The female soul has always remained a mystery to men. But they always strive for this, because to understand a woman means to understand the world. By reading Akhmatova's lyrics, you can learn more about this distant and unknown galaxy - the female soul.
The exponent of the female worldview in Akhmatova’s work, of course, is the lyrical heroine, who grows up and grows wise along with the author.
Turning to early creativity poetesses, we can note in the lyrical heroine of that period some very character traits. When comparing two poems - “I clasped my hands under dark veil…” and “Song of the Last Meeting” - the common theme of separation, or more precisely, a woman’s experiences due to a break with her loved one, immediately stands out. The lyrical heroine here is still a very young girl.
Both poems allow us to lift the veil on the mystery female soul. The first feature that catches your eye is the inconsistency, even paradoxicality, of the heroine’s thinking. In the first poem, she considers herself to be the culprit of the separation; it was she who “made him drunk with tart sadness.” But, having brought the matter to the point of separation, she runs after him to the gate and shouts: “It’s a joke // That’s all that happened.” If you leave, I’ll die.”
In the poem “Clenched her hands under a dark veil...” the heroine runs after the hero leaving her house through the gate - a door from a closed space into a common one. Big world- forever. In “The Song of the Last Meeting,” the heroine herself leaves the house that was once close, but has now become a stranger to her. The excitement that covers the heroine is expressed in only one phrase: “I’m at right hand put // the glove on my left hand.”
Since both poems have a plot, there is a climax. In “I clasped my hands under a dark veil...” this is a conversation between the hero and heroine in the last stanza, in “Song of the Last Meeting” it is a dialogue between the heroine and the “autumn whisper.” Dialogue is more characteristic not of poetry, but of epic work. He brings the plot and conveys the intensity of passions.
In both cases, the detachment of the heroine and hero from each other is emphasized. In response to a request for forgiveness, the hero replies to the girl, “Don’t stand in the wind,” deliberately emphasizing his concern for her. But, at the same time, he shows that he no longer needs either her feelings or her recognition. In another poem, a replica of the autumn breeze finds a response in the heroine’s soul:
I'm deceived by my sadness
Changeable, evil fate.
She also feels deceived and unfairly offended. The hero himself is not shown, he does not speak to the heroine - all the words have already been said where the candles are burning with an “indifferent yellow fire”, in the house where he stayed, but his presence is clear and palpable. This is what creates the mood of the heroine and the mood of the entire poem.
At the moment of climax and in the second poem it sounds: “Die with me!” The aura of death gives a special resonance to the motive of separation: the heroine’s experiences become as dramatic as possible, taking the entire situation described in the poem to a completely new emotional level.
A completely different hypostasis of the lyrical heroine is revealed in the poem “Oh, you thought I was like that too...” The same theme of separation is played out by the author in a completely different way. And the heroine experiences separation differently: it evokes in her anger and malice, a desire to express everything that hurts. The heroine asks a rhetorical question: “Oh, you thought I’m like that too, // Why can you forget me?”
The answer to this question is already known. No, he won't be able to forget. Evil irony permeates the last lines of the first quatrain. The heroine seems to mock her beloved:
Oh, you thought...
...that I would throw myself down, begging and sobbing.
Under the hooves of a bay horse.
It is no coincidence that motifs of love conspiracies also appear in the poem:
Or I’ll ask the healers
There's a root in the slander water
And I will send you a terrible gift -
My treasured fragrant scarf.
The heroine again mocks the hero. But in the second part the tone suddenly becomes serious and even stern. For killing love, she curses the hero. The heroine calls his soul “cursed.” And swearing by the most sacred and bright thing that she has in her life: “an angelic garden”, “a miraculous icon”, a child of “fiery nights”, the lyrical heroine promises: “I will never return to you.”
This promise is made rather to oneself. Two points are striking in the poem. Firstly, carnal love and Christian love are equivalent for the heroine. And secondly, the extremely emotional poem does not contain a single exclamation mark. What does this mean? The fact that the decision made by the heroine is rational and cold. Ten years passed between the poems “Clenched my hands under a dark veil” and “Oh, you thought I was like that too...”, but the lyrical heroine has matured a lot.
It is absolutely clear that, despite the possibility of a variety of interpretations of these poems, all of them are only possible within the framework of a single plot, which is beyond doubt, and stems from the mystery of the female character, the mystery of life itself. But this mystery is not mystical, but ordinary, characteristic of life in general and women’s life in particular, the mystery of love, which no one denies or questions.
Akhmatova writes about herself - about the eternal...
M. Tsvetaeva.
Anna Akhmatova's lyrics are a confession of the female soul in its maximum embodiment. The poet writes about the feelings of his lyrical heroine, her work is as intimate as possible and, at the same time, it is an encyclopedia of the female soul in all its forms.
In 1912, Akhmatova’s first collection, “Evening,” was published, where the heroine’s youthful romantic expectations were embodied. A young girl has a presentiment of love, speaks of its illusions, unfulfilled hopes, “graceful sadness”:
Gasping for breath, I shouted: “It’s a joke.
All that has gone before. If you leave, I’ll die.”
Smiled calmly and creepily
And he told me: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
In the second collection of poetry, “The Rosary,” which brought Akhmatova real fame, the image of the lyrical heroine develops and transforms. Already here the versatility of Akhmatov’s heroine is manifested - she is both a girl and adult woman, and wife, and mother, and widow, and sister. The poet takes a particularly close look at the “love” female roles. The lyrical heroine of Akhmatova can be a beloved, a lover, a homewrecker, a harlot. Her “social range” is also wide: wanderer, Old Believer, peasant woman, etc.
It seems that such “ramifications” of the heroine are connected with the poet’s desire to reveal not so much individuality as the general female psychology. Therefore we can say that for female images Akhmatova is characterized by a timeless “universality of feelings and actions”:
How many requests does your beloved always have!
A woman who has fallen out of love has no requests.
I'm so glad there's water today
It freezes under the colorless ice.
The events of the First World War and revolutions change the tonality of Akhmatova’s lyrics and add new touches to the image of her lyrical heroine. Now she is not only a private person living with personal joys and sorrows, but also a person involved in the destinies of the country, people, and history. The collection “The White Flock” reinforces the motives of the heroine’s tragic premonition of the bitter fate of an entire generation of Russian people:
We thought: we are beggars, we have nothing,
And how they began to lose one after another,
So that became every day
Memorial day -
They began to compose songs about the great generosity of God
Yes about our former wealth.
Akhmatova did not accept the 1917 revolution. Her heroine of the 1920s desperately yearns for bygone but irrevocable times. And that is why the present becomes even more unattractive and the future of the entire country, the entire nation even more cloudy:
Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashes,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy...
Moreover, the October events are perceived by the heroine Akhmatova as punishment for her unrighteous, sinful life. And even though she herself did not do evil, the heroine feels involved in the life of the entire country, the entire people. Therefore, she is ready to share their common sad fate:
I am your voice, the heat of your breath,
I am the reflection of your face...
Thus, after the revolution, the image of a loving woman in Akhmatova’s lyrics recedes into the background, while the roles of a patriot, a poetess, and a little later, a mother who wholeheartedly cares not only for her child, but also for all those who suffer, come forward:
No, and not under an alien sky,
And not under the protection of alien wings, -
I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.
The grief of Akhmatova’s mother merges with the grief of all mothers and is embodied in universal human grief. Mother of God:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
Thus, A. Akhmatova’s lyrics reveal all the hypostases of the female soul. In the early lyrics of the poetess, her heroine is, first of all, loving woman in a variety of roles. In Akhmatova’s more mature work, the emphasis shifts towards the role of a woman-mother, patriot and poetess, who sees her duty in sharing the fate of her people and her homeland. .
I taught women to speak...
A. Akhmatova.
The year 1912 can be called revolutionary in Russian poetry. At this time, Anna Akhmatova’s first collection, “Evening,” was published. After its release, critics unanimously ranked this poetess next to the first poets of Russia. Moreover, contemporaries recognized that it was Akhmatova “after Blok’s death that undoubtedly holds first place among Russian poets.” After “Evening” came “The Rosary” (1914) and “The White Flock” (1917).
All three of these collections by the poetess were devoted to one theme - love. The revolutionary nature of Akhmatova’s lyrics lay in the fact that she opened the universe of the female soul to the world. The poetess brought her lyrical heroine onto the stage and revealed all her emotional experiences - her feelings, emotions, dreams, fantasies.
In her poems, Akhmatova not only created a universal female character. She showed it various shapes and manifestations: a young girl (“I pray to the window ray”, “Two poems”), a mature woman (“How many requests…”, “As simple courtesy commands”, “Walk”), an unfaithful wife (“The Gray-Eyed King”, “The Husband Whipped me patterned..."). In addition, Akhmatova’s heroine is a homewrecker, a harlot, a wanderer, an Old Believer, and a peasant woman. In her poems, the poetess also depicts the fate of her sister and mother (“Magdalene fought and sobbed,” “Requiem” and others).
In the poem “We are all hawk moths here, harlots...” the lyrical heroine experiences the pangs of jealousy. Her love for the hero is so strong that it drives the woman crazy:
Oh, how my heart yearns!
Am I waiting for the hour of death?
And the one who is dancing now,
Will definitely be in hell.
The heroine is trying to return the lost feeling. She wants to attract her lover with her beauty: “I put on a tight skirt to appear even slimmer.” Or is the heroine already celebrating a wake for her departed love? After all, she understands perfectly well that “the windows are forever blocked.” Love is gone, you can't bring it back. All that remains is to yearn and wish for death, but nothing can be corrected.
And the poem “The boy told me: “How painful it is!” paints the opposite situation. Akhmatova’s heroine, a mature woman, inspired the love of the young man. The heroine’s age is indicated by her address to the young man – “boy”. Now this woman refuses love. She sees what she's doing young man unbearable pain, but cannot do otherwise:
I know: he won’t cope with his pain,
With the bitter pain of first love.
How helplessly, greedily and hotly he strokes
My cold hands.
The contrast in the last lines of the poem conveys the intensity of the characters' feelings. The young man “greedily and hotly” loves the lyrical heroine, but the same one is cold towards him.
In general, hands are a very significant detail in Akhmatova’s lyrics. They, in my opinion, are a reflection of the soul, feelings and emotions of the characters. So, in the poem “I clenched my hands under a dark veil...” Akhmatova conveys all the grief of separation through this line. She clenched her hands under the veil - this means she clenched her soul under the blackness of melancholy and misfortune. The heroine said something to her lover, confessed something to him. These words “made the hero drunk with sadness.” Realizing what she did, the heroine tries to return everything, because she cannot live without her lover:
Gasping for breath, I shouted: “It’s a joke.
All that has gone before. If you leave, I’ll die.”
But... it's too late. The hero is already “poisoned” with sadness. His last words were casual and indifferent: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
Hands also play a large role in the poem “Song of the Last Meeting.” In it, the heroine experienced a very difficult moment - parting with her beloved. Her condition is conveyed by one, but very significant, detail:
But my steps were light.
I put it on my right hand
Glove from the left hand.
In general, in the life of the lyrical heroine Akhmatova, love plays a colossal role. This is the main thing both for her and for the poetess herself. But, unfortunately, happy love is very rare in A. Akhmatova’s lyrics. This feeling for the poetess is always bitterness, separation, sadness, the desire for death. We can say that Akhmatova’s heroine dies with each parting and is reborn with each new love in her life.
Another hypostasis of the lyrical heroine is a woman poet. She perceives her talent not as a gift, but as a cross that she must bear throughout her life. In the poem “Muse,” the heroine reproaches her “muse-sister”:
Muse! you see how happy everyone is
Girls, women, widows...
I'd rather die on the wheel
Not these shackles.
For the lyrical heroine, God's gift is the opportunity to live life ordinary woman, do not honor the troubles and hardships of all women on earth. But such happiness is not available to the heroine. She must endure all the world's pain and express it in her poems.
In the poem “Song,” Akhmatova’s heroine is a simple peasant woman. Her harsh life is depicted, her difficult “share-torment”. The fate of this heroine is associated with the image of a quinoa, which was traditionally considered a sign of misfortune: “I sing about love to the quinoa field.” The voice of this simple woman, who has endured a lot of troubles and grief, is intertwined with the voice of a woman poet. The key image of the last stanza of the poem is “stone instead of bread.” This is an “evil reward” for the poetess heroine and the simple woman heroine for everything: for their lives, for their actions. The woman in this poem by Akhmatova is lonely. She is left alone with the universe, with God:
Above me there is only the sky,
And your voice is with me.
Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine is a mother who has lost her child (“Husband in the grave, son in prison - pray for me…”), and a Russian woman suffering along with her country (“Requiem”):
No, and not under an alien sky,
And not under the protection of alien wings,
I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.
Thus, Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine is a Woman in all her earthly incarnations, in all her guises. It was thanks to this poetess that the richest and deepest world of the female soul was revealed - the world of Love and Sadness, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil...
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A. Akhmatova
She was considered perfect. Her poems were read. Her hook-nosed, surprisingly harmonious profile evoked comparisons with ancient sculpture. In her later years she became an honorary Doctor of Science from Oxford. This woman's name is Anna Akhmatova. “Akhma-tova is a jasmine bush, charred by gray fog,” is what her contemporaries said about her. According to the poetess herself, Alexander Pushkin and Benjamin Constant, the author of the acclaimed 19th century novel “Adolphe,” had a huge influence on her. It was from these sources that Akhmatova drew the subtlest psychologism, that aphoristic brevity and expressiveness that made her lyrics the object of endless love from readers and the subject of research by several generations of literary scholars.
I learned to live simply, wisely, Look at the sky and pray to God, And wander for a long time before the evening, To calm down unnecessary anxiety.
This is the result of this wise, suffering life.
She was born at the turn of two centuries - the nineteenth, “iron” according to Blok’s definition, and the twentieth century, which had no equal in fear, passions and suffering in the history of mankind. She was born at the turn of the century to connect them with the living, tremulous thread of her destiny.
A great influence on her poetic development was had by the fact that Akhmatova spent her childhood years in Tsarskoe Selo, where the very air was saturated with poetry. This place became one of the most dear to her on earth for the rest of her life. Because “here lay his (Pushkin’s) cocked hat and the disheveled volume of Guys.” Because for her, seventeen years old, it was there that “the dawn was all itself, in April the smell of prey and earth, and the first kiss...”. Because there, in the park, there were dates with Nikolai Gumilyov, another tragic poet era, which became Akhmatova’s fate, about which she would later write in lines that were terrible in their tragic sound:
Akhmatova’s poetry is the poetry of the female soul. And although literature is universal to humanity, Akhmatova could rightfully say about her poems:
Could Biche, like Dante, create, Or could Laura glorify the heat of love? I taught women to speak.
In her works there is a lot of personal, purely feminine things that Akhmatova experienced in her soul, which is why she is dear to the Russian reader.
Akhmatova's first poems are love lyrics. In them, love is not always bright; it often brings grief. More often than not, Akhmatova’s poems are psychological dramas with poignant plots based on tragic experiences. The lyrical heroine of Akhmatova is rejected and falls out of love. But he experiences this with dignity, with proud humility, without humiliating either himself or his beloved.
In the fluffy muff, my hands were cold. I felt scared, I felt somehow vague. Oh, how to bring you back, quick weeks of His love, airy and momentary!
The hero of Akhmatov's poetry is complex and multifaceted. He is a lover, a brother, a friend, appearing in different situations. Either a wall of misunderstanding arises between Akhmatova and her lover and he leaves her; then they break up because they can’t see each other; then she mourns her love and grieves; but he always loves Akhmatova.
All for you: daytime prayer, and the burning heat of insomnia, and the white flock of my poems, and the blue fire of my nights.
But Akhmatova’s poetry is not only the confession of a female soul in love, it is also the confession of a person living with all the troubles and passions of the 20th century. And also, according to O. Mandelstam, Akhmatova “brought to Russian lyrics all the enormous complexity and psychological richness of the Russian novel of the 20th century”:
She escorted her friend to the front hall, stood in the golden dust, and important sounds flowed from the nearby bell tower. Abandoned! Invented word - Am I a flower or a letter?
And the eyes are already looking sternly into the darkened dressing table.
Most main love in the life of A. Akhmatova there was love for native land, about which she will write later that “we lie down in it and become it, that’s why we call it so freely ours.”
IN difficult years revolution, many poets emigrated from Russia abroad. No matter how hard it was for Akhmatova, she did not leave her country because she could not imagine her life without Russia.
But Akhmatova “indifferently and calmly closed her ears with her hands” so that “the sorrowful spirit would not be defiled by this unworthy speech.”
Akhmatova’s love for the Motherland is not a subject of analysis or reflection. There will be a Motherland - there will be life, children, poetry. Without her, there is nothing. Akhmatova was a sincere spokesman for the troubles and misfortunes of her century, which she was ten years older than.
Akhmatova was concerned about both the fate of the spiritually impoverished people and the worries of the Russian intelligentsia after the Bolsheviks seized power in the country. She conveyed the psychological state of intellectuals in those inhuman conditions:
In a bloody circle, day and night, a cruel languor hurts... No one wanted to help us Because we stayed at home.
During Stalinism, Akhmatova was not subjected to repression, but these were difficult years for her. Her only son was arrested, and she decided to leave a monument to him and all the people who suffered at that time. This is how the famous “Requiem” was born. In it, Akhmatova talks about the difficult years, about the misfortunes and suffering of people:
The death stars stood above us, And innocent Rus' writhed Under bloody boots And under the tires of black marus.
Despite all the severity and tragic life, despite all the horror and humiliation she experienced during the war and after, Akhmatova did not have despair and confusion. No one had ever seen her with her head bowed. Always direct and strict, she was a person of great courage. In her life, Akhmatova knew fame, infamy and glory again.
Such is Akhmatova’s lyrical world: from the confession of a woman’s heart, insulted, indignant, but loving, to the soul-shaking “Requiem”, with which “a hundred million people” shout.
Once in her youth, clearly anticipating her poetic destiny, Akhmatova said, addressing the Tsarskoye Selo statue of A. S. Pushkin:
Cold, white, wait, I will also become marble.
And, probably, opposite the Leningrad prison - where she wanted - there should be a monument to a woman holding in her hands a bundle with a package for her only son, whose only guilt was that he was the son of Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova - two great poets who displeased the authorities.
Or maybe there is no need for marble sculptures at all, because there are already miraculous monument, which she erected for herself after her Tsarskoe Selo predecessor - these are her poems.
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