Akhmatova's poetry. Online reading of the book Poems by Anna Akhmatova. Poetry. There is a cherished quality in the closeness of people

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova's first collection of poems, "Evening", published in early 1912, was soon sold out. Then her poems appeared in various timetables, and in March 1914 a new collection, “Rosary Beads,” was published, which also included a significant part of the poems from “Evening.”

Upon the release of the first collection, Akhmatova’s poems were marked with the stamp of her personal originality, a little pretentious; it seemed that she made the poems remarkable. But unexpectedly, Akhmatova’s personal style, which did not claim to have a general meaning, acquired, through “Evening” and the poems that appeared after it, a seemingly unfounded influence. Signs of the emergence of the Akhmatova school were revealed in young poetry, and its founder gained a well-established reputation.

If the individual received a general meaning, then, obviously, the source of charm was not only in the entertaining nature of the personality being expressed, but also in the art of expressing it: in the new ability to see and love a person. I named the prime mover of Akhmatova’s creativity. What points of application she finds for herself, what sets her work in motion and what she achieves - this is what I try to show in my article.

Until there was “The Rosary,” the randomly published poems after “Evening” lay in the shadow of the first collection, and Akhmatova’s growth was not fully realized. Now it is obvious: before your eyes is a very strong book of powerful poems that inspire great confidence.

It is primarily achieved by the freedom of Akhmatova’s speech.

Poetry is not made of rhythms and harmonies, but of words; from the words only then, in full accordance with their inner life, and from the combination of these living words, the consequences determined by the interiority of the words, the excitement of the rhythms, and the radiance of sounds flow, as if to the end - and the poem rests on the inner backbone of the words. The words of a poem, each separately, should not be inserted into the cells of some rhythmic-instrumental frame: no matter how tightly they fit, if you mentally remove the frame, all the words will jump out like a shaken-out typographic font.

The latter does not apply to Akhmatova’s poems. That they are built on words can be shown by the example of at least this poem, which does not stand out in any way in “The Rosary” (p. 23):

With nothing, and she is quiet.
You are in vain carefully wrapping
My shoulders and chest are covered in fur,
And in vain are the words submissive
You're talking about first love.
How do I know these stubborn ones,
Your insatiable glances!1

The speech is simple and colloquial to the point, perhaps, that it is not poetry? But what if you read it again and notice that when we talked like this, then, for the complete exhaustion of many human relationships, it would be enough for each person to exchange two or three eight-line lines - and there would be a reign of silence. Is it not in silence that the word grows to the power that transforms it into poetry?

You can't confuse real tenderness
With nothing... -

what a simple, completely everyday phrase, how calmly it moves from verse to verse, and how smoothly and with tension the first verse flows - pure anapests, the emphasis of which is distant from the end of the words, so appropriate for the dactylic rhyme of the verse. But now, smoothly moving into the second verse, the speech is compressed and cut: two anapests, the first and third, are pulled together into iambs, and the stresses, coinciding with the ends of the words, cut the verse into solid feet. You can hear the continuation of a simple saying:

Tenderness cannot be confused
With nothing, and she is quiet.

But the rhythm had already conveyed anger, deeply held somewhere, and the whole poem suddenly became tense with it. This anger decided everything: it had already subdued and humiliated the soul of the one to whom the speech was addressed; Therefore, in the following verses, the triumph of victory has already floated to the surface - in cold contempt:

It's in vain that you carefully wrap...

What especially clearly indicates the mental movement that accompanies speech? The words themselves are not wasted on this, but the flow and fall of them work again: this “carefully wraps you up” is so figurative and so, if you like, tenderly, that it could be said to a loved one, that’s why it hits here. And then it’s almost mockery in words:

My shoulders and chest are covered in fur... -

This is a day case, so bringing the sensation closer and giving out some kind of shudder of disgust, and at the same time sounds, sounds! “My shoulders and chest...” - what a gentle crunch of all the gentle, pure and deep sounds in this spondee and anapest.

But suddenly there is a change in tone to a simple and significant one, and how syntactically this change is authentically justified: by the repetition of the word “in vain” with “and” before it:

And in vain the words of submissiveness...

To the vain attempt at impudent tenderness, a cruel answer was given, and then it was especially emphasized that the submissive words were also in vain; the particularity of this nuance is outlined by the fact that the corresponding verses are already included in another rhyme system, in the second quatrain:

And in vain are the words submissive
You're talking about first love.

How this again seems to be said in an ordinary way, but what answers play on the gloss of this shield - after all, the shield is the whole poem. It is not said: and in vain do you SPEAK obedient words, but it is said: and in vain DO YOU SPEAK obedient words... Isn’t strengthening the idea of ​​speaking already an exposure? And is there any irony in the words: “submissive”, “about the first”? And isn’t that why irony is so felt because these words are pronounced on iambic anapests, on rhythmic concealments?

In the last two verses:

How do I know these stubborn ones,
Your unsatisfied glances! -

again the ease and agile expressiveness of dramatic prose in the word combination, and at the same time the subtle lyrical life in the rhythm, which, bringing out the word “these” in an iambic anapest, makes the views mentioned actually “these”, that is visible here now. And the very way of leading the last phrase, after the break of the previous wave, with the exclamatory word “how,” immediately shows that in these words something completely new and final awaits us. The last phrase is full of bitterness, reproach, judgment and something else. What? Poetic liberation from all bitter feelings and from the person standing here; it is undoubtedly felt, but how is it given? Only the rhythm of the last line, pure, these completely freely, without any pretense, rolling anapests; There is still bitterness in the words: “Your unsatisfied glances,” but underneath the words there is already flight. The poem ended at the first flutter of the wings, but if it were continued, it is clear: the characters in the poem would fall into the abyss of renunciation, but one spirit would tremble, free, at an unattainable height. This is how creativity liberates.

In a dissected poem, every shade of the internal meaning of a word, every particularity of word combination and every movement of verse structure and sound - everything works in word formation and in proportion to the other, everything is towards a common goal, and the saving of means is such that what was done by rhythm is no longer done, for example, by meaning ; nothing, finally, goes against each other: there is no friction and mutual destruction of forces. That is why this, it turns out, significant poem penetrates into us so easily.

And if you pay attention to its construction, you will have to be convinced once again of the freedom and power of Akhmatova’s speech. An octet from two simple four-line rhyme systems breaks down into three syntactic systems: the first embraces two lines, the second - four and the third - again two; Thus, the second syntactic system, tightly linked by rhymes with the first and third, with its unity firmly connects both rhyme systems, and, moreover, with a strong but elastic connection: above, I noted, speaking about the dramatic effectiveness of the method of introducing the second, “in vain”, that the change of rhyme The systems here feel proper and work efficiently.

So, with the striking strength of the construction site, what at the same time tension is the elastic trembling of the soul!

It is worth noting that the described technique, that is, the translation of an entire syntactic system from one rhyme system to another, so that phrases, bending stanzas in the middle, fasten their edges, and stanzas do the same with phrases, is one of the techniques very characteristic of Akhmatova, with which she achieves a special flexibility and insinuation of verses, for verses, so articulated, look like snakes. Anna Akhmatova sometimes uses this technique with the familiarity of a virtuoso.

The analyzed poem shows how Akhmatova speaks. Her speech is effective, but her song binds the soul even more strongly.

This can be seen in the poem (p. 46):

Charcoal marked on the left side
Place to shoot
To release the bird - my longing
On a deserted night again.

Darling, your hand will not tremble,
And I won't have to endure it for long.
A bird will fly out - my longing,
He will sit on a branch and begin to sing.

So that the one who is calm in his home
Opening the window, he said:
“The voice is familiar, but I don’t understand the words,”
And he lowered his eyes.

In the song, as before in speech, there is the same ease of word arrangement - these words, without violence against the language, cannot be combined otherwise than in these verses: the verses are sung from simply spoken words; That’s why they are perceived as so sincere and sharp. Their song mode is noteworthy: it is free verse of the dactylic-trochaic key, lively and impressionable; starting with a purely dactylic line and in subsequent verses every now and then, especially at the end of the verses, replacing dactyls with trochees, the poem acquires a special gentle languor from the opening lines (anacruz) of the third, fourth, sixth, ninth and tenth verses, from these extra ones, to the first main one stress at the beginning of the verse of the sounding syllables. For example, the beginning of the second stanza:

Darling, your hand will not tremble,
And I won't have to endure it for long.

The poem is composed of three stanzas. The first is built epically: even verses, three-beat, shorter odd, four-beat. The second stanza begins with the same structure: the second verse is three-stressed; therefore, you expect the same from the fourth, but suddenly it turns out, like an odd one, to have four beats. This verse:

He will sit on a branch and begin to sing, -

at which the turning point of the lyrical wave occurs, and the significance of the verse is still raised precisely by its rhythmic oversaturation, which, thus, performs a certain and necessary work in the poem. The lyrical change precisely at the end of the second stanza is felt even more clearly when compared with the song connection of the first stanzas - with the way they call each other with their third, very melodious verses:

To release the bird - my longing...
and a bird flies out - my longing...

The third stanza is thus, as it were, isolated: it is again of an epodic structure, modeled after the first; only in the last verse the first syllable, stressed everywhere (with the necessary reservation about lines with choruses), loses stress (here it’s not the chorus, since the first stress falls on the fourth syllable), making the verse especially light, completely fleeting. And not for nothing, but in full accordance with the vision it evokes; this is a verse:

And lowered his eyes

How gentle and modest he is, and most importantly, melting. What is the source of this last feeling? The final consonances in the entire poem are rhymes, in everything except for one consonance that connects the last verse with the tenth: he said - eyes. It is assonance, and not a coincidence of consonance in that in the responding verse the last sound l melted away like a thin cloud, but so as not to diminish the tenderness, this gentle sound did not disappear at all: the consonance “said” - with was left without a response; then comes the consonance of the guttural k and g, the consonance of a, z and a again; and that l, which in the tenth verse is heard at the end of a consonant word, in the twelfth went to the beginning, between the guttural and the first a: said - eyes.

In the future, when I happen to touch upon individual poems, I will no longer talk about how the agitating soul of creation is revealed in the sounding flesh of the word.

In a variety of poems, even without underlining, one is struck by the stringed intensity of experiences and the unmistakable accuracy of their sharp expression. This is Akhmatova’s strength. With what joy that you no longer have to languish with inexpressibility in this, in the area affected by it, you read sayings born as if in folk literature (p. 18):

They helplessly ask for mercy
Eyes. What should I do with them?
When they say it in front of me
Short, catchy name?

Or this (p. 27):

My beloved always has so many requests,
A woman who has fallen out of love has no requests.

The man of the century is tormented by the difficulty of speaking about his inner life: there is so much that cannot be said due to the confusion of words - and, pressed down by silence, the spirit is slow to grow. Those poets who; like Hermes of old, they teach a person to speak, release his inner strengths into free growth and, generous, keep his grateful memory for a long time.

The tension of Akhmatova’s experiences and expressions sometimes gives such heat and such light that from them the inner world of a person boils with the outer world. Only in such cases does the spectacle of the latter appear in Akhmatova’s poems; That’s why his paintings are not detachedly plastic, but, permeated with spiritual radiations, are seen as if through the eyes of a drowning man (p. 114):

It's dawning. And above the forge
smoke rises.
Ah, with me, the sad prisoner,
You couldn't stay again.

Or the continuation of the poem about eyes asking for mercy:

I'm walking along the path into the field
Along the gray stacked logs.
There's a light breeze here
Spring-like, fresh and uneven.

Sometimes lyrical modesty forces Akhmatova to barely hint at the suffering that seeks expression in nature, but the heartbeats are still audible in the description (p. 45):

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,

Already from the above poems of Akhmatova, the presence in her work of a force that dominates the soul is noticeable. It is not in the manifestation of a “strong man” and not in the expression of experiences boldly aimed at impressionable souls: Akhmatova’s lyrics are filled with the opposite content. No, this strength lies in the extent to which, true to every emotion, even if it arises from weakness, there is a word that is flexible and full-breathing, and, like the word of the law, strong and persistent. The impression of perseverance and strength of words is so great that, it seems, an entire human life can rest on them; It seems that if the tired woman who speaks these words did not have the strong armor of words covering her and restraining her, the composition of her personality would immediately collapse, and the living soul would disintegrate into death.

And it must be said that suffering lyrics, if they do not give the feeling just described, are whining, devoid of both life truth and artistic meaning. If you keep moaning about the suffering before death and don’t die, won’t the weakness of your flabby, deceitful soul become despicable? - or let it be obvious that, in violation of the laws of life, a miraculous force, without leading you away from the path to death, every time keeps you at the very gates. The cruel healer Apollo watches over Akhmatova in exactly this way. “And I would die if I didn’t write poetry,” she says with each suffering song, which, no matter what it concerns, is also a glorification of creativity.

The life-saving effect of poetry as part of Akhmatova’s lyrical personality predetermines both the circle of her attention and the way she relates to the phenomena included in this circle.

Anyone for whom poetry is the savior of life, for fear of suddenly finding himself defenseless, will not unleash his creative abilities on observational walks around the surrounding area and will not write about what he cares little about, but will keep all his art for himself.

For the same main reason, she does not look at her personal life with investigative curiosity, in which I always sense ill will towards a person. Her awareness of a vital moment is always biased and impetuous, and this awareness always coincides with the vital task of the moment; But isn’t this the source of true lyricism?

I do not want to say that Akhmatova’s creative abilities are exhausted by lyricism. In the same “Rosary” an epic passage is printed (p. 84): white iambic pentameter floats calmly and evenly and foams so softly:

At that time I was staying on earth.
I was given a name at baptism - Anna,
The sweetest thing for human lips and ears.

This verse does not have the same soul as Akhmatova’s lyric verse. Judging by this example, non-lyrical problems will be solved by her in a decent form: in a poem, in a story, in a drama; but the form of a lyric poem is never just a false guise of essentially non-lyrical experiences*.

Akhmatova’s creativity does not seek to impress itself on the soul from the outside, showing the eyes a spectacle of distinct images or filling the ears with creatures in the very chest, near the listener’s heart, and to fawn at his throat. Her poems are created, not composed. In any case, without ruining the charm of her lyricism, she could not allow herself that magnificent display of creative power, which would not only not harm an artist distinguished by greater mental stability, but could even become a source of charm in him.

The above predetermines Akhmatova’s indifferent attitude towards external poetic canons. Observation of the form of her poems inspires confidence in her deep assimilation of all the formal achievements of modern poetry and all the sensitivity that has arisen in connection with these achievements to the priceless legacy of the effective poetic efforts of the past. But she does not write, for example, in canonical stanzas. She does not, on the other hand, have a single poem about which it could be said that it was written exclusively, or mainly, or at least to some extent in order to make experience in the use of this or that innovation, how to use it in extreme tension one or another means of poetic expression. The means, whether new or old, she takes are those that most directly touch the string in her soul that is necessary for the development of the poem.

Therefore, if Akhmatova, in her journey through the world of poetry, suddenly happens to take the most traveled road, we follow her even then with unflagging cheerful receptivity. The goal is not to imitate it, if in your wanderings you are guided by maps and guidebooks, and not by natural knowledge of the area.

When poems are sung like Akhmatova’s, Tyutchev’s words about spring are applicable to the creative moment:

Was there another one before her,
She doesn't know about it.

It is natural that, having the properties described above, Akhmatova’s poems excite very much, and not only with lyrical excitement, but with all the emotions of life that arouse the creative ability to activity. From two views on poetry: from the conviction that human emotions should be processed in it to the point of complete non-contagion, so that the perceiver can only contemplate them detachedly and tremble with only one aesthetic emotion, and from the assumption that the very emotions of life can become the material of art , which will then overcome the whole person, harmonizing him right down to the physical feelings - I prefer the second view and praise in Akhmatova what may seem like a flaw to another lover of aesthetic jellies.

It is this effectiveness of Akhmatova’s poems that forces us to take everything expressed in them with an increased degree of seriousness.

Unhappy love and its sufferings have a very prominent place in the content of Akhmatova’s lyrics - not only in the sense that unhappy love is the subject of many poems, but also in the fact that in the field of depicting her unrest, Akhmatova managed to find universally binding expressions and develop the poetics of unhappy love to the point of exceptional difficulty. Are expressions such as the one above about a woman who has fallen out of love making no requests, or such (p. 30) definitive?

You say you can't see your hands,
My hands and eyes.

Or (page 37):

When the cold came,
You were already watching dispassionately
Follow me everywhere and always,
As if he was saving up signs
My dislike...

Or this poem (p. 26):

I have one smile.
So, the movement of the lips is slightly visible.
I'm saving it for you -
It doesn’t matter that you are arrogant and angry,
It doesn't matter that you love others.
Before me is a golden lectern,
And with me is a gray-eyed groom.

Many of the same, and perhaps even more acute and painful expressions can be found in “The Rosary”, and, however, one cannot say about Anna Akhmatova that her poetry is “the poetry of unhappy love.” Such a definition, if it were heard by a person who carefully delved into the “Rosary”, would be for him a pretext for genuine fun - so rich in echoes is Akhmatova’s unhappy love. It is a creative method of penetrating a person and depicting an unquenchable thirst for him. Such a technique may be obligatory for poetesses, female poets: women so strong in life, so sensitive to all the charms of love, when they begin to write, know only one love, painful, painfully insightful and hopeless2. To understand the reason for this, in the concept of a poetess, a woman poet, we must first emphasize the first word and think about how much throughout our male culture love has spoken about itself in poetry on behalf of a man and how little on behalf of a woman. As a result, art has developed to an extreme degree the poetics of male aspiration and female charms, and, on the contrary, the poetics of female unrest and male charms has been almost never developed. Male poets, creating male images, focused on the universal humanity in them, leaving love in the shadows, because they were little attracted to it, and could not have the necessary polar sensitivity to it. However, the types of masculinity are barely outlined and are very far from the crystallization obtained by the types of femininity brought to a law-like integrity. It is enough, after all, to name the color of the hair and determine the favorite fold of the lips for a holistic image of a woman to arise, immediately definable in some relation to the religious ideal of eternal femininity. Is it not through this eternal femininity that a man partakes of the heavenly spheres?

And if sometimes, in various corners of our male culture, the very permissibility of a woman into the heavenly spheres is questioned, is it not because there is no door for her there that corresponds to our eternal femininity?

In developing the poetics of masculinity, which would then help to create the ideal of eternal masculinity and provide a way to define each male image in relation to this ideal - the path of a woman to her religious equality with a man, the path of a woman to the Temple**.

This is the thirst for this path, which has not yet been found, and therefore unhappy love is the love that every poem by Akhmatova, seemingly dedicated to completely personal suffering, breathes at great depths. Is this "unhappy love"?

Now in the same concept of a poetess, a woman poet, we must shift the emphasis to the second word and remember Apollo, the poet-god who fell unhappily in love, remember how he pursued Daphne and how, finally overtaken, she turned into a laurel - only a wreath of glory... The eternal wheel of poets' love! The fear that they inspired by the depth of their encroachments forces us to flee from them: they themselves know this and honestly warn. Tyutchev says to the maiden, inviting her not to believe in poetic love:

Involuntarily young curls
He will burn with his crown.

It’s not like a snake that stings the heart,
But like a bee sucks it3.

In the composition of the thirst for love expressed in the “Rosary”, the element of this particular bee thirst is vividly felt, for the quenching of which it is too little for the beloved to love. And isn’t it a dark guess about the poverty of simple love that makes a man somehow stupidly run away from a woman poet, leaving her in the despair of misunderstanding?

Why did you leave?
I don't understand... (page 98)

Or in another poem (p. 120)

Oh I was sure
That you will come back.

And something, although very petty human, was still understood by the one who, as reported in one poem (p. 29), on the day of the last meeting

He talked about summer and how
That being a poet for a woman is absurd.

The desire to imprint oneself on a loved one, somewhat violent, but combined with a selfless readiness to squander oneself to the end, in order to suddenly rise again and remain both whole and detachedly clear - this is poetic love. Sometimes it is impossible to reconcile with the ways of quenching this love - they are so offensive to an ordinary heart (p. 73):

Because they became close
We are in a blissful moment of miracles,
At the moment when over the Summer Garden
The pink moon has risen, -
I don't need expectations
At the hateful window
And languid dates, -
All love is quenched.

Such love is unfaithful and terrible; but rays flow from it, deifying the beloved or, at least, making it visible. Apollo's longing for an imprint in the depths of the personality merges with a feminine longing for the eternally masculine - and in the rays of great love the man appears in Akhmatova's poetry. She pays for his exaltation with the torment of a living soul.

But not only the suffering of unhappy love is expressed by Akhmatova’s lyrics. In fewer poems, but by no means with less force, she glorifies another suffering: acute dissatisfaction with oneself. Unhappy love, which has so penetrated into the very core of a person, and at the same time, with its strangeness and ability to suddenly disappear instantly, inspires suspicion of fictitiousness, so that, it seems, a self-made ghost torments a living soul to the point of bodily pain - this love will call much into question for the person who gets to experience it; sorrows that cause mortal torments and do not bring death, but at their extreme tension cause a miracle of creativity that instantly neutralizes them, so that a person himself presents a spectacle of the upside-down laws of life; incredible soarings of the soul without the ability to descend, so that every rise ends in a helpless and humiliating fall - all this tires and dissuades a person.

From such an experience, for example, the following poems will be born (p. 58):

You are my letter, dear, don’t crumple it,
Read it to the end, friend.
I'm tired of being a stranger
To be a stranger on your way.
Don't look like that, don't frown angrily,
I am beloved, I am Yours.
Not a shepherdess, not a princess
And I’m no longer a nun -
In this gray everyday dress,
In worn out heels...

It seems that only a dead person could remember life with such acuteness as Akhmatova recalls the time when she had not yet entered into her withering experience; and as soon as the properties of this experience are determined by it, we will see that in the dreams of the vast majority of people it is the best lot. This is what she says, remembering Sevastopol (p. 51):

I see a faded flag over customs
And there is a yellow haze over the city.
Now my heart is more careful
He freezes and it hurts to breathe.

I wish I could become a seaside girl again,
Put shoes on bare feet,
And put a crown on your braids,
And sing with an excited voice.

Everyone would look at the dark heads
Chersonesos Temple from the porch
And not knowing what comes from happiness and glory
Hearts are hopelessly decrepit.

And one more thing - you have to go through a lot of suffering in order to turn to the person who came to console you with these words (p. 55):

What death to me now!
If you still stay with me,
I will ask God for forgiveness
To you and everyone you love.

Such self-forgetfulness comes not only at the cost of great suffering, but also of great love.

These torments, complaints and such extreme humility - isn’t this weakness of spirit, isn’t it simple sentimentality? Of course not: the very voice of Akhmatova, firm and rather self-confident, the very calmness in the recognition of both pains and weaknesses, the very abundance of poetically translated torments - all this testifies not to tearfulness over the trifles of life, but reveals the lyrical soul, rather tough than too soft, rather cruel than tearful, and clearly dominant rather than oppressed.

The enormous suffering of this not so easily vulnerable soul is explained by the magnitude of its demands, by the fact that it wants to rejoice or suffer only on great occasions. Other people walk in the world, rejoice, fall, hurt themselves against each other, but all this happens here, in the middle of the world circle; but Akhmatova belongs to those who somehow reached its “edge” - and why would they turn around and go back to the world? But no, they fight, painfully and hopelessly, at the closed border, and scream and cry. He who does not understand their desire considers them eccentrics and laughs at their trifling groans, not suspecting that if these same pitiful holy fools suddenly forgot “their absurd passion and returned to the world, then with iron feet they would walk over the bodies of him, a living worldly man; then he would have recognized the brutal force there at the wall from the trifles of tearful capricious women and capricious women...

With the overall coverage of all the impressions given by Akhmatova’s lyrics, the result is an experience of a very bright and very intense life. Beautiful movements of the soul, varied and strong emotions, torments that one can envy, proud and free relationships of people, and all this in the radiance and singing of creativity - isn’t this exactly the kind of human life that should be greeted with Fet’s verses:

As we live, so we sing and praise,
And we live in such a way that we cannot help but sing.

And since the life described is shown with great power of lyrical action, it ceases to be only a personal value, but turns into a force that lifts the spirit of everyone who has embraced Akhmatova’s poetry. Obsessed with it, we see both our own and our common life as more valuable and greater, and the memory of this increased appreciation is not erased - the assessment turns into value. And if we really, as I think, are sailing into a new creative era in the history of mankind, then Akhmatova’s song, working along with many other forces to restore a proud human sense of well-being, no matter how small, doesn’t it help us row?

In particular, the lyrics, which deal so much with man, and, moreover, not with the solitary self, but with his relationships with other people: now in love for another, now in the love of another for himself, now in falling out of love, in jealousy, in resentment, in self-denial and in friendship - aren’t such lyrics distinguished by a deeply humanistic character? The way of outlining and evaluating other people in Anna Akhmatova’s poems is full of such benevolence towards people and such admiration for them, from which we have become unaccustomed not only in a year, but, perhaps, in the entire second half of the 19th century. Akhmatova has the gift of heroically illuminating a person. Wouldn’t we ourselves like to meet people like the one to whom at least these lines, already quoted, are addressed:

Pray for the poor, the lost,
About my living soul,
You, who have long been confident in your ways,
The light seen in the hut.

Or this (p. 27):

And you take care of my letters,
So that our descendants can judge us,
To make it clearer and clearer
You were visible to them, wise and brave.
In your glorious biography
Is it possible to leave spaces?

Or this (p. 19):

Beautiful hands, happy prisoner
On the left bank of the Neva,
My famous contemporary
It happened as you wanted...

Or - here it is no longer possible to refuse to quote the entire poem; it is an example of how to show heroes (p. 9):

As simple courtesy dictates,
Came up to me; smiled;
Half-affectionate, half-lazy
Touched my hand with a kiss -
And mysterious ancient faces
The eyes looked at me...

(To what height does it take off, immediately, instantly - that means what kind of power!)

Ten years of freezing and screaming,
All my sleepless nights
I put it in a quiet word
And she said it in vain.
You walked away and it started again
My soul is both empty and clear.

Not only are Akhmatova’s people abundant in intelligence, strength, fame and beauty (although these qualities are beloved by humanists), but their souls are sometimes so black, like those of someone for whom the best smiles are saved, sometimes so touching that the mere memory of them healing (p. 56):

The sun filled the room
The dust is yellow and see-through.
I woke up and remembered:
Darling, today is your holiday.
That's why it's snowy
There's warmth in the distance outside the windows,
That's why I, sleepless,
How the communicant slept.

It is not necessary to say what this comparison is worth, unless in vain I wrote above about another Sacrament.

I think we all see approximately the same people, and, however, after reading Akhmatova’s poems, we are filled with new pride in life and in man. Most of us still treat people completely differently; Even in the dead this way and that, one can assume something lofty, but in contemporaries? - how not to shrug your shoulders...

But the question is whether Akhmatova’s poems turn out to be a true comprehension of the present; if so, then she not only helps to sail to the land of a new culture, but has already seen it and announces to us: “Earth.”

Until recently, contemplating the events taking place in Russia, we proudly said: “This is history.” Well, history has once again confirmed that its major events are only great when the seeds for sowing the people’s soil grow in beautiful biographies. It is worth thanking Akhmatova, who is now restoring the dignity of man: when we run our eyes from face to face and meet first one glance, then another, she whispers to us: “These are biographies.” Already? You listen to her like a gospel message; your eyes light up with hope, and you are filled with that romantic feeling for the present, in which a spirit not oppressed by misanthropy is so free to grow.

After everything that has been written, it is strange for me to predict what I am, however, sure of. After the release of “The Rosary,” Anna Akhmatova, “in view of the undoubted talent of the poetess,” will be called upon to expand “the narrow circle of her personal themes.” I do not join this call - the door, in my opinion, should always be smaller than the temple into which it leads: only in this sense can Akhmatova’s circle be called narrow. And in general, its recognition is not in squandering in breadth, but in cutting layers, for its tools are not the tools of a surveyor measuring the land and making an inventory of its rich lands, but the tools of a miner cutting into the depths of the earth to veins of precious ores.

However, Pushkin gave the poet the law forever; I quote it here, with all the allusions to the content of the stanza in which it is included:

You go where they take you
Secret dreams4,

Such a strong poet as Anna Akhmatova, of course, will follow Pushkin’s behest.

Notes

* In "Apollo" 1915, book. 3, Akhmatova’s excellent poem “Near the Sea” is printed, confirming the considerations expressed here. (Approx. N.V. Nedobrovo.) up

** In quite a few articles about the "Rosary" similar thoughts were expressed, and so often that my thoughts at the present time are only a detailed formulation of a common place. (Approx. N.V. Nedobrovo.) up

*** It must be remembered that this was written in the spring of 1914. Since then, history has again filled the entire life of mankind with such sacrificial deeds and such fatal ones as have never been seen before. And thank God that people really turned out to be infinitely more beautiful than they thought; This especially applies to the Russian young generation, so slandered before the war, to which almost all the rank and file and junior officers of our army belong and which, thus, bears the bright future of Russia and the world. Akhmatova must be treated with all the more attention because she in many ways expresses the spirit of this generation and her work is loved by them. (Approx. N.V. Nedobrovo.) up

Nedobrovo Nikolay Vladimirovich(1882-1919) - poet, critic, playwright. Friend and mentor of A. Akhmatova, recipient of many of her poems. Until the end of her days, Akhmatova considered N.V. Nedobrovo’s article “the best of everything that had ever been written about her” (Vilenkin V.Ya. Memoirs with comments. M., 1982. p. 429). “How could he guess the cruelty and firmness ahead,” Akhmatova said to L.K. Chukovskaya, “after all, at that time (10s) it was generally accepted that all these poems were so-so, sentimental, tearful, capricious... But Nedobrovo understood my path, my future, guessed and predicted it, because he knew me well.” In addition to its independent value, Nedobrovo’s article acquires special interest also because it is partly “memoir” in nature, being the result of many conversations between the author and A. Akhmatova.

1 In the margins of the draft manuscript of the article (OR IRLI, f. 201, No. 1) Nedobrovo wrote down a comic madrigal on January 31, 1914 - as if in response to Akhmatova’s poem “You can’t confuse real tenderness...”:

Not in vain your chest and shoulders
The mischievous man wrapped in furs
And repeated memorized speeches...
And is his fate bad!
He acquired incorruptibility without hesitation,
In time to annoy you:
Your song is for preparing mummies
An incomparable balm.

Quote according to the article: Timenchik R.D., Lavrov A.V. Materials of A.A. Akhmatova in the manuscript department of the Pushkin House. In: Yearbook of the Manuscript Department of the Pushkin House for 1974. L., 1976, p. 63) up

2 Wed. with a similar thought by A. Akhmatova in her article “On the poems of N. Lvova” (Russian Thought, 1914, No. 1): “But it’s strange: women so strong in life, so sensitive to all love charms, when they begin to write, know only one love, painful, painful, insightful and hopeless." It is difficult to determine who borrowed this idea from whom - the articles by Akhmatova and Nedobrovo were written almost simultaneously. up

3 N. Nedobrovo does not quote the verse entirely accurately. F. I. Tyutcheva. “Don’t believe, don’t believe the poet, maiden...” (Tyutchev: “He, like a bee, sucks him”). up

4 From A. S. Pushkin’s poem “Yezersky”. up

And Nna Akhmatova wrote about herself that she was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and the Eiffel Tower. She witnessed the change of eras - she survived two world wars, a revolution and the siege of Leningrad. Akhmatova wrote her first poem at the age of 11 - from then until the end of her life she did not stop writing poetry.

Literary name - Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova was born in 1889 near Odessa into the family of a hereditary nobleman, retired naval mechanical engineer Andrei Gorenko. The father was afraid that his daughter’s poetic hobbies would disgrace his family name, so at a young age the future poetess took a creative pseudonym - Akhmatova.

“They named me Anna in honor of my grandmother Anna Egorovna Motovilova. Her mother was a Chingizid, the Tatar princess Akhmatova, whose surname, not realizing that I was going to be a Russian poet, I made my literary name.”

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova spent her childhood in Tsarskoe Selo. As the poetess recalled, she learned to read from Leo Tolstoy’s “ABC,” and began speaking French while listening to the teacher teach her older sisters. The young poetess wrote her first poem at the age of 11.

Anna Akhmatova in childhood. Photo: maskball.ru

Anna Akhmatova. Photos: maskball.ru

Gorenko family: Inna Erasmovna and children Victor, Andrey, Anna, Iya. Photo: maskball.ru

Akhmatova studied at the Tsarskoye Selo Women's Gymnasium “at first it’s bad, then it’s much better, but always reluctantly”. In 1905 she was home schooled. The family lived in Yevpatoria - Anna Akhmatova’s mother separated from her husband and went to the southern coast to treat tuberculosis that had worsened in children. In the following years, the girl moved to relatives in Kyiv - there she graduated from the Fundukleevsky gymnasium, and then enrolled in the law department of the Higher Women's Courses.

In Kyiv, Anna began to correspond with Nikolai Gumilyov, who courted her back in Tsarskoe Selo. At this time, the poet was in France and published the Parisian Russian weekly Sirius. In 1907, Akhmatova’s first published poem, “On His Hand There Are Many Shining Rings...”, appeared on the pages of Sirius. In April 1910, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev got married - near Kiev, in the village of Nikolskaya Slobodka.

As Akhmatova wrote, “No other generation has had such a fate”. In the 30s, Nikolai Punin was arrested, Lev Gumilyov was arrested twice. In 1938, he was sentenced to five years in forced labor camps. About the feelings of the wives and mothers of “enemies of the people” - victims of repressions of the 1930s - Akhmatova later wrote one of her famous works - the autobiographical poem “Requiem”.

In 1939, the poetess was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers. Before the war, Akhmatova’s sixth collection, “From Six Books,” was published. “The Patriotic War of 1941 found me in Leningrad”, - the poetess wrote in her memoirs. Akhmatova was evacuated first to Moscow, then to Tashkent - there she spoke in hospitals, read poetry to wounded soldiers and “greedily caught news about Leningrad, about the front.” The poetess was able to return to the Northern capital only in 1944.

“The terrible ghost pretending to be my city amazed me so much that I described this meeting of mine with him in prose... Prose has always seemed to me both a mystery and a temptation. From the very beginning I knew everything about poetry - I never knew anything about prose.”

Anna Akhmatova

"Decadent" and Nobel Prize nominee

In 1946, a special Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” - for “providing a literary platform” for “unprincipled, ideologically harmful works.” It concerned two Soviet writers - Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. They were both expelled from the Writers' Union.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Portrait of A.A. Akhmatova. 1922. State Russian Museum

Natalia Tretyakova. Akhmatova and Modigliani at an unfinished portrait

Rinat Kuramshin. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova

“Zoshchenko portrays the Soviet order and Soviet people in an ugly caricature, slanderously presenting Soviet people as primitive, uncultured, stupid, with philistine tastes and morals. Zoshchenko’s maliciously hooligan portrayal of our reality is accompanied by anti-Soviet attacks.
<...>
Akhmatova is a typical representative of empty, unprincipled poetry, alien to our people. Her poems, imbued with the spirit of pessimism and decadence, expressing the tastes of the old salon poetry, frozen in the positions of bourgeois-aristocratic aesthetics and decadence, “art for art’s sake,” which does not want to keep pace with its people, harm the education of our youth and cannot be tolerated in Soviet literature".

Excerpt from the Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”

Lev Gumilyov, who after serving his sentence volunteered to go to the front and reached Berlin, was again arrested and sentenced to ten years in forced labor camps. Throughout his years of imprisonment, Akhmatova tried to achieve the release of her son, but Lev Gumilyov was released only in 1956.

In 1951, the poetess was reinstated in the Writers' Union. Having never had her own home, in 1955 Akhmatova received a country house in the village of Komarovo from the Literary Fund.

“I didn’t stop writing poetry. For me, they represent my connection with time, with the new life of my people. When I wrote them, I lived by the rhythms that sounded in the heroic history of my country. I am happy that I lived during these years and saw events that had no equal.”

Anna Akhmatova

In 1962, the poetess completed work on “Poem without a Hero,” which she wrote over 22 years. As the poet and memoirist Anatoly Naiman noted, “Poem without a Hero” was written by the late Akhmatova about the early Akhmatova - she recalled and reflected on the era she found.

In the 1960s, Akhmatova's work received wide recognition - the poetess became a Nobel Prize nominee and received the Etna-Taormina literary prize in Italy. Oxford University awarded Akhmatova an honorary doctorate of literature. In May 1964, an evening dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the poetess was held at the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow. The following year, the last lifetime collection of poems and poems, “The Running of Time,” was published.

The illness forced Anna Akhmatova to move to a cardiological sanatorium near Moscow in February 1966. She passed away in March. The poetess was buried in the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral in Leningrad and buried at the Komarovskoye cemetery.

Slavic professor Nikita Struve

One of the brightest, most original and talented poets of the Silver Age, Anna Gorenko, better known to her admirers as Akhmatova, lived a long life full of tragic events. This proud and at the same time fragile woman witnessed two revolutions and two world wars. Her soul was seared by repression and the death of her closest people. The biography of Anna Akhmatova is worthy of a novel or film adaptation, which was repeatedly undertaken by both her contemporaries and the later generation of playwrights, directors and writers.

Anna Gorenko was born in the summer of 1889 in the family of a hereditary nobleman and retired naval mechanical engineer Andrei Andreevich Gorenko and Inna Erazmovna Stogova, who belonged to the creative elite of Odessa. The girl was born in the southern part of the city, in a house located in the Bolshoi Fontan area. She turned out to be the third oldest of six children.

As soon as the baby was one year old, the parents moved to St. Petersburg, where the head of the family received the rank of collegiate assessor and became a State Control official for special assignments. The family settled in Tsarskoe Selo, with which all Akhmatova’s childhood memories are connected. The nanny took the girl for a walk to Tsarskoye Selo Park and other places that were still remembered. Children were taught social etiquette. Anya learned to read using the alphabet, and she learned French in early childhood, listening to the teacher teach it to older children.

The future poetess received her education at the Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium. Anna Akhmatova began writing poetry, according to her, at the age of 11. It is noteworthy that she discovered poetry not with the works of Alexander Pushkin and, whom she fell in love with a little later, but with the majestic odes of Gabriel Derzhavin and the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” which her mother recited.

Young Gorenko fell in love with St. Petersburg forever and considered it the main city of her life. She really missed its streets, parks and Neva when she had to leave with her mother for Evpatoria, and then for Kyiv. Her parents divorced when the girl turned 16.

She completed her penultimate grade at home, in Evpatoria, and finished her last grade at the Kyiv Fundukleevskaya gymnasium. After completing her studies, Gorenko becomes a student at the Higher Courses for Women, choosing the Faculty of Law. But if Latin and the history of law aroused a keen interest in her, then jurisprudence seemed boring to the point of yawning, so the girl continued her education in her beloved St. Petersburg, at N.P. Raev’s historical and literary women’s courses.

Poetry

No one in the Gorenko family studied poetry, “as far as the eye can see.” Only on the side of Inna Stogova’s mother was a distant relative, Anna Bunina, a translator and poetess. The father did not approve of his daughter’s passion for poetry and asked not to disgrace his name. Therefore, Anna Akhmatova never signed her poems with her real name. In her family tree, she found a Tatar great-grandmother who allegedly descended from the Horde Khan Akhmat, and thus turned into Akhmatova.

In her early youth, when the girl was studying at the Mariinsky Gymnasium, she met a talented young man, later the famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov. Both in Evpatoria and in Kyiv, the girl corresponded with him. In the spring of 1910, they got married in the St. Nicholas Church, which still stands today in the village of Nikolskaya Slobodka near Kiev. At that time, Gumilyov was already an accomplished poet, famous in literary circles.

The newlyweds went to Paris to celebrate their honeymoon. This was Akhmatova's first meeting with Europe. Upon his return, the husband introduced his talented wife into the literary and artistic circles of St. Petersburg, and she was immediately noticed. At first everyone was struck by her unusual, majestic beauty and regal posture. Dark-skinned, with a distinct hump on her nose, the “Horde” appearance of Anna Akhmatova captivated literary bohemia.

Anna Akhmatova and Amadeo Modigliani. Artist Natalia Tretyakova

Soon, St. Petersburg writers find themselves captivated by the creativity of this original beauty. Anna Akhmatova wrote poems about love, and it was this great feeling that she sang all her life, during the crisis of symbolism. Young poets try themselves in other trends that have come into fashion - futurism and acmeism. Gumileva-Akhmatova gains fame as an Acmeist.

1912 becomes the year of a breakthrough in her biography. In this memorable year, not only was the poetess’s only son, Lev Gumilyov, born, but her first collection, entitled “Evening,” was also published in a small edition. In her declining years, a woman who has gone through all the hardships of the time in which she had to be born and create will call these first creations “the poor poems of an empty girl.” But then Akhmatova’s poems found their first admirers and brought her fame.

After 2 years, a second collection called “Rosary” was published. And this was already a real triumph. Fans and critics speak enthusiastically about her work, elevating her to the rank of the most fashionable poetess of her time. Akhmatova no longer needs her husband's protection. Her name sounds even louder than Gumilyov’s name. In the revolutionary year of 1917, Anna published her third book, “The White Flock.” It is published in an impressive circulation of 2 thousand copies. The couple separates in the turbulent year of 1918.

And in the summer of 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov was shot. Akhmatova was very upset by the death of her son’s father and the man who introduced her to the world of poetry.

Anna Akhmatova reads her poems to students

Since the mid-1920s, difficult times have come for the poetess. She is under close surveillance of the NKVD. It is not printed. Akhmatova’s poems are written “on the table.” Many of them were lost during travel. The last collection was published in 1924. “Provocative”, “decadent”, “anti-communist” poems - such a stigma on creativity cost Anna Andreevna dearly.

The new stage of her creativity is closely connected with soul-debilitating worries for her loved ones. First of all, for my son Lyovushka. In the late autumn of 1935, the first alarm bell rang for the woman: her second husband Nikolai Punin and son were arrested at the same time. They are released in a few days, but there will be no more peace in the life of the poetess. From now on, she will feel the ring of persecution around her tightening.

Three years later, the son was arrested. He was sentenced to 5 years in forced labor camps. In the same terrible year, the marriage of Anna Andreevna and Nikolai Punin ended. An exhausted mother carries parcels for her son to Kresty. During these same years, the famous “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova was published.

To make life easier for her son and get him out of the camps, the poetess, just before the war, in 1940, published the collection “From Six Books.” Here are collected old censored poems and new ones, “correct” from the point of view of the ruling ideology.

Anna Andreevna spent the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War in evacuation in Tashkent. Immediately after the victory she returned to the liberated and destroyed Leningrad. From there he soon moved to Moscow.

But the clouds that had barely cleared overhead—the son was released from the camps—condensed again. In 1946, her work was destroyed at the next meeting of the Writers' Union, and in 1949, Lev Gumilyov was arrested again. This time he was sentenced to 10 years. The unfortunate woman is broken. She writes requests and letters of repentance to the Politburo, but no one hears her.

Elderly Anna Akhmatova

After leaving yet another prison, the relationship between mother and son remained tense for many years: Lev believed that his mother put creativity in first place, which she loved more than him. He moves away from her.

The black clouds over the head of this famous but deeply unhappy woman disperse only at the end of her life. In 1951, she was reinstated in the Writers' Union. Akhmatova's poems are published. In the mid-1960s, Anna Andreevna received a prestigious Italian prize and released a new collection, “The Running of Time.” The University of Oxford also awards a doctorate to the famous poetess.

Akhmatova "booth" in Komarovo

At the end of his years, the world-famous poet and writer finally had his own home. The Leningrad Literary Fund gave her a modest wooden dacha in Komarovo. It was a tiny house that consisted of a veranda, a corridor and one room.

All the “furniture” is a hard bed with bricks as a leg, a table made from a door, a Modigliani drawing on the wall and an old icon that once belonged to the first husband.

Personal life

This royal woman had amazing power over men. In her youth, Anna was fantastically flexible. They say she could easily bend over backwards, her head touching the floor. Even the Mariinsky ballerinas were amazed at this incredible natural movement. She also had amazing eyes that changed color. Some said that Akhmatova’s eyes were gray, others claimed that they were green, and still others claimed that they were sky blue.

Nikolai Gumilyov fell in love with Anna Gorenko at first sight. But the girl was crazy about Vladimir Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a student who did not pay any attention to her. The young schoolgirl suffered and even tried to hang herself with a nail. Luckily, he slipped out of the clay wall.

Anna Akhmatova with her husband and son

It seems that the daughter inherited her mother’s failures. Marriage to any of the three official husbands did not bring happiness to the poetess. Anna Akhmatova's personal life was chaotic and somewhat disheveled. They cheated on her, she cheated. The first husband carried his love for Anna throughout his short life, but at the same time he had an illegitimate child, about whom everyone knew. In addition, Nikolai Gumilyov did not understand why his beloved wife, in his opinion, not a genius poetess at all, evokes such delight and even exaltation among young people. Anna Akhmatova's poems about love seemed too long and pompous to him.

In the end they broke up.

After the breakup, Anna Andreevna had no end to her fans. Count Valentin Zubov gave her armfuls of expensive roses and was in awe of her mere presence, but the beauty gave preference to Nikolai Nedobrovo. However, he was soon replaced by Boris Anrepa.

Her second marriage to Vladimir Shileiko exhausted Anna so much that she said: “Divorce... What a pleasant feeling this is!”

A year after the death of her first husband, she breaks up with her second. And six months later she gets married for the third time. Nikolai Punin is an art critic. But Anna Akhmatova’s personal life did not work out with him either.

Deputy People's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky Punin, who sheltered the homeless Akhmatova after a divorce, also did not make her happy. The new wife lived in an apartment with Punin’s ex-wife and his daughter, donating money to a common pot for food. Son Lev, who came from his grandmother, was placed in a cold corridor at night and felt like an orphan, always deprived of attention.

Anna Akhmatova’s personal life was supposed to change after a meeting with pathologist Garshin, but just before the wedding, he allegedly dreamed of his late mother, who begged him not to take a witch into the house. The wedding was cancelled.

Death

The death of Anna Akhmatova on March 5, 1966 seems to have shocked everyone. Although she was already 76 years old at that time. And she had been ill for a long time and seriously. The poetess died in a sanatorium near Moscow in Domodedovo. On the eve of her death, she asked to bring her the New Testament, the texts of which she wanted to compare with the texts of the Qumran manuscripts.

They rushed to transport Akhmatova’s body from Moscow to Leningrad: the authorities did not want dissident unrest. She was buried at the Komarovskoye cemetery. Before their death, the son and mother were never able to reconcile: they did not communicate for several years.

At his mother’s grave, Lev Gumilyov laid out a stone wall with a window, which was supposed to symbolize the wall in the Crosses, where she carried messages to him. At first there was a wooden cross on the grave, as Anna Andreevna requested. But in 1969 a cross appeared.

Monument to Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva in Odessa

The Anna Akhmatova Museum is located in St. Petersburg on Avtovskaya Street. Another one was opened in the Fountain House, where she lived for 30 years. Later, museums, memorial plaques and bas-reliefs appeared in Moscow, Tashkent, Kyiv, Odessa and many other cities where the muse lived.

Poetry

• 1912 – “Evening”
• 1914 – “Rosary”
• 1922 – “White Flock”
• 1921 – “Plantain”
• 1923 – “Anno Domini MCMXXI”
• 1940 – “From six books”
• 1943 – “Anna Akhmatova. Favorites"
• 1958 – “Anna Akhmatova. Poems"
• 1963 – “Requiem”
• 1965 – “Running Time”

Celebrity biography - Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova (Anna Gorenko) is a Russian and Soviet poetess.

Childhood

Anna was born into a large family on June 23, 1889. She will take the creative pseudonym “Akhmatova” in memory of the legends about her Horde roots.

Anna spent her childhood in Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg, and every summer the family went to Sevastopol. At the age of five, the girl learned to speak French, but studying at the Mariinsky Gymnasium, where Anna entered in 1900, was difficult for her.

Akhmatova's parents divorced when she was sixteen years old. Mom, Inna Erasmovna, takes the children to Evpatoria. The family did not stay there long, and Anna finished her studies in Kyiv. In 1908, Anna began to become interested in jurisprudence and decided to study further at the Higher Women's Courses. The result of her studies was knowledge of Latin, which later allowed her to learn Italian.

Children's photographs of Anna Akhmatova

The beginning of a creative journey

Akhmatova’s passion for literature and poetry began in childhood. She composed her first poem at the age of 11.

Anna's works were first published in 1911 in newspapers and magazines, and a year later her first collection of poems, “Evening,” was published. The poems were written under the influence of the loss of two sisters who died of tuberculosis. Her husband Nikolai Gumilyov helps publish poetry.

Young poetess Anna Akhmatova

Career

In 1914, the collection “Rosary Beads” was published, which made the poetess famous. It is becoming fashionable to read Akhmatova’s poems; young Tsvetaeva and Pasternak admire them.

Anna continues to write, new collections “White Flock” and “Plantain” appear. The poems reflected Akhmatova’s experiences of the First World War, revolution, and civil war. In 1917, Anna fell ill with tuberculosis and took a long time to recover.

Beginning in the twenties, Anna's poems began to be criticized and censored as inappropriate for the era. In 1923, her poems ceased to be published.

The thirties of the twentieth century became a difficult test for Akhmatova - her husband Nikolai Punin and son Lev were arrested. Anna spends a long time near the Kresty prison. During these years, she wrote the poem “Requiem”, dedicated to the victims of repression.

In 1939, the poetess was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers.
During the Great Patriotic War, Akhmatova was evacuated from Leningrad to Tashkent. There she creates poems with military themes. After the blockade is lifted, he returns to his hometown. During the move, many of the poetess’s works were lost.

In 1946, Akhmatova was removed from the Writers' Union after sharp criticism of her work in a resolution of the organizing bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. At the same time as Anna, Zoshchenko is also criticized. Akhmatova was reinstated in the Writers' Union in 1951 at the instigation of Alexander Fadeev.

The poet reads a lot and writes articles. The time in which she worked left its mark on her work.

In 1964, Akhmatova was awarded the Etna-Taormina Prize in Rome for her contribution to world poetry.
The memory of the Russian poetess was immortalized in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Tashkent. There are streets named after her, monuments, memorial plaques. During the life of the poetess, her portraits were painted.

Portraits of Akhmatova: artists Nathan Altman and Olga Kardovskaya (1914)

Personal life

Akhmatova was married three times. Anna met her first husband Nikolai Gumilev in 1903. They got married in 1910 and divorced in 1918. The marriage to her second husband, Vladimir Shileiko, lasted 3 years; the poetess’s last husband, Nikolai Punin, spent a long time in prison.

In the photo: the poetess with her husband and son

Lyovushka with his famous mother

Son Lev was born in 1912. Spent more than ten years in prison. He was offended by his mother, believing that she could have helped avoid imprisonment, but did not do so.

Lev Gumilev spent almost 14 years in prisons and camps; in 1956 he was rehabilitated and found not guilty on all counts.

Among the interesting facts, one can note her friendship with the famous actress Faina Ranevskaya. On March 5, 1966, Akhmatova died in a sanatorium in the Moscow region, in Domodedovo. She was buried near Leningrad at the Komarovskoye cemetery.

Anna Akhmatova's grave

A. A. Akhmatova worked in a very difficult time, a time of catastrophes and social upheavals, revolutions and wars. Poets in Russia in that turbulent era, when people forgot what freedom was, often had to choose between free creativity and life.
But, despite all these circumstances, poets still continued to work miracles: wonderful lines and stanzas were created. The source of inspiration for Akhmatova was the Motherland, Russia, which was desecrated, but this made it even closer and dearer. Anna Akhmatova could not emigrate, because she knew that only in Russia could she create, that it was in Russia that her poetry was needed: “I am 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 let's remember the beginning of the poetess's path. Her first poems
appeared in Russia in 1911 in the magazine "Apollo", and the following year the poetry collection "Evening" was published. Almost immediately, Akhmatova was ranked by critics among the greatest Russian poets. The whole world of Akhmatova’s early, and in many ways later, poetry was connected with A. Blok. Blok's muse was married to Akhmatova's muse. The hero of Blok's poetry was the most significant and characteristic "male" hero of the era, while the heroine of Akhmatova's poetry was a representative of "female" poetry. It is from the images of Blok that the hero of Akhmatov’s lyrics largely comes. Akhmatova in her poems appears in an endless variety of women's destinies: lovers and wives, widows and mothers, cheating and abandoned. Akhmatova showed in art the complex history of the female character of the advanced era, its origins, breakdown, and new formation. That is why in 1921, at a dramatic time in her life and in everyone’s life, Akhmatova was able to write the lines that were astounding in her spirit:
"Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashed,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy -
Why did it become light for us?"
So, in a certain sense, Akhmatova was also a revolutionary poet.
But she always remained a traditional poet, who placed herself under the banner of Russian classics, first of all, Pushkin. The development of Pushkin's world continued throughout his life.
There is a center that, as it were, brings the rest of the world of poetry to itself; it turns out to be the main nerve, idea and principle. This is Love.
The element of the female soul inevitably had to begin with such a declaration of love. In one of her poems, Akhmatova called love the “fifth season of the year.” The feeling, in itself acute and extraordinary, receives additional acuteness, manifesting itself in extreme, crisis expression - a rise or fall, a first meeting or a completed break, mortal danger or mortal melancholy, which is why Akhmatova gravitates so much towards a lyrical short story with the unexpected, often whimsical and capricious. the end of the psychological plot and to the unusualness of the lyrical ballad, eerie and mysterious (“The City Has Disappeared,” “New Year’s Ballad”). Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama, or only its climax, or even more often the finale and ending. And here she relied on the rich experience of Russian not only poetry, but also prose:
"Glory to you, hopeless pain,
The gray-eyed king died yesterday.
..............................
...And outside the window the poplars rustle:
Your king is not on earth."
Akhmatova’s poems carry a special element of love-pity:
"Oh no, I didn't love you,
Burned with sweet fire,
So explain what power
In your sad name."
The world of Akhmatova’s poetry is a tragic world. Motifs of misfortune and tragedy are heard in the poems “Slander”, “The Last”, “After 23 Years” and others.
In the years of repression, the most difficult trials, when her husband is shot and her son ends up in prison, creativity will become the only salvation, “the last freedom.” The muse did not abandon the poet, and she wrote the great "Requiem".
Thus, life itself was reflected in Akhmatova’s work; creativity was her life.