At the very end of the war, the Germans set fire to a tank in which Semyon Avdeev was a turret gunner.
For two days, blind, burned, with a broken leg, Semyon crawled between some ruins. It seemed to him that the blast wave threw him out of the tank into a deep hole.
For two days, step by step, half a step, a centimeter an hour, he got out of this smoky pit to the sun, into the fresh wind, dragging his broken leg, often losing consciousness. On the third day, sappers found him barely alive on the ruins of an ancient castle. And for a long time, the surprised sappers wondered how a wounded tanker could get on this ruin that no one needed ...
In the hospital, Semyon's leg was taken away from the knee and then they took him for a long time to famous professors so that they would restore his sight.
But nothing came of it...
While Semyon was surrounded by comrades, cripples like him, while a smart, kind doctor was by his side, while nurses cared for him, he somehow forgot about his injury, lived like everyone else lives. For laughter, for a joke, I forgot grief.
But when Semyon left the hospital on the city street - not for a walk, but completely, into life, he suddenly felt the whole world completely different from the one that surrounded him yesterday, the day before yesterday and all his past life.
Although Semyon had been told a few weeks ago that his sight would not return, he still harbored hope in his heart. And now everything has collapsed. It seemed to Semyon that he again found himself in that black hole into which the blast wave had thrown him. Only then did he passionately want to get out into the fresh wind, to the sun, he believed that he would get out, but now there was no such confidence. Anxiety crept into my heart. The city was incredibly noisy, and the sounds somehow elastic, and it seemed to him that if he took even one step forward, these elastic sounds would throw him back, hurt him on the stones.
Behind the hospital. Together with everyone, Semyon scolded him for his boredom, did not look forward to how to escape from him, and now he suddenly became so expensive, so necessary. But you will not return there, even though it is still very close. We must move forward, but fearfully. Afraid of the ebullient cramped city, but most of all afraid of himself:
He brought Seeds Leshka Kupriyanov out of his stupor.
- Oh, and the weather! Now if only to take a walk with the girl! Yes, in the field, yes, pick flowers, but would run.
I love to fool around. Let's go! What are you up to?
They went.
Semyon heard how the prosthesis creaked and clapped, how hard, with a whistle, Leshka breathed. These were the only familiar, close sounds, and the clang of trams, the screams of cars, children's laughter seemed alien, cold. They parted before him, ran around. The stones of the pavement, some columns got underfoot, hindered the way.
Semyon knew Leshka for about a year. Small in stature, he often served as a crutch for him. It used to be that Semyon was lying on a bunk and shouting: “Nanny, give me a crutch,” and Lyoshka would run up and squeak, fooling around:
- I'm here, Count. Give me your whitest pen. Lay it, most illustrious one, on my unworthy shoulder.
So they walked side by side. Semyon knew Leshkino's round, armless shoulder and faceted, cropped head well by touch. And now he put his hand on Leshka's shoulder and his soul immediately became calmer.
All night they sat first in the dining room, and then in the restaurant at the station. When they went to the dining room, Leshka said that they would drink a hundred grams, have a good dinner and leave with the night train. We drank as agreed. Leshka offered to repeat. Semyon did not refuse, although he rarely drank in general. The vodka flowed surprisingly easily today. The hop was pleasant, did not stupefy the head, but awakened good thoughts in it. True, it was impossible to focus on them. They were nimble and slippery like fish, and like fish they slipped out and disappeared into the dark distance. This made my heart sad, but the longing did not linger for a long time. It was replaced by memories or naive but pleasant fantasies. It seemed to Semyon that one morning he would wake up and see the sun, grass, a ladybug. And then suddenly a girl appeared. He clearly saw the color of her eyes, her hair, felt her tender cheeks. This girl fell in love with him, the blind man. They talked a lot about such people in the ward and even read a book aloud.
Leshka did not have a right arm and three ribs. The war, as he said with a laugh, had cut him to pieces. In addition, he was wounded in the neck. After the throat operation, he spoke intermittently, with a hiss, but Semyon got used to these sounds, little like human ones. They annoyed him less than the accordion waltzers, than the coquettish cooing of the woman at the next table.
From the very beginning, as soon as wine and snacks were served on the table, Leshka chatted merrily, laughed contentedly:
- Oh, Senka, I love nothing in the world so much as a well-cleaned table! I love to have fun - especially to eat! Before the war, we used to go to Medvezhye Ozera in the summer with the whole factory. Brass band and buffets! And I - with an accordion. There is a company under every bush, and in every company I, like Sadko, am a welcome guest. “Spread it out, Alexei Svet-Nikolaevich.” And why not stretch it if they ask and the wine is already being poured. And some blue-eyed ham on a fork brings...
They drank, ate, sipped, savoring, cold thick beer. Leshka continued to enthusiastically talk about his suburbs. His sister lives there in her own house. She works as a technician at a chemical plant. The sister, as Leshka assured, would definitely fall in love with Semyon. They will get married. Then they will have children. Children will have as many toys as they want and what they want. Semyon will make them himself in the artel where they will work.
Soon it became difficult for Leshka to speak: he was tired, and it seemed that he had stopped believing in what he was talking about. They were silent more, they drank more ...
Semyon remembers how Lyoshka croaked: “We are lost people, it would be better if they killed us completely.” He remembers how the head became heavier, how dark it was in it - bright visions disappeared. Cheerful voices and music finally brought him out of himself. I wanted to beat everyone, smash, Leshka hissed:
- Don't go home. Who needs you there?
Home? Where is the house? A long, terribly long time, maybe
a hundred years ago he had a house. And there was a garden, and a birdhouse on a birch, and rabbits. Small, with red eyes, they trustingly jumped towards him, sniffed at his boots, funnyly moved their pink nostrils. Mother ... Semyon was called an "anarchist" because at school, although he studied well, he desperately hooligans, smoked, because he and his lads arranged merciless raids on gardens and orchards. And she, mother, never scolded him. The father mercilessly flogged, and the mother only timidly asked not to misbehave. She herself gave money for cigarettes and in every possible way hid Semyonov's tricks from her father. Semyon loved his mother and helped her in everything: he chopped wood, carried water, cleaned the barn. The neighbors envied Anna Filippovna, looking at how cleverly her son managed the housework,
- The breadwinner will be, - they said, - and the seventeenth water will wash away the boyish foolishness.
Drunk Semyon remembered this word - "breadwinner" - and repeated to himself, gritted his teeth so as not to burst into tears. What is he now the breadwinner? Collar on mother's neck.
The comrades saw how Semyon's tank burned, but no one saw how Semyon got out of it. The mother sent a notice that her son had died. And now Semyon thought, should she be reminded of her worthless life? Is it worth reopening her tired, broken heart with new pain?
An intoxicated woman was laughing nearby. Leshka kissed her with wet lips and hissed something incomprehensible. Dishes rattled, the table overturned, and the earth turned over.
We woke up in a woodshed at the restaurant. Someone caring spread straw for them, gave them two old blankets. All the money is drunk, the ticket requirements are lost, and Moscow is six days away. To go to the hospital, to say that they were robbed, did not have enough conscience.
Lyoshka offered to go without tickets, in the position of beggars. Semyon was even afraid to think about it. He suffered for a long time, but there was nothing to be done. You have to go, you have to eat. Semyon agreed to walk through the cars, but he would not say anything, he would pretend to be dumb.

They entered the wagon. Leshka briskly began his speech in his hoarse voice:
- Brothers and sisters, help the unfortunate cripples...
Semyon walked bent over, as if through a cramped black dungeon. It seemed to him that sharp stones hung over his head. A rumble of voices was heard from afar, but as soon as he and Leshka approached, this rumble disappeared, and Semyon heard only Leshka and the clinking of coins in his cap. Semyon was shivering from this tinkling. He lowered his head, hiding his eyes, forgetting that they were blind, unable to see either reproach, or anger, or regret.
The farther they went, the more unbearable became Semyon Leshka's crying voice. It was stuffy in the carriages. There was absolutely nothing left to breathe, when suddenly a fragrant, meadow wind blew in his face from the open window, and Semyon was frightened of it, recoiled, and hurt his head painfully on the shelf.
We walked the whole train, collected more than two hundred rubles, and got off at the station for lunch. Leshka was satisfied with the first success, boastfully spoke about his happy "planid". Semyon wanted to cut Leshka off, hit him, but even more he wanted to get drunk as soon as possible, to get rid of himself.
They drank cognac in three stars, ate crabs, cakes, since there was nothing else in the buffet.
Having drunk, Lyoshka found friends in the neighborhood, danced with them to the accordion, bawled songs. Semyon at first wept, then somehow forgot himself, began to stomp, and then sing along, clap his hands, and finally sang:
And we do not sow, but we do not plow, And the ace, the eight and the jack, And we wave our handkerchief from prison, Four on the side - and yours are gone ...,
... They were again left without a penny of money at a strange distant station.
Friends traveled to Moscow for a whole month. Lyoshka got so used to begging that sometimes he even buffooned, singing vulgar jokes. Semyon no longer felt remorse. He reasoned simply: you need money to get to Moscow - not to steal? And what they drink is temporary. He will come to Moscow, get a job in an artel and take his mother to him, be sure to take him and maybe even get married. And well, happiness falls to other cripples, it will fall to him too ...
Semyon sang front-line songs. He held himself confidently, proudly raising his head with dead eyes, shaking his long, thick hair in time with the song. And it turned out that he did not ask for alms, but condescendingly takes the reward due to him. His voice was good, the songs came out sincere, the passengers generously served the blind singer.
The passengers especially liked the song, which told how a fighter was dying quietly in a green meadow, an old birch leaned over him. She extended her hands to the soldier, as if she were her own mother. The fighter tells the birch tree that his mother and girl are waiting for him in a distant village, but he will not come to them, because he is forever betrothed to the white birch, and that she is now his “bride and mother”. In conclusion, the soldier asks: “Sing, my birch, sing, my bride, about the living, about kind, about people in love - I will sleep sweetly to this song.”
It happened that in another carriage Semyon was asked to sing this song several times. Then they took with them in a cap not only silver, but also a bunch of paper money.
Upon arrival in Moscow, Leshka flatly refused to go to the artel. Wandering around the trains, as he said, is not dusty and money work. Only worries to slip away from the policeman. True, this was not always possible. Then he was sent to a nursing home, but he safely escaped from there the next day.
I visited the home for the disabled and Semyon. Well, he said, it’s both satisfying and comfortable, the care is good, the artists come, and everything seems to be as if you were sitting buried in a mass grave. Was in the artel. “They took it like a thing that they don’t know where to put it, and put it on the machine.” All day he sat and spanked - stamped some tins. The presses clapped to the right and left, dryly, annoyingly. An iron box rattled across the concrete floor, in which blanks were dragged and finished parts were dragged. The old man who was carrying this box approached Semyon several times and whispered, breathing in a shag fumes:
- You're here for a day, sit another, and ask for another job. At least for a break. You will earn there. And here the work is hard, "and a little income ... Don't be silent, but step on your throat, otherwise ... It would be best to take a liter and drink it with the master. He would then give you money work. The master is our own guy .
Semyon listened to the angry talk of the workshop, the old man's teachings, and thought that he was not needed here at all, and everything here was alien to him. Especially clearly he felt his restlessness during dinner.
The machines were silent. People were talking and laughing. They sat down on workbenches, on boxes, untied their bundles, rattling pots, rustling paper. It smelled of homemade pickles, cutlets with garlic. Early in the morning, these knots collected the hands of mothers or wives. The working day will end, and all these people will go home. They are expected there, they are expensive there. And he? Who cares about him? No one will even take you to the dining room, sit without lunch. And so Semyon wanted the warmth of home, someone's caress ... To go to his mother? “No, it's too late now. Get lost all the time."
- Comrade, - someone touched Seeds on the shoulder. - Why did you hug the stamp? Come eat with us.
Semyon shook his head.
- Well, as you wish, and then let's go. Yes, you do not scold.
It always happens again, and then you get used to it.
Semyon would have gone home at that very moment, but he did not know the way. Leshka brought him to work and in the evening he had to come for him. But he didn't come. Semyon was waiting for him for a whole hour. A replacement watchman escorted him home.
My hands ached out of habit, my back was breaking. Without washing, without supper, Semyon went to bed and fell into a heavy, uneasy sleep. Woke up Leshka. He came drunk, with a drunken company, with bottles of vodka. Semyon began to drink greedily...
Didn't go to work the next day. Again they walked on the wagons.
A long time ago, Semyon stopped thinking about his life, stopped being upset by his blindness, he lived as God puts on his soul. He sang badly: he tore his voice. Instead of songs, it turned out to be a continuous scream. He did not have the former confidence in his gait, pride in the manner of holding his head, only impudence remained. But the generous Muscovites gave it anyway, so the money from friends read.
After several scandals, Leshka's sister left for an apartment. A beautiful house with carved windows turned into a brothel.
Anna Filippovna has aged a lot in recent years. During the war, my husband died somewhere digging trenches. The announcement of her son's death finally knocked her off her feet, she thought she would not rise, but somehow everything worked out. After the war, her niece Shura came to her (she had just graduated from the institute, got married at that time), came and said: “What are you, aunt, you will live here as an orphan, sell the hut and let’s go to me.” Neighbors condemned Anna Filippovna, they say, it is most important for a person to have his own corner. Whatever happens, but your house and live neither cursed nor crumpled. And then you sell the hut, the money will fly by, and then who knows how it will turn out.
It may be that people were telling the truth, but only the niece got used to Anna Filippovna from an early age, treated her like her own mother, and sometimes lived with her for several years, because they did not get along with her stepmother. In a word, Anna Filippovna made up her mind. She sold the house and went to Shura, lived for four years and does not complain about anything. And she really liked Moscow.
Today she went to see the dacha, which the young people rented for the summer. She liked the dacha: a garden, a small kitchen garden.
Thinking about the need to fix the boys' old shirts and trousers for the village today, she heard a song. In some ways she was familiar to her, but in what, she did not understand. Then I realized - the voice! Understood and shuddered, turned pale.
For a long time I did not dare to look in that direction, I was afraid that the painfully familiar voice would not disappear. And yet I looked. I looked... Senka!
The mother, as if blind, stretched out her hands and went to meet her son. Here she is next to him, put her hands on his shoulders. And Senkina's shoulders, with pointed bumps. I wanted to call my son by name and could not - there was no air in my chest and I did not have enough strength to breathe.
Blind silenced. He felt the woman's hands and became alert.
The passengers saw how the beggar turned pale, how he wanted to say something and could not - he suffocated. Passengers saw how the blind man put his hand on the woman's hair and immediately pulled her back.
"Senya," the woman said softly and weakly.
The passengers stood up and waited in trepidation for his answer.
The blind man at first only moved his lips, and then said muffledly:
- Citizen, you are mistaken. My name is Ivan.
- How! - exclaimed the mother. - Senya, what are you ?! The blind man pushed her away and with a quick, uneven gait
went on and did not sing anymore.
Passengers saw how the woman looked after the beggar and whispered: "He, he." There were no tears in her eyes, only pleading and suffering. Then they disappeared, and the anger remained. The terrible anger of an offended mother...
She lay in a heavy faint on the couch. An elderly man, probably a doctor, was leaning over her. Passengers in a whisper asked each other to disperse, to give access to fresh air, but did not disperse.
“Maybe I made a mistake?” someone asked hesitantly.
“Mother will not be mistaken,” answered the gray-haired woman,
So why didn't he confess?
- How can you admit it?
- Silly...
A few minutes later Semyon came in and asked:
- Where is my mother?
“You no longer have a mother,” the doctor replied.
The wheels were rattling. For a moment, Semyon, as if he had regained his sight, saw people, was frightened of them and began to back away. The cap fell out of his hands; crumbled, small things rolled on the floor, coldly and worthlessly ringing ...

German Sadulaev

VICTORY DAY

Old people sleep little. In youth, time seems to be an unchangeable ruble, the time of an elderly person is a copper trifle. Wrinkled hands are carefully stacked minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day: how much is left? Sorry every night.

He woke up at half past six. There was no need to get up so early. Even if he had not gotten out of his bed at all, and sooner or later it had to happen, no one would have noticed this. He could not get up at all. Especially so early. In recent years, he increasingly wanted not to wake up one day. But not today. Today was a special day.

Aleksey Pavlovich Rodin got up from the old creaking bed in a one-room apartment on the street ... in old Tallinn, went to the toilet, eased the bladder. In the bathroom, he began to put himself in order. He washed, brushed his teeth, and spent a long time scraping the stubble from his chin and cheeks with a battered razor. Then he washed his face again, rinsing off the remaining soap suds, and refreshed his face with aftershave lotion.

Going into the room, Rodin stood in front of a wardrobe with a cracked mirror. The mirror reflected his battered, scarred body, clad in faded shorts and a tank top. Rodin opened the closet door and changed the linen. For a couple of minutes he looked at his ceremonial tunic with order medals. Then he took out a shirt that had been ironed the day before and put on his uniform.

Immediately, as if twenty years had fallen off my shoulders. In the dim light of a chandelier dimmed from time, the captain's epaulettes burned brightly.

Already at eight o'clock Rodin met at the front of his house with another veteran, Vakha Sultanovich Aslanov. Together with Vakha, they went through half the war, in one reconnaissance company of the First Belorussian Front. By 1944, Vakha was already a senior sergeant, he had a medal "For Courage". When the news came about the eviction of the Chechens, Vakha was in the hospital after being wounded. Immediately from the hospital he was transferred to the penal battalion. Without guilt, on a national basis. Rodin, then a senior lieutenant, went to the authorities, asked to return Vakha. The intercession of the commander did not help. Vakha ended the war in a penal battalion and immediately after demobilization was sent to a settlement in Kazakhstan.

Rodin was demobilized in 1946, with the rank of captain, and was assigned to serve in Tallinn as an instructor in the city party committee.

Then there was only one "n" in the name of this city, but my computer has a new spelling system, I will write Tallinn with two "l" and two "n" so that the text editor does not swear and underline this word with a red wavy line .

After the rehabilitation of the Chechens in 1957, Rodin found his front-line comrade. He made inquiries, taking advantage of his official position - by this time Rodin was already the head of the department. Rodin even managed to do more than just find Vakha, he secured his call to Tallinn, found him a job, helped him with an apartment and a residence permit. Waha has arrived. Rodin, starting his troubles, was afraid that Vakha would not want to leave his native land. He made sure that Vakha could transport his family.

But Vakha came alone. He had no one to carry. The wife and child died during the eviction. They fell ill with typhus in a freight car and died suddenly. Parents died in Kazakhstan. Vakha has no close relatives left. This is probably why it was easy for him to leave Chechnya.

Then there was… life. Life? .. probably, then there was a whole life. She had good and bad. Indeed, a lifetime. After all, sixty years have passed. Sixty years have passed since the end of that war.

Yes, it was a special day. Sixtieth anniversary of the victory.

Sixty years is the whole life. Even more. For those who did not return from the war, who remained twenty years old, these are three lives. It seemed to his homeland that he was living these lives for those who did not return. No, this is not just a metaphor. Sometimes he thought: for these twenty years I have been living for Sergeant Savelyev, who was blown up by a mine. For the next twenty years, I will live for Private Talgatov, who died in the first battle. Then Rodin thought: no, I won’t be able to do much. Let ten years be better. After all, living to thirty is not so bad. Then I will have time to live for three more of my dead fighters.

Yes, sixty years is a long time! A lifetime, or six additions to the ragged lives of dead soldiers.

And yet it is ... if not less, then probably as much as four years of war.

I don't know how to explain it, others before me have explained it much better. A person lives four years in a war, or half a year in an Arctic wintering, or a year in a Buddhist monastery, then he lives for a long time, a whole life, but that period of time remains the longest, most important for him. Maybe because of the emotional tension, because of the simplicity and brightness of sensations, maybe it's called something else. Maybe our life is measured not by time, but by the movement of the heart.

He will always remember, he will compare his present with that time, which will never turn into the past for him. And the comrades who were next to him then will remain the closest, the most faithful.

And not because good people will never meet again. It’s just that those others… they won’t understand much, no matter how you explain it. And with your own, with them you can even just be silent.

As with Waha. Sometimes Rodin and Vakha drank together, sometimes they argued and even quarreled, sometimes they simply remained silent. Life has been different...

Rodin married and lived in marriage for twelve years. His wife got a divorce and went to Sverdlovsk, to her parents. Rodin had no children. But Vakha probably had many children. He didn't even know how much. But Vakha did not marry. Vakha was still that reveler.

Neither one nor the other made a great career. But in Soviet times, respected people left for a decent pension. They stayed in Tallinn. Where were they to go?

Then everything began to change.

Rodin didn't want to think about it.

Everything just changed. And he ended up in a foreign country, where it was forbidden to wear Soviet orders and medals, where they, who had nourished the land with their blood from Brest to Moscow and back to Berlin, were called invaders.

They were not occupiers. Better than many others, Rodin knew about everything wrong that was happening in that country that had sunk into oblivion. But then, those four years… no, they were not occupiers. Rodin did not understand this anger of prosperous Estonians, who, even under Soviet rule, lived better than Russian people somewhere in the Urals.

After all, even Vakha, Rodin was ready that after the eviction, after that monstrous injustice, the tragedy of his people, Vakha would begin to hate the Soviet Union and especially the Russians. But it turned out that this was not the case. Waha has seen too much. In the penal battalion there are Russian officers who heroically escaped from captivity and for this they were demoted to ordinary, overcrowded zones and prisons. Once Rodin directly asked if Vakha did not blame the Russians for what had happened.

Vakha said that the Russians suffered from all this more than other peoples. And Stalin was generally a Georgian, although this is not important.

And Vakha also said that together, together, they not only sat in the zones. Together they defeated the Nazis, sent a man into space, built socialism in a poor and devastated country. All this was done together, and all this - and not just the camps - was called: the Soviet Union.

And today they put on front-line orders and medals. Today was their day. They even went to a bar and took a hundred grams of front-line soldiers, yes. And there, in the bar, young men in fashionable military with stripes stylized as "SS" symbols called them Russian pigs, old drunkards and tore off their awards. They also called Wakha a Russian pig. The knife, it was just lying on the counter, probably the bartender was chopping ice with it.

Vakha with an accurate blow put him between the ribs of a young Estonian.

There was also a telephone on the counter, and Rodin threw its cord like a noose around the neck of another SS man. There is no longer that strength in the hands, but it is not needed, every movement of the old scout has been worked out to automatism. The frail boy groaned and fell to the floor.

They returned to the present time. They were again Soviet intelligence officers, and there were enemies around. And everything was right and simple.

For another five minutes they were young.

While they were kicked to death on the wooden floor.

And I don't feel sorry for them at all. I just don't dare to humiliate them with my pity.

In Krupin AND YOU SMILE!

On Sunday, some very important issue was to be decided at a meeting of our housing cooperative. They even collected signatures so that there would be a turnout. But I couldn’t go - I couldn’t take the children anywhere, and my wife was on a business trip.

I went for a walk with them. Although it was winter, it was melting, and we began to sculpt a snowman, but it was not a woman who came out, but a snowman with a beard, that is, dad. The children demanded to sculpt their mother, then themselves, then relatives went further away.

Next to us was a wire mesh fence for hockey, but there was no ice in it, and the teenagers played football. And they drove very passionately. So we were constantly distracted from our sculptures. Teenagers had a saying: "And you smile!" She stuck to them all. Either they took it from which movie, or they came up with it themselves. The first time she flashed when one of the teenagers hit a wet ball in the face. "It hurts!" he shouted. "And you smile!" - answered him under friendly laughter. The teenager broke out, but pulled back - the game, who to be offended by, but I noticed that he began to play angrier and more reserved. He lay in wait for the ball and hit, sometimes not passing his own, but slamming into opponents.

Their game was cruel: the boys had seen enough TV. When someone was shoved off, pressed to the wire, pushed away, they shouted victoriously: "Power hold!"

My children quit sculpting and watched. The guys have a new passing fun - throwing snowballs. Moreover, they did not immediately begin to aim at each other, first they aimed at the ball, then at the leg at the moment of impact, and soon, as they shouted, “a power struggle all over the field” began. It seemed to me that they were fighting - the clashes, blows, snowballs were thrown with all their might at any place of the body. Moreover, the teenagers rejoiced when they saw that the opponent got hit, and it hurt. "And you smile!" they shouted at him. And he smiled and answered the same. It was not a fight, because she was hiding behind the game, sports terms, the score. But what was it?

Here, from the meeting of the housing cooperative, people reached out. The teenagers were taken to dinner by their parents. The chairman of the housing cooperative stopped and scolded me for my absence from the meeting.

You can't stand aside. We discussed the issue of teenagers. You see, there are so many cases of teenage cruelty. We need to distract, we need to develop sports. We decided to make another hockey field.

"And you smile!" I suddenly heard the cry of my children. They shot with snowballs molded from the snow and dad, and mom, and themselves, and all relatives.

Ray Bradbury "Thunder Came"

E. Karpov My name is Ivan
At the very end of the war, the Germans set fire to a tank in which Semyon Avdeev was a turret gunner. For two days, blind, burned, with a broken leg, Semyon crawled between some ruins. It seemed to him that the blast wave threw him out of the tank into a deep hole. For two days, step by step, half a step, a centimeter an hour, he got out of this smoky pit to the sun, into the fresh wind, dragging his broken leg, often losing consciousness. On the third day, sappers found him barely alive on the ruins of an ancient castle. And for a long time, the surprised sappers wondered how a wounded tanker could have ended up on this ruin that no one needed ... In the hospital, Semyon's leg was taken away from the knee and then they took him for a long time to famous professors so that they would restore his sight. But nothing came of it... While Semyon was surrounded by comrades, cripples like him, while a smart, kind doctor was by his side, while nurses cared for him, he somehow forgot about his injury, lived, how everyone lives. For laughter, for a joke, I forgot grief. But when Semyon left the hospital on the city street, not for a walk, but completely, into life, he suddenly felt the whole world completely different from the one that surrounded him yesterday, the day before yesterday and all his past life. Although Semyon had been told a few weeks ago that his sight would not return, he still harbored hope in his heart. And now everything has collapsed. It seemed to Semyon that he again found himself in that black hole into which the blast wave had thrown him. Only then did he passionately want to get out into the fresh wind, to the sun, he believed that he would get out, but now there was no such confidence. Anxiety crept into my heart. The city was incredibly noisy, and the sounds were somehow elastic, and it seemed to him that if he took even one step forward, these elastic sounds would throw him back, hurt him on the stones. Behind the hospital. Together with everyone, Semyon scolded him for his boredom, did not look forward to how to escape from him, and now he suddenly became so expensive, so necessary. But you will not return there, even though it is still very close. We must move forward, but fearfully. Afraid of the ebullient cramped city, but most of all afraid of himself: He brought Seeds Leshka Kupriyanov out of his stupor. Oh, and the weather! Now if only to take a walk with the girl! Yes, in the field, yes, pick flowers, but would run. I love to fool around. Let's go! What are you up to? They went. Semyon heard how the prosthesis creaked and clapped, how hard, with a whistle, Leshka breathed. These were the only familiar, close sounds, and the clang of trams, the screams of cars, children's laughter seemed alien, cold. They parted before him, ran around. The stones of the pavement, some columns got underfoot, hindered walking. Semyon knew Leshka for about a year. Small in stature, he often served as a crutch for him. It used to be that Semyon was lying on a bunk and shouting: “Nanny, give me a crutch,” and Lyoshka would run up and squeak, fooling around: I’m here, count. Give me your whitest pen. Lay it, most illustrious one, on my unworthy shoulder. So they walked side by side. By touch, Semyon knew Leshkino's round, armless shoulder and faceted, cropped head well. And now he put his hand on Leshka's shoulder and his soul immediately became calmer. All night they sat first in the dining room, and then in the restaurant at the station. When they went to the dining room, Leshka said that they would drink a hundred grams, have a good dinner and leave with the night train. They drank as agreed. Leshka offered to repeat. Semyon did not refuse, although he rarely drank. Vodka went surprisingly easy today.
The hop was pleasant, did not stupefy the head, but awakened good thoughts in it. True, it was impossible to focus on them. They were nimble and slippery like fish, and like fish they slipped out and disappeared into the dark distance. This made my heart sad, but the longing did not linger for a long time. It was replaced by memories or naive but pleasant fantasies. It seemed to Semyon that one morning he would wake up and see the sun, grass, a ladybug. And then suddenly a girl appeared. He clearly saw the color of her eyes, her hair, felt her tender cheeks. This girl fell in love with him, the blind man. They talked a lot about such people in the ward and even read a book aloud. Leshka did not have a right arm and three ribs. The war, as he said with a laugh, had cut him to pieces. In addition, he was wounded in the neck. After the throat operation, he spoke intermittently, with a hiss, but Semyon got used to these sounds, little like human ones. They annoyed him less than the accordion waltzers, than the coquettish cooing of the woman at the next table. From the very beginning, as soon as wine and snacks were brought to the table, Lyoshka chatted merrily, laughed contentedly: Eh, Senka, I love nothing in the world as much as a well-cleaned table! I love to have fun, especially to eat! Before the war, we used to go to Medvezhye Ozera in the summer with the whole factory. Brass band and buffets! And I'm with an accordion. Under every bush there is a company, and in every company I, like Sadko, are a welcome guest. “Spread it out, Alexei Svet-Nikolaevich.” And why not stretch it if they ask and the wine is already being poured. And some blue-eyed ham on a fork brings ham ... They drank, ate, pulled, savoring, cold thick beer. Leshka continued to enthusiastically talk about his suburbs. His sister lives there in her own house. She works as a technician at a chemical plant. The sister, as Leshka assured, would definitely fall in love with Semyon. They will get married. Then they will have children. Children will have as many toys as they want and what they want. Semyon will make them himself in the artel where they will work. Soon it became difficult for Leshka to speak: he was tired, and it seemed that he had stopped believing in what he was talking about. They were silent more, they drank more ... Semyon remembers how Lyoshka wheezed: "We are lost people, it would be better if they killed us completely." He remembers how the head became heavier, how dark it became, the bright visions disappeared. Cheerful voices and music finally brought him out of himself. I wanted to beat everyone, smash, Leshka hissed: Do not go home. Who needs you there? Home? Where is the house? Long, terribly long ago, maybe a hundred years ago, he had a house. And there was a garden, and a birdhouse on a birch, and rabbits. Small, with red eyes, they jumped trustingly towards him, sniffing at his boots, moving their pink nostrils funny. Mother ... Semyon was called an "anarchist" because at school, although he studied well, he desperately hooligans, smoked, because he and his lads arranged merciless raids on gardens and orchards. And she, mother, never scolded him. The father mercilessly flogged, and the mother only timidly asked not to be a hooligan. She herself gave money for cigarettes and in every possible way hid Semyonov's tricks from her father. Semyon loved his mother and helped her in everything: he chopped wood, carried water, cleaned the barn. The neighbors envied Anna Filippovna, looking at how cleverly her son managed the housework, They would be the breadwinner, and the seventeenth water would wash away the boyish foolishness. The drunk Semyon remembered this word "breadwinner" and repeated to himself, gritted his teeth so as not to burst into tears. What is he now the breadwinner? Collar on mother's neck. The comrades saw how Semyon's tank burned, but no one saw how Semyon got out of it. The mother sent a notice that her son had died. And now Semyon thought, should she be reminded of her worthless life? Is it worth reopening her tired, broken heart with new pain? An intoxicated woman was laughing nearby. Leshka kissed her with wet lips and hissed something incomprehensible. Dishes rattled, the table turned over, and the earth turned over.
We woke up in a woodshed at the restaurant. Someone caring spread straw for them, gave them two old blankets. All the money was drunk, the demands for tickets were lost, and it was a six-day drive to Moscow. To go to the hospital, to say that they were robbed, did not have enough conscience. Lyoshka offered to go without tickets, in the position of beggars. Semyon was even afraid to think about it. He suffered for a long time, but there was nothing to be done. You have to go, you have to eat. Semyon agreed to walk through the cars, but he would not say anything, he would pretend to be dumb.
They entered the wagon. Lyoshka briskly began his speech in his hoarse voice: Brothers and sisters, help the unfortunate cripples... Semyon walked bent over, as if through a cramped black dungeon. It seemed to him that sharp stones hung over his head. A rumble of voices was heard from afar, but as soon as he and Leshka approached, this rumble disappeared, and Semyon heard only Leshka and the clinking of coins in the cap. Semyon was shivering from this tinkling. He lowered his head, hiding his eyes, forgetting that they were blind, unable to see either reproach, or anger, or regret. The farther they went, the more unbearable the crying voice of Leshka became to Semyon. It was stuffy in the carriages. There was absolutely nothing left to breathe, when suddenly a fragrant, meadow wind blew in the face from the open window, and Semyon was frightened of it, recoiled, hitting his head painfully on the shelf. We walked the whole train, collected more than two hundred rubles, and got off at the station for lunch. Leshka was satisfied with the first success, boastfully spoke about his happy "planid". Semyon wanted to cut Leshka off, to hit
· him, but even more I wanted to get drunk as soon as possible, to get rid of myself. They drank cognac in three stars, ate crabs, cakes, since there was nothing else in the buffet. Having drunk, Leshka found friends in the neighborhood, danced with them to the accordion, bawled songs. Semyon cried at first, then somehow forgot himself, began to stomp, and then sing along, clap his hands, and finally sang: But we don’t sow, but we don’t plow, And the ace, the eight and the jack, And from prison with a handkerchief we wave, Four on the side and yours are gone ..., ... They again were left without a penny of money at a strange distant station. Friends traveled to Moscow for a whole month. Lyoshka got used to begging so much that sometimes he even buffooned, singing vulgar jokes. Semyon no longer felt remorse. He reasoned simply: do you need money to get to Moscow, not to steal? And what they drink is temporary. He will come to Moscow, get a job in an artel and take his mother to him, be sure to take him and maybe even get married. And well, happiness falls to other cripples, it will fall to him too ... Semyon sang front-line songs. He held himself confidently, proudly raising his head with dead eyes, shaking his long, thick hair in time with the song. And it turned out that he did not ask for alms, but condescendingly takes the reward due to him. His voice was good, the songs came out sincere, the passengers generously served the blind singer. The passengers especially liked the song, which told how a soldier was dying quietly in a green meadow, an old birch leaned over him. She extended her hands to the soldier, as if she were her own mother. The fighter tells the birch tree that his mother and girlfriend are waiting for him in a distant village, but he will not come to them, because he is forever betrothed to the white birch tree, and that she is now his “bride and mother”. In conclusion, the soldier asks: “Sing, my birch, sing, my bride, about the living, about kind, about people in love, I will sleep sweetly to this song.” It happened that in another carriage Semyon was asked to sing this song several times. Then they took with them in a cap not only silver, but also a bunch of paper money. Upon arrival in Moscow, Leshka flatly refused to go to the artel. Wander on the trains
he said, the work is not dusty and money. Only worries to slip away from the policeman. True, this is not always successful. Then he was sent to a nursing home, but he safely escaped from there the next day. I visited the home for the disabled and Semyon. Well, he said, it’s both satisfying and comfortable, the care is good, the artists come, and everything seems as if you are sitting buried in a mass grave. Was in the artel. “They took it like a thing that they don’t know where to put it, and put it on the machine.” He sat all day and spanked and stamped some tins. The presses clapped to the right and left, dryly, annoyingly. An iron box rattled across the concrete floor, in which blanks were dragged and finished parts were dragged. The old man who was carrying this box approached Semyon several times and whispered, breathing in a shag fumes: You're here for a day, sit another, and ask for another job. At least for a break. You will earn there. And here the work is hard, "and a little income ... Don't be silent, but step on your throat, otherwise ... It would be best to take a liter and drink it with the master. He would then give you money work. The master is our own guy Semyon listened to the angry talk of the workshop, the old man's teachings, and thought that he was not needed here at all, and everything here was alien to him. He felt his restlessness especially clearly during dinner. on workbenches, on boxes, untied their bundles, rattling pans, rustling paper. There was a smell of homemade pickles, cutlets with garlic. Early in the morning, these bundles collected the hands of mothers or wives. The working day will end, and all these people will go home. They are expected there "They're expensive there. And he? Who cares about him? No one will even take you to the dining room, sit without lunch. And so Semyon wanted home warmth, someone's caress ... Go to his mother? "No, now it's too late. Go to hell." Comrade, someone touched Semyon's shoulder. What are you saying? hugged? Come eat with us. Semyon shook his head. Well, whatever you want, let's go. Yes, you do not scold. It always happens again, and then you get used to it. Semyon would have gone home at that very moment, but he did not know the way. Leshka brought him to work and in the evening he had to come for him. But he didn't come. Semyon was waiting for him for a whole hour. A replacement watchman escorted him home. My hands ached out of habit, my back was breaking. Without washing, without supper, Semyon went to bed and fell into a heavy, uneasy sleep. Woke up Leshka. He came drunk, with a drunken company, with bottles of vodka. Semyon began to drink greedily... The next day he did not go to work. Again they walked around the wagons. A long time ago, Semyon stopped thinking about his life, stopped being upset by his blindness, he lived as God puts on his soul. He sang badly: he tore his voice. Instead of songs, it turned out to be a continuous scream. He did not have the former confidence in his gait, pride in the manner of holding his head, only impudence remained. But the generous Muscovites gave it anyway, so the money from friends read. After several scandals, Leshka's sister left for an apartment. A beautiful house with carved windows turned into a brothel. Anna Filippovna has aged a lot in recent years. During the war, my husband died somewhere digging trenches. The announcement of the death of her son finally knocked her off her feet, I thought she would not rise, but somehow everything worked out. After the war, her niece Shura came to her (she had just graduated from the institute, got married at that time), came and said: “What are you, aunt, you will live here as an orphan, sell the hut and let’s go to me.” Neighbors condemned Anna Filippovna, they say, it is most important for a person to have his own corner. Whatever happens, but your house and live neither cursed nor crumpled. And then you sell the hut, the money will fly by, and then who knows how it will turn out.
It may be that people were telling the truth, but only the niece got used to Anna Filippovna from an early age, treated her like her own mother, and sometimes lived with her for several years, because they did not get along with her stepmother. In a word, Anna Filippovna made up her mind. She sold the house and went to Shura, lived for four years and does not complain about anything. And she really liked Moscow. Today she went to see the dacha, which the young people rented for the summer. She liked the dacha: a garden, a small kitchen garden. Thinking about the need to fix the boys' old shirts and trousers for the village today, she heard a song. In some ways she was familiar to her, but in what, she did not understand. Then I realized the voice! Understood and shuddered, turned pale. For a long time I did not dare to look in that direction, I was afraid that the painfully familiar voice would not disappear. And yet I looked. I looked... Senka! The mother, as if blind, stretched out her hands and went to meet her son. Here she is next to him, put her hands on his shoulders. And Senkina's shoulders, with pointed bumps. I wanted to call my son by name and could not breathe, there was no air in my chest and I did not have enough strength to breathe. Blind silenced. He felt the woman's hands and pricked up. The passengers saw how the beggar turned pale, how he wanted to say something and could not suffocate. Passengers saw how the blind man put his hand on the woman's hair and immediately pulled her back. Senya, quietly, the woman said weakly. The passengers stood up and waited in trepidation for his answer. The blind man at first only moved his lips, and then said muffledly: Citizen, you are mistaken. My name is Ivan. How! exclaimed the mother. Senya, what are you?! The blind man pushed her aside and walked on with a quick, uneven gait and no longer sang. Passengers saw how the woman looked after the beggar and whispered: "He, he." There were no tears in her eyes, only pleading and suffering. Then they disappeared, and anger remained. The terrible anger of an offended mother... She lay in a heavy faint on the couch. An elderly man, probably a doctor, was leaning over her. Passengers in a whisper asked each other to disperse, to give access to fresh air, but did not disperse. Maybe wrong? someone asked hesitantly. Mother will not be mistaken, answered the gray-haired woman, So why did he not confess? How can you admit this? Stupid... A few minutes later Semyon came in and asked: Where is my mother? You no longer have a mother, the doctor replied. The wheels were rattling. For a moment, Semyon, as if he had regained his sight, saw people, was frightened of them and began to back away. The cap fell out of his hands; crumbled, small things rolled on the floor, coldly and worthlessly ringing ...

EVGENY VASILIEVICH KARPOV

At the end of 1967, Wolf Messing, after completing his performances in Stavropol, visited Yevgeny Karpov. When Karpov's mother entered from the street, Messing suddenly became agitated, got up from the table and began to repeat: “Oh, the long-liver has come! The long-liver has come!” and indeed: Baba Zhenya lived for several more decades, happily telling everyone about the words of the telepathic magician, and died at a ripe old age.

Now it becomes obvious that Messing could make the same prediction to her son. But Karpov at that moment was 48 years old (that is, he was almost half his age today), and Volf Grigorievich did not look into such a distant future ...

A widely known writer in the Stavropol Territory was born on Monday, October 6, 1919, on the Esaulovka farm in the Rossoshansky district of the Voronezh region. His father, Vasily Maksimovich Karpov, a hereditary railway worker, commander of a red armored train, was shot by soldiers of General Mamontov at the station of the Talovaya South-Eastern Railway on his son's birthday.

So, starting from the first moments, the whole future life of E.V. Karpov will be inextricably linked with the fate and history of the country.

During the days of terror, he was in the camp: he was building a railway near Murmansk along with other prisoners on the orders of L.P. Beria.

In the days of the war - on the front line: a topographer at the headquarters battery on the Stalingrad front.

After the war - on the construction of the Volga giant. XXII Party Congress: fitter, dispatcher, employee of a large-circulation newspaper.

It was here, among the installers and builders of the hydroelectric power station, that Karpov the writer was truly born, although before that he had been in his life the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky, classes in the seminar of Konstantin Paustovsky. The living classic favored the former front-line soldier. After defending his diploma, K. Paustovsky said: “Here, meet me. Maybe you will like something, ”the Smena magazine thrust into his hands. “I began to flip through,” recalls Karpov, “my dear mother! My story "Pearl". For the first time I saw my words printed, and even in the capital's magazine.

In 1959, the Stalingrad book publishing house published the first book of Karpov's stories, My Relatives.

In 1960, the Leningrad magazine "Neva" in No. 4 published his story "Shifted Shores", which suddenly became the main publication of the year. Reviews in the magazines "Don", "October", "Znamya", "In the World of Books" are written by well-known literary critics in the country. The story is published as a separate book in the Moscow publishing house "Soviet Russia". Reprinted in half a million copies in Roman-gazeta. Translated into Czech, Polish, French and Chinese. A film was made based on it, in which Ivan Lapikov first appeared on the screen.

In 1961, Karpov was accepted into the Writers' Union of the USSR. The magazine "Neva" and the publishing house "Soviet Russia" offer him to conclude contracts for a new story.

What is the reason for the official recognition and incredible success of "Shifted Shores"? I can assume the following ... At that time, the country was reading the books of V. Aksenov and A. Gladilin, whose heroes, city slickers with a touch of healthy cynicism, did not like the party and literary "generals" at all. And now a story appears, in the center of which the working youth with enthusiasm or, as the author himself writes, "coordinatedly and energetically" builds a hydroelectric power station. The ruling power wanted the people to read just such books, and seized on it like a lifesaver. At the time, it looked, if not funny, then at least naive. Where was she to keep up with the Star Ticket or the Chronicle of the Times of Viktor Podgursky. But what a metamorphosis trick: a little more than half a century has passed and the once fashionable heroes of Aksenov and Gladilin have shriveled and faded away in our minds, and Karpov’s heroes, the creators of romance, have today acquired even greater significance, charm and necessity.

Before moving to Stavropol, E. Karpov publishes two more stories: "Blue Winds" (1963) in the publishing house "Soviet Russia" and "Don't Be Born Happy" (1965) in the "Soviet Writer". They are written about in the magazines Ogonyok, Oktyabr, Novy Mir, Zvezda, and Literaturnaya Gazeta.

Since 1967, Karpov has been in Stavropol. From now on, the history of the Stavropol Territory, its people become the main theme of his work for the writer. "Chogray Dawns" (1967) - the first book published in the Stavropol Territory by E. Karpov. For two years he was the executive secretary of the Stavropol Writers' Organization.

His 50th anniversary was marked in the region not only by articles by A. Popovsky and V. Belousov in the press, but also by the publication of "The Chosen One" by the Stavropol book publishing house, the premiere of the play "Don't Be Born Happy" on the stage of the Drama Theater. Lermontov, as well as conferring the title of Honored Worker of Culture of the RSFSR to the hero of the day.

In 1975, "Profizdat" publishes a documentary story by E. Karpov "High Mountains" - about the builders of the Great Stavropol Canal. The regional publishing house publishes the collection “Your Brother”: it contains a scattering of poetically subtle, deep and tragic stories - “Five poplars”, “Brut”, “My name is Ivan”, “Forgive me, Motya”.

In 1980, the Sovremennik publishing house published the story “The Sultry Field” - a large-scale biography of the first secretary of the Izobilnensky district party committee G.K. Gorlov, where the fate of the country is explored through the fate of the hero.

The following year, a small but unique book "On the Seven Hills" ("Soviet Russia") is published - essays about Stavropol and its eminent inhabitants known throughout the Soviet Union. This book is like an old wine: its price and value grows with each passing year.

A quarter of a century later, Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Stavropol State University Lyudmila Petrovna Egorova, in the article “Literary Stavropoliana”, published in the almanac “Literary Stavropol”, focused on the essays “On the Seven Hills”, explaining that Karpov managed to issue a “new business card ”to industrial Stavropol: “Of the Stavropol writers, E. Karpov, perhaps, was the first to derive a generalized human component of the city: “The city is the concentrated energy of the human genius, its unceasing development, intense search.” Therefore, human characteristics are necessarily present in the generalized definitions of the City: “Courage, courage, diligence, the breadth of nature, its nobility - this is Stavropol, the city on seven hills, on seven winds. And they are all passing."

In the early 90s, after releasing the novel Buruny (1989), E. Karpov moved to Moscow. In vain he does not take into account the bitter experience of Stavropol friends-writers who moved to Moscow earlier - Andrei Gubin and Vladimir Gneushev. The latter publicly regretted their rash move:

We must live in the homeland, where they love,
Where envy and lies are dead.
In a foreign land, where strangers are all over,
Milk, my friend Andryusha Gubin,
You can't even drink from a she-wolf.

In autumn 1999 Karpov visits Stavropol for the last time. Journalist Gennady Khasminsky, after meeting with him, publishes the material “They do not renounce confession” in the newspaper Stavropol Gubernskiye Vedomosti on the occasion of the writer’s 80th birthday:

“I have the impression that I came to my home,” said Evgeny Vasilyevich. - And as for Stavropol, it has become much cleaner and more comfortable ... Many beautiful buildings have appeared. I walked along the familiar streets, remembered my friends, visited the studio of the artist Zhenya Bitsenko, met with the writer Vadim Chernov. Vladyka Gideon received me, gave me his blessing for the book "The Link of Times" - about the revival of Orthodoxy, which I am currently working on.

I don't think I've lived my life in vain. Any life is never wasted, except perhaps a criminal one. But a simple human life ... It is already good because I saw the sun, met sunsets and sunrises, saw the steppe. I love the steppe more than the sea, because I am a steppe dweller. And it’s not in vain that my life has been lived, and because I have children, grandchildren, and many friends.”

Currently, E. Karpov lives in Kyiv, where he has a daughter, Alena, and a son, Leo, who work in Ukrainian cinema. Published in the Russian-language magazine "Rainbow". The Kyiv publishing houses published several voluminous volumes of the writer: "New Heaven" (2004), "Thy will be done" (2006), "Everything was as it was" (2008).

Fortunately, his most important book, Gog and Magog: Reporting Chronicle, 1915-1991. published in Stavropol in the magazine "Southern Star" in 2005. And here we all must express our gratitude to the publisher Viktor Kustov. He makes vigorous efforts to keep the works of E. Karpov in the treasury of classical Russian literature.

Vadim Chernov, who for a long time valued only his own work, in his declining years honored Karpov with an unprecedented characterization: “His authority overshadowed mine and even Chernoy, Usov, Melibeev and other old people combined. Karpov is a bright star among writers not only in the North Caucasus.”

Even today, Evgeny Vasilievich begins his day at the computer, working on the story "Baba Nastusya" - the story of the appearance in the Karpovs' house of the beautifully published folio of the "Bible". This book, in a homemade oilcloth binding with a large yellow metal cross, is familiar to many Stavropol writers.

A priest from the nearby temple of Prince Vladimir often visits Karpov. They have long, slow conversations.

And only if the conversation concerns Stavropol, Karpov cannot hold back his tears ...

Nikolai Sakhvadze

// Stavropol chronograph for 2014. - Stavropol, 2014. - S. 231-236.

If you ask a person who is only superficially familiar with the lyrics of A. Akhmatova, what her poems are written about, he, of course, will say: "about love." Indeed, it was A. Akhmatova's poems dedicated to love that became the most popular in her work. However, her lyrics are strangely laconic, in which passion resembles the silence of a pre-storm and usually expresses itself in two or three words.

A.Akhmatova's poetry A.Kollontai called "the book of the female soul", thus emphasizing that her poems reflected all the innermost subtleties and nuances of a woman's love experiences.

In the poems "Evening", "Rosary", "White Flock" a lot of space is given to the image of the direct love relationship between a man and a woman. All transitions of feeling - from tender love to fiery, scorching passion can be found in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova.

It is for this reason that the love lyrics of A. Akhmatova over time win more and more reader circles and generations.

There is a center in her poetry, which, as it were, brings the rest of the world of her poetry to itself, turns out to be her main idea. This is Love. A new look at it allows us to talk about the poetry of A. Akhmatova as a new phenomenon in the development of Russian lyrics of the twentieth century. In her poetry there is both "deity" and "inspiration". Keeping the high value of the idea of ​​love, Akhmatova returns her living real 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 the lyrics of Anna Akhmatova. It was she who made her see the world in a different way, not symbolists and acmeists, but realistically.

That fifth season

Just praise him.

Breathe the last freedom

Because it is love.

In this poem, "love" is called 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 senses are sharpened and exposed. And the unusualness of the ordinary is revealed. The world opens up in an additional reality, things return to their original meaning. Only a woman with her ability not only to feel, but also to foresee, not just to think, but also to feel, not only to suffer herself, but also to embody the suffering of millions in her own torments and experiences, could create such a unique lyric. And this is the great mystery of Anna Akhmatova's creativity. But love in Akhmatova's poems is by no means only love - happiness, especially well-being. Often this is suffering, a kind of anti-love and torture, a painful breakdown of the soul. She almost does not appear in a calm stay, she is always in motion, development, transitions:

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 joy and peace.

Can cry so sweetly

In the prayer of a longing violin,

And it's scary to guess

In an unfamiliar smile.

Akhmatova's poems very often carry a special element of love-pity. so in Russian folklore for Akhmatova, the synonym for the word “love” is often “pity”. Love - passion turns into love - pity, or even it is opposed or displaced by it.

And a way out is opened from the world of chamber, closed egoistic love - passion, love - fun to a truly "great earthly love" for people and for people.

First of all, a few words should be said about the periodization of A. Akhmatova's lyrics. In her work, early lyrics stand out (collections: “Evening”, “Rosary”, White Flock), lyrics of the 20s-30s (“Anno Domini”, “Reed”) and late lyrics (mature lyrics) by Akhmatova.

We will consider the concept sphere of the word "love" primarily in the context of the writer's work, and then - in the immediate verbal environment. Comparing the compatibility features (first of all, lexical and semasiological) of this word with other words, he will analyze the increment of the meaning and actualization of the hyposeme and additional semes of the given word.

A few words must be said about the concept of "frame fields". It seems appropriate in this work to indirectly refer to this term, which implies all that noospheric amount of knowledge on which the poet relies not only consciously, but also intuitively in a state of inspiration. In such a plan, the "frame fields" available in the poet's mind allow him to unfold the associative links of the word, which also contributes to the allocation of additional semes in his LSV.

First, let's define the principle of delimitation of semantic variants of the word "love" in Akhmatova's early poetry. This will be the principle of dividing the meaningful word "feelings" - concepts into different components. So, in one case, love for Akhmatova is love - passion, "eros" in its purest form, love directed only at itself, and almost always - unhappy. In another case, we have before us love - "philia", love - friendship, tender and romantic, in the third - this is love - "storge", tenderness, already striving for family comfort, for mutual understanding, but not always finding it.

Let's see how the tone of the poems and the semantics of the word "love" change in 1914-1916. According to periodization, this is still Akhmatova's early lyrics, but it must be taken into account that quite important events took place in her life and the life of the country, which made profound changes in the poet's idea of ​​​​life and about himself. This is, firstly, the marriage of Anna Akhmatova and the poet Nikolai Gumilyov and the subsequent divorce, secondly, the birth of a son, Leo, and, thirdly, the beginning of the First World War, which had a great influence on the minds of all progressive writers in Russia. Here is what A.I. Pavlovsky writes about this: “A. Akhmatova’s love novel included an era - she voiced and altered poems in her own way, introduced a note of anxiety and sadness into them, which had a wider meaning than her own fate” (A .I.Pavlovsky "Anna Akhmatova. Life and Creativity" - Moscow: Enlightenment, 1991). It can be said that gradually Anna Akhmatova's ideas about love are expanding, this feeling is beginning to be perceived by her on an increasingly global scale and in various aspects, in her poems there is the same love that "moves the sun and the luminaries."

In accordance with these changes in the worldview of the poet, the semantics of love also changes. Gradually, A. Akhmatova's "love" begins to mean a feeling of the relationship of the heart with the whole world, a cosmically large-scale feeling. This is no longer just the love of a man and a woman, this is a woman's love for the earthly world, for the earth, which feels as intimately close as the beloved man. This love is already filled with humility before the trials that have fallen to the lot, and this is reflected in the context the poet chooses for the word “love”.

Akhmatova's post-revolutionary lyrics are filled with foreboding and awareness of the formidable and tragic events taking place in Russia. A merciless and ruthless reality bursts into her personal, still generally intimate world of the soul: bloody terror, revolutions, deaths of loved ones and relatives, mostly violent and cruel. In Akhmatova’s own life, too, not everything is going well: a stormy and, in general, sad romance with V. Shileiko, marriage to Lev Punin, who tragically died during the years of repression, the arrest of her son and second husband, the execution in 1921 of her first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov. All these events could not but leave an imprint on the spiritual self-state of the poet, could not but complicate the perception of Akhmatova's feelings of love.

Turning to the late lyrics of A. Akhmatova, one should take into account the life experience that formed the basis of her later poems. This is in addition to all of the above, the secondary arrest and exile to the camps of her son, Lev, the Great Patriotic War, the tragedy of Leningrad, which Akhmatova experienced with her heart while being evacuated in the city of Tashkent, these are, finally, the personal problems of Anna Andreevna, who was not recognized in Soviet Russia for a long time like a poet.

It would seem that such a heavy burden could completely force the poetess to abandon her belief in love, but her ideas become only deeper and more sublime, and the feeling itself is described already in the light of its eternal existence.

We have established that from 1911 to 1964, the semantics of the word "love" in Akhmatova is filled with an increasing number of hypotheses, reflecting the high philosophical meaning of love. Additional meanings arise, contextual semantics, which linguistically reflects the spiritual development of the concept of love in Akhmatova’s poetry, shows that Akhmatova’s “love” is a formidable, imperative, morally pure, all-consuming feeling that makes one fulfill the biblical line: “Strong as death love and its arrows are fiery arrows.

2.3 Formation of the concept sphere of the word "love" in the work of A. Akhmatova

As already noted, the concept of "love" is the leading one in the work of A.A. Akhmatova and, according to V.V. Vinogradov, is one of the central "semantic spheres" in the individual author's style of the poet. The semantic content of the named concept is consistently formed throughout the entire work of A. Akhmatova and includes four semantic planes (conceptual features): “a feeling of hot hearted inclination, attraction to a lover”, “a feeling of deep and sincere affection (to the Motherland, friends)”, "constant, strong inclination, passion for poetic creativity", "sublime, deeply spiritual sense of unity with the world and God." These semantic plans consist of a number of semantic components that interact and create a poetic picture of the world that corresponds to the author's worldview.

Before talking about the expansion and narrowing of the semantic planes of the word "love" in the work of A. Akhmatova, which, as we see, become clearly visible in a specific analysis of the text, a few words should be said about the periodization of the poet's work.

In our work, we will rely on the three-part periodization of A. Akhmatova's work in accordance with the collected works edited by M. M. Kralin.

The period of early lyrics: the books "Evening", "Rosary", "White Flock" - almost exclusively lyrics of love.

In "Plantain" and "Anno Domini" the tonality of the lyrics noticeably changes, the love feeling takes on a broader and more spiritual character.

The time from 1928 to 1936 can be characterized as a period of creative silence of the poet.

The late period of the lyrics of A. Akhmatova should include the books "Reed", "The Seventh Book", "Odd", written in the period from 1936 to 1966.

It is clear that we do not set as our goal a thorough examination of the manifestations of the conceptual features of the concept of "love" in all poetic texts created by Akhmatova. It seems to us interesting to show the gradual formation and expansion of the concept of "love" in the work of A.A. Akhmatova.

The semantic planes of the concept "love" in Akhmatova's individual picture of the world are complex in composition and different in scope and significance. The leading role in the context of Akhmatov's lyrics is played by the semantic plan "a feeling of hot heart inclination, attraction to the beloved" in which the understanding of love as a feeling of full suffering and mental anguish is most vividly presented. In general, love in A. Akhmatova's individual-author's picture of the world is a deep, spiritual, heaven-lit and at the same time passionate feeling, often causing suffering and torment to the lyrical hero (heroine) (due to separation, unrequited love, deceit, incompatibility of love and poetic creativity, lack of freedom, jealousy, betrayal), which can even lead to death, but at the same time gives happiness. At the same time, Akhmatova's love is a strong, deep, spiritual feeling of sincere attachment to the Motherland, to friends, full of suffering and compassion, as well as a constant, strong, spiritual inclination towards poetic creativity. Distinguished by its essential individuality, the concept of “love” as an integral part of A.A. Akhmatova’s poetic picture of the world is based on universal human, national and general literary concepts and ideas, including artistic and figurative ones. Moreover, it includes both individual author's and traditional poetic images.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

MOU SOSH № 13 NOVOPOKROVSKY DISTRICT STATION KALNIBOLOTSKY

ESSAY

discipline: "Literature"

on the topic:

"Beautiful" and "eternal" in the poetry of A. Akhmatabouthowl"

Completed by: 11th grade student

MOU secondary school No. 13

Slavets Olga

Checked: teacher Nedilko I.N.

Art. Kalnibolotskaya, 2006

• • Introduction 3
  • Chapter 1. The influence of the philosophy of culture of acmeism on the creation of "eternal" images in the work of A. Akhmatova 5
  • 1.1. The value system of the philosophy of acmeism, reflected in the poetry of A. Akhmatova 5
  • 1.2. Aesthetics of the philosophy of acmeism and its embodiment in the concept of "beautiful" and "eternal" A. Akhmatova 6
  • Chapter 2. The embodiment of "eternal" themes in the poetry of A. Akhmatova 9
  • 2.1. Happiness Theme 9
  • 2.2.Love theme 13
  • 2.3. The theme of the poet and poetry 14
  • 2.4. The theme of the poet and the citizen 15
  • 2.5. Image of Petersburg 15
  • Chapter 3
  • Conclusion 22
  • References 23
  • Introduction
  • The relevance of the topic of our study is due to the fact that the culture of the Russian "Silver Age", which has recently become the subject of close attention not only of cultural experts, not only art historians and professional aestheticians, but also of the widest sections of the reading public, at the same time has not yet become a subject, uniting their common interests. We see a real process: sincere attention and semi-instinctive searches for analogies of "that" and "that" end of the century - and the almost complete absence of a single idea uniting these searches.
  • These are the efforts of the total cultural consciousness, both specialized and "ordinary", to engage in "reflection to the foundations": at the end of the 20th century, when a significant reassessment of values ​​is taking place, to find a kind of starting point: both temporary and "normative". Any culture, no matter how complex and indirect ways it develops, has its own model of the world, its own relationship with previous cultural epochs. The case of Russian culture of the 20th century is unique in its own way: the complete revision taking place now in the public consciousness could lead to relativism, if it were not in itself an interesting cultural syndrome: the search for a way out of a situation of uncertainty. In part, it repeats what happened at the beginning of the 20th century, in the "silver age" of Russian literature - the situation is perceived as problematic and ambiguous, diverse cultural codes are turned on, appeals to "culture" and "traditions" are made with a variety of goals. The "Silver Age" becomes for us, in the language of analogies, the "key" to the "box" of the 20th century.
  • Our study is one of the attempts to see a certain regularity in such searches, to understand the reflection of culture on itself, to realize the solid regularity of the seemingly multidirectional foundations of the poetic systems of the great poets of the "Silver Age" - especially those of them whose creative life has continued in our time. . Therefore, the theme "Eternal images" of culture in the work of Anna Akhmatova" seems to be an excellent occasion for such a daring, but not aimless attempt.
  • The purpose of our study is to reveal the essence of the problem of "beautiful" and "eternal" in the works of A. Akhmatova.
  • Tasks:
  • - to study and analyze the literature on the topic of the essay;
  • analyze the poetry of A. Akhmatova.

Chapter 1. Influence of philosophy culture of acmeism on the created a research of "eternal" images in the work of A. A X matte

1.1. The value system of the philosophy of acmeism, reflected in the poetry of A. Akhmatova

The era of the tenth years, designated by contemporaries themselves as a time of crisis ("crisis of symbolism"), marked the entry into the "non-calendar" (A. Akhmatova) twentieth century. There came a revision of the traditional humanitarian values ​​of the new European culture, there was a feeling of a "crisis of humanism" (A. Blok) - a very ambiguous phenomenon in its essence, which led to a feeling of the fragility of time.

The "breakdown" of traditional values, embodied in the most diverse types of reactions - everyday, philosophical, aesthetic - was associated in the minds of contemporaries with the theme of the coming chaos - and various possibilities for overcoming it. Culture itself was unconditionally recognized as one of the cosmos-creating forces. The philosophy of culture, the place of the poet in culture have become the subject of deep disagreements between representatives of various creative systems that are in conflict - symbolism and acmeism. In the philosophy of culture of symbolism, life as a level of being belonged to the empirical world. Therefore, it is only a conditional value until it is re-surrendered according to the laws of aesthetic creativity, only then it acquires the status of a cultural value. Therefore, for symbolism, artistic creativity is higher than life. But life, in order to be recreated into a cultural value, must be deprived of its organic nature: creativity requires the sacrifice of "living life", the creator himself in the spirit of the requirements of the aesthetics of "romantic genius".

This position was based on those ascending to Vl. Solovyov and Schelling, as well as to modern neo-Kantianism, ideas about the existence of objective forces that stand above individually directed wills and desires. Ultimately - to the belief, so beloved in the Russian tradition, in the subordination of the individual, the subject to some higher goals, ignoring his private existence. "Thus, in the philosophy of creativity of Russian symbolism, the tragic antinomy of life and creativity, which comes from the traditions of romanticism, is resumed; the creative act, which in the romantic consciousness is supposed to be saving in relation to culture, turns out to be destructive, destructive in relation to the life of the creator himself."

1.2. Aesthetics of the philosophy of acmeism and its embodiment in the concept of "pr e red" and "eternal" A. Akhmatova

The theme of overcoming chaos in the philosophy of culture of acmeism was interpreted differently. It was no coincidence that the great connoisseur and researcher of German romanticism V. Zhirmunsky, the author of the work "German Romanticism and Modern Mysticism" (1914), became one of the first theorists who fundamentally distinguished the deep goals of the aesthetics of symbolism and acmeism. The pathos of his article "The Overcomers of Symbolism" is that the "external" overcoming of chaos is not the overcoming of deep chaos. The high "thematism" of the poetry of Russian symbolism claimed to "remove" chaos by including the poetic subject - and with it the reader - in the awareness of the problem of "non-finite" of any artistic (read: cultural) text, in the "movement" of both of them into a holistic and deep "chaotism" of being. Acmeists did not defeat chaos with the form, which is the highest task of art, but deliberately expelled it, along with the "dropsy of big themes" (N. Gumilyov) from the circle of their aesthetic interests, which gave their poetic texts artistic completeness, but, according to an impartial researcher, impoverished "the significance and value of a poetic work", while poetry "lives not only by its artistic reality, but by a whole range of non-artistic experiences caused by aesthetic experience."

There was a conscious narrowing of the world to the world of a private subject. This is the result summed up in an earlier article by Zhirmunsky.

Zhirmunsky is right in naming the processes taking place in Russian lyrics at the beginning of the 20th century. But they require correlates in the world of culture.

As a modern researcher accurately noted, "... mythology, literature, history are different levels through which the development of thought passes. They exist simultaneously with other levels of its development. The images associated with them are included in the hierarchy of different types of means expressing the same same common motives. A kind of system of mirrors appears, aimed at the same content. "

The idea common to the entire culture of the 1910s is the idea of ​​rehabilitating a private person, a subject; it is the theme of "ordinary consciousness" powerfully asserting its rights. (Isn’t this the reason for our own obvious interest in this period of Russian history?) The “Euclidean geometry” of the old world was retreating, complex processes of changing paradigms were taking place in culture, habitual assessments and criteria were changing, the theoretical “enlightenment” mind of the Age of Enlightenment was retreating in the intelligentsia consciousness in the face of the complexity of the new time, philosophy sought to combine the pathos of traditional European "humanitarian" subjectivity with the rights of life, recognized in reality above theory. Everything was mixed up, the system of assessments and hierarchies was lost, there was no correspondence in the traditional consciousness between the realities of a particular world, the surrounding subject, the world itself and the norms of moral life. "Everything was mixed up in the Oblonskys' house..." - for the umpteenth time...

Husserl's phenomenology tried to combine both lines in itself: the tradition of the subject empathizing with the theory and the world around him. Russian Husserlianism (it has hardly been studied and has not even been named at least at the level of influences and relationships - for example, the powerful and most interesting line of Husserl-Bakhtin) included a rehabilitated "everyday worldview", Husserl's "life world" as a powerful help in cultural, aesthetic , poetic and sometimes political disputes about the essence of the movement of the era.

"It is the ordinary type of life activity of an individual, who in theoretical reflection does not rise above the awareness of the immediacy of his being, limited by the horizons of practical activity, and was the real social basis, the generalization of which was Husserl's concept of the "life world". ... The world of ordinary understanding, i.e. "the life world" becomes for him the last criterion of truth, it is not science that judges the "life world", but the self-evidence of the given in the "life world" turns out to be a judge in relation to the objective propositions of science. The attitude to the world within the framework of ordinary understanding is not reflected, it does not himself into knowledge and activity.That is why Husserl<...>considered his own concept as the theory of all forms of human activity ..., self-knowledge, self-determination and self-realization of the mind as a kind of synthesis that does not decompose into theory and practice. "This is how the movement towards the restoration of" the trampled dignity of human subjectivity" took place within the framework of phenomenology" (L.G. Ionin).

But it occurs, as we could see, not only in the bosom of phenomenology. Husserl's "Life World", the philosophy and poetics of V. Rozanov shocking contemporaries, the philosophy of the culture of acmeism stand here in the same row.

Chapter 2 The embodiment of "eternal" themes in the poetry of A. Akhmatova

2.1. Happiness Theme

Defining the outline of the poetic system of I. Annensky, the poet who actually laid the "acmeist foundation" of Russian poetic culture, L. Ginzburg notes two points. First: "The promise of happiness changes the relationship between the lyrical subject and reality." And the second - situationally giving an acmeistic picture of the world - ... a person reaching for a world that is not given to him. The feeling of "a world that is not given" to a person, inherent as a foretaste of Annensky's acmeistic worldview, turns into a persistent quality of all "Hyperboreans". If symbolism "gathered" its cosmos into metaphorical rows, seeing deep commonalities and reflections in everything, then the principle of the poetics of acmeism is the principle of gathering, concentration, concentration around the subject of his world, his personal cosmos. This is the principle of associative metonymic connections, links, hooks, which, as it were, connect the gaps in the world fabric. The feeling of oneself and surrounding objects of the world "on an equal footing", having equal opportunities for self-identification, gives way to the need to cultivate chaos, to master the world with the help of an act of nomination, to be true "Adamists", giving names to things - as on the first day of creation.

As for the principle of concentration, in three early - and best - articles on acmeism - Zhirmunsky, Nedobrovo and B. Eikhenbaum - it is fixed in different ways: Zhirmunsky, starting from the opposition of the romantic, "metaphorical" and classical, "metonymic" lines in development poetry, associated acmeism with the classical style - which in the Russian tradition has always entailed the awareness of the culture of this style as "high" and quite perfect. (Later, this was precisely what gave rise to talk about the imaginary "realism" of the poems by Akhmatova and Mandelstam, which is not there: the acmeist text is oriented to other criteria.) "Classic" implied collecting, i.e. concentration.

Nedobrovo, speaking about the embodiment in A. Akhmatova's poems of "proud human well-being", fastened by the "firm word of the law", wrapping it like a shell, in his own way declared the idea of ​​concentration.

B. Eikhenbaum, coming from the evolution of poetic devices and genre forms, which, in his opinion, give rise to natural paradigm shifts, fixed the problem of the equal size of verse and word, the elements of rhythm and the elements of the word, or, more precisely, the verse word and the objective word, proclaiming victory in verse - prose. And this was also a kind of understanding of the idea of ​​the concentration of the world, the need for an architectonic overcoming of chaos by means of art itself, in which the poet-master was likened to an architect building a building of culture from stones.

"One of the most cardinal conquests of the literary language, which is indebted to the acmeists, was a sharp shift in the boundaries between poetry and prose (and both of them) and life - the external world, extra-textual being," acting out ", as Mandelstam would say, in the work ... The essence of the acmeist reforms in this respect - in the interiorization in the space of the poem ... elements of prose, but not for the sake of its primarily conspicuous features, such as "plot", the presence of many heroes, plot composition, etc., but for the sake of maximum compression of the world works". This compressed world of the work is for the culture of acmeism the key to the possibility of "gathering" chaos into space - let it be micro, not macro. In the 1922 article "The End of the Novel", Osip Mandelstam, who thought a lot about the fate of culture in connection with the fate of the new European subject, wrote: "... the measure of the novel is a human biography ... The further fate of the novel will be nothing more than the history of dispersing biography , as forms of personal existence, even more than dispersal - the catastrophic death of biography ... Now Europeans are thrown out of their biographies, like balls from billiard pockets, and the laws of their activity, like the collision of balls on a billiard field, are governed by one principle: the angle of incidence is equal to the angle reflections".

It is worth comparing this statement with the point of view of N. Nedobrovo, who, giving his assessment of the early lyrics of Akhmatova, already in an article of the fifteenth year, astutely noted that although her lyrics are a kind of beating against world boundaries (compare with the "fundamentally" different feeling of chaos in the symbolist traditions!) but at the same time she has a rare quality: "Akhmatova has the gift of heroic illumination of man"16. As one of the main advantages of the young poetess, N. Nedobrovo also noted her search for "people with a biography" (i.e., one of the paradigmatic features of the new culture, the disappearance of which O. Mandelstam complained about in 1922): events in Russia, we proudly said: "this is history." Well, history once again confirmed that its major events are only great when seeds grow in excellent biographies for sowing the people's soil. We should thank Akhmatova, who is now restoring her dignity of a person: when we run our eyes from face to face and meet this or that look, she whispers to us: “this is a biography.” Already?

So, Akhmatova's themes are: "beating against the world's borders" (i.e., a sense of chaos) and the pathos of courageous transformation, ideally having "people with a biography" (gathering reality into space - an organized world).

The ability to combine the perception of the world as a chaotic state of diverse "substances of existence" with a clear idea of ​​gathering the world into a single beam, a focused beam that highlights a sector that is necessarily interesting for a new poet - and thus "collecting", "naming" history, is a rare quality, fully inherent in Akhmatova. Imprinted in an indirect way in various observations of researchers, it became the reason why Akhmatova's poetic system was the very iron regularity of the foundations that was mentioned above.

The creation of a "narrative integrity" of life implied a different, non-symbolist (still close to the classical romantic paradigm) vision of the world. Moreover, it was not realistic. A modern researcher aptly called Akhmatova's style "running classicism", contrasting it (and not comparing it!) to the classical style.

All the same V. Zhirmunsky in his early work of the twenties wrote about the deep content of the so-called "style evolution". The evolution of style, as a unity of artistic and expressive means or techniques, is closely connected with a change in the artistic and psychological task, aesthetic skills and tastes, but also - "the whole worldview of the era." (underlined by me. - N.P.)

Researchers of the twenties and the beginning of the century, unlike us, saw in the work of Akhmatova what in the language of cultural studies is called a "sample" - a typical example of a new cultural paradigm. The world of the classical paradigm has disintegrated - the mirror has crumbled into a scattering of fragments, each of which is also a reflection of the world, but in a different way. In the culture of the 1910s, in addition to the idea of ​​concentration, the image of gathering, gathering, and hence, as the main motives of this image, the motives of a bunch of letters, private notes, notes collected in a casket, casket, packing appear.

In the traditions of the culture of acmeism, one indisputable condition was created: each text written by the poet was perceived as included in the "world poetic text" - a certain supreme absolute of culture, opposing the world of chaos with its harmony and beautiful architectonics. The inclusion did not mean that a specific text was only a part - it was an analogue of the entire system and, as it were, used the material of the entire world culture not as a model, but as material for creating a new object of art. In the acmeist text, the text was also set on self-knowledge, because "... the specificity of the acmeist text is that its structure can reproduce its genesis."

The installation of the text on self-knowledge (let us note this as the main quality of the acmeist text) led to a change in the role of the lyrical subject: he ceased to be, as in the "romantic" lyrics of symbolism, a medium of transcendental forces, and turned into a kind of theatrical "person", consciously "epicizing" ( according to a different interpretation - "prosaic") what used to be called "lyrical thematism".

The ideal of the author's position in this case appeared as an arbiter's position (R. Timenchik), taken out of the given text, appealing to the cultural and linguistic tradition (Hence - the illusion of realism and classicism of the text).

Considering the position "text within the text", Yu.M. Lotman notes the following points: the game (understood according to J. Huizinga), doubling, the motive of the mirror - and the theme of duality associated with it. However, this observation applies to any, as the researcher believes, cultural text. Without dwelling on the necessary, from our point of view, clarifications, we note that the main principle is much more significant: the principle of clarifying the subordination of texts, the idea of ​​a hierarchy of texts, which helps to streamline the relationship of cultural elements. How was this hierarchy realized in Akhmatova's poetry? What was its relationship with cultural tradition? What did the change of rhythms in the verse mean? And, most importantly, what united all these questions? Let's start with the last one.

2.2. Love Theme

Love is undoubtedly the most sublime, the most poetic of all feelings, because the poet is always "dictated by feeling" - and which of the feelings can be compared with love in terms of the power of influence? Love motives in Akhmatova's lyrics are presented in all their diversity: meetings and partings, betrayal and jealousy, self-sacrifice and selfishness of those who love, unrequited passion and painful happiness of reciprocity. For Akhmatova, as once for Tyutchev, love is a union of two souls, replete with internal tragedies:

Their combination, combination,

And their fatal merger,

And ... a fatal duel.

And as an epigraph to his most intimate, "love" collection, the author takes an excerpt from a poem by another of his predecessors in the field of love collisions, Baratynsky:

Forgive me forever! but know that the two guilty,

Not one, there are names

In my poems, in love stories.

Love becomes for Akhmatova an integral part of human existence, the basis of humanistic values; only with it are possible "both divinity, and inspiration, and life, and tears," as Pushkin once wrote. That is, in the words of another poet who became a classic during his lifetime - Blok: "Only a lover has the right to be called a man."

2.3. The theme of the poet and poetry

Poet and poetry - a topic that Russian lyricists liked to think about, because "a poet in Russia is more than a poet." The heroine of Akhmatova rises above the power of life circumstances, realizing her fate as a special, visionary one:

No, prince, I'm not the one

Who do you want to see me

And for a long time my lips

They do not kiss, but prophesy.

The six-winged seraphim, who appeared to Pushkin, also comes to the heroine; Lermontov's prophet, persecuted by his fellow citizens, is again doomed to human ingratitude in her poems:

Go alone and heal the blind

To know in the dark hour of doubt

The pupils' malevolent mockery

And the indifference of the crowd.

2.4. The theme of the poet and the citizen

Civic lyrics are an integral part of Akhmatova's work. The opposition "poet" and "citizen" simply did not exist for her: the poet initially cannot but be with his country, with his people. The poet is "always with people when a thunderstorm roars," and this thesis of his predecessor Akhmatov confirms with all his work. The words calling on the heroine to leave her land, "deaf and sinful", are assessed by her as unworthy of the high spirit of poetry.

For Akhmatova, who inherited the great tradition of Russian classics, the call of duty is above all:

Some look into gentle eyes,

Others drink until the sun's rays

And I'm negotiating all night

With an indomitable conscience.

2.5. Petersburg image

The image of Petersburg is familiar to us from the works of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Gogol. For them, it is a city of contrasts, "magnificent" and "poor" at the same time; a city where anything can happen; a city rejected and denounced, but at the same time loved. This is a kind of symbolic embodiment of the whole world, the universal city. From the very beginning, it appears in the work of Akhmatova. Having absorbed the air of the Neva embankments, imprinting in her soul the bright and harmonious correctness of its architecture, she, following others, turns the details of the St. Petersburg landscape into an immutable poetic reality. Akhmatova's Petersburg is a controversial, but unusually attractive city:

But we won’t exchange magnificent

Granite city of glory and misfortune,

Wide rivers shining ice,

Sunless, gloomy gardens...

The sense of proportion, restraint, and strict completeness of thought that characterize the best examples of Russian classical poetry are also characteristic of Akhmatova's lyrics. She does not splash out her emotions on the reader, does not expose her soul in a fit of feelings, but "simply, wisely" tells about her experiences. Here is how the author writes about the love confusion of his heroine:

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.

The pain and despair of the heroine are obvious - but how restrained, without anguish it is shown, and at the same time how psychologically accurate and exhaustive the denouement is given. There are not many landscape descriptions in Akhmatova's poems. The landscape for her is usually just a background, just an occasion for reasoning, for describing a state of mind. The parallelism of what is happening in the soul and nature is a favorite motif of classical poetry. We are accustomed to likening natural phenomena to human actions - the storm "cries like a child", the thunder "frolics and plays." In Akhmatova's poem "Three Autumns", the heroine, referring to her favorite time of Russian poetry, distinguishes three stages in it, corresponding to three stages of human maturity:

It became clear to everyone: the drama is ending,

And this is not the third autumn, but death.

Chapter 3The meaningful meaning of rhythm inincarnation"vechfoot» and "beautiful"A. AXmatte

At the level of rhythm in Akhmatova's poetry, the same "beating against world borders" is recorded. The symbolist attitude to musicality, both at the euphonic and cultural-philosophical levels (the world orchestra of history), is replaced here by a different kind of attitude: to the intonational structures of everyday speech, to the syncopated rhythms of modern urbanism.

If we recall the meaningful semantic meaning of rhythm in the culture of the beginning of the century, recall that the rhythmic organization and the compositional design of material associated with it in culture, starting from myth and ending with a modern work of art, is the beginning that singles out and arranges from chaos - space, then the rhythm of Akhmatov Dolnikov becomes a reflection of the rhythm of existence of the torn world of traditional values. Mandelstam is profoundly right: "..the attitude for the artist is a tool and means, like a hammer in the hands of a bricklayer, and the only real thing is the work itself."

Defining her own poetic worldview, her "arbiter's position", Akhmatova uses the concepts of "reflection in mirrors", "someone's dream", "nonsense", in every possible way emphasizing the idea of ​​"fraud", illusory and precariousness, "fragility" of life, existence in a kind of Looking-Glass, filled with images of "persons" - twins.

"The conceivable space for the lyrical plot is only the consciousness of the poet (emphasized by me - N.P.), ... his inner experience, regardless of whether it is a personal experience or about the affairs and objects of the outside world."

This "conceivable space" in the new poetics (I repeat persistently!) turned out to be a new type of poetic consciousness, containing both a sense of the fragmentation and chaos of world existence, and the need for the heroic everyday pathos of gathering. (Later in relation to the "lost generation" they will say about this: "tragic stoicism", having lost an important shade of everyday life in the definition). So it was with Akhmatova. "Shards of a mirror", "sheets of folding", "fallen leaves", a shaky and fragile foundation, on which, feeling its fragility, the subject of culture tries to build the house of his private existence, are strengthened by strong piles driven into the very foundation, braces that connect seams of construction, clutches, giving a sense of security. Akhmatova's cultural tradition becomes - as it should be in the bosom of an acmeist text - an element of architectonics.

Very conditionally - in Pushkin, early - in the spirit of classicism - an appeal to tradition as a recognition of the canon and thus inclusion in the same high cultural hierarchy; in the spirit of romanticism - destroying the old canons, romanticism created its own - and traced its own traditions - i.e. took other samples and clichés from the previous culture. Pushkin's romanticism assumed inclusion in new areas of culture for Russia, including poetic: the thematicism of "Byronism", then picked up by Lermontov and outlived by him in Grushnitsky, the exoticism of the oriental theme as an introduction to the foreignness of culture due to the effect of a sharp removal, etc. . Mature Pushkin suggests a special, non-conditional conversation.

Just as conditionally - Blok: a fan of traditions - the search for predecessors in philosophical and poetic cultural creativity - a feature that is highly characteristic of the romantic-symbolist direction; the naming of names - Pushkin, Shakespeare, Fra Filippo Lippi and others - as a magic spell - with the function of protecting one's space and the right to inner freedom - to one's "air" of culture, to hearing music. Wed Blok's: "But what will happen to us if the music leaves us?"

It is interesting to compare with this the opinion about the role of tradition and culture in Mandelstam, a person closer to Akhmatov's philosophy of culture: "Few people, like Mandelstam, perceived the ambivalence of time with such force: few people saw its catastrophic side so clearly, few tried with such ardor to resist this catastrophicity..." "The spiritual structure of the poet," Mandelstam wrote about Blok (but, as almost always, thinking of himself), "is conducive to disaster. Cult and culture, on the other hand, presuppose a hidden and protected source of energy, a uniform and expedient movement: "Love that moves the sun and the rest of the luminaries" Poetic culture arises from the desire to prevent a catastrophe, to make it dependent on the central sun of the entire system, whether it be love, which Dante spoke of, or music, which Blok finally came to. .. Mandelstam tried to get to the sources of the modern catastrophe, which manifested itself as a slow slide of the last years of the 19th century and an incorrigible cataclysm the zmom of the 20th century".

However, Akhmatova's appeal to tradition also exists for other purposes. These goals are diverse, and we are interested in identifying a more specific and narrow topic: the culturological functions of the "eternal images" of culture in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. In turn, this is connected with the task: to understand the functional meaning of the cultural values ​​of the past in the life of a person engaged in art and creating a new cultural-poetic paradigm.

In the work of Akhmatova, hierarchical ideas are realized, as mentioned above, at all levels. There is an "inside position" in relation to the old values ​​subjected to verification.

Firstly, these are the eternal images of the myth - and, above all, the eternal Text - the Word with a capital letter - the Logos - the Bible. These are, of course, "biblical verses", where Akhmat's principle of the "triple bottom" - the combination of three time layers, the fan of time (A. Bergson) - is especially evident. Through the "neo-ornamentalist" (S. Averintsev) use of the situation of the myth, the poet brings together temporary situations in the psychological experience so characteristic of her, localized in time and space, signified by a landscape or an object. And here, using the words of N. Struve, Akhmatov's constant "victory of being over non-being, an ontological surplus value given by suffering, conveyed by language almost not updated, although still as tragic," takes place.

Secondly, Akhmatova "introduces" into eternity, realizing already as high examples, existing on an equal footing with the era of the classics, the images of poets - her contemporaries: Blok, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Annensky, Mandelstam. The fact that she has an impeccable poetic ear, in this case, is only one of the reasons for such an "input". For the poet Akhmatova, the main principle here remains the principle of metonymic cultural linkage, as a result of which the era is called "according to the poet".

"He conquered both time and space.

They say: Pushkin's era, Pushkin's Petersburg. And this has no direct relation to literature (I emphasized - N.P.), it is something completely different. In the palace halls, where they danced and gossiped about the poet, his portraits hang and his books are kept, and their poor shadows are banished from there forever. They say about their magnificent palaces and mansions: Pushkin has been here, or Pushkin has not been here. Everything else is of no interest to anyone. "(Compare her own regrets, extremely rare for her: "...they will not call Akhmatova / Neither the street, nor the stanza" (1946))

"Hidden quotations" from the poetry of fellow poets, to whom the verses are dedicated, are recognized as identification marks of culture. ("And again autumn brings down Tamerlane ..." - in a poem about Boris Pasternak; "I will bow over them, as if over a bowl ...", dedicated to Osip Mandelstam ...) There is, as it were, the introduction of people who are really present in Akhmatov's " living world", into the world of great culture and history. At the same time, she does such a manipulation not only with poets, but also with her fellow contemporaries, who are also perceived as part of culture, a sign of the era (poems dedicated to Nedobrovo, Lozinsky, Yu. Anrep, Bulgakova, O. Sudeikina, T. Vecheslova, etc. .)

Part of the explanation for this is given in Akhmatov's late 1963 poem "Everything in Moscow is saturated with verses ...", where the formula for the numbness of contemporaries is an attempt to approach Mandelstam's "I forgot the word ..." to the same extent as an attempt to give in this way time formula:

Let silence reign over us

Let us settle apart with rhyme,

Let silence be a secret sign

Those who are with you, but seemed to be me,

Are you going to marry in secret?

With virgin bitter silence,

That in the darkness the underground granite sharpens

And the magic closes the circle

And in the night above the ear death prophesies,

Drowning out the loudest sound."

(Compare also the rejected Tyutchev's: "... blowing up, disturb the keys, feed on them - and be silent.")

Conclusion

So, in the process of preparing our abstract, we came to the following conclusions:

The beginning of the 20th century in Russia was a time of unprecedented flourishing of poetry, rightfully called the "silver age" - following the "golden" age of Pushkin. This is the period of the emergence of many new trends in Russian art: symbolism, futurism, acmeism and others. As a rule, each of them aspired to be a new art; most of them belonged to modernism. One of the characteristic features of the latter is the desire to break with the art of the previous era, the rejection of tradition, the classics, the setting and solution of new artistic tasks, with new artistic means. And in this respect, acmeism, in line with which Akhmatova's early work developed, was no exception. However, much in the author's creative destiny was predetermined by the inclination towards the classically strict and harmoniously verified tradition of Russian poetry of the 20th century. And above all, of great importance in the formation of Akhmatova as a poet was her classical education, her childhood spent in Tsarskoe Selo, her upbringing given in the best traditions of Russian noble culture.

In her lyrics, Akhmatova develops traditional themes: love, creativity, nature, life, history.

A. Akhmatova's poetry matured, feeding on the great tradition of Russian literature of the 19th century - a humanistic, sublime, bright tradition. "High freedom of the soul", fidelity to ideals, humanistic pathos, courageous truthfulness of the image, the tension of spiritual life, the attraction to the classical, clear, strict and proportionate style - all that is characteristic of Russian poetry of the last century reappears precisely in Akhmatov's line, imperious and tender at the same time.

List of used literature

1. Bakhtin M.M. Author and hero in aesthetic activity // Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. - M., 1978.

2. Bely A. The problem of culture // Symbolism. -M., 1910.

3. Bely A. The tragedy of creativity.- M., 1912

4. Blok A.A. The soul of a writer. (Notes of a contemporary) // Alexander Blok. About art. -M., 1980.

5. Vinogradov V.V. Poetry by A. Akhmatova. -L., 1925

6. Ginzburg L.Ya. About lyrics. -L., 1972.

7. Ionin L.G. Understanding sociology: historical and critical analysis. - M., 1979.

8. Ioffe I. Synthetic history of art. - L., 1983.

9. Kozhevnikova N.A. Word usage in Russian poetry of the early XX century. - M., 1986.