Love lyrics in Akhmatova's poetry. The theme of love in the lyrics of Anna Akhmatova. Features of love lyrics. (Akhmatova Anna). I called for death dear
Anna Akhmatova's creative path began in 1912 with the collection “Evening”, and the vast majority of early poems were dedicated to love. But in this eternal, repeatedly played out theme, the poetess of the “Silver Age” proved herself to be an innovator. Almost every work of hers is a novel in miniature. It’s as if the poetess takes out a small episode from the whole story, shows love in a state of crisis, and the feeling becomes extremely acute.
Akhmatova's poems about love are most often poems about breakup.
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They contain tense silence, a cry of pain, the anguish of a broken heart, and the experiences of an abandoned woman. However, in her poems there is no weakness or brokenness; on the contrary, the lyrical heroine shows incredible fortitude. She is both feminine and masculine at the same time.
This deep and complex image requires great skill from the poet. But Akhmatova seems to cope with this easily. In just a few short quatrains, she manages to convey the psychologism of the lyrical heroine in the smallest detail. And the main means of creating a character’s image are things. Little things, such as, for example, a glove put on the other hand, green copper on a washstand, a forgotten whip, are remembered by the reader immediately and for a long time. The description of objects shows the internal state of the lyrical hero, therefore not a single thing in Akhmatova’s poems is accidental: “So helplessly my chest grew cold, // But my steps were light.// I put on my right hand// The glove from my left hand.” This is an excerpt from their poem “Song of the Last Meeting,” but how amazingly this imagery of Akhmatova’s poetic speech is manifested here. It’s as if the author says one word, and the reader finishes the sentence himself. The heroine put the glove on the wrong hand, and this gesture showed the confusion, helplessness, and detachment of the unfortunate woman from the outside world. All this is difficult to convey in ordinary words, you just need to imagine and feel it.
Love in Akhmatova's lyrics never appears in its calm state. Very often, along with despair, pain, hopelessness, thoughts about death awaken in the lyrical heroine. Then Akhmatova conveys the inner state of her character through the landscape. In the same “Song of the Last Meeting”, the lyrical heroine feels unity with nature, she sees a kindred soul in the “autumn whisper”. The wind quietly whispers: “I am deceived by my sad, // Changeable, evil fate...”, and she understandably replies, “Dear, dear, - and so am I.” I will die with you! The death of the human soul occurs in parallel with the death of nature, so the image of autumn is often found in Akhmatova’s poems. In the work “Tearful Autumn, Like a Widow...” the season is personified, appears before us “in black robes” and sobs continuously, “going over her husband’s words.” The merging of the lyrical heroine with autumn also speaks of the inner dying of an offended woman.
With her poems, Akhmatova proves that autumn can also come in the soul with its piercing cold and endless rains. Love in the poetess's lyrics is always disharmonious; it is filled with the deepest drama, a feeling of hopelessness and a premonition of an approaching catastrophe. But this shows a strong-willed and brave female face. In one of her poems, Akhmatova writes: “I taught women to speak.” Indeed, her work openly and truthfully shows the depth of the inner world of a simple woman.
Updated: 2018-03-02
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I pray to the window beam-
He is pale, thin, straight.
Today I have been silent since the morning
And the heart-in half.
On my washstand
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 consolation to me.
1909
Anna Akhmatova's poems can be considered as compressed novels. It was these features that turned out to be the most durable and decisive in the evolution of Akhmatova’s poetry. The poet’s enormous resilience and will to live played a role in her poetry.
The poetess had an extraordinary ability to see poetry in ordinary life - this was her talent, bestowed by nature itself. Critics note that Anna Andreevna’s love dramas run like a thread through her poems: there are no explanations or comments, there are very few words, and each of them carries a great psychological load. The author invites the reader himself, through his own experience, to create an image of his secret drama, to create a plot hidden in the depths of the soul.
“I pray to the window ray...” - in a line of three words one can hear undying pain, desire and confusion, the gaze seeks at least some kind of peace in the sun’s ray. And there is no need to try to decipher the line, since a specific decoding can harm the strength of the poem; it will narrow the plot and deprive the work of depth, thereby distorting the image created by the author in the mind of the reader. Akhmatova’s wisdom in miniatures is great, and it lies in the fact that it speaks of the healing power of nature and the world around us for the soul. Just a ray of sunshine: “so innocent and simple,” illuminating both the washstand and the human soul with equal affection; this is precisely the semantic center, the basis of Akhmatov’s entire poem.
The poetess's lyrics are simple and magnificent in their simplicity. Her first books “Rosary Beads”, “Evening”, “White Flock” are dedicated to the lyrics of love. Anna Andreevna is an innovating artist in this eternal, repeatedly played out theme. The freshness of the poetess's love lyrics lies in its incompleteness and similarity to a small novel, or a page from a novel, or perhaps a torn piece from this page. There is no beginning, no end - the author invisibly invites the reader to create a scene with two actors.
Akhmatova’s poems are like a “geyser”; they are fragmentary poems, like a strong feeling bursting out from the heavy captivity of silence, despair, patience, hopelessness. The poetess loves fragmentation in her works, because it gives the image a certain documentary quality of what is happening: as if an excerpt from a conversation between two lovers; a dropped notebook not intended for reading; overheard fragments of the hero's memories. The poetess provides the reader with the opportunity to look into someone else's world, someone else's drama, as if inadvertently, as if contrary to the intentions of the author, allowing in the involuntary immodesty of the reader. Very often, Akhmatova’s poems resemble scraps of diary entries. Such “diary” entries by the author include two, three, and sometimes four persons, describe interior features, a modest landscape - but at the same time, maintaining fragmentation, very similar to a “romantic page”. And this is why Anna Akhmatova’s miniature is wise and beautiful.
Almost immediately after the release of her first book, and after “The White Flock” and “The Rosary,” they somehow especially started talking about the “mystery of Akhmatova.” The poetess's love story is an era, voiced and reinterpreted in its own way by the author in her works. In Anna Andreevna’s poems there is a note of anxiety and sadness, which have a broader role than their own fate. That is why Akhmatova’s love lyrics in the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary years conquered more and more readership circles, and subsequently, generations. Her works are an object of attention and admiration; they adore subtle connoisseurs of high poetry. Her lyrics of female love are fragile and tender, like a rose, frozen in time.
The character of Akhmatov's lyrics is similar to the poetry of love, an inexhaustible and ever-alluring theme, always interesting and close to people. The poetess made her modest adjustments to the very scale of this eternal and beautiful immortal feeling, literally permeating it with lofty ideas and goals. Akhmatova introduced into the world of relationships between women and men the noble idea of equality in the sphere of feelings and genuine activity.
She clasped her hands under a dark veil...
“Why are you pale today?”
- Because I am tartly sad
Got him drunk.
How can I forget? He came out staggering
The mouth twisted painfully...
I ran away without touching the railing,
I ran after him to the gate.
Gasping for breath, I shouted: “It’s a joke.
All that has gone before. If you leave, I’ll die.”
Smiled calmly and creepily
And he told me: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
This is a typical poem from the book “Evening”, in which the conflicts of difficult relationships between a man and a woman are presented in various ways. In this case, a woman, overcome with sudden compassion and acute pity, admits her guilt to those whom she makes suffer. The conversation is conducted with an invisible interlocutor - obviously, with one’s own conscience, since this interlocutor knows about the pallor of the heroine, covering her face with both a veil and her hands. The answer to the question: “Why are you pale today?” - and there is a story about the end of the last date with “him”. There is neither a name nor - yet - other “identifying” signs of the hero; the reader must be satisfied only with the fact that this is a person very well known to the heroine and an important person for her. The entire conversation is omitted, its content is concentrated in one metaphor: “...I made him drunk with tart sadness.” They “drunk” him with sadness, but now she suffers, she is to blame for this, capable of worrying about another, repenting of the evil caused to him. The metaphor develops into a hidden comparison: the drunk “drunk” “came out staggering,” but this is not a decline in the hero, because he is only like a drunk, unbalanced.
After his departure, the poet sees what the heroine cannot see - his facial expressions: “The mouth twisted painfully,” as the inner interlocutor saw her hidden pallor. Another interpretation is equally permissible: first, a pained expression appeared on her face, then he came out, staggering, but in the perception of the distraught heroine everything was confused, she tells herself, remembers what happened (“How can I forget?”), without controlling the flow of her own memory, highlighting the most intense external moments of the event. The range of feelings that gripped her cannot be conveyed directly, so only the action they caused is spoken of. “I ran away without touching the railing,” / I ran after him to the gate.” The repetition of the verb in such a capacious poem of three quatrains, where Akhmatova even saves on pronouns, emphasizes the strength of the internal change that has occurred in the heroine. “Without touching the railing,” that is, quickly, without any caution, without thinking about oneself, is an acmeistically accurate, psychologically rich internal detail.
Here the poet, seeing this detail of the heroine’s behavior, is already clearly separated from her, who is unlikely to be able to fix such details in her mind.
In the third stanza there is another, in fact, the fourth indication of the swiftness of this run: “Gasping for breath, I shouted...”. Only a scream escapes from his constricted throat. And at the end of the first verse of the last stanza, the word “joke” hangs, separated from the end of the phrase by a strong poetic transfer, thereby sharply highlighted. It is clear that everything previous was serious, that the heroine is awkwardly, without thinking, trying to refute the previously spoken cruel words. In this context, there is nothing funny about the word “joke”; on the contrary, the heroine herself immediately, inconsistently, moves on to extremely serious words: “A joke / All that happened. If you leave, I’ll die” (again verbal economy, even “If you ...” is omitted). At this moment she believes what she says. But he, as we guess, having just listened to much more than something completely different, no longer believes, he only nobly feigns calmness, which is reflected on his face in the form of a terrible mask (again his facial expressions): “He smiled calmly and terribly” (Akhmatova’s favorite syntactic device - oxymoron, combination of incompatible things). He will not return, but he still loves the woman who brought him such grief, takes care of her, asks her, heated, to leave the yard: “And he said to me: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
The pronoun “me” is, as it were, twice as redundant here. The hero has no one else to turn to, and the scheme of the 3-foot anapest does not imply words with stress in this place. But that makes it all the more important. This one-syllable word delays the pace and rhythm of speech and attracts attention: he said so to me, so to me, despite the fact that I am like that. Thanks to the finest nuances, we figure out a lot, understand what is not directly said. Real art presupposes precisely this perception.
Composition
The tonality of that love story, which before the revolution at times covered almost the entire content of Akhmatova’s lyrics and which many wrote about as the main discovery and achievement of the poetess, changed noticeably in the 20-30s in comparison with the early books.
Because Akhmatova’s lyrics constantly expanded throughout the post-revolutionary twenty years, absorbing more and more new areas that were previously unfamiliar to her, the love story, without ceasing to be dominant, now occupied only one of the poetic territories in it. However, the inertia of reader perception was so great that Akhmatova, even in these years, marked by her turn to civil, philosophical and journalistic lyrics, still appeared to the eyes of the majority as solely and exclusively an artist of love. We understand that this was far from the case.
Of course, the expansion of the range of poetry, which was a consequence of changes in the worldview and attitude of the poetess, could not, in turn, not affect the tonality and character of the love lyrics themselves. True, some of its characteristic features remained the same. The love episode, for example, as before, appears before us in a peculiar Akhmatovian guise: it, in particular, is never consistently developed, it usually has neither an end nor a beginning; the declaration of love, despair or prayer that makes up a poem always seems to the reader as if it were a snippet of an overheard conversation, which did not begin in front of us and the end of which we will not hear either:
Oh, you thought I was like that too
That you can forget me.
And that I will throw myself, begging and sobbing,
Under the hooves of a bay horse.
Or I’ll ask the healers
There's a root in the slander water
And I'll send you a terrible gift
My treasured fragrant scarf.
Damn you.
Not a groan, not a glance
I will not touch the damned soul,
But I swear to you by the garden of angels,
I swear by the miraculous icon
And our nights are a fiery child
I will never return to you."
This feature of Akhmatova’s love lyrics, full of innuendos, hints, going into the distant, I would like to say Hemingway-esque, depth of subtext, gives it true originality. The heroine of Akhmatova’s poems, most often speaking as if to herself in a state of impulse, semi-delirium or ecstasy, naturally does not consider it necessary, and indeed cannot, further explain and explain to us everything that is happening. Only the basic signals of feelings are transmitted, without decoding, without comments, hastily - according to the hasty alphabet of love. The implication is that the degree of spiritual intimacy will miraculously help us understand both the missing links and the overall meaning of the drama that has just occurred. Hence the impression of extreme intimacy, extreme frankness and heartfelt openness of these lyrics, which seems unexpected and paradoxical if we remember its simultaneous codedness and subjectivity.
"Somehow we managed to separate
And put out the hateful fire.
My eternal enemy, it's time to learn
You really need someone to love.
I'm free. Everything is fun for me
At night the Muse will fly down to console,
And in the morning glory will come
A rattle crackles over your ear.
There's no need to pray for me
And when you leave, look back...
The black wind will calm me down.
The golden leaf fall makes me happy.
I will accept separation as a gift
And oblivion is like grace.
But tell me, on the cross
Do you dare to send another? "
Tsvetaeva once wrote that real poetry usually “grinds” everyday life, just as a flower, which delights us with beauty and grace, harmony and purity, also “grinds” the black earth. She vehemently protested against the attempts of other critics or literary scholars, as well as readers, to get to the bottom of the earth, to that humus of life that served as “food” for the emergence of the beauty of a flower. From this point of view, she passionately protested against obligatory and literalist commentary. To a certain extent, she is, of course, right. Is it really so important to us what served as the everyday root cause for the emergence of the poem “Somehow we managed to separate...”? Perhaps Akhmatova meant a break in relations with her second husband V. Shileiko, a poet, translator and Assyrian scholar, whom she married after her divorce from N. Gumilyov? Or maybe she had in mind her affair with the famous composer Arthur Lurie?.. There could be other specific reasons, knowledge of which, of course, can satisfy our curiosity. Akhmatova, as we see, does not give us the slightest opportunity to guess and judge the specific life situation that dictated this poem to her. But, perhaps, precisely for this reason - because of its encrypted and unclear nature - it acquires a meaning that is immediately applicable to many other initial, and sometimes completely dissimilar situations. The main thing in the poem that captivates us is the passionate intensity of feeling, its hurricane force, as well as that unquestioningness of decisions that reveals an extraordinary and strong personality before our eyes.
Another poem, dating to the same year as the one just quoted, speaks about the same thing and almost in the same way:
Let the voices of the organ ring out again,
Like the first spring thunderstorm;
They'll look over your bride's shoulder
My eyes are half closed.
Goodbye, goodbye, be happy, beautiful friend,
I will return to you your joyful vow,
But beware of your passionate friend
Tell me my unique nonsense, -
Then, that he will pierce with burning poison
Your blessed, your joyful union...
And I'm going to own a wonderful garden,
Where are the rustling of grass and the exclamations of muses.
A. Blok in his “Notebooks” cites a statement by J. Ruskin, which partly sheds light on this feature of Akhmatova’s lyrics. “The beneficial effect of art,” wrote J. Ruskin, “is also due (in addition to didacticism) to its special gift of concealing an unknown truth, which you will only reach through patient digging; this truth is hidden and locked on purpose so that you cannot get it until you have first forged a suitable key in your crucible."
Akhmatova is not afraid to be frank in her intimate confessions and pleas, since she is sure that only those who have the same code of love will understand her. Therefore, she does not consider it necessary to explain or describe anything further. The form of randomly and instantly bursting speech, which can be overheard by everyone passing by or standing nearby, but not everyone can understand, allows it to be lapidary, undistributed and meaningful.
This feature, as we see, is fully preserved in the lyrics of the 20-30s. The extreme concentration of the content of the episode itself, which lies at the heart of the poem, is also preserved. Akhmatova never wrote limp, amorphous or descriptive love poems. They are always dramatic and extremely tense and confused. She has rare poems describing the joy of established, stormless and cloudless love; The muse comes to her only at the most climactic moments experienced by the feeling, when it is either betrayed or dries up:...
I wasn't nice to you
You hate me. And the torture lasted
And how the criminal languished
Love full of evil.
It's like a brother. You are silent, angry.
But if we meet eyes
I swear to you by heaven,
Granite will melt in the fire.
In a word, we are always present, as it were, at a bright, lightning flash, at the self-combustion and charring of a pathetically huge, incinerating passion that pierces the entire being of a person and echoes through the great silent spaces that surround him with biblical, solemn silence in this sacred timeless hour.
Akhmatova herself more than once associated the excitement of her love with the great and imperishable “Song of Songs” from the Bible.
And in the Bible there is a red wedge leaf
Laid down on the Song of Songs...
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is a subtle lyricist and a great Russian poetess, who revealed in her works the abundant and generous spiritual world of a woman, her suffering, experiences, subtlety and tenderness, greatness and depth. Akhmatova, in her poems about love, showed how selflessly, brightly, sincerely, bitterly and passionately women love, in contrast to rational men.
Anna Andreevna wrote about the most secret and intimate thing - about Love - the “fifth season of the year.” This is the time when the human soul soars and strives to improve, the time when a person gains new strength, lives with enthusiasm, dawns, transforms, is ready for change, for crazy actions, when he is able to give happiness and love. Akhmatova's poems about love showed the meaning of love, its healing power, which can change the fate of a Russian woman!
Anna Akhmatova was a poetess born in Russia, the first wife of Nikolai Gumilyov. At the turn of the century, when the two world wars collided, before the revolution came, poetry probably began to appear in Russia in the form of a work written by Anna Akhmatova, which gained more importance in literature. The love theme in Anna Akhmatova's poems has greater significance than traditionally in accepted ideas.
Akhmatova's expression of lyricism is an important and indispensable part of the Russian culture of the nation. She turned out to be one of those who are overwhelmed by the desire to live, and have not lost their freshness on the branches of the tree of poetry of Russian poets. When Akhmatova reads poems about love, Tyutchev comes to mind. His rapidly flowing passions are expressed in a fatal duel. Akhmatova resurrected it all. The similarities will become even more noticeable when we remember that she is an improviser, like Tyutchev, in her poems and feelings.
Akhmatova repeatedly argues that she cannot imagine how one can compose, having previously drawn up a plan that was previously prepared. From time to time it seemed to her that a muse had visited her. The intimacy of Anna Akhmatova's lyrics and poems about love are imbued with one unique feature.
From Akhmatova’s lips one can hear the conversation of a woman who has become a lyrical character from the object of the poet’s feelings. With everything, in the intimate lyrics one can feel the manifestation of civil poetry.
Comfort? "Comfort"
During the First World War, the verse “Consolation” was very popular. Akhmatova’s poem that she heard a voice that began to call, comforting, during the revolution was the most striking of her works. It expresses the passion of intelligent people who made mistakes, hesitated, walked in torment, searched but could not find, but as a result made a choice, not daring to leave their people and country. During the period of devastation after the revolution, when it was necessary to starve, the second period began, in which Anna Akhmatova’s creative activity developed.
In a verse that says that everyone was plundered, betrayed, sold, the poetess blesses a new manifestation of life's wisdom. The time when the thirties passed, saturated with drama, was overwhelmed by the feeling of an impending war, which was a new tragedy. Against the backdrop of terrible military operations and personal suffering, the poetess decided to use sources permeated with folk lament from folklore and motifs from the Bible. Thus passed a wave with a violent surge in Akhmatova’s creative activity, which became an exposure of the first two wars and the criminal actions of the authorities who do not support their people.
Poems about the enemy’s banner, oath, manifestation of courage and others belong to this time. The theme of prayer ran through Akhmatova’s creative activity. In her first works, she asks God to give inspiration and love.
Prayer or verse?
During the era of the First World War, during prayer Akhmatova asks for all of Russia. The motif of the prayer that is used at the wake is noticeable in the verse where it says that she was left alone. The verse about lamentation is included in the genre of prayer in which weep. Already before the end of her own life, when Akhmatova managed to find a state of calm within herself, she accepted the cross and prayer as a source for human life.
Akhmatova was able to deprive literary scholars of the opportunity to study the biography of personal lyrical love. Many people tried to guess what the secret of the poems was hidden, so easily written, without beautiful epithets, full of sophistication, provoking the discoveries of innovators. They combined something that is impossible to combine. Anna Akhmatava wrote poems about love in such a way that a catastrophe with a tectonic character burned out in them, and at the same time the wisdom of the Bible flourished.
Anna Akhmatova’s poems about love have become so perfect that it may seem that what Blok called “the ascension of the soul underground” is absolutely not characteristic of her creative activity. Anna Akhmatova often remembers the tanned Muse, who dictated to her that she just needed to make a recording on time “without mistakes.” What Akhmatova had to endure then in the “calendar twentieth century” could not have been dreamed of by people of the twenty-first century.
ABSTRACT
on the topic of:
“LOVE LYRICS BY A. AKHMATOVA”
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.
A. Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova's first poems appeared in Russia in 1911 in the magazine Apollo. Almost immediately, Akhmatova was ranked by critics among the greatest Russian poets.
A. A. Akhmatova lived and 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 her Motherland, Russia, which was desecrated, but this made it even closer and dearer to her. Anna Akhmatova could not emigrate; she knew that only in Russia could she create, that it was in Russia that her poetry was needed.
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.
In the famous work “Everything is stolen, betrayed, sold...” (1921), the first line of which was quoted many times to prove the idea of the poetess’s hostile attitude towards Soviet society and the revolution, even in it one could hear her benevolent curiosity and undoubted interest in new life:
Everything is stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashed,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy,
Why did we 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 crumbling dirty houses...
Unknown to anyone,
But from the ages we have desired.
This is 1921, devastation, famine, the very end of the civil war, from which the country emerged with incredible strain. The old world was destroyed, the new one was just beginning to live. For Akhmatova and those whom she unites with herself in this poem, the destroyed past was a well-lived and familiar home. And yet, the inner strength of life forced her, in the midst of the ruins of the old world, to utter words blessing the eternal in its charm and wise newness of life. The poem is essentially optimistic, it radiates light and joy, anticipation of life, which seems to be starting over.
The lyrics of Anna Akhmatova in her first books “Evening”, “The Rosary” and “The White Flock” are almost exclusively lyrics of love.
The romance between Anna Akhmatova and Lev Gumilyov lasted for seven years. Confused, broken, on the verge of breaking down, the relationship with Gumilyov forever determined for Anna Akhmatova the model of her relationships with men. She will always fall in love only when she sees a riddle on top of the earthly, real essence. It excited her, she sought to unravel it, she sang its praises. She spoke about love as a higher concept, almost religious. And she herself - with the rarest exceptions - abruptly ended the romance if it threatened to turn into an everyday, familiar existence...
Even if I don’t have a flight
From a flock of swan,
Alas, lyric poet
Must be a man!
Otherwise everything will go upside down
Until the hour of parting:
And the garden is not a garden, and the house is not a house,
A date is not a date!
Her heart seemed to be looking for death, looking for torment. On April 25, 1910, Anna Gorenko and Nikolai Gumilev were married in the St. Nicholas Church near Kiev, and in May they left for a honeymoon to Paris. And the very next year Anna Akhmatova’s first poems appeared in print. In 1911, the poetry collection “Evening” was published - the first-born of the poetess. A collection permeated with the pain of a loving and deceived woman
I'm not asking for your love -
She is now in a safe place.
Believe that I am your bride
I don’t write jealous letters….
Akhmatova wrote about unhappy love. She was created for happiness, but did not find it. Probably because she herself understood: “Being a poet for a woman is absurd.”
A woman is a poet with her thirst for love... After all, to quench this thirst, it is not enough for a man to love: a woman-poet suffers from the scarcity of simple love. To quench such an “immortal passion,” Akhmatova sought equivalence, equal value in love.
From your mysterious love
I scream out loud in pain,
Became yellow and fitful,
I can barely drag my feet...
In August 1914, Gumilyov volunteered to go to the front. Anna Akhmatova was disappointed in the love of Nikolai Gumilyov. And Gumilyov suffered a lot for the happiness of being Akhmatova’s husband.
And the heart will no longer respond
Everything is over…
And my song rushes
On an empty night where you are no longer there
Akhmatova in her poems appears in an infinite variety of women's destinies: lovers and wives, widows and mothers, cheating and abandoned.
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. 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 - rise or fall, first meeting or complete breakup, mortal danger or mortal melancholy. That is why Akhmatova is so drawn to a lyrical short story with an unexpected end to a psychological plot, eerie and mysterious (“The City Has Disappeared,” “New Year’s Ballad”).
Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama, or only its culmination, and more often the finale and ending. 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.
In the complex music of Akhmatova’s lyrics, in its barely flickering depths, a special, frightening disharmony constantly lived and made itself felt in the subconscious, which embarrassed Akhmatova herself. She later wrote in “Poem Without a Hero” that she constantly heard an incomprehensible hum, as if some kind of underground bubbling, shifting and friction of those original solid rocks on which life had been eternally and reliably based, but which began to lose stability and balance. The very first harbinger of such an unsettling sensation was the poem "The First Return" with its images of a mortal sleep, a shroud and a death knell, and with a general feeling of a sharp and irrevocable change that had occurred in the very air of time.
Over time, Akhmatova’s lyrics conquered more and more reading circles and generations and, while never ceasing to be the object of admiring attention from discerning connoisseurs, clearly came out of the seemingly destined narrow circle of readers.
Soviet poetry of the first years of October and civil
war, occupied with the grandiose tasks of overthrowing the old world, preferring to talk not so much about a person as about humanity, or in any case about the masses, was initially insufficiently attentive to the microcosm of intimate feelings, classifying them in a fit of revolutionary puritanism as socially unsafe bourgeois prejudices. Akhmatova’s lyrics, by all laws of logic, should have gotten lost and disappeared without a trace. But that did not happen.
Young readers of the new, proletarian Soviet Russia, which was embarking on the socialist path, workers and workers' faculty members, Red Army women and Red Army men - all these people, so distant and hostile to the world itself, mourned in Akhmatova's poems, nevertheless noticed and read the elegantly published volumes of her poems.
Anna Akhmatova's lyrics change in the 20s and 30s compared to earlier books. These years were marked by exceptional creative intensity. Akhmatova, as before, remained unknown to the reader and therefore seemed to have disappeared from the reading and literary world.
Akhmatova's lyrics throughout the post-revolutionary period
twenty years has constantly expanded, absorbing more and more new,
areas previously uncharacteristic of her, the love story, without ceasing to be dominant, nevertheless now occupied only one of the poetic territories in her. However, the inertia of reader perception was so great that Akhmatova, even in these years, marked by her turn to civil, philosophical and journalistic lyrics, still appeared to the eyes of the majority as solely and exclusively an artist of love.
The expansion of the range of poetry resulting from changes in
the worldview and attitude of the poetess, could not, in turn, not affect the tonality and character of the love lyrics themselves. True, some of its characteristic features remained the same.
The love episode, as before, appears before us in a peculiar Akhmatovian guise: it is never consistently developed, it usually has neither end nor beginning; the declaration of love, despair or prayer that makes up the poem seems like a fragment of a accidentally overheard conversation that did not begin in front of us and the end of which we will not hear either:
"Oh, you thought I was like that too,
That you can forget me.
And that I will throw myself, begging and sobbing,
Under the hooves of a bay horse.
Or I’ll ask the healers
There's a root in the slander water
And I'll send you a terrible gift
My treasured fragrant scarf.
Damn you.
Not a groan, not a glance
I will not touch the damned soul,
But I swear to you by the garden of angels,
And our nights are a fiery child
I will never return to you."
This feature of Akhmatova’s love lyrics, full of innuendos, hints, going into the distant depths of subtext, gives it true originality. The heroine of Akhmatov’s poems, most often speaking as if to herself in a state of impulse, semi-delirium or ecstasy, naturally does not consider it necessary to explain and explain to us everything that is happening. Only the basic signals of feelings are transmitted, without decoding, without comments, hastily - according to the hasty alphabet of love. The implication is that the degree of spiritual intimacy will miraculously help us understand both the missing links and the overall meaning of the drama that has just occurred. Hence the impression of extreme intimacy, extreme frankness and heartfelt openness of these lyrics...
"Somehow we managed to separate
And put out the hateful fire.
My eternal enemy, it's time to learn
You really need someone to love.
I'm free.
Everything is fun for me
At night the Muse will fly down to console,
And in the morning glory will come
A rattle crackles over your ear.
There's no need to pray for me
And when you leave, look back...
The black wind will calm me down.
The golden leaf fall makes me happy.
I will accept separation as a gift
And oblivion is like grace.
But tell me, on the cross
Do you dare to send another?"
The poem is captivating. The passionate intensity of the feeling, its hurricane force, reveals before our eyes an extraordinary and strong personality.
Another poem relating to
the same year as the one just quoted:
Like the first spring thunderstorm;
They'll look over your bride's shoulder
My half closed eyes
Goodbye, goodbye, be happy, beautiful friend,
I will return to you your joyful vow,
But beware of your passionate friend
Tell me my unique nonsense, -
Then, that he will pierce with burning poison
Your blessed, your joyful union...
And I'm going to own a wonderful garden,
Where are the rustling of grass and the exclamations of muses.
Akhmatova is not afraid to be frank in her intimate confessions and pleas, since she is sure that only those who have the same code of love will understand her. Therefore, she does not consider it necessary to explain or describe anything further. A form of randomly and instantly bursting speech that can be overheard by anyone passing by or standing nearby, but not everyone can understand. Akhmatova never wrote limp, amorphous or descriptive love poems. They are always dramatic and extremely tense and confused. She has rare poems describing the joy of established, stormless and cloudless love; The muse comes to her only at the most climactic moments experienced by the feeling, when it is either betrayed or dries up:...
I wasn't nice to you
You hate me.
And the torture lasted
And how the criminal languished
Love filled with evil
It's like a brother.
You are silent, angry.
But if we meet eyes
I swear to you by heaven,
Granite will melt in the fire.
In a word, we are always present, as it were, at a bright, lightning flash, at the spontaneous combustion and charring of a pathetically huge, incinerating passion that pierces the entire being of a person. Akhmatova herself more than once associated the excitement of her love with the great and imperishable “Song of Songs” from the Bible.
And in the Bible there is a red wedge leaf
Laid down on the Song of Songs...
Akhmatova's poems about love - that's it! - pathetic.. A. Blok said about some of Akhmatova’s poems that she writes in front of a man, but she should be writing in front of God...
Her poems dedicated to love go to the very heights of the human spirit. Filled with enormous obsession, love became not only incomparably richer and more colorful, but also truly tragic. The biblical, solemn elation of Akhmatova's love poems of this period is explained by the genuine height, solemnity and pathosity of the feeling contained in them. Here is at least one of these poems:
An unprecedented autumn built a high dome,
There was an order for the clouds not to darken this dome.
And people marveled: the September deadlines were passing,
Where did the cold, humid days go?
The water of the muddy canals became emerald,
And the nettles smelled like roses, but only stronger.
It was stuffy from the dawns, unbearable, demonic and scarlet,
We all remembered them until the end of our days.
The sun was like a rebel entering the capital,
And the spring autumn caressed him so greedily,
It seemed like the transparent snowdrop was about to turn white...
That's when you calmly approached my porch.
It is difficult to name in world poetry a more triumphant and pathetic image of how a beloved approaches. This is truly a manifestation of Love to the eyes of an enthusiastic World!
Akhmatova's love lyrics inevitably lead to memories of Tyutchev. The stormy clash of passions, Tyutchev’s “fatal duel” - all this was resurrected in Akhmatova. She, like Tyutchev, is an improviser - both in her feelings and in her verse. Many times Akhmatova spoke about the paramount importance of pure inspiration for her, about the fact that she cannot imagine how one can write according to a pre-thought-out plan, that it seems to her that at times the Muse is standing behind her...
And just dictated lines
They go into a snow-white notebook.
She repeated this thought more than once. Thus, even in the poem “Muse” (1924), included in the cycle “Secrets of Craft,” Akhmatova wrote:
When I wait for her to come at night,
Life seems to hang by a thread.
What honors, what youth, what freedom
In front of a lovely guest with a pipe in her hand.
And then she came in.
Throwing back the covers,
She looked at me carefully.
I tell her: "
Did you dictate to Dante?
Pages of Hell?
Answers: “I am.”
About the same thing in the 1956 poem “Dream”:
How will I repay for the royal gift?
Where to go and with whom to celebrate?
And so I write as before, without any blots,
My poems in a burnt notebook.
This does not mean that she did not rework the poems. Many times, for example,
“The Poem without a Hero” was supplemented and revised, “Michal” was improved over the decades; Sometimes, although rarely, stanzas and lines in old poems were changed. Being a master who knows the “secrets of the craft,” Akhmatova is precise and meticulous in her choice of words and in their arrangement. But it has a very strong impulsive, improvisational element. All her love poems, in their initial impulse, in their arbitrary flow, appearing as suddenly as they suddenly disappear, in their fragmentary and plotless nature, are also pure improvisation. The “fatal” Tyutchev duel that constitutes their content is an instant outbreak of passions, a mortal combat of two equally strong opponents, one of whom must either surrender or die, and the other must win
No secrets and no sadness,
Not the wise will of fate
These meetings always left
The impression of a struggle.
When you come to me,
I felt my arms bent
A faint tingling shiver...
Marina Tsvetaeva, in one of her poems dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, wrote that her “anger is deadly and mercy is deadly.” And indeed, any kind of middle ground, smoothness of the conflict, temporary agreement between the two warring parties with a gradual transition to smoothness of relations is most often not even assumed here. “And like a criminal, love, filled with evil, languished.”
Her love poems mix unexpected pleas with curses, everything is sharply contrasting and hopeless, They contain a victorious
power over the heart is replaced by a feeling of emptiness, and tenderness is adjacent to rage. The quiet whisper of recognition is interrupted by the harsh language of ultimatums and orders. In these wildly flaming cries and prophecies one can feel the latent, unspoken and also Tyutchev’s thought about the playgrounds of dark passions, arbitrarily lifting up human destiny on their steep dark waves, about the primordial Chaos stirring beneath us. “Oh, how murderously we love” - Akhmatova, of course, did not ignore this side of Tyutchev’s worldview. It is characteristic that often love, its victorious power, appears in her poems, to the horror and confusion of the heroine, turned against... love itself!
I called death to my dear ones,
And they died one after another.
Oh, woe is me! These graves
Foretold by my word.
How the crows circle, sensing
Hot, fresh blood,
So wild songs, rejoicing,
Mine sent love.
With you I feel sweet and sultry.
You are close, like a heart in my chest.
Give me your hand, listen calmly.
I implore you: go away.
And let me not know where you are,
Oh Muse, don't call him,
Let it be alive, unsung
Not recognizing my love.
Akhmatova’s lyrics are born at the very junction of contradictions from the contact of Day with Night and Wakefulness with Sleep:
When the sleepless darkness bubbles around,
That sunny one, that lily of the valley wedge
Bursts into the darkness of the December night.
The epithets “daytime” and “nighttime,” outwardly completely ordinary, seem strange, even inappropriate, in her poem, if you don’t know their special meaning:
Confidently knock on the door
And, the same, cheerful, daytime,
He will come in and say: “Enough,”
You see, I also have a cold...
She, following Tyutchev, could repeat his famous words:
As the ocean envelops the globe,
Earthly life is surrounded by dreams...
Dreams occupy a large place in Akhmatova’s poetry.
After all, dreams, which are one of her favorite artistic means of comprehending the secret, hidden, intimate life of the soul, testify to this artist’s aspiration inward, into himself, into the secrets of the ever-mysterious human feeling. The poems of this period are generally more psychological. If in “Evening” and “Rosary” the feeling of love was depicted, as a rule, with the help of details (the image of a red tulip), then in the poems of 30–40 Anna Akhmatova, for all her expressiveness, is still more plastic in the direct depiction of psychological content.
The plasticity of Akhmatova's love poem does not in the least imply descriptiveness, slow flow, or narration. Before us is still an explosion, a catastrophe, a moment of incredible tension between two opposing forces that met in a fatal duel, but now this storm cloud, eclipsing all horizons, throwing thunder and lightning, appears before our eyes in all its terrifying beauty and power, in the frantic swirling of dark forms and the dazzling play of heavenly light:
But if we meet eyes
I swear to you by heaven,
Granite will melt in the fire.
It is not without reason that in one of N. Gumilev’s poems dedicated to her, Akhmatova is depicted with lightning bolts in her hand:
She is bright in the hours of languor
And holds lightning in his hand,
And her dreams are as clear as shadows
On the heavenly fiery sand.
Inspiration does not leave Anna Akhmatova, and when she is already over seventy, she thinks about the strangeness of love, about the richness of the secrets of the heart. here is the courageous overcoming of separation, the “non-meeting” of these two, here is a high example of high lyricism.
You can’t imagine a bottomless separation,
It would be better right then - on the spot...
And, probably, we will be separated
No one has been in this world.
At seventy, Anna Akhmatova speaks about love with such energy, with such unspent mental strength, that it seems as if she is victoriously emerging from her time into eternity. Akhmatova revealed the philosophical essence of late love, when that which is greater than the person himself comes into play - the Spirit, the Soul. She revealed the unique coincidence of two personalities who cannot connect. And this is reflected in her poetry as if in a mirror.
CONCLUSION
If you arrange Akhmatova’s love poems in a certain order, you can build a whole story with many mise-en-scenes, twists and turns, characters, random and non-random incidents. Meetings and separations, tenderness, guilt, disappointment, jealousy, bitterness, languor, joy singing in the heart, unfulfilled expectations, selflessness, pride, sadness - in which facets and kinks we do not see love on the pages of Akhmatova’s books.
In the lyrical heroine of Akhmatova’s poems, in the soul of the poetess herself, there constantly lived a burning, demanding dream of truly high love, undistorted in any way. Akhmatova’s love is a formidable, commanding, morally pure, all-consuming feeling that makes one remember the biblical line: “Love is strong as death - and its arrows are fiery arrows.”
LITERATURE
1O. O. Simchenko, The theme of memory in the works of Anna Akhmatova. – “News of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Series of Literature and Language”, 1985, No. 6. 11. Viktor Esipov, “Like the times of Vespasian...” (On the problem of the hero in the works of Anna Akhmatova of the 40-60s). – “Questions of Literature”, 1995, vol. VI, p. 64-65.
