The theme of love in the work of Anna Akhmatova briefly. The theme of love in the lyrics of Anna Akhmatova. “I am not with those who abandoned the earth…”

Introduction.

The theme of love in the work of many poets occupied and occupies a central place, because love exalts, awakens the highest feelings in a person. At the turn of the last century, on the eve of the revolution, in an era shaken by two world wars, "women's poetry" arose and developed in Russia - the poetry of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova. Perhaps the theme of love in the work of a remarkable poet was one of the main themes.

This theme is very important at the beginning of the twentieth century because, at this time of great upheavals, man continued to love, to be high, noble, passionate.

A lot of critics studied the work of Akhmatova. Among them, I would like to highlight N.V. Nedobrovo, who was one of the first to appreciate the work of Akhmatova. He wrote that the love theme in Akhmatova's works is much broader and more significant than its traditional framework.

The fact that "the great poet in a given social situation or through the eyes of a generation can be read in different ways" wrote in his article "The Life and Work of Anna Akhmatova" A.I. Pavlovsky. Akhmatova narrated about sorrows and wanderings, insults and power, storms and deserts of her love - her own and only.

V. Vinogradov, on the other hand, approached Akhmatova's poems as a kind of "individually closed system of linguistic means."

Being a friend of Anna Andreevna herself, the critic A. Naiman wrote that "her main and poetic feeling is the feeling of the extreme fragility of being, the proximity of an inevitable catastrophe."

Also, all those who wrote about Anna Akhmatova noted her tragic intonation, with which her works are narrated. The love story expressed in the verse is a reflection of a real life story that was tragic. Despite the fact that all critics assessed Akhmatova's work differently, they were unanimous in the fact that she was a great poet, a great and profound artist. Anna Andreevna went a long way in life, realizing the futility of the circle of life and people from which she left, but this was given to her with great difficulty, at the cost of torment and blood. She is a person of great will and unyielding courage.

All these articles, devoted to the theme of love in the work of Anna Akhmatova, allow us to determine the range of problems:

1. Unravel the mystery of the popularity of Akhmatova's love lyrics.

2. Find the differences between early lyrics and lyrics in the 20s - 30s.

3. What new did Akhmatova's lyrics bring to Russian literature.

The purpose of my essay was the decision to explore the theme of love in the work of Anna Akhmatova, to get acquainted with the opinions of critics and draw my own conclusions.

The world of deep and dramatic experiences, the charm, richness and originality of the personality are imprinted in the love lyrics of Anna Akhmatova. The theme of love, of course, occupies a central place in her poetry. Genuine sincerity, combined with strict harmony, laconic capacity of the poetic language of Akhmatova's love poems, allowed her contemporaries to call her Russian Sappho immediately after the release of the first poetry collections.

The early love lyrics of the poet are perceived as a kind of lyrical diary. She talks about simple human happiness and earthly, ordinary sorrows: about separation, betrayal, loneliness, despair - about everything that is close to many, that everyone is able to experience and understand. (poem "Song of the last meeting").

So helplessly my chest went cold,

But my steps were light.

I put on my right hand

Left hand glove.

It seemed that many steps

And I knew there were only three of them!

Autumn whisper between the maples

He asked: “Die with me!

I'm deceived by my despondent,

Changeable, evil fate.

I said, "Darling, dear!

And I'll die with you too..."

This is the song of the last meeting.

I looked at the dark house.

Candles burned in the bedroom

Indifferent yellow fire.

Royal Village.

Love in the lyrics of A. Akhmatova appears as a "fatal duel", it is almost never portrayed serenely, idyllicly, but, on the contrary, in an extremely crisis expression: at the moment of breakup, separation, loss of feeling or the first stormy blindness with passion. Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama or its climax. "The torment of a living soul" is paid by her lyrical heroine for love. The combination of lyricism and epicness brings A. Akhmatova's poems closer to the genres of the novel, short story, drama, lyrical diary. One of the secrets of her poetic gift lies in the ability to fully express the most intimate and wonderfully simple in herself and the world around her.

In her poems, "the string tension of experiences and the unmistakable accuracy of their sharp expression are striking. This is the strength of Akhmatova ..." (N.V. Nedobrovo).

Almost immediately after the appearance of her first book, and after the "Rosary" and "White Pack" in particular, they started talking about the "mystery of Akhmatova." The talent itself was obvious, but its essence was unusual and unclear. "Romance", noticed by critics, did not explain everything. How to explain, for example, a captivating combination of femininity and fragility with that firmness and distinctness of the drawing, which testify to imperiousness and extraordinary, almost rigid will? At first they wanted to ignore this will, because it contradicted the "standard of femininity." Aroused bewildered admiration and strange reticence of her love lyrics, in which passion was like the silence of a pre-storm and usually expressed itself in only two or three words, similar to lightning flashes flaring up behind a menacingly darkened horizon.

In the complex music of Akhmatova's lyrics, in its barely flickering depth, in its darkness escaping from the eyes, in the subsoil, in the subconscious, a special, frightening disharmony constantly lived and made itself felt, embarrassing Akhmatova herself. She later wrote in "A Poem without a Hero" that she constantly heard an incomprehensible rumble, as if some kind of underground gurgling, shifts and friction of those original solid rocks on which life was eternally and reliably based, but which began to lose stability and balance.

Christmas time was warmed by bonfires,

And carriages fell from the bridges,

And the whole mourning city floated

For an unknown destination

Along the Neva or against the current, -

Just away from your graves.

On the galley arch blackened,

In Summer, the weather vane sang subtly,

And the silver moon is bright

Frozen over the Silver Age.

Because on all roads,

Because to all thresholds

A shadow slowly approached

The wind tore posters from the wall,

Smoke danced squatting on the roof

And the cemetery smelled of lilacs.

And cursed by Queen Avdotya,

Dostoevsky and the Possessed

The city went into its fog,

And looked again out of the darkness

An old Petersburger and a reveler!

As before the execution the drum beat ...

And always in the frosty stuffiness,

Pre-war, prodigal and formidable,

Lived some future rumble,

But then it was heard more muffled,

He almost did not disturb the soul

And drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva ...

The very first foreshadowing of such an unsettling sensation was the poem "The First Return" with its images of death sleep, shroud and death knell and with a general feeling of abrupt and irrevocable change.

Akhmatova's love story included an era - she voiced and altered the poems in her own way, introduced into them a note of anxiety and sadness, which had a wider meaning than her own fate.

It is for this reason that Akhmatova's love lyrics over time, in the pre-revolutionary, and then in the first post-revolutionary years, won more and more reader circles and generations and, without ceasing to be the object of admiring attention of connoisseurs, clearly left the narrow circle of readers.

A.I. Pavlovsky in his book “Anna Akhmatova - Life and Work” said that Akhmatova is really the most characteristic heroine of her time, manifested in an endless variety of women's destinies: mistress and wife, widow and mother, cheating and leaving. According to A. Kollontai, Akhmatova gave "a whole book of the female soul." Akhmatova "poured into art" a complex story of the female character of a turning point era, its origins, breaking, new formation.

There is a center that, as it were, brings the rest of the world of her poetry to itself, turns out to be its main nerve, its idea and principle. This is Love. The element of the female soul inevitably had to begin with such a declaration of itself in love. Herzen once said, as a great injustice in the history of mankind, that a woman is "driven into love." In a certain sense, all the lyrics (especially the early ones) by Anna Akhmatova are "driven into love." It was here that truly poetic discoveries were born, such a view of the world that allows us to speak of Akhmatova's poetry as a new phenomenon in the development of Russian lyrics of the twentieth century. There is both "deity" and "inspiration" in her poetry. While maintaining the high value of the idea of love associated with symbolism, Akhmatova returns to it a living and real, by no means abstract character. The soul comes to life "Not for passion, not for fun, // For great earthly love":

This meeting is not sung by anyone,

And without songs, sadness subsided.

Cool summer has come

It's like a new life has begun.

The sky seems like a stone vault,

Wounded by yellow fire

And more necessary than daily bread

I have one word about him.

You, who sprinkle the grass with dew,

Revive my soul with news,

Not for passion, not for fun

For great earthly love.

"Great earthly love" - this is the driving principle of all Akhmatova's lyrics. It was she who made us see the world in a different way - no longer in a symbolist and not in an acmeist way, but, if we use the usual definition, realistically - to see the world:

That fifth season

Just praise him.

Breathe the last freedom

Because it is love.

The sky flew high

Light outlines of things

And no longer celebrates the body

Anniversary of your sadness.

In this poem, Akhmatova called love "the fifth season." From this unusual, fifth, time, she saw the other four, ordinary ones. In a state of love, the world is seen anew. All the senses are sharpened and tense. And the unusualness of the ordinary is revealed. A person begins to perceive the world with a tenfold strength, really reaching peaks in the sensation of life. The world opens in an additional reality: After all, the stars were larger,

After all, the herbs smelled differently.

The poem "Love conquers deceitfully":

Love conquers deceitfully

The motive is simple, unskillful

Even so recently - strange

You were not gray and sad.

And when she smiled

In your gardens, in your house, in the field,

Everywhere you seemed

That you are free and at will.

You were bright, taken by her

And drinking her poison.

Because the stars were bigger

After all, the herbs smelled differently,

Autumn herbs.

Royal Village.

Therefore, Akhmatova's verse is so objective: it returns things to their original meaning, it draws attention to what we are normally able to pass by indifferently, not to appreciate, not to feel.

And one more feature. In Akhmatova's love poems, many epithets are born from a holistic, inseparable, fused perception of the world.

Not without reason, when speaking about Akhmatova, about her love lyrics, critics (A.I. Pavlovsky, A. Naiman, A. Batalov) subsequently noticed that her love dramas, unfolding in verse, take place as if in silence: nothing is explained, not commented, there are so few words that each of them carries a huge psychological burden. “It is assumed that the reader either has to guess, or, most likely, tries to turn to his own experience, and then it turns out that the poem is very broad in its meaning: its secret drama, its hidden plot refers to many, many people” - wrote A. Naiman (stories about Anna Akhmatova).

I pray to the window beam -

He is pale, thin, straight.

Today I am silent in the morning

And the heart is cut in half.

On my washstand

The copper turned green.

But this is how the beam plays on it,

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.

So it is in this early poem. It is not so important for us what exactly happened in the life of the heroine? After all, the most important thing - pain, confusion and a desire to calm down at least when looking at a sunbeam - all this is clear, understandable and almost everyone is familiar with it. The wisdom of Akhmatov's miniature, which is somewhat similar to Japanese hoku, lies in the fact that it speaks of the healing power of nature for the soul. A sunbeam, "so innocent and simple", illuminating both the greenery of the washstand and the human soul with equal caress, is truly the semantic center of this amazing poem.

This is the early lyrics of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova.

The lyrics of Akhmatova noticeably changed in the 20-30s.

Because the lyrics of Akhmatova throughout the entire post-revolutionary twenty years were constantly expanding, absorbing more and more new areas that were not characteristic of her before, now a love story has occupied one of the main poetic territories in her.

Of course, the expansion of the range of poetry, which was the result of changes in the world outlook and attitude of the poet, could not, in turn, not affect the tone and nature of the actual love lyrics. True, some of its characteristic features remained the same. A love episode, for example, as before, appears before us in a peculiar Akhmatov guise: it, in particular, is never consistently unfolded, it usually has neither an end nor a beginning; a love confession, despair or entreaty that make up a poem always seems to the reader as if it were a snippet of a conversation overheard by chance. (poem "Oh, you thought - I'm like that too").

Oh, you thought I was the same

That you can forget me.

And that I will throw myself, praying and sobbing,

Under the hooves of a bay horse.

Or I'll ask the healers

In spoken water spine

And I will send you a terrible gift -

My treasured fragrant handkerchief.

Be damned. Not a groan, not a look

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 fiery child of nights -

I will never return to you.

The heroine of Akhmatov's poems, who most often speaks as if to herself in a state of impulse, semi-delusion or ecstasy, naturally does not consider it necessary, and cannot additionally explain and interpret everything that happens to us. Only the main signals of feelings are transmitted, without decoding, without comments, hastily - according to the hurried ABC of love. Hence - the impression of extreme intimacy, the utmost frankness of this lyrics. (poem "Somehow we managed to part").

Somehow managed to break up

And put out the hateful fire.

My eternal enemy, it's time to learn

You really love someone.

I am free. Everything is fun for me

At night, the muse will fly to comfort,

And in the morning glory will drag

Rattle over the ear to crackle.

Don't even pray for me

And when you leave, look back...

The black wind will calm me down.

Amuses the golden leaf fall.

As a gift, I will accept separation

And oblivion is like grace.

But, tell me, on the cross

Would you dare to send another?

Akhmatova's poems about love - everything! - pathetic. But - one way or another - Akhmatova's love lyrics of the 1920s and 1930s are mostly directed to the inner, secretly spiritual life. The poems of this period are more psychological. If in "Evening" and "Rosary" the feeling of love was depicted, as a rule, with the help of very few material details, now, without in the least refusing to use an expressive subject stroke, Anna Akhmatova, for all her expressiveness, is still more plastic in direct depiction of psychological content. Before us is still an explosion, a catastrophe, but now it is a thundercloud that has eclipsed all horizons, throwing thunder and lightning:

But if we meet eyes

I swear to you by heaven

Granite will melt in the fire.

Akhmatova herself many times associated the excitement of her love with the great “Song of Songs” from the Bible, wrote the famous critic A.I. Pavlovsky.

Beginning with The White Flock, but especially in Plantain, Anno Domini, and in later cycles, her love feeling acquires a broader and more spiritual character. Poems of the 20s and 30s go to the very heights of the human spirit. They do not subjugate all life, all existence, as it was before, but all existence, all life, brings into love experiences the whole mass of shades inherent in them. Filled with this enormous content, love became not only richer and more multicolored, but - and truly tragic - wrote A. Batalov. (literary criticism "Next to Akhmatova").

If you arrange Akhmatova's love poems in a certain order, you can build a whole story with many mise-en-scenes, ups and downs, characters, random and non-random incidents. Meetings and partings, tenderness, guilt, disappointment, jealousy, bitterness, languor, joy singing in the heart, unfulfilled expectations, selflessness, pride, sadness - in what facets and kinks we do not see love on the pages of Akhmatov's books.

In the lyrical heroine of Akhmatova's poems, in the soul of the poet himself, a burning, demanding dream of a truly lofty love, not distorted by anything, constantly lived. Akhmatova's love is a formidable, imperious, morally pure, all-consuming feeling, which makes one recall the biblical line: "Love is strong as death - and its arrows are arrows of fire."

If you arrange Akhmatova's love poems in a certain order, you will notice that at the very beginning of the lyrical poems, the heroine is proud, quivering, tender. And already at the end of the lyrical poems, this is a woman who has come a long way and has come a long way. But throughout her work, the lyrical heroine is strong and proud. This is one of the striking features of her love lyrics.

The second important feature of Akhmatova's lyrical works is the role of household details.

Akhmatova has poems that are “made” literally from everyday life, from everyday, uncomplicated life. Involuntarily, the words of Anna Andreevna herself are recalled that poems “grow from rubbish”, that even a stain of mold on a damp wall, and burdock, and nettle, can become the subject of the image.

According to critic A.I. Pavlovsky, “the most important thing in her craft is vitality and realism, the ability to see poetry in ordinary life.” Her “material” details, sparingly presented, but distinct everyday interiors, boldly introduced prosaisms, and most importantly, the inner connection that she always traces between the external environment and the turbulent life of the heart, everything reminds, not only of prose, but also poetic classics.

The third feature of the works of Anna Akhmatova is poems written in the form of a lyrical diary. Akhmatova always preferred a "fragment" to a coherent, consistent story. The fragment gave documentary quality to the work: after all, we have before us either an excerpt from an overheard conversation, or a dropped note:

He loved three things in the world:

For evening singing, white peacocks

And erased maps of America.

Didn't like it when children cry

Didn't like raspberry tea

And female hysteria.

…And I was his wife.

"He loved…"

And the fourth feature is "romance". Eikhenbaum was the first to express the idea of "romance" in Akhmatova's work. He wrote: “Akhmatova's poetry is a complex lyrical novel. We can trace the development of the narrative lines that form it, we can talk about its composition, right down to the relationship of individual characters.

V. Gippius also wrote interestingly about the "romance" of Anna Andreevna's lyrics. He saw the key to Akhmatova's success and influence in the fact that the lyric came to replace the dormant form of the novel at that time.

All those who wrote about Akhmatova noted the tragic intonation with which the plots of her books are narrated. That particular intonation, which they called Akhmatov, hinted at more than just another story of great and endless love.

I am very close to the position of the critic N.V. Nedobrovo, who noted that “the love theme and poetry in general by Akhmatova are much wider and more significant than their traditional framework. He pointed out that the distinguishing feature of the poet's personality is not weakness and brokenness, but, on the contrary, exceptional willpower. In poetry, he saw "a lyrical soul, rather harsh than too soft, rather harsh than tearful, and clearly dominant, not oppressed."

Not without reason, another critic A.I. Pavlovsky gave a high assessment to his analysis: “He, in fact, was the only one who understood before anyone else the true scale of Akhmatova’s poetry, pointing out that the distinguishing feature of the poet’s personality is not weakness and brokenness, but, on the contrary, exceptional strength will." Yes, and Anna Akhmatova herself believed that it was N.V. Nedobrovo who guessed and understood her entire further creative path.

There is a connection between the poet and the time in which she lived. On the one hand, her lyrics, creativity - a look, as it were, through the "prism of poetry", which gave her the opportunity to overcome all difficulties.

On the other hand, her strength of will and spirit did not let her lose herself, made it possible to survive and remain a poet.

The main thing in the theme of love in Anna Akhmatova is the persistent search for the spirit, the search for the meaning and height of life, which are accompanied by gestures of excitement, conscience, faith:

And only conscience every day worse

He rages: he wants a great tribute.

Covering my face, I answered her...

But there are no more tears, no more excuses.

Akhmatova is not afraid to be frank in her confessions and prayers. It can be understood only by those who possess the same “cipher of love”.

“Not feeling landmarks, not seeing lighthouses, barely keeping her balance,” Anna Akhmatova was guided by the secret and powerful “intuitive power” of artistic creativity:

And my sad Muse

Like a blind woman, she led me.

A great poet, in a given social situation, can be read in different ways. Such is the property of any genuine art, if it deeply and faithfully conveys to contemporaries at least one of the melodies of its time.

Bibliography.

1. Pavlovsky A.I. "Anna Akhmatova: Life and work". Enlightenment, 1991.

2. Nyman A. "Stories about Anna Akhmatova." Magazine "New World". 1989

3. Batalov A. "Literary criticism: Next to Akhmatova." 1984

4. Sushilina I.K. Anna Akhmatova Favorites. 1993

5. Gorlovsky A.S. "Song of Love: Russian Love Lyrics". 1986

Introduction.

This theme is very important at the beginning of the twentieth century because, at this time of great upheavals, man continued to love, to be high, noble, passionate.

V. Vinogradov, on the other hand, approached Akhmatova's poems as a kind of "individually closed system of linguistic means."

Being a friend of Anna Andreevna herself, the critic A. Naiman wrote that “her main and poetic feeling is the feeling of the extreme fragility of being, the proximity of an inevitable catastrophe.”

All these articles, devoted to the theme of love in the work of Anna Akhmatova, allow us to determine the range of problems:

1. Unravel the mystery of the popularity of Akhmatova's love lyrics.

2. Find the differences between early lyrics and lyrics in the 20s - 30s.

3. What new did Akhmatova's lyrics bring to Russian literature.

The purpose of my essay was the decision to explore the theme of love in the work of Anna Akhmatova, to get acquainted with the opinions of critics and draw my own conclusions.

So helplessly my chest went cold,

But my steps were light.

I put on my right hand

Left hand glove.

It seemed that many steps

And I knew there were only three of them!

Autumn whisper between the maples

He asked: “Die with me!

I'm deceived by my despondent,

Changeable, evil fate.

I said, "Darling, dear!

And I'll die with you too..."

This is the song of the last meeting.

I looked at the dark house.

Candles burned in the bedroom

Indifferent yellow fire.

Royal Village.

In her poems, "the string tension of experiences and the unmistakable accuracy of their sharp expression are striking. This is the strength of Akhmatova ..." (N.V. Nedobrovo).

Christmas time was warmed by bonfires,

And carriages fell from the bridges,

And the whole mourning city floated

For an unknown destination

Along the Neva or against the current, -

Just away from your graves.

On the galley arch blackened,

In Summer, the weather vane sang subtly,

And the silver moon is bright

Frozen over the Silver Age.

Because on all roads,

Because to all thresholds

A shadow slowly approached

The wind tore posters from the wall,

Smoke danced squatting on the roof

And the cemetery smelled of lilacs.

And cursed by Queen Avdotya,

Dostoevsky and the Possessed

The city went into its fog,

And looked again out of the darkness

An old Petersburger and a reveler!

As before the execution the drum beat ...

And always in the frosty stuffiness,

Pre-war, prodigal and formidable,

There lived some future rumble,

But then it was heard more muffled,

He almost did not disturb the soul

And drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva ...

Akhmatova's love story included an era - she voiced and altered the poems in her own way, introduced into them a note of anxiety and sadness, which had a wider meaning than her own fate.

This meeting is not sung by anyone,

And without songs, sadness subsided.

Cool summer has come

It's like a new life has begun.

The sky seems like a stone vault,

Wounded by yellow fire

And more necessary than daily bread

I have one word about him.

You, who sprinkle the grass with dew,

Revive my soul with news,

Not for passion, not for fun

For great earthly love.

That fifth season

Just praise him.

Breathe the last freedom

Because it is love.

The sky flew high

Light outlines of things

And no longer celebrates the body

Anniversary of your sadness.

After all, the herbs smelled differently.

The poem "Love conquers deceitfully":

Love conquers deceitfully

The motive is simple, unskillful

Just so recently - strange

You were not gray and sad.

And when she smiled

In your gardens, in your house, in the field,

Everywhere you seemed

That you are free and at will.

You were bright, taken by her

And drinking her poison.

Because the stars were bigger

After all, the herbs smelled differently,

Autumn herbs.

Royal Village.

Therefore, Akhmatova's verse is so objective: it returns things to their original meaning, it draws attention to what we are normally able to pass by indifferently, not to appreciate, not to feel.

And one more feature. In Akhmatova's love poems, many epithets are born from a holistic, inseparable, fused perception of the world.

I pray to the window beam -

He is pale, thin, straight.

Today I am silent in the morning

And the heart is cut in half.

On my washstand

The copper turned green.

But this is how the beam plays on it,

What fun to watch.

So innocent and simple

In the evening silence

To this great feeling. At first it seems that these words make no sense, they are opposites; how can you praise something that brings suffering and pain! But the antithesis here is not accidental: it contains the whole gamut of experiences from happy to unrequited love. Anna Akhmatova managed to convey in just a few lines not just a picture of the meeting or parting of the characters, but also their thoughts and feelings through ...

Sings and sadly "... Of course, in these lyrical moods, images and symbols, it is not difficult to guess the influence of decadent philosophy, which has become a symbol of the Silver Age of Russian poetry. 2.2 The lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova and the poetics of symbolism and acmeism ideal, unknowable, deep aestheticism, interest in higher...

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The theme of love in the work of Anna Akhmatova

Marakhovskaya S.A.. 11 G class, Lyceum

Supervisor: Mishina L.I.., teacher of Russian language and literature, Lyceum, Troitsk.

ROMANCE IN AKHMATOVA'S LYRICS

The lyrics of Akhmatova during the period of her first books ("Evening", "Rosary", "White Flock") are almost exclusively the lyrics of love. Her innovation as an artist initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeatedly and, it would seem, played out theme to the end. The need for a novel is obviously an urgent need. The novel has become a necessary element of life, like the best juice extracted, in the words of Lermontov, from its every joy. It immortalized hearts with enduring features, and the cycle of ideas, and the elusive background of a sweet life. It is clear that the novel helps to live. Here is one of those novels:

"As simple courtesy dictates,

He came up to me and smiled.

Half kind, half lazy

He touched his hand with a kiss.

And mysterious ancient faces

Glasses looked at me.

Ten years of fading and screaming.

All my sleepless nights

I put in a quiet word

And she said it in vain.

You left. And it became again

My heart is empty and clear.”

("Confusion", 1913

Often, Akhmatova's poems resemble a fluent and, as it were, not even "processed" diary entry:

"He loved three things in the world:

For evening singing, white peacocks

And erased maps of America.

Didn't like it when children cry

Didn't like raspberry tea

And female hysteria.

…BUT I was his wife."

("He loved...", 1910)

Sometimes such love "diary" entries were more common, they included not two, as usual, but three or even four persons, as well as some features of the interior or landscape, but internal fragmentation, similarity to a "novel page" invariably persisted and in these thumbnails:

« There my shadow remained and yearns,

Everyone lives in the same blue room

Waiting for guests from the city after midnight

And the enamel icon kisses.

And the house is not entirely safe:

The fire is lit, but it's still dark...

Isn't that why the new mistress is bored,

Isn't that why the owner drinks wine

And hears how behind a thin wall

The guest who has come is talking to me.

(“My shadow remained there and yearns ...”

3 January 1917 Slepnevo)

"GREAT EARTH LOVE" IN LYRIKA AKHMATOVA

Akhmatova, indeed, is the most characteristic heroine of her time, manifested in the endless variety of female destinies: mistresses and wives, widows and mothers who cheated and left. According to A. Kollontai, Akhmatova gave "a whole book of the female soul." Akhmatova "poured into art" a complex story of the female character of a turning point era, its origins, breaking, new formation. The hero of Akhmatov's lyrics (not the heroine) is complex and many-sided. Actually, it is even difficult to define him in the sense that, say, the hero of Lermontov's lyrics is defined. It is he - a lover, a brother, a friend, who appeared in an endless variety of situations: insidious and generous, killing and resurrecting, the first and the last.

There is a center that, as it were, brings the rest of the world of her poetry to itself, turns out to be its main nerve, its idea and principle. This is Love. While maintaining the high value of the idea of love associated with symbolism, Akhmatova returns to it a living and real, by no means abstract character. The soul comes to life "Not for passion, not for fun, // For great earthly love."

"Great earthly love" - this is the driving principle of all Akhmatova's lyrics. It was she who made me see the world in a different way - no longer symbolist and not acmeist, but realistic - to see the world.

THE ROLE OF DETAILS IN AKHMATOVA'S LOVE POEMS

Akhmatova has poems that are "made" literally from everyday life, from everyday life, simple life - right down to the green washstand, on which a pale evening beam plays. One involuntarily recalls the words spoken by Akhmatova in her old age, that poems “grow from rubbish”, that even a spot of mold on a damp wall, and burdock, and nettle, and a damp fence, and dandelion, can become the subject of poetic inspiration and image. her craft - vitality and realism, the ability to see poetry in everyday life - was already embedded in her talent by nature itself. And how, by the way, this early line is characteristic of all her subsequent lyrics:

“Today I am silent in the morning,

And the heart - in half ... "

(“I pray to the window beam ...”, 1909)

Not without reason, when speaking about Akhmatova, about her love lyrics, critics subsequently noticed that her love dramas unfolding in verse take place as if in silence: nothing is explained, not commented on, there are so few words that each of them carries a huge psychological burden.

SICK AND TROUBLED LOVE

It must be said that Akhmatova's poems about love are not fragmentary sketches, not broken psychological studies: the sharpness of the gaze is accompanied by the sharpness of thought. Their generalizing power is great. A poem may begin as an unassuming ditty:

"I'm at sunrise

I sing about love

On my knees in the garden

Swan field.

And it ends biblically:

"There will be a stone instead of bread

I am an evil reward.

All I need is the sky

But love in Akhmatova's poems is by no means only love - happiness, especially well-being. Often, too often, it is suffering. The image of such "sick" love in the early Akhmatova was both an image of the sick pre-revolutionary period of the 1910s and an image of the sick old world. It is not for nothing that the late Akhmatova, in verse, and especially in "A Poem without a Hero," will administer severe lynching, moral and historical, over him. Love in Akhmatova almost never appears in a calm stay.

“That snake, curled up in a ball,

At the very heart conjures

That whole days like a dove

Cooing on the white window,

It will shine in the bright hoarfrost,

Feels like a Levkoy in the slumber...

But faithfully and secretly leads

From happiness and peace.

("Love", 1911)

Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama. The poet all the time strives to take a position that would allow him to reveal his feelings to the maximum. That is why Akhmatova has poems that seem to be uttered even from behind a death line. But they do not carry any afterlife, mystical secrets. And there is no hint of something otherworldly. Love often turns into another, love is pity:

"Oh no, I didn't love you,

Burning with sweet fire

So explain what power

In your sad name.

LOVE LYRICS OF AKHMATOVA IN THE 20'S AND 30'S

In the 1920s and 1930s, the tonality of that love novel, which before the revolution at times covered almost the entire content of Akhmatova’s lyrics and which many wrote about as the main discovery of the achievement of the poetess, noticeably changes in the 20-30s compared to early books. Akhmatova is not afraid to be frank in her intimate confessions and pleas, as she is sure that only those who have the same code of love will understand her.

CONCLUSION

In the lyrical heroine of Akhmatova's poems, in the soul of the poetess herself, a burning, demanding dream of a truly lofty love, not distorted by anything, constantly lived. Akhmatova's love is a formidable, imperious, morally pure, all-consuming feeling, which makes one recall the biblical line: "Love is strong as death - and its arrows are arrows of fire."

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INTRODUCTION

Three periods are clearly distinguished in Akhmatova's work, each of which corresponds to a certain angle of the author's vision, which determines a particular circle of ideas and motives, a commonality of poetic means. The main artistic principles of Akhmatova were formed precisely in the initial period, marked by the collections "Evening" and "Rosary".

The lyrics of Akhmatova are, for the most part, and if we keep in mind the early work, then almost exclusively the lyrics of love. No wonder the poetess immediately and unanimously, as soon as "Evening" and "Rosary" came out, she was titled "Sappho of the New Age". Her innovation as an artist initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeatedly and, it would seem, played out theme to the end.

The novelty of Akhmatova’s love lyrics caught the eye of her contemporaries almost from her first poems, published in Apollo, but, unfortunately, the heavy banner of acmeism, under which the young poetess stood, for a long time seemed to drape in the eyes of many her true, original appearance and made her constantly correlate her poems either with acmeism, or with symbolism, or with one or another linguistic or literary theories that for some reason came to the fore. Meanwhile, Akhmatova's love lyrics, which attracted the attention of connoisseurs already in 1912, when The Evening was published, over time, in the pre-revolutionary, and then in the first post-revolutionary years, won more and more reader circles and generations, without ceasing to be the object of admiring interest of connoisseurs and poetic gourmets from the circle from which she came.

The new shades of feeling that Akhmatova was able to discover in the old love theme, embodying them in a simple and strict, noble and concise individual form, are associated with a truthful, modern and realistic approach to this topic, which is more characteristic of psychological prose than poetry. In this sense, Akhmatova’s friend, the poet O. Mandelstam, was right when he wrote: “Akhmatova brought to Russian lyrics all the enormous complexity and richness of the Russian novel of the 19th century.”

This work is devoted to the features of Akhmatova's early lyrics and the depiction of the theme of love in her work.

1 . MAIN PART

The love theme undoubtedly occupies the main place in Akhmatova's lyrics. Love in Akhmatova's poems is a living and genuine feeling, deep and humane, although, due to real life reasons, it is usually touched by the seal of ennobling suffering. The feeling of the poetess knows different heroes, and at present, in the light of biographical data, we can name their names and recognize their dissimilar faces in her poetic image, and at the same time they merge into a single image of great, true love. This feeling is not light and scattered, but concentrated, not irresponsible in its fleetingness, but all-encompassing and internally necessary. Hence the high nobility, the great moral purity of her love poems.

Akhmatova developed the concept of love, the embodiment of which was a psychological and poetic discovery in Russian lyrics of the 20th century. Akhmatova moved away from the symbolist stereotype of depicting love as a refraction in the human soul of certain world entities (universal harmony, elemental or chaotic beginnings) and focused on "earthly signs", the psychological aspect of love.

What was new (or rather, rare in the history of poetry, including Russian poetry) was, in particular, that a woman spoke through Akhmatova). From an object of poetic feeling, a woman became a lyrical hero in poetry. Following the example of Akhmatova, the gift of the poetic word was acquired by her countless imitators and followers, who were in a hurry to pour out in verse the intimate experiences of the female soul. But Akhmatova's poems were least of all "women's" or "ladies'" poems, like the work of her numerous - mostly forgotten - imitators. Pushkin or Goethe.

Whatever the relationship between a man and a woman, reproduced by the classics, their basis is a feeling with a positive sign, even if it is a passing or past feeling. And "unhappy love" is not an exception, but an aspect of the directed image; "misfortune" here stands on a par with "crazy happiness", with "delight", with "joy" that "knows no limit" - in the same row, but at the other pole. Akhmatova, on the other hand, focuses her gaze on love-dislike, on the interweaving and clash of emotional opposites, even extremes, on the absence of genuine, deep closeness - in the presence of intimacy. Poetry masters a special, previously undepicted variant of convergence-divergence, a special kind of behavioral situation.

The essence of love, according to Akhmatova, is dramatic. In building the plots of early collections, varying the motives of a failed meeting, separation, deceived hope, the following pattern is seen: in the very nature of love, love passion, there is a certain inaccessibility of bliss, constancy, harmony, reciprocity. But dramatic, according to Akhmatova, is not only love without reciprocity, but also "happy." The "stopped moment" of happiness dies, because the satisfaction of love is fraught with melancholy and cooling. The analysis of this state is devoted to the poem "There is a cherished trait in the proximity of people ...".

In such an interpretation of love, the intense drama of the existence of the individual on the eve of world catastrophes was indirectly reflected. Hence - the motif of expectation of death, implicitly passing through the lyrical miniatures of "Evening" and "Rosary". Love in the artistic world of Akhmatova is an existential beginning: through the prism of a love drama, the laws of the life of the soul are comprehended. Love passion, according to Akhmatova, completely changes the perception of the world. The scales of perception of reality turn out to be shifted, the horizons of the soul, completely absorbed by love, narrow, love often becomes a force that suppresses a person (“And I can’t take off, / But since childhood I was winged”). But at the same time, everything that falls into the field of attention of the lover acquires a special substantial significance. Therefore, love becomes a creative method of comprehending the world, because the lyrical heroine, in a state of love languor, perceives reality extremely sharply.

The love story unfolds both in breadth and depth - both as a chain of dramatic events, and as a layering of experiences and self-perceptions. "I" and "you" ("she" and "he") in a variety of ways reveal the dissimilarity of mutual perception, respectively, personal behavior: he is "cute" for her, even "irreparably cute", "the most gentle, meek", "wise and brave", "strong and free", but also "arrogant and evil", "prisoner of another"; she is a "stranger" for him, exhausted by her attraction, sensually desirable, but spiritually indifferent ("What power does a person have / Who does not even ask for tenderness!"). She suffers painfully, she is bitter, it hurts, he ironizes, draws, enjoys his power ("Oh, I know: his consolation is / It is intense and passionate to know, / That he does not need anything, / That I have nothing to refuse him "). She told him: "You know, I'm languishing in captivity, / I pray for the death of the Lord", he - to her: "... go to a monastery / Or marry a fool ...". At the same time, she is confident in the penetrating power of feeling, in the inevitability of its impact (“I was your insomnia, / I was your longing”, “And if you offend with a mad word - / It will hurt yourself”), he, with all his arrogance, sometimes experiences restlessness, anxiety ("woke up, you groaned").

Her torment spills over into a vengeful warning ("Oh, how often will you remember / The sudden longing of unnamed desires"), he is sometimes ready to make excuses ("I am with you, my angel, I did not dissemble"), a true feeling sometimes breaks into his sensual desire ("Like God's sun, he loved me"), so the definition of "unrequited love" (also used) is hardly suitable, it narrows, simplifies the situation. Sometimes there is a change of roles: a man (more precisely, a “boy”) is given to experience the “bitter pain of first love”, a woman remains indifferent to him (“How helplessly, greedily and hotly strokes / My cold hands”). The situation is sealed by a through leitmotif, and, moreover, cannot be reduced to it.
In the ups and downs of the intense drama, love is surrounded by a network of contradictory names-interpretations: light, song, "last freedom" - and sin, delirium, illness, poison, captivity. The feeling is accompanied by the dynamics of heterogeneous states: expectations, languor, exhaustion, petrification, oblivion. And, rising to an insatiable passion, it absorbs other strong movements of the soul - resentment, jealousy, renunciation, betrayal. The content richness of love-dislike makes it worthy of a long, multi-part narrative: the quantity (written) and quality (described) are commensurate. Akhmatova lyrics love creativity

The interpretation of love affected the development of the image of the lyrical heroine. The heroine of Akhmatova in her psychological make-up is a woman of the twentieth century. Under the external simplicity of appearance hides a completely new image of a modern woman - with a paradoxical logic of behavior that eludes static definitions, with a "multi-layered" consciousness, in which contradictory principles coexist.

The plurality of guises of the lyrical "I" is clear: a woman - either from a secular environment ("under a dark veil"), then from the bottom ("my husband whipped me ... with a belt"), then from a bohemian circle ("Yes, I loved them, those gatherings of the night"); the difference in social status is complicated by a change in family status: sometimes she is single, sometimes married, moreover, not only a wife, but also a loving mother; sometimes we find her on the threshold of youth, and sometimes beyond this threshold (in some places this is indirectly indicated: "ten years of fading and screaming", "waiting for him in vain for many years"). The man is also not the same: either his attraction to “her” is the only one (“my faithful, gentle friend is always with me”), or he has a “different wife” and is destined to “raise his sons with his quiet girlfriend / "". Meanwhile, "she" and "he" enter our consciousness as two self-identical figures, over all personal differences, the stability of the typological property prevails - the stability of their role position in the unfolding drama. The general emerges, persistently cut through the variable.

Contrasting facets of consciousness are personified in different types of the lyrical heroine. In some poems we have before us a representative of literary and artistic bohemia, in others - a humble blueberry. Sometimes the lyrical "I" is stylized as a village woman (cf .: "My husband whipped me patterned ..."), sometimes it appears in a "simple", everyday look. The trend of alienation of the lyrical hero from the author's "I" is characteristic of the poetics of acmeism. But if Gumilyov gravitated toward the personalistic form of expressing the lyrical "I", and the hero of the early Mandelstam "dissolved" in the objectivity of the depicted world, then Akhmatova's "objectification" of the lyrical heroine happened differently.

As in the classics, the lyrical story registers the characteristic moments of moving relationships: dates, partings, estrangement from each other, the transition of the event to the power of "love memory". But no order of action is observed, different stages on the pages of books both coexist and combine. Already in the first collection, first - poems about past suffering ("It's strange to remember: / the soul yearned, / Choked in death delirium"), then - a step back, to a relatively late phase of continuing intimacy ("Still so recently, strange / You were not gray-haired and sad"), then - like a snapshot of a stopped moment of what is happening now ("Closed hands under a dark veil ..."), and next to it - thoughts about the experience ("Maybe it's better that I did not become / your wife"). And this is repeated many times, many first meetings, many last, and there is no path from the beginning to the end. Where adjacent verses are attracted to each other, it is not due to the sequence of events, but on the basis of semantic similarity (in "Evening": two poems about "I" in a rustic appearance, two about other persons, the "gray-eyed king" and " fisherman"; in the "White Flock": two - about the escape, three - about the "muse", "song", "pre-song alarm"). The poet's attention is focused on the essential features of the depicted phenomenon, and therefore it is understood out of chronological order. At the price of truncations and rearrangements, it would be possible to construct a scheme for the development of love-dislike, but such an operation would lead us far away from the author's intention. All the less applicable to Akhmatov's tetralogy is the concept of a diary or a novel.

Akhmatova's characters seem to be ready to mingle with the crowd, their days and nights are the same as those of many other love couples, meetings, separations, quarrels, walks are from the category of well-known. At the same time, the heroine's confession breaks through the shell of everyday life, her feeling is elevated to the circle of concepts of triumph and damnation, temple and dungeon, torture and death, hell and paradise. And it's an upward spiral of lyrics activating its own reserves.

In the early poems, the meaning of what was and what was not - in the relationship between "I" and "you" - is relatively clear, rare ambiguities (say, caused by the shift of the plot to a legend, a parable) complicate, but do not shake the overall impression.

Any state of mind is designated by Akhmatova with an external sign that makes it concrete and individual. Longing, unrequited love is expressed as follows:

Faded and, it seems, have already become

The pupils of dazzling eyes.

Here is an expression of mental confusion:

I can't lift tired eyelids

When he says my name.

Or even more clearly and more externally:

I put on my right hand

Left hand glove.

Love is the image of the beloved. And the masculine image, the impression of masculine beauty, is depicted with the same stingy, visually clear and at the same time psychologically significant features. Here's about his eyes:

Only laughter in the eyes of his calm

Under the light gold of the eyelashes.

Portrait resemblance can be expressed by a concise psychological formula, or a direct moral characterization, or an expressive gesture behind which spiritual experience is hidden. In each poem by Akhmatova, we perceive, each time in a different way, but always distinctly and clearly, the sound of a voice, movements and gestures, a costume , manners and a number of other minor features of the external appearance of the beloved. Of course, these details are not heaped indiscriminately, for photographic accuracy, as in realistic works; sometimes it is one particular, just one touch of the artist's brush, but always it is not a lyrical hint, but a strict and precise observation, and it always reveals the spiritual meaning of the experience. So, in the poem “I have one smile ..” an accurately and subtly reproduced detail - “a barely visible movement of the lips” - suddenly develops into a whole narrative, revealing the deepest spiritual content embedded in this detail.

Close attention to the emotional, sensual sphere, combined with ideas about the ontological value of real life, contributed to the formation of Akhmatova's phenomenological model of seeing the world. This model covers the circle of ideas of the poetess about the relationship between the subject and the object and leads to the emergence of a new way of lyrical embodiment.

CONCLUSION

The original work of Akhmatova is the product of a large and complex poetic culture, brought up on the classical achievements of Russian and world literature.

Akhmatova in her later years did not like it when her poetry was called, according to superficial memories of the "Rosary", "tired", "weak", "sickly". Therefore, from early reviews of her poems, she especially appreciated the article by N.V. Nedobrovo, who called her "strong" and in her poems saw "a lyrical soul rather harsh than too soft, rather cruel than tearful, and clearly dominating, not oppressed." “How could he guess the stiffness and hardness ahead,” she said to L.K. Chukovskaya many years after the death of his friend. “After all, at that time it was customary to believe that all these poems were so-so sentiments, tearfulness, whim ... But Nedobrovo understood my path, guessed my future and predicted it, because he knew me well.” This inner strength and courage of a great poet in the face of tragic trials determined Akhmatova's creative path in the future.

Akhmatova entered the literature, moreover, artistically established herself under the sign of a love theme. The path traveled by the poetess, starting from the first poems collected in the book “Evening”, through the “Rosary” and “The White Flock”, is the path of a gradual, but quite intense and consistent rejection of the isolation of the spiritual world. The depth and richness of her spiritual life, the seriousness and height of moral demands steadily led Akhmatova onto the path of public interests. Poems not about love sharply show the poet's involvement in the super-personal sphere of being and everyday life.

However, the primacy of the intimate-personal principle remains unshaken, rather the opposite: revelations addressed to the depths of the soul outline the individuality of the lyrical "I" and thereby justify its right to civil pathos. Poems about love form, in fact, the background and subsoil of programmatic poetic statements.

LIST OF USED LITERATURE

1.Akhmatova A. Poems. Poems. Prose. Yekaterinburg, 2005.

2.Gurvich I. Love lyrics by Akhmatova (integrity and evolution) // Questions of Literature.1997. No. 5.

3.Zhirmunsky V. M. Creativity of Anna Akhmatova. L., 1973.

4.Zhirmunsky V. M. Overcoming symbolism // http://novruslit.ru/library/?p=36

5.Kikhney L. G. Poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Secrets of the Craft. M., 1997.

6. Nedobrovo N.V. Anna Akhmatova // http://www.akhmatova.org/articles/nedobrovo.htm

7.Pavlovsky A.I. Anna Akhmatova. Essay on creativity. 2nd ed. L., 1982.

8.Shcheglov Yu.K. Features of the poetic world of Akhmatova // http://novruslit.ru/library/?p=17

9. Eikhenbaum B. M. Anna Akhmatova. The experience of analysis // Eikhenbaum B. M. About prose. About poetry: Sat. articles. L., 1986.

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At the turn of the last and present centuries, although not literally chronologically, on the eve of the revolution, in an era shaken by two world wars, perhaps the most significant “female” poetry in all the world literature of the new time, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, arose and developed in Russia. The closest analogy, which already arose among her first critics, turned out to be the ancient Greek love singer Sappho: the young Akhmatova was often called the Russian Sappho.
Anna Andreevna Gorenko was born on June 11 (23), 1889 near Odessa. As a one-year-old child, she was transported to Tsarskoye Selo, where she lived until she was sixteen. Akhmatova’s first memories were those of Tsarskoye Selo: “... the green, damp splendor of the parks, the pasture where the nanny took me, the hippodrome, where little motley horses galloped, the old station ...” Anna studied at the Tsarskoye Selo female gymnasium. He writes about it like this: "At first I studied poorly, then much better, but always reluctantly." In 1907, Akhmatova graduated from the Fundukleev gymnasium in Kyiv, then entered the law faculty of the Higher Women's Courses. The beginning of the 10s was marked in the fate of Akhmatova by important events: she married Nikolai Gumilyov, found friendship with the artist Amadeo Modigliani, and in the spring of 1912 her first collection of poems "Evening" was published, which brought Akhmatova instant fame. Immediately, she was unanimously placed by critics in the ranks of the greatest Russian poets. Her books have become a literary event. Chukovsky wrote that Akhmatova met "extraordinary, unexpectedly noisy triumphs." Her poems were not only heard, they were repeated, quoted in conversations, copied into albums, they even explained lovers. “All of Russia,” Chukovsky noted, “remembered that glove that the rejected woman speaks of in Akhmatova, leaving the one who pushed her away.”
So helplessly my chest grew cold, But my steps were
easy. I put on the glove on my right hand on my left
arms. "
Song of the last meeting.
Romance in lyrics
Akhmatova
The lyrics of Akhmatova during the period of her first books ("Evening", "Rosary", "White Flock") are almost exclusively the lyrics of love. Her innovation as an artist initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeatedly and, it would seem, played out theme to the end.
The novelty of Akhmatova's love lyrics caught the eye of her contemporaries almost from her first poems, published back in Apollo, but, unfortunately, the heavy banner of acmeism, under which the young poetess stood, for a long time seemed to drape in the eyes of many her true, original appearance and made her constantly correlate her poems either with acmeism, or with symbolism, or with certain linguistic or literary theories that for some reason came to the fore.
Speaking at the evening of Akhmatova (in Moscow in 1924), Leonid Grossman wittily and rightly said: “For some reason it has become fashionable to test new theories of linguistics and the latest trends in versification on the Rosary and the White Pack. Questions of all kinds of complex and difficult disciplines began Blok's woeful verse could be applied to the poetess on the fragile and subtle material of these wonderful examples of love elegy: her lyrics became "the property of an associate professor." This, of course, is an honor and absolutely inevitable for any poet, but this is the least of all that captures that unique expression a poetic face that is dear to countless generations of readers."
Indeed, two books about Akhmatova published in the 1920s, one of which belonged to V. Vinogradov and the other to B. Eikhenbaum, almost did not reveal Akhmatova's poetry to the reader as a phenomenon of art, that is, human content embodied in the word. Eikhenbaum's book, in comparison with the work of Vinogradov, of course, gave incomparably more opportunities to get an idea of \u200b\u200bAkhmatova - an artist and a person.
The most important and, perhaps, the most interesting thought of Eikhenbaum was his consideration of the "romance" of Akhmatov's lyrics, that each book of her poems is, as it were, a lyrical novel, which also has Russian realistic prose in its genealogical tree. Proving this idea, he wrote in one of his reviews: "Akhmatova's poetry is a complex lyrical novel. We can trace the development of the narrative lines forming it, we can talk about its composition, right down to the correlation of individual characters. When moving from one collection to another, we experienced a characteristic sense of interest in the plot - in how this novel will develop.
Vasily Gippius (1918) also wrote interestingly about the "romance" of Akhmatova's lyrics. He saw the key to Akhmatova's success and influence (and her echoes had already appeared in poetry) and at the same time the objective significance of her love lyrics was that these lyrics replaced the form of the novel that had died or dozed off at that time. Indeed, the average reader may underestimate the sound and rhythmic richness of such, for example, lines: "And for a century we cherish the barely audible rustle of steps," - but he cannot help but be captivated by the originality of these stories - miniatures, where drama is told in a few lines. Such miniatures are a story about a gray-eyed girl and a murdered king and a story about parting at the gates (the poem "She clenched her hands under a dark veil . . . "), printed in the very first year of Akhmatova's literary fame.
The need for a novel is obviously an urgent need. The novel has become a necessary element of life, like the best juice extracted, in the words of Lermontov, from its every joy. It immortalized hearts with transient features, and the cycle of ideas, and the elusive background of a sweet life. It is clear that the novel helps to live. But the novel in its former forms, the novel, like a smooth and full-flowing river, became less and less common, began to be replaced first by swift streams ("novella"), and then by instantaneous "geysers". Examples can be found, perhaps, in all poets: for example, Lermontov's "novel" - "The Child", with its riddles, allusions and omissions, is especially close to Akhmatov's modernity. In this kind of art, in the lyrical novel - miniature, in the poetry of "geysers" Anna Akhmatova achieved great skill. Here is one of those novels:
"As simple courtesy dictates, He came up to me, smiled. Half-gentle, half-lazy With a kiss touched the hand. And the mysterious ancient faces looked at me. Ten years of fading and screams. All my sleepless nights I put into a quiet word And said it in vain. And it became again In the soul both empty and clear.
Confusion.
The novel is over. The tragedy of ten years is told in one brief event, one gesture, look, word.
Often Akhmatova's miniatures were, in accordance with her favorite manner, fundamentally unfinished and suited not so much to a small novel in its, so to speak, traditional form, but to a randomly torn page from a novel or even part of a page that had neither beginning nor end. and forcing the reader to think out what happened between the characters before.
“Do you want to know how it all was?” Three struck in the dining room, And saying goodbye, holding on to the railing, She seemed to say with difficulty: “That's it. . . Oh no, I forgot, I love you, I loved you Back then!" "Yes."
Do you want to know how it all was?
Perhaps it was precisely such verses that the observant Vasily Gippius called "geysers", since in such verses - fragments, the feeling really, as it were, instantly breaks out of some heavy captivity of silence, patience, hopelessness and despair.
The poem "Do you want to know how it all happened? . . " was written in 1910, that is, even before Akhmatova's first book "Evening" (1912) was published, but one of the most characteristic features of Akhmatova's poetic manner was already expressed in it in clear and consistent form. Akhmatova always preferred a “fragment” to a coherent, consistent and narrative story, as it provided an excellent opportunity to saturate the poem with sharp and intense psychologism; in addition, oddly enough, the fragment gave the depicted a kind of documentary: after all, we really have, as it were, not that passage from an accidentally overheard conversation, something like a dropped note, not intended for prying eyes. Thus, we look into someone else's drama as if inadvertently, as if contrary to the intentions of the author, who did not assume our involuntary indiscretion.
Often, Akhmatova's poems resemble a fluent and, as it were, not even "processed" diary entry:
"He loved three things in the world:
For evening singing, white peacocks And erased maps of America. Didn't like it when children cry, Didn't like tea with raspberries And women's tantrums.
. . . And I was his wife."
He loved. . .
Sometimes such love "diary" entries were more common, they included not two, as usual, but three or even four persons, as well as some features of the interior or landscape, but internal fragmentation, similarity to a "novel page" invariably persisted and in these thumbnails:
"My shadow remained there and yearns, All in the same blue
lives in a room, Waits for guests from the city after midnight And kisses an enamel icon. And the house is not entirely safe: The fire will be lit, but still it is dark. . . Isn't that why the new hostess is bored, Isn't that why the owner drinks wine And hears how a guest who has come talks to me behind a thin wall.
There my shadow remained and yearned. . .
In this poem one feels more like a fragment of an internal monologue, that fluidity and unpremeditated mental life, which Tolstoy loved so much in his psychological prose.
Particularly interesting are poems about love, where Akhmatova - which, incidentally, is rare with her - goes over to the "third person", that is, it would seem that she uses a purely narrative genre that implies both consistency and even descriptiveness, but even in such poems she prefers lyrical fragmentation, vagueness and reticence. Here is one of these poems, written on behalf of a man:
"I came up. I didn't show any excitement, Looking indifferently out the window. She sat down like a porcelain idol, In a position she had chosen long ago. Being cheerful is a common thing, Being attentive is more difficult. . .
March spicy nights? The tiresome buzz of conversations
The lifeless heat of a yellow chandelier And the flickering of skillful partings Above a raised light hand. The interlocutor smiled again And looked at her hopefully. . . My happy rich heir, You read my will.
Came up. I didn't show any excitement. . .
Love Popularity Mystery
lyrics by Akhmatova
Almost immediately after the appearance of the first book, and after "The Rosary" and "The White Flock" in particular, they began to talk about the "mystery of Akhmatova." The talent itself was obvious, but unusual, and therefore unclear, was its essence, not to mention some really mysterious, albeit side properties. "Romance", noticed by critics, did not explain everything. How to explain, for example, a captivating combination of femininity and fragility with that firmness and distinctness of the drawing, which testify to imperiousness and extraordinary, almost rigid will? At first they wanted to ignore this will, it was quite contrary to the "standard of femininity." Aroused bewildered admiration and strange reticence of her love lyrics, in which passion was like the silence of a pre-storm and usually expressed itself in only two or three words, similar to lightning flashes flaring up behind a menacingly darkened horizon.
But if the suffering of a loving soul is so incredible - to the point of silence, to the point of loss of speech - closed and charred, then why is the whole world around us so huge, so beautiful and captivatingly authentic?
The point, obviously, is that, like that of any great poet, her love affair, unfolding in the verses of the pre-revolutionary years, was broader and more ambiguous than its specific situations.
In the complex music of Akhmatova's lyrics, in its barely flickering depth, in its darkness escaping from the eyes, in the subsoil, in the subconscious, a special, frightening disharmony constantly lived and made itself felt, embarrassing Akhmatova herself. She later wrote in "A Poem without a Hero" that she constantly heard an incomprehensible rumble, as if some kind of underground gurgling, shifts and friction of those original solid rocks on which life was eternally and reliably based, but which began to lose stability and balance.
The very first foreshadowing of such an unsettling sensation was the poem "The First Return" with its images of death sleep, shroud and death knell and with a general feeling of a sharp and irrevocable change that took place in the very air of time.
Akhmatova's love story included an era - she voiced and altered the poems in her own way, introduced into them a note of anxiety and sadness, which had a wider meaning than her own fate.
It is for this reason that Akhmatova's love lyrics over time, in the pre-revolutionary, and then in the first post-revolutionary years, won more and more reader circles and generations and, without ceasing to be the object of admiring attention of connoisseurs, clearly left the seemingly intended her narrow circle of readers. This "fragile" and "chamber" lyric of women's love, as it was usually called, soon began, and to everyone's surprise, to sound no less captivating for the first Soviet readers - civil war commissars and workers in red scarves. At first, such a strange circumstance caused considerable embarrassment - especially among proletarian readers.
It must be said that the Soviet poetry of the first years of October and the Civil War, busy with the grandiose tasks of overthrowing the old world, loving images and motifs, as a rule, of a universal, cosmic scale, preferring to speak not so much about a person, but 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. Of all the possible musical instruments in those years, she preferred percussion.
Against this rumbling background, which did not recognize halftones and shades, next to the thunderous marches and "iron" verses of the first proletarian poets, Akhmatova's love lyrics, played on muted violins, should, according to all the laws of logic, be lost and disappear without a trace. . .
But that did not happen.
Young readers of the new, proletarian, Soviet Russia embarking on the socialist path, workers and workers of the faculty, Red Army and Red Army men - all these people, so distant and hostile to the world itself, mourned in Akhmatov's poems, nevertheless noticed and read small, white, elegantly published volumes her poems that continued to come out imperturbably all these fiery years.
"Great earthly love" in the lyrics of Akhmatova
Akhmatova, indeed, is the most characteristic heroine of her time, manifested in the endless variety of female destinies: mistresses and wives, widows and mothers who cheated and left. According to A. Kollontai, Akhmatova gave "a whole book of the female soul." Akhmatova "poured into art" a complex story of the female character of a turning point era, its origins, breaking, new formation.
The hero of Akhmatov's lyrics (not the heroine) is complex and many-sided. Actually, it is even difficult to define him in the sense that, say, the hero of Lermontov's lyrics is defined. It is he - a lover, a brother, a friend, who appeared in an endless variety of situations: insidious and generous, killing and resurrecting, the first and the last.
But always, with all the variety of life collisions and everyday incidents, with all the unusual, even exotic nature of the characters, the heroine or heroine of Akhmatova carries something important, primordially feminine, and a verse in a story about some rope dancer, for example, goes through the usual definitions and memorized positions ("I was left at the new moon // My beloved friend. Well, so what!") to what "the heart knows, the heart knows": the deep longing of the abandoned woman. This ability to come to what "the heart knows" is the main thing in Akhmatova's poetry. "I see everything // I remember everything." But this "everything" is illuminated in her poetry by one source of light.
There is a center that, as it were, brings the rest of the world of her poetry to itself, turns out to be its main nerve, its idea and principle. This is Love. The element of the female soul inevitably had to begin with such a declaration of itself in love. Herzen once said, as a great injustice in the history of mankind, that a woman is "driven into love." In a certain sense, all the lyrics (especially the early ones) by Anna Akhmatova are "driven into love." But here, first of all, the possibility of an exit opened up. It was here that truly poetic discoveries were born, such a view of the world that allows us to speak of Akhmatova's poetry as a new phenomenon in the development of Russian lyrics of the twentieth century. There is both "deity" and "inspiration" in her poetry. While maintaining the high value of the idea of love associated with symbolism, Akhmatova returns to it a living and real, by no means abstract character. The soul comes to life "Not for passion, not for fun, // For great earthly love."

"This meeting is not sung by anyone,
And without songs, sadness subsided.
Cool summer has come
It's like a new life has begun.
The sky seems like a stone vault,
Wounded by yellow fire
And more necessary than daily bread
I have one word about him.
You, who sprinkle the grass with dew,
Revive my soul with news,
Not for passion, not for fun
For great earthly love."

"Great earthly love" - this is the driving principle of all Akhmatova's lyrics. It was she who forced us to see the world in a different way - no longer symbolist and not acmeist, but, if we use the usual definition, realistically - to see the world.
"That fifth season, Only praise it. Breathe the last freedom, Because it is love. The sky has flown high, The outlines of things are light, And the body no longer celebrates the Anniversary of its sadness."
In this poem, Akhmatova called love "the fifth season." From this unusual, fifth, time, she saw the other four, ordinary ones. In a state of love, the world is seen anew. All the senses are sharpened and tense. And the unusualness of the ordinary is revealed. A person begins to perceive the world with a tenfold strength, really reaching peaks in the sensation of life. The world opens in an additional reality: "After all, the stars were larger, // After all, the herbs smelled differently." Therefore, Akhmatova's verse is so objective: it returns things to their original meaning, it draws attention to what we are normally able to pass by indifferently, not to appreciate, not to feel. "Above the dried dodder // A bee swims softly" - this is seen for the first time.
Therefore, it opens up the opportunity to feel the world in a childishly fresh way. Poems such as "Murka, don't go, there's an owl" are not thematically given poems for children, but they have a feeling of completely childish spontaneity.
And one more related feature. There are many epithets in Akhmatova's love poems, which once the famous Russian philologist A. N. Veselovsky called syncretic and which are born from a holistic, inseparable, fused perception of the world, when the eye sees the world inseparably from what the ear hears in it; when feelings are materialized, objectified, and objects are spiritualized. "In white-hot passion," says Akhmatova. And she sees the sky, "wounded by yellow fire" - the sun, and "the chandeliers are lifeless heat."
The role of details in poetry
about love at Akhmatova
Akhmatova has poems that are "made" literally from everyday life, from everyday life, simple life - right down to the green washstand, on which a pale evening beam plays. One involuntarily recalls the words spoken by Akhmatova in her old age, that poems “grow from rubbish”, that even a spot of mold on a damp wall, and burdock, and nettle, and a damp fence, and dandelion, can become the subject of poetic inspiration and image. her craft - vitality and realism, the ability to see poetry in everyday life - was already embedded in her talent by nature itself.
And how, by the way, this early line is characteristic of all her subsequent lyrics:
Today I am silent in the morning
And the heart is cut in half. . .
Not without reason, when speaking about Akhmatova, about her love lyrics, critics subsequently noticed that her love dramas unfolding in verse take place as if in silence: nothing is explained, not commented on, there are so few words that each of them carries a huge psychological burden. It is assumed that the reader must either guess, or, most likely, try to turn to his own experience, and then it turns out that the poem is very broad in its meaning: its secret drama, its hidden plot refers to many, many people.
So it is in this early poem. Is it really important to us what exactly happened in the life of the heroine? After all, the most important thing - pain, confusion and a desire to calm down at least when looking at a sunbeam - all this is clear, understandable and almost everyone is familiar with it. a specific interpretation would only damage the power of the poem, as it would instantly narrow, localize its plot, depriving it of universality and depth. The wisdom of Akhmatov's miniature, which is somewhat similar to Japanese hoku, lies in the fact that it speaks of the healing power of nature for the soul. A sunbeam, "so innocent and simple", illuminating both the greenery of the washstand and the human soul with equal caress, is truly the semantic center, focus and result of all this amazing Akhmatov's poem.
Her love verse, including the earliest, printed on the pages of Apollo and Hyperborea, the verse is still imperfect ("the first timid attempts," Akhmatova later said), sometimes almost adolescent in intonation, nevertheless grew out of immediate life impressions, although these impressions were limited to the concerns and interests of "one's own circle." The poetic word of the young Akhmatova, the author of the first book of poems "Evening" published in 1912, was very vigilant and attentive in relation to everything that fell into her field of vision. The concrete, material flesh of the world, its clear material contours, colors, smells, strokes, everyday fragmentary speech - all this was not only carefully transferred to poetry, but also constituted their own existence, gave them breath and vitality. For all the non-proliferation of first impressions that served as the basis for the collection "Evening", what was imprinted in it was expressed both visibly, and accurately, and succinctly. Already Akhmatova's contemporaries noticed what an unusually large role the strict, deliberately localized everyday detail played in the poems of the young poetess. She was not only accurate. Not content with a mere definition of any aspect of an object, situation, or spiritual movement, she sometimes carried out the whole idea of a verse, so that, like a castle, she kept the whole structure of the work on herself.
"Don't like, don't want to watch?
Oh, how beautiful you are, damned!
And I can't fly
And from childhood she was winged.
Fog obscures my eyes,
Things and faces merge
And only a red tulip
The tulip is in your buttonhole."
Confusion
Isn't it true, if this tulip, as if from a buttonhole, is taken out of a poem, it will immediately fade! . Why? Is it not because all this silent explosion of passion, despair, jealousy and truly mortal resentment - in a word, everything that makes up the meaning of her life at this moment for this woman, everything is concentrated, as in the red Garshin flower of evil, precisely in a tulip: dazzling and arrogant, looming at the very level of her eyes, he alone arrogantly triumphs in a deserted and covered with a veil of tears, a hopelessly discolored world. The situation of the poem is such that it seems not only to the heroine, but also to us, the readers, that the tulip is not a “detail” and certainly not a “touch”, but that it is a living being, a true, full-fledged and even aggressive hero of the work, inspiring us a kind of involuntary fear, mixed with semi-secret delight and irritation.
For another poet, a flower in a buttonhole would have remained a more or less picturesque detail of the character’s appearance, but Akhmatova not only absorbed the sophisticated culture of polysemantic meanings developed by her predecessors, the Symbolists, in particular, their ability to give life realities an infinitely expanding meaning, but also , apparently, did not remain alien to the magnificent school of Russian psychological prose, especially the novel (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy). Her so-called real details, sparingly presented, but distinct everyday interiors, boldly introduced prosaisms, and most importantly, that inner connection that always shines through in her between the external environment and the secretly turbulent life of the heart - everything vividly resembles Russian classics, not only novels, but also short stories, not only prose, but also poetry (Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, later Nekrasov).
Pushkin and
Akhmatova
Speaking about the love lyrics of Akhmatova, one cannot fail to say a few words about the feelings of the poetess herself, about her idols, about the objects of her admiration.
And one of the inexhaustible source of creative joy and inspiration for Akhmatova was Pushkin. She carried this love through her whole life, not even being afraid of the dark jungle of literary criticism, which she entered more than once in order to add several new touches to the biography of her beloved poet. (A. Akhmatova owns the articles: "Pushkin's Last Tale (about the Golden Cockerel")", "Adolf" by Benjamin Constant in Pushkin's work, "About Pushkin's Stone Guest", as well as works: "The Death of Pushkin", "Pushkin and the Neva Coast", "Pushkin in 1828", etc.)
In "Evening" a poem of two stanzas is dedicated to Pushkin, very clear in drawing and quiveringly tender in intonation.
Love for Pushkin was aggravated by the fact that, by coincidence, Anna Akhmatova was a Tsarskoye Selo girl, her adolescent, gymnasium years were spent in Tsarskoye Selo, present-day Pushkin, where even now everyone involuntarily feels the indelible Pushkin spirit, as if forever settled on this eternally sacred land of Russian Poetry . The same Lyceum and the sky, and the girl is just as sad over a broken jug, the park is rustling, the ponds are shimmering, and, apparently, in the same way (or - differently?) Is the Muse to countless pilgrimage poets. . .
For Akhmatova, the Muse is always "dark". It was as if she appeared before her in the "gardens of the Lyceum" immediately in the adolescent guise of Pushkin, a curly-haired lyceum student - a teenager who more than once flickered in the "sacred dusk" of Catherine's Park - he was then her peer, her divine comrade, and she almost searched with meetings with him. In any case, her poems dedicated to Tsarskoe Selo and Pushkin are imbued with that special color of feeling that can best be called falling in love - not, however, the somewhat abstract, albeit exalted love that accompanies the posthumous fame of celebrities in a respectful distance, but very lively , direct, in which there is fear, and annoyance, and resentment, and even jealousy. . . Yes, even jealousy! For example, to that beauty with a jug, whom he admired, sang and glorified forever. . . and who is now so cheerfully sad, this smartly naked pretender, this lucky woman who has settled in Pushkin's immortal verse!
"Dropping the urn with water,
the maiden broke her on the rock.
The maiden sits sadly
idle holding a shard.
Miracle! The water won't dry up
pouring out from a broken urn;
Virgo, above the eternal stream,
sits forever sad.
Akhmatova peers with feminine partiality at the famous statue that once captivated the poet, and at Pushkin's verse. Her own poem, entitled (not without a secret injection!), like Pushkin's, "The Tsarskoye Selo Statue", breathes with a feeling of woundedness and annoyance:

And how could I forgive her
The delight of your praise lover. . .
Look, she's happy to be sad
So beautifully naked."

It must be said that Akhmatov's short poem is certainly one of the best in Pushkin's now already vast poetic poetry, which apparently numbers many hundreds of excited appeals to the great genius of Russian literature. But Akhmatova turned to him as soon as she alone could turn - like a woman in love, suddenly feeling an instant prick of unexpected jealousy. In essence, she, not without revenge, proves to Pushkin with her poem that he was mistaken when he saw in this dazzling, slender beauty with bare shoulders some kind of eternally sad maiden. Her eternal sadness has long passed, and for about a century now she has been secretly rejoicing and having fun with her truly rare, chosen, enviable and immensely happy female fate, bestowed on her by Pushkin's word and name. . .
Be that as it may, but love for Pushkin, and with him for other diverse and expanding cultural traditions over the years, to a large extent determined the realistic path of development for Akhmatova. In this respect, she was and remains a traditionalist. In the context of the rapid development of various post-symbolist movements and groups, marked by certain phenomena of bourgeois modernism, Akhmatova's poetry of the 10s could even look archaic if her love lyrics, it would seem, so intimate and narrow, intended for HER and HIM, were not acquired in its best samples that universally significant sound, which is characteristic only of true art.
Sick and troubled love
It must be said that Akhmatova's poems about love are not fragmentary sketches, not broken psychological studies: the sharpness of the gaze is accompanied by the sharpness of thought. Their generalizing power is great. A poem may begin as an unassuming ditty:
I'm at sunrise
I sing about love
On my knees in the garden
Swan field.
And it ends biblically:
"There will be a stone instead of bread. I will be an evil reward. It is necessary
I only have the sky, And with me your voice.
The personal (“your voice”) ascends to the general, merging with it:
here to the all-human parable and from it - higher, higher - to heaven. And so it is always in Akhmatova's poetry. Thematically, it is only as if sadness about the departed (the poem "The Garden") appears as a picture of the world that has faded in this state. And here is what kind of novel power the psychological clot begins the poem:
"There are always so many requests from a loved one! A loved one does not have requests."
Doesn't Anna Karenina open similarly: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way . . . "? O. Mandelstam had reason to write back in the 20s: "... Akhmatova brought to Russian lyrics all the enormous complexity and psychological richness of the Russian novel of the nineteenth century. There would be no Akhmatova if there were no Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, Turgenev with" A nest of nobles", all of Dostoevsky and partly even Leskov.
The genesis of Akhmatova lies entirely in Russian prose, not poetry. She developed her poetic form, sharp and peculiar, with an eye on psychological prose.
But love in Akhmatova's poems is by no means only love - happiness, especially well-being. Often, too often, this is suffering, a kind of anti-love and torture, painful, up to disintegration, to prostration, a break in the soul, painful, "decadent". And only the invariable feeling of valuable beginnings puts a line between such and especially decadent verses. The image of such "sick" love in the early Akhmatova was both an image of the sick pre-revolutionary time of the 10s and an image of the sick old world. It is not for nothing that the late Akhmatova, in verse, and especially in "A Poem without a Hero," will administer severe lynching, moral and historical, over him. Back in 1923, Eikhenbaum, analyzing Akhmatova’s poetics, noted that already in The Rosary “the image of the heroine, paradoxical in its duality, begins to take shape - either a “harlot” with violent passions, or a beggar nun who can beg forgiveness from God.
Love in Akhmatova almost never appears in a calm stay. Now like a snake, curled up in a ball, He conjures at the very heart, Then he coos for whole days like a dove On a white window, Then he flashes in bright hoarfrost, Seems to be a Levkoy in the slumber. . . But faithfully and secretly leads From happiness and peace.
The feeling, in itself sharp and extraordinary, acquires additional sharpness and unusualness, manifesting itself in the ultimate crisis expression - a rise or fall, the first awakening meeting or a completed break, mortal danger or mortal anguish. That is why Akhmatova gravitates towards the lyrical short story with an unexpected, often whimsically whimsical end to the psychological plot and towards the unusual lyrical ballads, eerie and mysterious.
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. “This technique,” Akhmatova wrote, “in Russian literature was magnificently and irresistibly developed by Dostoevsky in his novels - tragedies; in essence, the reader - the viewer is invited to be present only at the denouement." The poems of Akhmatova herself, like many of Dostoevsky's works, are a collection of the fifth acts of tragedies. The poet all the time strives to take a position that would allow him to reveal his feelings to the utmost, to sharpen the conflict to the end, to find the last truth. That is why Akhmatova has poems that seem to be uttered even from behind a death line. But they do not carry any afterlife, mystical secrets. And there is no hint of something otherworldly. On the contrary, the situation that arises on this side is completely exposed. Without taking this into account, it is very easy to take the path of a wide variety of accusations of such verses, for example, of pessimism. At one time, back in the 1920s, one of the critics counted how many times, say, the word "longing" is used in Akhmatova's poems, and drew the appropriate conclusions. But the word lives in the context. And by the way, it is the word "longing", perhaps stronger than others in the context of Akhmatov's poems, that speaks of their vitality. This melancholy, as a special state in which the acceptance of the world takes place, is akin to Tyutchev's melancholy: "An hour of inexpressible anguish: everything is in me and I am in everything." But this is also that sadness - longing, which is often imbued with a folk song.
Akhmatova's poems are, indeed, often sad: they carry a special element of love.
- pity. There is in the Russian folk language, in the Russian folk song, a synonym for the word "love" - the word "pity"; "I love" - "I'm sorry."
Already in the very first poems of Akhmatova, not only the love of lovers lives. It often turns into another, love is pity, or even opposed to it, or even supplanted by it:
Oh no, I didn't love you
Burning with sweet fire
So explain what power
In your sad name.
This sympathy, empathy, compassion in love - pity makes many of Akhmatova's poems truly folk, epic, makes them related to Nekrasov's poems so close to her and beloved by her. And a way out of the world of chamber, closed, egoistic love opens - passion, love - fun for truly "great earthly love" and more - all-love, for people and for people. Love here is not an infinite variation of love experiences proper. Akhmatova's love in itself carries the possibility of self-development, enrichment and expansion of the infinite, global, almost cosmic.
Love lyrics by Akhmatova in the 20s and 30s
In the 1920s and 1930s, the tonality of that love novel, which before the revolution at times covered almost the entire content of Akhmatova’s lyrics and which many wrote about as the main discovery of the achievement of the poetess, noticeably changes in the 20-30s compared to early books.
Because the lyrics of Akhmatova throughout the entire post-revolutionary twenty years were constantly expanding, absorbing more and more new areas that were not characteristic of her before, the love story, without ceasing to be dominant, nevertheless now occupied only one of the poetic territories in it. However, the inertia of the reader's perception was so great that even in these years, marked by her turning to civil, philosophical and journalistic lyrics, Akhmatova still seemed to the eyes of the majority as only and exclusively an artist of love feelings. We understand that this was far from the case.
Of course, the expansion of the range of poetry, which was the result of changes in the worldview and worldview of the poetess, could not, in turn, not affect the tone and nature of the actual love lyrics. True, some of its characteristic features remained the same. A love episode, for example, as before, appears before us in a peculiar Akhmatov guise: it, in particular, is never consistently unfolded, it usually has neither an end nor a beginning; a love confession, despair or entreaty that make up a poem always seem to the reader like a snippet of a conversation that was accidentally overheard, which did not begin with us and the end of which we also will not hear:

"Oh, you thought I was like that too,
That you can forget me.
And that I will throw myself, praying and sobbing,
Under the hooves of a bay horse.
Or I'll ask the healers
In spoken water spine
And I'll send you a scary gift
My treasured fragrant handkerchief.
Be damned.
Not a groan, not a look
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 fiery child of nights
I will never return to you."

This feature of Akhmatov's love lyrics, full of reticence, allusions, going into the distant, I would like to say Hemingway's, depth of subtext, gives it a true originality. The heroine of Akhmatov's poems, who most often speaks as if to herself in a state of impulse, semi-delusion or ecstasy, naturally does not consider it necessary, and cannot additionally explain and interpret everything that happens to us. Only the main signals of feelings are transmitted, without decoding, without comments, hastily - according to the hurried ABC of love. It is understood that the degree of spiritual closeness will miraculously help us understand both the missing links and the general meaning of the drama that has just taken place. Hence the impression of extreme intimacy, extreme frankness and heartfelt openness of these lyrics, which seems unexpected and paradoxical, if we recall its simultaneous codedness and subjectivity.

"Somehow managed to separate
And put out the hateful fire.
My eternal enemy, it's time to learn
You really love someone.
I'm free. Everything is fun for me
At night, the Muse will fly to comfort,
And in the morning glory will drag
Rattle over the ear to crackle.
Don't even pray for me
And when you leave, look back. . .
The black wind will calm me.
Amuses the golden leaf fall.
As a gift, I will accept separation
And oblivion is like grace.
But, tell me, on the cross
Would you dare to send another?

Tsvetaeva once wrote that real poems usually “grind” everyday life, just as a flower, which delights us with beauty and grace, harmony and purity, also “ground” the black earth. She protested ardently against the attempts of other critics or literary critics, 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 protested passionately against mandatory and literal commentary. To a certain extent, she is right, of course. Is it so important to us what was the everyday root cause for the emergence of the poem "Somehow we managed to part . . . "? Maybe Akhmatova had in mind a break in relations with her second husband
V. Shileiko, a poet, translator and assyrologist, whom she married after her divorce from N. Gumilyov? Or maybe she was referring to her romance with the famous composer Arthur Lurie? . There could be other specific reasons, the 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, just for this reason - due to its, as it were, encryption and lack of clarity - it acquires a meaning that can be applied at once to many other destinies of the original, and sometimes completely dissimilar situations. The main thing in the poem that captures us is the passionate intensity of feeling, its hurricane, as well as the unquestioning decisions that draw before our eyes an outstanding and strong personality.
About the same and almost the same thing says another poem, referring to the same year as the one just quoted:
Let the voices of the organ resound
Like the first spring thunderstorm;
From behind your bride's shoulder they will look
My half closed eyes.
Farewell, farewell, be happy, my beautiful friend, I will return your joyful vow to you, But beware of your passionate friend To lead my unique delirium, - Then, that it will pierce with burning poison Your blessed, your joyful union. . . And I'm going to own a wonderful garden, Where the rustle of herbs and 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 due (also, apart from didacticism) to its special gift of concealing an unknown truth, which you will only get to by patiently digging out; this truth is hidden and locked up on purpose so that you cannot get it until you forge, first, a suitable key in your furnace."
Akhmatova is not afraid to be frank in her intimate confessions and pleas, as 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 anything and further describe. The form of a randomly and instantly escaped speech, which can be overheard by everyone passing by or standing nearby, but not everyone can understand, allows it to be lapidary, uncommon and significant.
This feature, as we see, is completely preserved in the lyrics of 20-30
-s. The ultimate concentration of the content of the
episode that is the basis of the poem. Akhmatova never had languid, amorphous or descriptive love poems. They are always dramatic and extremely tense, confused. She has rare poems that describe the joy of established, stormless and cloudless love; The muse comes to her only at the most culminating moments experienced by the feeling, when it is either betrayed or dries up:
. . . I wasn't nice to you
You shamed me. And the torture continued
And how the criminal languished
Love full of evil.
It's like a brother. Shut up, angry.
But if we meet eyes, I swear to you by heaven, The granite will melt in the fire.
In a word, we are always present, as it were, at a bright, lightning flash, at self-combustion and charring of a pathetically huge, withering passion, piercing the whole being of a person and echoing through the great silent spaces, surrounding him with biblical, solemn silence at 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. . .
Akhmatova's poems about love - everything! - pathetic. But the poems of the early Akhmatova
- in "Evening" and in "Rosary" - they are less spiritual, they have more restless sensuality, vain insults, weakness; it is felt that they come out of the ordinary sphere, from the habits of the environment, from the habits of upbringing, from inherited ideas. . . In connection with this, they recalled the words of A. Blok, allegedly said about some of Akhmatov's poems, that she writes before a man, but she should write before God. . .
Beginning with The White Flock, but especially in Plantain, Anno Domini, and in later cycles, her love feeling acquires a broader and more spiritual character. That didn't make it any less powerful. On the contrary, the verses of the 20s and 30s, dedicated to love, go to the very heights of the human spirit. They do not subjugate all life, all existence, as it was before, but all existence, all life, brings into love experiences the whole mass of shades inherent in them. Filled with this enormous content, love became not only incomparably richer and more multicolored, but also truly tragic. The biblical, solemn elation of Akhmatov's love poems of this period is explained by the true height, solemnity and pathos of the feeling contained in them. Here is just one of those poems:
Unprecedented autumn built a high dome,
The clouds were ordered not to darken this dome.
And people marveled: the September deadlines are passing,
And where did the cold, wet days go?
The water of the muddy channels became emerald,
And the nettles smelled like roses, but only stronger.
It was stuffy from the dawns, intolerable, demonic and scarlet,
We all remember them until the end of our days.
The sun was like a rebel entering the capital, And spring autumn caressed him so greedily, That it seemed that a transparent snowdrop would now turn white. . . That's when you approached, calm, to my porch.
It is difficult to name in world poetry a more triumphant and pathetic depiction of how the beloved is approaching. This is truly a manifestation of Love to the eyes of the rapturous World!
Akhmatova's love lyrics inevitably lead everyone to memories of Tyutchev. A stormy clash of passions, Tyutchev's "fateful duel" - all this in our time has been resurrected precisely by Akhmatova. The similarity is even more enhanced if we remember that she, like Tyutchev, is an improviser - both in her feeling and in her verse. Akhmatova speaks many times, for example, about the paramount importance for her of pure inspiration, that she has no idea how to write according to a premeditated plan, that it seems to her that at times the Muse stands behind her. . .
And just dictated lines
Lie down in a snow-white notebook.
She repeated this thought over and over. So, even in the poem "Muse" (1924), which was included in the cycle "Secrets of the Craft", Akhmatova wrote:
When I wait for her arrival at night,
Life seems to hang by a thread.
What honors, what youth, what freedom Before a dear guest with a pipe in her hand. And so she entered. Throwing back the covers, she looked at me carefully. I say to her: "Did you dictate the Pages of Hell to Dante?" Answers: "I am".
About the same in the 1956 poem "Dream":
What will I repay for a royal gift? Where to go and with whom to celebrate? And here I am writing as before, without blots, My poems in a burnt notebook.
This does not mean that she did not alter the poems. Many times, for example, the "Poem without a Hero" was supplemented and revised, "Mechola" was improved for decades; sometimes changed, although rarely, stanzas and lines in old poems. Being a master who knows the "secrets of the craft", Akhmatova is precise and scrupulous in her choice of words and in their arrangement. But the purely impulsive, improvisational beginning in it is really very strong. All her love poems, in their primary impetus, in their arbitrary flow, which arises as suddenly as it suddenly disappears, in their fragmentary and lack of plot, are also the purest improvisation. Yes, in essence, it could not be otherwise here: the "fatal" Tyutchev duel, which constitutes their content, is an instant flash of passions, a deadly single combat of two equally strong opponents, of which one must either surrender or die, and the other - win.
Not secrets and not sadness,
Not a wise will of fateThese meetings have always left the impression of a struggle. I, guessing the minute in the morning, When you come to me, I felt in my bent arms A weakly stabbing trembling. . .
Marina Tsvetaeva, in one of her poems dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, wrote that her "anger is deadly and mercy is deadly." And indeed, any middle ground, smoothing of the conflict, a temporary agreement between the two warring parties with a gradual transition to smooth relations is most often not even assumed here. "And love, full of evil, languished like a criminal." Her love poems, where unexpected prayers are mixed with curses, where everything is sharply contrasted and hopeless, where the victorious power over the heart is replaced by a feeling of emptiness, and tenderness is adjacent to rage, where the quiet whisper of recognition is interrupted by the rough language of ultimatums and orders - in these stormy-flaming cries and In the prophecies one senses the latent, unspoken and also Tyutchev's thought about the games of gloomy passions, arbitrarily uplifting human destiny on their steep dark waves, about the primordial Chaos stirring under us. "Oh, how deadly we love" - Akhmatova, of course, did not pass by this side of Tyutchev's worldview. It is characteristic that often love, its victorious power, turns out to be in her poems, to the horror and confusion of the heroine, who is turned against herself. . . love!
I called death dear,
And they died one by one.
Oh, woe to me! These graves
Foretold by my word.
Like crows circling, 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 the chest.
Give me your hand, listen calmly.
I conjure you: go away.
And let me not know where you are
O Muse, do not call him,
May it be alive, unsung
My unrecognized love.
Criticism of the 1930s sometimes wrote, referring to Akhmatova's interpretation of some of Pushkin's texts, about the elements of Freudianism in her literary method. This is doubtful. But the tense, contradictory and dramatic psychologism of her love lyrics, often horrified by the dark and unexplored depths of human feeling, testifies to her possible closeness to individual Freud's ideas, secondarily based on the experience learned from Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tyutchev and Annensky. In any case, the significance of, for example, artistic intuition as a form of "unconscious" creativity, inspiration, and ecstasy has been repeatedly emphasized by her.
However, in artistic and epistemological terms, here, in the origins, of course, not so much Freud, but the dualistic division of the world into two warring elements - the area of Day and the area of \u200b\u200bNight, which goes back to Tyutchev and the romantics, the collision of which gives rise to irreconcilable and deeply painful contradictions in the human soul. Akhmatova's lyrics, not only love ones, are born at the very junction of these contradictions from the contact of Day with Night and Wakefulness with Sleep:
When sleepless darkness bubbles around, That sunny, that lily-of-the-valley wedge Bursts into the darkness of a December night.
It is interesting that the epithets "day" and "night", outwardly quite ordinary, seem in her verse, if one does not know their special meaning, strange, even inappropriate:
Confidently knock on the door
And, the former, cheerful, daytime,
He will enter and say: "Enough,
You see, I caught a cold too." . . .
Characteristically, the word "daytime" here is synonymous with the words "cheerful" and "confident."
Also, following Tyutchev, she could repeat his famous words:
As the ocean embraces the globe,
Earthly life is surrounded by dreams. . .
Dreams occupy a large place in Akhmatova's poetry.
But - one way or another - Akhmatova's love lyrics of the 1920s and 1930s, to an incomparably greater extent than before, are directed to the inner, hidden spiritual life. Indeed, dreams, which are one of her favorite artistic means of comprehending the secret, hidden, intimate life of the soul, testify to this aspiration of the artist inward, into himself, into the secret secrets of the eternally 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 very few material details (remember the image of a red tulip), now, without in the least refusing to use an expressive subject stroke, Anna Akhmatova, with all her expressiveness, yet more plastic in the direct depiction of psychological content.
It is only necessary to remember that the plasticity of Akhmatov's love poem does not in the least imply descriptiveness, slow fluidity or narrative. Before us is still an explosion, a catastrophe, a moment of incredible tension of two opposing forces that came together in a fatal duel, but now this storm cloud that has eclipsed all horizons, throwing thunder and lightning, appears before our eyes in all its awesome beauty and power, in furious swirling of dark forms and dazzling play of heavenly light:
But if we meet eyes
I swear to you by heaven
Granite will melt in the fire.
Not without reason, in one of the poems dedicated to her by N. Gumilyov, Akhmatova is depicted with lightning bolts in her hand:
She is bright in the hours of languor
And holds lightning bolts in his hand,
And her dreams are clear, like shadows
On heavenly fiery sand.
Conclusion
If you arrange Akhmatova's love poems in a certain order, you can build a whole story with many mise-en-scenes, ups and downs, characters, random and non-random incidents. Meetings and partings, tenderness, guilt, disappointment, jealousy, bitterness, languor, joy singing in the heart, unfulfilled expectations, selflessness, pride, sadness - in what facets and kinks we do not see love on the pages of Akhmatov's books.
In the lyrical heroine of Akhmatova's poems, in the soul of the poetess herself, a burning, demanding dream of a truly lofty love, not distorted by anything, constantly lived. Akhmatova's love is a formidable, imperious, morally pure, all-consuming feeling, which makes one recall the biblical line: "Love is strong as death - and its arrows are arrows of fire."