Akhmatova’s poems reveal the world of a woman’s soul, passionate, tender and proud. The framework of this world was outlined by love - a feeling that constitutes the content of Akhmatova’s poems human life. There seems to be no shade of this feeling that would not be mentioned here: from accidental slips of the tongue that reveal something deeply hidden (“And as if by mistake I said: “You...” to “white-hot passion.”
Akhmatova’s poems do not talk about her state of mind - it is reproduced as something experienced now, albeit experienced in memory. It is reproduced accurately, subtly, and every detail, even the most insignificant, is important here, allowing, by catching, to convey the overflow of emotional movement, which might not have been directly mentioned. These details, these details are sometimes defiantly noticeable in the poems, speaking about what is happening in the heart of their heroine more than lengthy descriptions could say. An example of such an amazing psychological richness of a verse, the capacity of a verse word, can be the lines of “Song of the Last Meeting”:
My chest was so helplessly cold,
But my steps were easy.
I'm on right hand put it on
Glove from the left hand.
Akhmatova’s poetry is like a novel, saturated with the finest psychologism. There is a “plot” here, which is not difficult to restore by tracing how it arises, develops, resolves with a gust of passion and goes away, the feeling that in Akhmatova’s early poems determines the main thing in a person’s life becomes a memory. Here is just a premonition of love, a still unclear yearning that makes the heart tremble: “The Eyes are asking for mercy without will. What should I do with them, When they say a short, sonorous name in front of me? It is replaced by another feeling, which sharply increases the beating of the heart, already ready to flare up with passion: “It was stuffy from the burning light, And his glances were like rays. I just shuddered: this one can tame me.” This state is conveyed with physical palpability, the burning light here has a strange - and frightening - attractive force, and the last word in the verses betrays the extent of helplessness in front of it. The angle of vision in these verses is perhaps not wide, but the vision itself is concentrated. And that's because here we're talking about about what constitutes the value of human existence; human dignity is tested in a love match. Humility will also come to the heroine of the poems, but first she will burst out proudly: “You submissive? You are crazy! I am submissive to the Lord's will alone. I don’t want either trembling or pain, My husband is an executioner, and his house is a prison.” But the main words here are those that appear after those just given: “But you see! After all, I came on my own...” Submission - and in love too - is possible in Akhmatova’s lyrics only by one’s own will.
Much has been written about Akhmatova’s love, and, probably, no one in Russian poetry has recreated this sublime and beautiful feeling so completely, so deeply.
In the early poems of the poetess, the power of passion turned out to be irresistible, fatal, as they liked to say then. Hence the piercing sharpness of the words that escape from a heart scorched by love: “Don’t you love, don’t you want to look? Oh, how beautiful you are, damn you!” And then here: “My eyes are filled with fog.” And there are many of them, lines that capture the almost woeful helplessness that replaces defiant defiance, comes in spite of the obvious. How it is seen - mercilessly, precisely: “Half-affectionately, half-lazyly I touched my hand with a kiss...”, “How unlike an embrace the Touch of these hands is.”
And this is also about love, which is spoken about in Akhmatova’s lyrics with that boundless frankness that allows the reader to treat the poems as lines addressed to him personally.
Akhmatova’s love bestows both joy and sorrow, but it is always happiness, because it allows you to overcome everything that separates people (“You breathe the sun, I breathe the moon, But we live by love alone”), allows their breath to merge, echoing in the poems born of this :
Only your voice sings in my poems,
My breath blows in your poems.
And there is a fire that does not dare
Touch neither oblivion nor fear.
And if you knew how much I love you now
Your dry, pink lips.
In Akhmatova’s poems life unfolds, the essence of which in her first books is love. And when she leaves a person, leaves, even fair reproaches of conscience cannot stop her: “My flesh languishes in a sorrowful illness, But my free spirit will already rest serenely.” Only this apparent serenity is devastating, giving rise to the sad realization that in a house abandoned by love, “things are not entirely safe.”
Akhmatova does not seek to evoke sympathy in the reader, much less pity: the heroine of her poems does not need this. “Abandoned! Invented word - Am I a flower or a letter? And this is not at all a matter of the notorious strength of character - in Akhmatova’s poems, every time a moment is captured: not stopped, but fleeting. A feeling, a state, only having become apparent, changes. And perhaps it is precisely in this change of states - their fragility, instability - that the charm, the charm of the character embodied in Akhmatova’s early lyrics: “Joyful and clear Tomorrow will be morning. This life is beautiful, Heart, be wise.” Even the appearance of the heroine of the poems is outlined with a light touch, barely perceptible: “I have one smile. So, the movement of the lips is slightly visible.” But this instability and uncertainty is balanced by an abundance of details, details that belong to life itself. The world in Akhmatova’s poems is not conventionally poetic - it is real, written out with tangible authenticity: “The worn rug under the icon, It’s dark in the cool room...”, “You smoke a black pipe, How strange is the smoke above it. I put on a tight skirt to make myself look even slimmer.” And the heroine of the poems appears here “in this gray everyday dress, on worn-out heels...”. However, a feeling of grounding does not arise - here is something else: “...There is no earthly thing from the earth And there was no liberation.”
Immersing the reader in life, Akhmatova allows you to feel the passage of time, powerfully determining the fate of a person. However, at first this found expression in Akhmatova’s so-frequent attachment of what was happening to a precisely - by the clock - designated moment: “I’ve gone crazy, oh strange boy, I’m coming at three o’clock.” Later, the sensation of moving time will truly materialize:
What is war, what is plague? They see the end soon;
Their verdict is almost pronounced.
But what should we do with the horror that
Was once called the run of time.
Akhmatova spoke about how poetry is born in the series “Secrets of Craft.” The combination of these two words is remarkable, the combination of the sacred and the ordinary - one of them is literally inseparable from the other when it comes to creativity. For Akhmatova, it is a phenomenon of the same order as life, and its process occurs according to the will of the forces that dictate the course of life. The verse appears like a “roll of subsiding thunder,” like a sound that triumphs “in the abyss of whispers and ringings.” And the poet’s task is to catch it, to hear the signal bells breaking through from somewhere “words and light rhymes.”
The creative process, the birth of Akhmatova’s poetry, is equated to the processes that occur in life, in nature. And the poet’s duty, it would seem, is not to invent, but only, having heard, to write down. But it has long been noted that the artist in his work does not strive to do as in life, but creates as life itself. Akhmatova also enters into competition with life: “I have not settled my scores with fire and wind and water...” However, here, perhaps, it is more accurate to speak not about competition, but about co-creation: poetry allows you to get to the hidden meaning of what is done and done by life. It was Akhmatova who said: “If only you knew from what rubbish poems grow without shame, like a yellow dandelion near a fence, like burdocks and quinoa.” But the earth's rubbish becomes the soil on which poetry grows, lifting a person with it: “... For me, my slumbers Suddenly open the gates And lead behind the morning star.” That is why in Akhmatova’s lyrics the poet and the world have an equal relationship - the happiness of being gifted by him is inseparable in poetry from the awareness of the opportunity to give generously, royally:
He probably wants a lot more
To be sung by my voice:
That which is wordless rumbles,
Or in the darkness the underground stone wears away,
Or breaks through the smoke.
For Akhmatova, art is capable of absorbing the world and thereby making it richer, and this determines its effective power, the place and role of the artist in people’s lives.
With a feeling of this power given to her, Akhmatova lived her life in poetry. “We are condemned - and we ourselves know this - We are to waste, not to save,” she said at the very beginning of her poetic path, in the fifteenth year. This is what allows the verse to gain immortality, as it is said aphoristically precisely:
Gold rusts and steel decays,
Marble is crumbling. Everything is ready for death.
The most durable thing on earth is sadness
And more durable is the royal word.
When meeting with Akhmatova’s poems, the name of Pushkin involuntarily comes to mind: the classical clarity, intonational expressiveness of Akhmatova’s verse, a clearly expressed position of acceptance of the world opposing man - all this allows us to speak about the Pushkin principle, which clearly reveals itself in Akhmatova’s poetry. The name of Pushkin was the most dear to her - the idea of what constitutes the essence of poetry was associated with it. There are almost no direct echoes of Pushkin’s poems in Akhmatova’s poetry; Pushkin’s influence is felt here on a different level - the philosophy of life, the persistent desire to be faithful only to poetry, and not to the power of power or the demands of the crowd.
It is with the Pushkin tradition that Akhmatova’s characteristic scale of poetic thought and harmonic precision of verse is associated, the ability to identify the universal significance of a unique emotional movement, to correlate the sense of history with the sense of modernity, and finally, the variety of lyrical themes, held together by the personality of the poet, who is always a contemporary of the reader.
The second great lyric poetess after Sappho...
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 who “after Blok’s death 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 revealed to the world the Universe of the female soul. The poetess brought her lyrical heroine onto the stage and exposed 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 cried,” “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 she 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 clasped my hands under 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:
Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine is a mother who 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, Sorrow and Joy...
The world of the female soul is most fully revealed in love lyrics A. Akhmatova and occupies a central place in her poetry. The genuine sincerity of Akhmatova’s love lyrics, combined with strict harmony, allowed her contemporaries to call her the Russian Sappho immediately after the release of her first poetry collections.
Anna Akhmatova's early love lyrics were perceived as a kind of lyrical diary. However, the depiction of romantically exaggerated feelings is not typical of her poetry. Akhmatova speaks about simple human happiness and about earthly, ordinary sorrows: about separation, betrayal, loneliness, despair - about everything that is close to many, that everyone is able to experience and understand.
Love in A. Akhmatova’s lyrics appears as a “fatal duel”; it is almost never depicted serenely, idyllically, but, on the contrary, in an extremely crisis expression: at the moment of breakup, separation, loss of feeling or the first violent blindness of passion.
Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama or its climax. Her lyrical heroine pays for love with “torment of a living soul.” The combination of lyricism and epicness brings A. Akhmatova’s poems closer to the genres of the novel, short story, drama, and lyrical diary.
One of the secrets of her poetic gift lies in her ability to fully express the most intimate things in herself and the world around her. In her poems, one is struck by the string tension of experiences and the unmistakable accuracy of their sharp expression. This is Akhmatova’s strength.
The theme of love and the theme of creativity are closely intertwined in Anna Akhmatova’s poems. In the spiritual appearance of the heroine of her love lyrics one can discern “wingedness” creative personality. The tragic rivalry between Love and the Muse was reflected in many works, starting from the early years of 1911. However, Akhmatova foresees that poetic glory cannot replace love and earthly happiness.
A. Akhmatova’s intimate lyrics are not limited to just depicting loving relationships. It always shows the poet’s inexhaustible interest in the inner world of man. The originality of Akhmatova's poems about love, the originality of the poetic voice, conveying the most intimate thoughts and feelings of the lyrical heroine, the filling of the poems with the deepest psychologism cannot but arouse admiration.
Like no one else, Akhmatova knows how to reveal the most hidden depths inner world a person, his experiences, states, moods. Amazing psychological persuasiveness is achieved by using a very capacious and laconic technique of eloquent detail (glove, ring, tulip in a buttonhole...).
“Earthly love” in A. Akhmatova also implies love for the “earthly world” around a person. The depiction of human relationships is inseparable from love for native land, to the people, to the fate of the country. The idea of a spiritual connection with the Motherland that permeates the poetry of A. Akhmatova is expressed in the readiness to sacrifice for her sake even happiness and closeness with the most dear people (“Prayer”), which later came true so tragically in her life.
She rises to biblical heights in her description of maternal love. The suffering of a mother doomed to see her son suffer on the cross is simply shocking in “Requiem”:
The choir of angels praised the great hour,
And the skies melted in fire.
He said to his father: “Why did you leave me!”
And to the Mother: “Oh, don’t cry for Me...”
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
Thus, the poetry of A. Akhmatova is not only the confession of a woman in love, it is the confession of a person living with all the troubles, pains and passions of his time and his land.
Anna Akhmatova, as it were, combined “women’s” poetry with the poetry of the mainstream. But this unification is only apparent - Akhmatova is very smart: retaining the theme and many techniques women's poetry, she radically reworked both of them in the spirit of not feminine, but universal poetics.
The world of deep and dramatic experiences, charm, wealth and uniqueness of personality are imprinted in the love lyrics of Anna Akhmatova.
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. .
