bitter death of friends?

Because I remained faithful.

My sad homeland?

So be it. Without executioner and scaffold

There will be no poet on earth.

We should go and howl with a candle.

The pinnacle of Anna Akhmatova’s civic poetry can be called her poem “Requiem,” which was published only in 1988. “Requiem,” “woven” from simple “overheard” words, as Akhmatova writes, reflected its time and the suffering of the mother’s soul with great poetic and civil force:

Magdalene fought and cried,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And where the mother stood silently,

So no one dared to look.

The poem shows the form of a parable, lamentation. This is the cry of a mother who has lost her son. The poem proves to us that the Stalinist regime did not crush the poetic word of Akhmatova, who speaks truthfully and openly about the tragedy of her generation.

During the war years, Akhmatova did not want to leave Leningrad and, being evacuated and then living in Tashkent, she did not stop thinking and writing about the abandoned city. Her poems contain maternal tears and compassion:

Knock with your fist and I'll open it.

I always opened up to you.

I'm now behind a high mountain,

Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,

But I will never betray you.

I didn't hear your moan.

You didn't ask me for bread.

Bring me a maple twig

Or just blades of green grass,

Like you brought last spring.

Bring me a handful of clean ones,

Our Neva icy water.

And from your golden head

I will wash away the bloody traces.

Anna Akhmatova's lyrics during the war years are full of compassion for the fate of the country and faith in its future:

We know what's on the scales now

And what is happening now.

The hour of courage has struck on our watch.

And courage will not leave us.

It's not scary to lie dead under bullets,

It's not bitter to be homeless, -

And we will save you, Russian speech,

Great Russian word.

We will carry you free and clean,

We will give it to our grandchildren and save us from captivity forever!

The lyrics of Anna Akhmatova, whose life was full of hard times tragedies, clearly conveys to us the feeling of that time. The lyrical heroine of the poetess is a passionate patriot of her homeland, a suffering mother, and a strong-willed woman who managed to bear the hardships of time on her shoulders. The history of Russia in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova is a heartfelt story of a brave woman who, during the years of universal silence, managed to tell the difficult truth about her country.