Completed by an 11th grade student
Razdelkina Tatyana
Municipal educational institution secondary school No. 2 2008
Content
Introduction
Biography pages
The history of writing the poem "Requiem"
Features of the composition of the poem
Conclusion
Applications
Literature
Introduction
Throughout its history, Russia has endured many adversities. Wars with a foreign enemy, internecine strife, popular unrest - the shadows of these events look at us through the “veil of times past” from the pages of ancient manuscripts and yellowed books.
The 20th century surpassed all previous centuries in the severity and cruelty of the trials that befell the Russian people, and not only the Russians. Having won the most terrible and bloody war in the history of mankind, the victorious people, as before the war, were powerless in the face of another enemy. This enemy was more cruel and insidious than the foreign invader, his true nature was hidden under the guise of the “father of all nations,” and his “fatherly concern” for the well-being of his country could not be compared even with cruelty towards the enemy. During the totalitarian regime, mass repression and terror reached their apogee. Millions of people became victims of the ruthless “Inquisition”, without ever understanding what their guilt was before their fatherland.
A bitter reminder of the events of those years are for us not only the facts given in history textbooks, but also literary works that also reflected feelings, mental anguish and worries about the fate of the country, the people who had to live in those difficult years and be eyewitnesses to the suffering of your people.
In the flow of today's memoir literature, "Requiem" occupies a special place. It is also difficult to write about him because, according to A. Akhmatova’s young friend, poet L. Brodsky, life in those years “crowned her muse with a wreath of sorrow.” V. Vilenkin writes in his publications: “Her “Requiem” least of all needs scientific commentary. Its folk origins and folk poetic scale are clear in themselves. Personally experienced, autobiographical things drown in them, preserving only the immensity of suffering.” Already in the first poem of the poem, called “Dedication,” the great river of human grief, overflowing with its pain, destroys the boundaries between “I” and “we.” This is our grief, this is “we are the same everywhere,” it is we who hear the “heavy steps of soldiers,” this is us walking through the “wild capital.” “The hero of this poetry is the people... Every single one of them participates on one side or the other in what is happening. This poem speaks on behalf of the people."
The poem “Requiem” was written as an autobiography of the poetess A. Akhmatova for the period of “two maddened years” of her life and - at the same time - covers decades of humiliation and pain throughout the country.
Guilty Rus' writhed
Under bloody boots
And under the black Marus tires.
The chapters of the poem are saturated with the suffering of a mother who is deprived of her son: “I followed you like I was being carried out.” Akhmatova very accurately conveys what she felt in those days. But the main essence of the poem is not to tell contemporaries and descendants about the tragic fate of the poetess, but to show the people's tragedy. After all, millions of mothers just like Akhmatova herself, millions of wives, sisters and daughters all over the country stood in similar queues, warming in their souls the hope of receiving at least some news from a loved one.
Akhmatova inextricably linked her life with the life of the people and drank to the dregs the cup of people's suffering.
No, and not under an alien sky,
And not under the protection of alien wings, -
I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.
The tragic fate of Anna Akhmatova, described in the poem “Requiem,” symbolizes the universal tragedy of the generation of those terrible decades.
The poem “Requiem” has become a speaking monument to a very difficult time in the history of our homeland. They remind us of the innocent and senseless victims of bloody decades and oblige us to prevent a repetition of these terrible events.
The purpose of the essay is to show how, with the help of composition and artistic means, the poet A. Akhmatova, in a small work, managed to convey the ominous breath of the era of Stalinism, depict the tragedy of personal and national fate, and preserve the memory of the victims of totalitarianism in Russia.
Biography pages
Born in Odessa. Father Andrei Antonovich Gorenko was a naval mechanical engineer; in 1890 the family settled in Tsarskoe Selo. In the capital's Maritime Department and educational institutions, my father held various administrative and teaching positions. The family had six children. The father soon left the family. He was very skeptical and irritated about his daughter’s early poetic pursuits. For this reason, the first publication (“There are many shiny rings on his hand...”) in the Sirius magazine published by N. Gumilyov in Paris appeared under the initials “A.G.” Then she came up with a pseudonym for herself, choosing the surname of her great-grandmother, who descended from the Tatar Khan Akhmat. Subsequently, Akhmatova said: “Only a seventeen-year-old crazy girl could choose a Tatar surname for a Russian poetess... That’s why it occurred to me to take a pseudonym for myself because my dad, having learned about my poems, said: “Don’t disgrace my name.” - “And don’t I need your name!" I said..."
Unlike her father, Akhmatova’s mother was invariably sensitive and attentive to her daughter’s activities. Poetic talent apparently came from her. My mother’s family included people involved in literature. For example, the now forgotten, but once famous Anna Bunina (1794-1829) (called “the first Russian poetess” by Akhmatova) was the aunt of her mother’s father, Erasmus Ivanovich Stogov, who left “Notes”, published at one time in “Russian Antiquity”.
In Tsarskoe Selo, Akhmatova studied at the Mariinsky Gymnasium, and usually spent the summer with her family near Sevastopol. Impressions from the Black Sea region were subsequently reflected in various works, including her first poem “By the Sea” (1914). Until the end of his life, Tsarskoye Selo remained his spiritual and poetic homeland, inseparable from the name of Pushkin. She began to write poems early and in her girlhood she wrote about two hundred of them; Some poems that have survived to this day date back to 1904-1905. In 1903, Akhmatova met N. Gumilev - he was three years older than her and also studied at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium. (They got married in 1910) After her parents’ divorce, Akhmatova and her mother moved to Yevpatoria - she was threatened with tuberculosis, which was the scourge of the family. She completed her high school course at home. But already in 1906-1907, having recovered somewhat, she began to study in the graduating class of the Fundukleevskaya gymnasium in Kyiv, and in 1908-1910. at the legal department of the Higher Women's Courses. All this time she did not stop writing poetry. Judging by the few of them that have survived, as well as by the statements of Akhmatova herself, she was then significantly influenced by V. Bryusov, A. Blok, somewhat later M. Kuzmin, as well as the French symbolists and “damned” (P. Verlaine, C. Baudelaire and others), from the prose works of K. Hamsun. In the spring of 1910, Akhmatova, together with N. Gumilev, left for Paris. There she met A. Modigliani, who captured the appearance of twenty-year-old Akhmatova in pencil portrait. After her first publication in Sirius, Akhmatova was published in the General Journal, the Gaudeamus magazine, and also in Apollo. The latest publication evoked a sympathetic response from V. Bryusov. The poems in "Apollo" caused a parody by V.P. Burenin. In the same year, Akhmatova’s first public performance took place, reading her poems at the Society of Admirers of the Artistic Word. She also received approval for her poetic work from N. Gumilyov, who had previously treated the poetic experiments of his fiancée and wife with some restraint and caution. Every summer, until 1917, Akhmatova spent on her mother-in-law’s estate Slepnevo (Tver province), which played a significant role in her work. The land of this region gave her the opportunity to feel and understand the hidden beauty of the Russian national landscape, and the proximity to peasant life enriched her with knowledge of folk customs and language. In Akhmatova’s work, Slepnevo occupies, along with Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg, Moscow and the Black Sea region, a special and certainly important place. In the same 1911, Akhmatova was included in the “Workshop of Poets” organized by N. Gumilev, where she served as secretary. In 1912, the “Workshop of Poets” formed within itself a group of Acmeists, which proclaimed in their manifestos and articles a reliance on realistic concreteness, thereby beginning a creative polemic with the Symbolists. Akhmatova’s first book, “Evening,” which appeared in 1912, not only met the requirements formulated by the leaders of Acmeism N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky, but to some extent it itself served as an artistic basis for Acmeist declarations. The book was prefaced by M. Kuzmin, who noted the characteristic features of Akhmatova’s poetry: acute sensitivity, acceptance of the world in its living, sunny flesh and, at the same time, the inner tragedy of consciousness. He also noticed in Akhmatova’s artistic world the connection between specific objects, things, “shards of life” with “lived moments.” Akhmatova herself associated these features of her poetics with the influence of I. Annensky on her, whom she called “teacher” and whose “Cypress Casket” was a reference book for her in those years. Acmeistic aesthetics, the fidelity of which Akhmatova emphasized in her later years, opposed symbolism. The poetess wrote:
“Our rebellion against symbolism is completely justified, because we felt like people of the 20th century and did not want to remain in the previous one...” In 1912-1913. She performed poetry readings in the cabaret "Stray Dog", at the All-Russian Literary Society, at the Higher Women's (Bestuzhev) Courses, at the Tenishev School, in the building of the City Duma and was extremely successful. On September 18, 1912, Akhmatova and N. Gumilev had a son, Lev (future historian and geographer, author of one of the largest achievements of the 20th century - ethnological theory). Akhmatova's fame after the appearance of "Evening" and then "The Rosary" turned out to be dizzying - for some time she clearly obscured many of her contemporaries-poets. "The Rosary" (1914) was highly praised M. Tsvetaeva(“Anna Akhmatova”), V. Mayakovsky, B. Pasternak. She was called the “Russian Sappho”, she became a favorite model for artists, her poetic dedications were compiled in the anthology “The Image of Akhmatova” (L., 1925), which included works by A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, M. Lozinsky, V. Shileiko, V. Komarovsky, N. Nedobrovo, V. Pyast, B. Sadovsky.
Both critics, poets, and readers noted the “mystery” of her lyrics; Despite the fact that the poems seemed like pages of letters or torn diary entries, the extreme laconicism and sparingness of speech left the impression of muteness or interception of the voice. To the readers of the 1910s. an artist of great and unique power arose. Akhmatova, in her poems, as in life, was very feminine, but the tenderness of her poetic words revealed authority and energy. Her lyrics, outwardly unlike any of her contemporaries or any of her predecessors, were nevertheless quite deeply rooted in Russian classics. Akhmatova’s lyrical theme was broader and more meaningful than the specific situations identified. Akhmatova's poems included the era.
After the revolution, Akhmatova published the collection “Plantain” (1921), “Anno Domini MCMXXI” (1921). Unlike many of her friends and acquaintances, she did not emigrate. Her poetic invective “I had a voice. He called comfortingly...” (1917), confirmed five years later by a poem of the same meaning: “I am not with those who abandoned the earth...” (1922). Part of the emigration reacted to these verses with great irritation. But even in her own country, after the revolution, Akhmatova did not find proper understanding - in the eyes of many, she remained a poet of old Russia, “a fragment of the empire.” This version haunted Akhmatova all her life - right up to the infamous Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”” (1946). Over the past four decades, she began to work a lot on the Pushkin era, including the architecture of St. Petersburg; her research interest in Pushkin and Akhmatova’s work in this area arose: “The Last Tale of Pushkin”, “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”, “Adolphe” by Benjamin Constant in the works of Pushkin”, “The Stone Guest” of Pushkin”, “The Death of Pushkin”, “ Alexandrina", "Pushkin and the Nevskoye Seaside" and others were highly appreciated by authoritative Pushkin scholars.
1930s were a time of the most difficult trials in Akhmatova’s life. Pre-war poems (1924-1940), collected in “Reed” and “The Seventh Book” (collections were prepared by the poetess, but were not published separately), indicate the expansion of the range of her lyrics. Tragedy absorbs the misfortunes and suffering of millions of people who have become victims of terror and violence in her own country. The repressions also affected her family - her son was arrested and exiled. The people's tragedy, which also became her personal misfortune, gave new strength to Akhmatov's Muse. In 1940, A. wrote a lament poem “The Path of All the Earth” (started in March 1940, first published in its entirety in 1965). This poem - with the image of a funeral sleigh in the center, with the expectation of death, with the ringing of Kitezh bells - is directly adjacent to the "Requiem", which was created throughout the 30s. "Requiem" expressed the great national tragedy; in its poetic form it is close to folk tale. “Woven” from simple words, “overheard,” as Akhmatova writes, in prison lines, he conveyed both the time and soul of the people with stunning poetic and civic power. "Requiem" was not known either in the 1930s, or much later (published in 1987), just as the accompanying "Shards" and many other works of the poetess were not known.
During the Great Patriotic War, having evacuated from besieged Leningrad at the beginning of the siege, Akhmatova worked intensively. Her patriotic poems “Oath” (1941) and “Courage” (1942) became widely known:
The hour of courage has struck on our watch,
And courage will not leave us.
Throughout the war years and later, until 1964, work continued on “Poem without a Hero,” which became the central work in her work. This is a wide canvas of epic-lyrical plan, where Akhmatova recreates the era of the “eve”, returning in memory to 1913. Pre-war Petersburg appears with the characteristic signs of that time; Along with the author, the figures of Blok, Chaliapin, O. Glebova-Sudeikina (in the image of the Confusion-Psyche, who was one of her theatrical roles), and Mayakovsky appear. Akhmatova judges the era, “spicy” and “disastrous,” sinful and brilliant, and at the same time herself. The poem is wide in scope - in its epilogue the motif of Russia at war with fascism appears; it is multifaceted and multilayered, extremely complex in its composition and sometimes encrypted imagery. In 1946, the well-known decree on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” again deprived Akhmatova of the opportunity to publish, but her poetic work, according to her, was never interrupted. There was a gradual, albeit slow, return to the printed page. In 1964 she was awarded the Etna Taormina Prize in Italy, and in 1965 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford. Akhmatova’s last book was the collection “The Running of Time” (1965), which became the main poetic event of that year and revealed to many readers the entire enormous creative path of the poet - from “Evening” to “Komarov’s Sketches” (1961).
Akhmatova died in the village of Domodedovo, near Moscow; buried in the village of Komarovo, 50 km from St. Petersburg.
The history of the poem
1937 A terrible page in our history. I remember the names of O. Mandelstam, V. Shalamov, A. Solzhenitsyn... Tens, thousands of names. And behind them are crippled destinies, hopeless grief, fear, despair, oblivion. But human memory is strange. She keeps the most intimate, dear things. And terrible... "White Clothes" by V. Dudintsev, "Children of Arbat" by A. Rybakov, "By Right of Memory" by A. Tvardovsky, "The Gulag Archipelago" by A. Solzhenitsyn - these and other works about the tragic 30-40s . The 20th century became the property of our generation; quite recently it turned our consciousness, our understanding of history and modernity upside down. A. Akhmatova's poem "Requiem" is a special work in this series. The poetess was able to talentedly and vividly reflect the tragedy of the individual, family, and people. She herself went through the horrors of Stalin’s repressions: her son Lev was arrested and spent seventeen months in Stalin’s dungeons, her husband N. Punin was also under arrest; those close and dear to her, O. Mandelstam and B. Pilnyak, died; Since 1925, not a single line from Akhmatova has been published; it was as if the poet had been erased from life. These events formed the basis of the poem "Requiem". The poem was written in 1935 -1940. Akhmatova was afraid to write down her poems and therefore told new lines to her friends (in particular, Lydia Chukovskaya), who then kept the “Requiem” in their memory. So the poem survived for many years when its printing was impossible. Since the 1960s. Akhmatova's "Requiem" was distributed in samizdat. In 1963, the poem was published in Munich without the author's consent. In Russia, the poem was first published in the magazine “October” No. 3 for 1987. Some chapters were published during the "thaw".
“Requiem” is one of the first poetic works dedicated to the victims Great Terror 1930s “Requiem” is translated as a funeral mass, a Catholic service for the deceased, literally translated as a request for peace. At the same time, it is a designation for a mournful piece of music. So, a requiem is a funeral mass. Having named her poem this way, Akhmatova openly declares that her poem is a funeral eulogy dedicated to all those who died during the terrible times of Stalin’s repressions, as well as to those who suffered, worrying about their repressed relatives and friends, in whom the soul was dying from suffering.
Features of the composition of the poem
The poem has a ring structure, which allows it to be correlated with Blok's "Twelve". The first two chapters form a prologue, and the last two chapters form an epilogue. They are somewhat different from the rest of the poem. "Requiem" is full of lyrical experiences, and these four verses tend more towards generalization, toward the epic.
The poem opens with a prose “Preface”, which resembles a newspaper article and introduces us to the atmosphere of that era. The poetess is not recognized, but “recognized,” the woman’s lips are “blue” from cold and emotions, those around her speak in a whisper and “in the ear.” A woman from the prison line asks Akhmatova to describe this, hoping for justice to prevail. And the poetess fulfills her duty, writes about her friends in misfortune and about herself.
The “Preface” is followed by a “Dedication”, which reveals the “address” of the poem.
After the “Dedication” there is an “Introduction”, significant in volume and content, in which images of those leaving for hard labor or execution appear. Leningrad in “Requiem” is very unique; it is not at all similar to the poetically mysterious Petersburg, glorified in symbolic poetry; This is a city characterized by a mercilessly expressive metaphor:
And dangled like an unnecessary pendant
Leningrad is near its prisons.
The personal theme of "Requiem" - the arrest of the son and the suffering of the mother - begins to sound only after the "Dedication" and "Introduction". After the prologue there are four first chapters. These are the peculiar voices of mothers from the past - the times of the Streltsy rebellion, her own voice, the head, as if from a Shakespearean tragedy, and, finally, Akhmatova’s own voice from the 30s. Akhmatova connects her personal grief with the suffering of all women in Russia and therefore speaks of “streltsy’s wives” crying for their dead husbands and sons, and that cruelty and executions stretch from the past to the present.
The motif of “Requiem”, which is very strong in artistic expressiveness, is the comparison of one’s own fate with the fate of the Mother of God, before whose eyes her son was crucified (the poem “The Crucifixion”). Such a comparison makes it possible to impart a truly universal tragedy to the image of a grieving mother; it is no coincidence that most literary scholars consider the “Crucifixion” to be the ideological and philosophical center of the entire poem. Chapters V and VI are the culmination of the poem, the apotheosis of the heroine’s suffering.
The next four verses deal with the theme of memory. The “Epilogue” in its meaning echoes the beginning of the work, the image of a prison line appears again, and then Anna Akhmatova says that she would like to see her monument at the prison wall, where she was waiting for news about her son. “Requiem” can be considered a kind of lyrical testament of the poetess, a reflection of the great tragedy experienced by all the people during the years of Stalinism.
"Requiem", from Latin - funeral mass. Many composers V.A. wrote music to the traditional Latin text of the Requiem. Mozart, T. Berlioz, G. Verdi. Akhmatova’s “Requiem” preserves the Latin spelling, relying on the basis, the original source, and tradition. It is not without reason that the finale of the work, its “Epilogue,” takes the tragic melody of eternal memory for the deceased beyond the boundaries of earthly reality:
And even from the still and bronze ages,
Melted snow flows like tears,
And the ships sail quietly along the Neva.
“Requiem” required Akhmatova to think musically, musically arrange individual disparate parts - lyric poems - into one coherent whole. It is noteworthy that both the epigraph and “Instead of a Preface,” written much later than the main text of the poetic cycle, are organically attached to it precisely through the means of music. This is an “overture”, an orchestral introduction in which two main themes of the work are played: the inseparability of the fate of the lyrical heroine from the fate of her people, the personal from the general, “I” from “we”. In its structure, Akhmatova’s work resembles a sonata. It begins after short musical bars with the powerful sound of the choir, and the presence here of Pushkin’s line from the poem “In the depths of the Siberian ores” expands the space and gives access to history. Nameless victims cease to be nameless. They are protected by the great traditions of freedom-loving Russian literature.
And when, maddened by torment,
The already condemned regiments were marching,
And a short song of parting
The locomotive whistles sang.
Death stars stood above us...
Russian poetry knew many examples when the genre of a musical work became a form of poetic thought. For Akhmatova, it was an ideal form of mastering the tragic plot of Russian history.
Literary critic and researcher of Akhmatova’s work E. G. Etkind In the article “The Immortality of Memory. Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”” considers the features of the composition of the poem “Requiem”.
Is "Requiem" a poem? Isn't it a cycle of separate poems written at different times and more or less accidentally united by the author's will under a common title?
An analysis of the composition of “Requiem” testifies to the thoughtfulness of the piece both as a whole and in individual details. The poem includes ten small - from 5 to 20 lines - poems, framed by a prologue and an epilogue. Both the prologue and epilogue consist of two parts; prologue 25 + 12, epilogue 12 + 34. The first and last parts (Dedication and Epilogue-II) are longer than each of the others; the second from the beginning and from the end of the part (Introduction and Epilogue-I) are equal in size 12-12.
Of the ten poems that make up the poem, the first and last are correlated in plot - these are variants of the Pieta theme. In poem 1, the grief of a Russian mother from the people for her son being taken away to certain execution (“Following you, as if on a takeaway ...”, “Deathly sweat on the brow ...”), in poem 10 - Pieta as a worldwide emblem of Christianity; besides, they both contain 8 lines (two quatrains each). The plot center of the poem - chapters 5 and 6 are both dedicated to the son and the movement of Time - the time of his imprisonment; begins with the verse “I’ve been screaming for seventeen months,” 6 with the verse “Lungs fly by weeks.” These two central chapters are preceded by four short ones, in which different voices are heard, by no means identical with the author’s and from him, the author’s, more or less removed 1 - a woman from Russian history, perhaps from the era of Peter the Great; 2 - a woman from a Russian (Cossack) folk song; 3 - a woman from a tragedy close in style to Shakespeare’s; - 4 - a certain voice addressing Akhmatova in the tens and Akhmatova in the thirties, but separated from both the one and the other - this is, as it were, a third. The poet's self, objectified and raised above the events of biography. Following the two central chapters - 5 and b - there are four others; they are united by the image of a suffering woman, the idea of the unbearability of suffering and, perhaps, the healing nature of death, as well as Memory as the meaning of human existence. The theme of Memory will be further deepened in both epilogues. Let us note in passing that, in contrast to chapters 1 - 4, almost all chapters of the second half - 7, 8, 10 - are equipped with titles, giving each greater independence. This relative independence made it possible to include them outside the context of the poem in Akhmatova’s collections (except for the poem “To Death”, which contains the lines “So that I can see the top of the blue hat / And the building manager pale with fear”) that are unacceptable from the point of view of censorship).
As we can see, the architectonics of “Requiem” are thoughtful and precise. In general, this is a harmonious and harmonious structure of the classical type, organized according to the laws of symmetry; nothing can be added or taken away without disturbing the proportionality of the parts and their balance. In other words, “Requiem” is not a combination of individual lyrical things, but a whole work. “Requiem” is indeed a poem that, in terms of genre characteristics, most closely approximates Blok’s “The Twelve.”
Personal fate and national fate in the poem
The poem “Requiem” is both an expression of the fate of Akhmatova, whose son was arrested and sentenced to death during the Yezhovshchina, and a document of a tragic era, an era of repression and violence, when the iron “roller of Stalinism” passed through the fates of thousands and thousands of people when they arrested and shot many innocent people without trial or investigation. “Requiem” resurrects the era of the Stalinist regime in all its truth, in it the poet conducts a dialogue with time about the misfortune of the people, about the misfortune of the mother. In Akhmatov's poem there is both a poet and a chronicler. After her son's arrest, she spent many hours in prison lines hoping to learn something about him. In the prosaic “Instead of a Preface,” Akhmatova will write about her mission to speak on behalf of mothers, wives, daughters like her, on behalf of people who suffered the tide of repression: “In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison lines. One day someone “identified” me. Then a woman standing behind me with blue lips, who, of course, had never heard my name, woke up from the daze characteristic of us all and asked me in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “I can.” Then something like a smile crossed what had once been her face." In the “Epilogue” (1940), Akhmatova will also talk about her mission to speak on behalf of all who suffered during the tragic years for our country:
And I’m not praying for myself alone,
And about everyone who stood there with me
And in the bitter cold and in the July heat
Under the blinding red wall.
A. Urban correctly writes about the courage of Akhmatova, who managed to convey a tragic page in the history of the country reliably and talentedly, with the fearlessness of a true daughter of her people, in the article “And the Stone Word Fell”: “Such courage was within the capabilities of a fragile woman, a visitor to Vyacheslav’s “Tower” Ivanov, the refined model of Modigliani.”
The tragedy of the mother in the poem is inseparable from the people's grief, from the grief of thousands and thousands of mothers, from the theme of memory of every person who lived in that terrible time. "Requiem" lives by the roll call of many voices; the poem is structured as a mother’s lament for her son, whose life is in mortal danger, and as the lament of a poet-citizen whose country is experiencing a tragedy in the “frenzied” years:
Death stars stood above us
And innocent Rus' writhed
Under bloody boots
And under the black tires there is marusa.
The author begins the narrative in the “Introduction” emphatically simply: “It was when he smiled...”, but already the second line introduces a poetically daring image into the verse: “smiles” because “dead, happy with peace.” The image of the “death star” is also poetically bright and daring in the poem; The purpose of the stars is to bring light and harmony, but here it’s the other way around - they were shot at night. Nature itself and man - its highest part - rebel against the “oblivion of reason”, the trampling of life on earth. In contrasting images, the poem captures the duel between the desire for death and the will to live - “We must learn to live again.” Relying on the poetic means of folklore, Akhmatova rises to her own understanding and vision of the world, giving birth to a unique artistic style. The energy of the narrative, the story of the mother, inscribed in the broad history of the people, give the poem volume, breadth of breath, and emphasize its freedom-loving, patriotic idea. Tracing the fate of the people who went through inhuman trials, Akhmatova appeals to reason, affirms goodness and happiness as the norm of life. Akhmatova transfers the will of women who have lost their relatives and friends, sons, husbands, loved ones through her pain - the pain of a mother for her son, and therefore the intonation of people's lament sounds so organically in the poem, ancient as life, coming from the depths of history, like Yaroslavna's lament , and appealing to reason, humanity:
They took you away at dawn
I followed you like I was being carried away,
Children were crying in the cramped room,
The goddess's candle floated.
There are cold icons on your lips,
Death sweat on the brow... Don't forget!
I will be like the Streltsy wives,
Howl under the Kremlin towers.
The lines about the people's tragedy, about the people's pain evoke an association with Mussorgsky's musical embodiment in the opera "Khovanshchina" of the "heart-rending crying" of the Streltsy wives in the scene of preparation for the execution of the Streltsy on Red Square and encourage active opposition to evil. “Requiem” is a funeral mass in memory of those who suffered, who did not break and found the strength to live and warm their neighbors with their warmth, and in memory of those who died, who suffer in places of imprisonment and exile; This is a monument to a grieving mother. The theme of the mother is associated in the poem with the biblical theme of “crucifixion” in the key poem in the cycle “Crucifixion” with an epigraph from a kontakion, a church hymn - “Do not weep for Me, Mother, in the tomb in sight”:
The choir of angels praised the great hour,
And the skies melted in fire.
He said to his father: “Why did you leave me!”
And to the Mother: “Oh, don’t cry to Me.”
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
The biblical vocabulary in the verses of the poem emphasizes the universal nature of the problems explored in the work, gives it a tragic and courageous coloring, and focuses on the humanistic thought of the poem about the value of human life. The lyrical hero speaks about himself, about people, about the country, conveys the alarming atmosphere of the era, and therefore S.S.’s statement is very true. Lesnevsky that “... the lyrical, autobiographical motif of the requiem in the poem is surrounded by the widest “Kulikovo Field” 1.
The artistic portraits recreated by Akhmatova in the “Wreath for the Dead” cycle became an understanding of the image and fate of the people of her generation. They contain both Akhmatova’s personal experiences and objective dramatic images of her friends and peers. “A single poetic sound” (S. Lesnevsky) - faith in truth, justice, protest against violence - unites this cycle about people close to the poet in spirit with “Requiem”. This cycle includes poems dedicated to writers with whom the poet was connected not only by friendship, a bright view of the world, and uncompromising judgment, but also by a tragic fate. Akhmatova dedicates wonderful lines to the memory of M. Bulgakov, B. Pilnyak, O. Mandelstam, M. Zoshchenko, B. Pasternak, M. Tsvetaeva, who left outstanding works of Russian classics to their descendants. These are lines in memory of a “mournful and high life”, in them Akhmatova calls herself a “mourner” who remembers loved ones, prophesies immortality for them, strives to save their “unique voices” from oblivion, compares their work with a “sunny, lily-of-the-valley wedge” that burst into “ into the darkness of the December night."
The final part of the “Requiem” develops the theme of the Monument, well known in Russian literature, which, under Akhmatova’s pen, acquires a completely unusual – deeply tragic – appearance and meaning. We can say that never, neither in Russian nor in world literature, has such an unusual image appeared - a monument to the Poet, standing, at his own request, near the prison wall. This is truly a Monument to all victims of repression. "Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova is a truly folk work, not only in the sense that the poem reflected a great folk tragedy, but also in its poetic form, close to a folk parable. To summarize, we can only add to what has been said the words of Viktor Astafiev, which accurately convey the state of mind of the lyrical heroine, the idea of the entire poem: “Mothers! Mothers! Why did you submit to wild human memory, reconcile yourself with violence and death? After all, you suffer more than anyone, most courageously you are talking about your primitive loneliness in your sacred and bestial longing for children.”
Conclusion
Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem" is a truly folk work, not only in the sense that it reflected and expressed a great folk tragedy, but also in its poetic form, close to folk speech. “Woven” from simple, “overheard,” as Akhmatova writes, words, he expressed his time and the suffering soul of the people with great poetic and civic power.
By examining the reflection in the poem of the personal fate of the poetess and the fate of the country, the following conclusions can be drawn:
The poem was created in inhuman conditions, during the “terrible years of Yezhovshina.”
The poem “Requiem” is dedicated to them “unwitting friends... two rabid ones...”.
In the “Introduction” the specific time of action is already outlined: Leningrad, the country is not the Soviet Union, but still “guiltless Rus'”.
The lyrical heroine of the poem seeks consolation from death; great sorrow, however, makes her like a new Mother of God.
The origins of evil, which have gained the upper hand in the country, go back into history, the scale of the tragedy is expanded by turning to the images of Christ and the Mother of God, to the biblical story.
Akhmatova showed the hell of the 20th century. Through the mouth of a poet, a people of 100 million speaks.
The epilogue contains the theme of a monument that can be erected to a specific person with a real biography, whose personal grief at the same time symbolizes the enormous national grief.
Despite the fact that “Requiem” and other works of Akhmatova of the 30s were not known to the reader, they are of great importance in the history of Soviet poetry of that time. And they testify that in those difficult years literature, crushed by misfortune and doomed to silence, continued to exist in defiance of the regime. And it doesn’t matter that the poem was published in Russia only in 1987. The main thing is that this work finally saw the light of day and won the hearts of many readers.
Application
Table 1 Independent work on understanding the poem
|
Elements topic formulations |
Questions for understanding the ideological and artistic features of the poem |
|
Requiem |
|
|
A.A.Akhmatova |
|
|
Poem |
|
|
era |
|
|
Reflection |
|
Sources
B. Ekhenbaum. "Anna Akhmatova. Experience of analysis." L. 1960
V. Zhimursky. "The Work of Anna Akhmatova." L. 1973
V. Vilenkin. "In the one hundred and first mirror." M. 1987
A.I. Pavlovsky. "Anna Akhmatova, life and work."
Moscow, "Enlightenment" 1991
h ttp://anna.ahmatova
com/index.htm
http://goldref.ru/
http://service.sch239.spb.ru:8001/infoteka/root/liter/room2/Chem_02/Ahmatova.htm?
Description of the presentation by individual slides:
1 slide
Slide description:
The fate of Russia and the fate of the poet in the lyrics of A.A. Akhmatova Prepared by Elena Garkusheva, 11th grade student of MBOU “Secondary School No. 1” in Bratsk, teacher A.P. Shevchuk.
2 slide
Slide description:
Russian poets and writers have never been indifferent to the fate of their homeland, especially at its turning points. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was no exception. In difficult times of social upheaval, revolutions, and wars, Russia remained a source of inspiration for her, becoming even more valuable. If there are bright poems in Akhmatova’s lyrics, they are almost always poems about the homeland. The homeland in her poetry is a sacred concept, and love for the homeland is not a subject of analysis and reflection, but something taken for granted, without which, like without air, human existence is impossible.
3 slide
Slide description:
Akhmatova forever linked her fate with the fate of her native land. Even at the beginning of her journey, she determined the main thing for herself - to be together with her homeland on all its paths and crossroads. For her it is clear: “If there is a Motherland, there will be life, children, poetry, but if there is no Motherland, there will be nothing.” And therefore, when the time came to choose after the revolution, she did not hesitate: she remained with her native country, with the people, declaring this decisively and loudly. Akhmatova knew that only in Russia could she create, that it was in Russia that her poetry was needed: I had a voice. He called comfortingly, He said: “Come here, Leave your land, deaf and sinful, Leave Russia forever.” But indifferently and calmly I closed my ears with my hands, so that the sorrowful spirit would not be defiled by this unworthy speech.
4 slide
Slide description:
The poem “I am not with those who abandoned the earth...” reflects the true patriotism and courage of the poetess, who considers it a shame to leave the country in difficult times. She dismisses the opportunity to leave her homeland in difficult times as an unworthy step, as a betrayal: I am not with those who threw the earth to be torn apart by enemies, I will not heed their rude flattery, I will not give them my songs. Those who left the country evoke the pity that seriously ill people evoke; they are “exiles”, deprived of their homeland, and therefore of happiness. Their roads are dark, and “foreign bread” smells of wormwood. Akhmatova herself is proud that she “didn’t deflect a single blow from herself” and was always with her people.
5 slide
Slide description:
The theme of her native land, Russia, already during the First World War, entered Akhmatova’s poetry with a sharp, ringing sound and turned out to be so organic that it remained in it forever, reaching its apogee during the period of the nationwide struggle against fascism. During the First World War, the theme of the Motherland was interpreted by the poetess in an anti-war, pacifist sense. Thus, in the poem “Prayer,” Akhmatova says that she is ready for any sacrifice, ready to accept the “bitter years of illness,” to lose her children, her friends, and her talent in order “so that the cloud over dark Russia becomes a cloud in glory.” rays." The imperialist war is perceived as a national disaster: people are starving, villages and cities are plundered. Soldiers are moaning over the guys, A widow’s cry is ringing through the village...
6 slide
Slide description:
Seeing all the hardships and unnecessary, unnecessary deaths of the Russian people, the poetess comes to a pessimistic conclusion: “The Russian land loves, loves, blood.” Akhmatova's lyrics change their tone, acquire a bright civil sound, and become tragic. But the fate of Anna Akhmatova itself was tragic. The thirties, marked by cruel lawlessness, arrests and executions, entered the life of the poetess with great misfortune. Akhmatova’s husband was shot, and her son was arrested, sentenced to death, but then exiled. And then creativity turned out to be the only salvation and consolation for the unhappy woman. The Second World War hit Russia with another difficult test. To support the fortitude of her people, Akhmatova writes poems such as “Oath” and “Courage”. From the very beginning of the war, the poetess believed in the victory of the Russians, because she knew that “nothing will force us to submit.” This war found Akhmatova in Leningrad and forced her to leave for Moscow. But the feat of the Leningraders, who did not surrender their city to the enemy, is captured in many of her poems: And the Leningraders again walk through the smoke in rows - The living with the dead: for glory there are no dead.
The lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is bright and original. Along with her most widely known poems about love, Akhmatova’s poetry includes a whole layer of poetry containing patriotic themes.
In the collection “The White Flock” (1917), summing up the early work of the poetess, for the first time the lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is freed from constant love experiences. Biblical motifs appear in it, the concepts of freedom and death are comprehended. And already here we find Akhmatova’s first poems on the topic of patriotism. The first poems of historical content also appear in the collection.
The theme of the Motherland increasingly asserted itself in her poetry. This topic helped Anna Akhmatova take a position during the First World War that differed from the official point of view. She acts as a passionate opponent of war:
Juniper smell sweet
Flies from burning forests.
The soldiers are moaning over the guys,
A widow's cry rings through the village.
It was not in vain that prayer services were served,
The earth yearned for rain:
Warmly sprinkled with red moisture
Trampled fields. Low, low empty sky,
“They wound your holy body,
They are casting lots for your garments.”
In the poem “Prayer,” Anna Akhmatova prays to fate for the opportunity to sacrifice everything she has to Russia:
Give me the bitter years of illness,
Choking, insomnia, fever,
Take away both the child and the friend,
And the mysterious gift of song -
So I pray at my liturgy
After so many tedious days,
So that a cloud over dark Russia
Became a cloud in the glory of the rays.
Intuitively sensing the time shift, Anna Akhmatova cannot help but notice how her native country is being torn apart. Her lyrical heroine cannot rejoice when Russia cries. She feels this crisis in her soul:
He said: "Come here,
Leave your land deaf and sinful,
Leave Russia forever.
I will wash the blood from your hands,
I will take the black shame out of my heart,
I'll cover it with a new name
The pain of defeat and resentment."
But indifferent and calm
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that with this speech unworthy
The mournful spirit was not defiled.
In this poem, Anna Akhmatova spoke as a citizen. She did not directly express her attitude towards the revolution. But this reflects the position of that part of the intelligentsia that remained with their homeland.
With the release of the collections “Plantain” and “Anno Domini”, the civil lyrics of Russian poetry were enriched with a new masterpiece, showing that the feeling that gave birth to the 1917 poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly.” not only did it not disappear, but, on the contrary, became stronger:
I'm not with those who abandoned the earth
To be torn to pieces by enemies.
I don't listen to their rude flattery.
I won’t give them my songs.
But I always feel sorry for the exile,
Like a prisoner, like a patient,
Your road is dark, wanderer,
Someone else's bread smells like wormwood.
And here, in the depths of the fire
Losing the rest of my youth,
We don't hit a single beat
They didn’t turn away from themselves.
And we know that in the late assessment
Every hour will be justified...
But there are no more tearless people in the world,
More arrogant and simpler than us.
The pre-revolutionary world, dear to the poetess’s heart, was destroyed. For Akhmatova and many of her contemporaries, this was a real tragedy. And yet she finds the inner strength to bless the eternal newness of life:
Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashed,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy,
Why did I feel light?
During the day the breath of cherry blossoms blows
An unprecedented forest under the city,
At night it shines with new constellations
The depth of the transparent July skies, -
And the wonderful comes so close
To the crumbling old houses...
Unknown to anyone,
But from the ages we have desired.
In the poems of the 30s, created against the alarming background of the outbreak of the World War, A. Akhmatova turns to folklore - to people's crying, to lamentation. She already felt in her heart the upcoming tragedy:
When an era is buried,
The funeral psalm does not sound,
Nettles, thistles,
It has to be decorated.
And only gravediggers dashingly
They are working. Things don't wait!
And quietly, so, Lord, quietly,
You can hear time passing.
And then she swims out,
Like a corpse on a spring river, -
But the son does not recognize his mother,
And the grandson will turn away in anguish.
And their heads bow lower,
The moon moves like a pendulum.
So - over the lost Paris
It's so quiet now.
The thirties were sometimes difficult life trials for Anna Akhmatova. She witnessed not only the Second World War unleashed by fascism, but also the beginning of the war between Soviet Russia and its people. The repressions of the 30s affected many of Akhmatova’s friends and like-minded people and destroyed her family. Despair and pain can be heard in the lines from “Requiem”:
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
Akhmatova does not consider the troubles that have occurred in the country to be either temporary violations of the law that could be easily corrected, or the misconceptions of individuals. After all, it was not just about her personal fate, but about the fate of the entire people, about millions of innocent victims...
While remaining a preacher of universal moral norms, Anna Akhmatova understood her “untimeliness” and rejection in the prison state:
Not the lyre of a lover
I'm going to captivate the people -
Leper's Ratchet
Sings in my hand.
You will have time to get tired,
And howling and cursing.
I'll teach you to shy away
You, brave ones, from me.
In 1935, she wrote a poem in which the theme of the tragic fate of the poet and at the same time a challenge to the authorities sound: Why did you poison the water and mix my bread with my dirt? Why are you turning your last freedom into a den? Because I didn’t mock the bitter death of my friends? Because I remained faithful. My sad homeland? So be it. Without an executioner and a scaffold, the Poet cannot exist on earth. We should go and howl with a candle. The pinnacle of Anna Akhmatova’s civic poetry can be called her poem “Requiem,” which was published only in 1988. “Requiem,” “woven” from simple “overheard” words, as Akhmatova writes, reflected its time and the suffering of the mother’s soul with great poetic and civil force:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
The poem shows the form of a parable, lamentation. This is the cry of a mother who has lost her son. The poem proves to us that the Stalinist regime did not crush the poetic word of Akhmatova, who speaks truthfully and openly about the tragedy of her generation.
During the war years, Akhmatova did not want to leave Leningrad and, being evacuated and then living in Tashkent, she did not stop thinking and writing about the abandoned city. Her poems contain maternal tears and compassion:
Knock with your fist and I'll open it.
I always opened up to you.
I'm now behind a high mountain,
Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,
But I will never betray you...
I didn't hear your moan.
You didn't ask me for bread.
Bring me a maple twig
Or just blades of green grass,
Like you brought last spring.
Bring me a handful of clean ones,
Our Neva icy water,
And from your golden head
I will wash away the bloody traces.
Anna Akhmatova's lyrics during the war years are full of compassion for the fate of the country and faith in its future:
We know what's on the scales now
And what is happening now.
The hour of courage has struck on our watch.
And courage will not leave us.
It's not scary to lie dead under bullets,
It's not bitter to be homeless, -
And we will save you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
We will carry you free and clean,
We will give it to our grandchildren and save us from captivity
The lyrics of Anna Akhmatova, whose life was full of hard times tragedies, clearly conveys to us the feeling of that time. The lyrical heroine of the poetess is both a passionate patriot of her homeland, a suffering mother, and a strong-willed woman who managed to bear the hardships of time on her shoulders. The history of Russia in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova is a heartfelt story of a brave woman who, during the years of universal silence, managed to tell the difficult truth about her country.
The poem “Requiem” is both an expression of the fate of Akhmatova, whose son was arrested and sentenced to death during the Yezhovshchina, and a document of a tragic era, an era of repression and violence, when the iron “roller of Stalinism” passed through the fates of thousands and thousands of people when they arrested and shot many innocent people without trial or investigation. “Requiem” resurrects the era of the Stalinist regime in all its truth, in it the poet conducts a dialogue with time about the misfortune of the people, about the misfortune of the mother. In Akhmatov's poem there is both a poet and a chronicler.
After her son's arrest, she spent many hours in prison lines hoping to learn something about him. In the prosaic “Instead of a Preface,” Akhmatova will write about her mission to speak on behalf of mothers, wives, daughters like her, on behalf of people who suffered the tide of repression: “In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison lines. One day someone “identified” me.
Then a woman standing behind me with blue lips, who, of course, had never heard my name, woke up from the daze characteristic of us all and asked me in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “I can.” Then something like a smile crossed what had once been her face." In the “Epilogue” (1940), Akhmatova will also talk about her mission to speak on behalf of all who suffered during the tragic years for our country:
And I’m not praying for myself alone,
And about everyone who stood there with me
And in the bitter cold and in the July heat
Under the blinding red wall.
A. Urban correctly writes about the courage of Akhmatova, who managed to convey a tragic page in the history of the country reliably and talentedly, with the fearlessness of a true daughter of her people, in the article “And the Stone Word Fell”: “Such courage was within the capabilities of a fragile woman, a visitor to Vyacheslav’s “Tower” Ivanov, the refined model of Modigliani.”
The tragedy of the mother in the poem is inseparable from the people's grief, from the grief of thousands and thousands of mothers, from the theme of memory of every person who lived in that terrible time. "Requiem" lives by the roll call of many voices; the poem is structured as a mother’s lament for her son, whose life is in mortal danger, and as the lament of a poet-citizen whose country is experiencing a tragedy in the “frenzied” years:
Death stars stood above us
And innocent Rus' writhed
Under bloody boots
And under the black tires there is marusa.
The author begins the narrative in the “Introduction” emphatically simply: “It was when he smiled...”, but already the second line introduces a poetically daring image into the verse: “smiles” because “dead, happy with peace.” The image of the “death star” is also poetically bright and daring in the poem; The purpose of the stars is to bring light and harmony, but here it’s the other way around - they were shot at night. Nature itself and man - its highest part - rebel against the “oblivion of reason”, the trampling of life on earth. In contrasting images, the poem captures the duel between the desire for death and the will to live - “We must learn to live again.” Relying on the poetic means of folklore, Akhmatova rises to her own understanding and vision of the world, giving birth to a unique artistic style. The energy of the narrative, the story of the mother, inscribed in the broad history of the people, give the poem volume, breadth of breath, and emphasize its freedom-loving, patriotic idea. Tracing the fate of the people who went through inhuman trials, Akhmatova appeals to reason, affirms goodness and happiness as the norm of life. Akhmatova transfers the will of women who have lost their relatives and friends, sons, husbands, loved ones through her pain - the pain of a mother for her son, and therefore the intonation of people's lament sounds so organically in the poem, ancient as life, coming from the depths of history, like Yaroslavna's lament , and appealing to reason, humanity:
Akhmatova requiem totalitarianism poem
They took you away at dawn
I followed you like I was being carried away,
Children were crying in the cramped room,
The goddess's candle floated.
There are cold icons on your lips,
Death sweat on the brow... Don't forget!
I will be like the Streltsy wives,
Howl under the Kremlin towers.
The lines about the people’s tragedy, about the people’s pain evoke an association with Mussorgsky’s musical embodiment in the opera “Khovanshchina” of the “heart-rending crying” of the Streltsy wives in the scene of preparation for the execution of the Streltsy on Red Square and encourage active opposition to evil. “Requiem” is a funeral mass in memory of those who suffered, who did not break and found the strength to live and warm their neighbors with their warmth, and in memory of those who died, who suffer in places of imprisonment and exile; This is a monument to a grieving mother. The theme of the mother is associated in the poem with the biblical theme of “crucifixion” in the key poem in the cycle “Crucifixion” with an epigraph from a kontakion, a church hymn - “Do not weep for Me, Mother, in the tomb in sight”:
The choir of angels praised the great hour,
And the skies melted in fire.
He said to his father: “Why did you leave me!”
And to the Mother: “Oh, don’t cry to Me.”
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
The biblical vocabulary in the verses of the poem emphasizes the universal nature of the problems explored in the work, gives it a tragic and courageous coloring, and focuses on the humanistic thought of the poem about the value of human life. The lyrical hero speaks about himself, about people, about the country, conveys the alarming atmosphere of the era, and therefore S.S.’s statement is very true. Lesnevsky that “... the lyrical, autobiographical motif of the requiem in the poem is surrounded by the widest “Kulikovo Field.”
The artistic portraits recreated by Akhmatova in the “Wreath for the Dead” cycle became an understanding of the image and fate of the people of her generation. They contain both Akhmatova’s personal experiences and objective dramatic images of her friends and peers. “A single poetic sound” (S. Lesnevsky) - faith in truth, justice, protest against violence - unites this cycle about people close to the poet in spirit with “Requiem”. This cycle includes poems dedicated to writers with whom the poet was connected not only by friendship, a bright view of the world, and uncompromising judgment, but also by a tragic fate. Akhmatova dedicates wonderful lines to the memory of M. Bulgakov, B. Pilnyak, O. Mandelstam, M. Zoshchenko, B. Pasternak, M. Tsvetaeva, who left outstanding works of Russian classics to their descendants. These are lines in memory of a “sorrowful and high life”, in them Akhmatova calls herself a “mourner” who remembers loved ones, prophesies immortality for them, strives to save their “unique voices” from oblivion, compares their work with a “sunny, lily-of-the-valley wedge” that burst into “ into the darkness of the December night."
The final part of "Requiem" develops the theme of the Monument, well known in Russian literature, which, under Akhmatova's pen, acquires a completely unusual - deeply tragic - appearance and meaning. We can say that never - neither in Russian nor in world literature - has such an unusual image appeared - a monument to the Poet standing, at his own request, near the prison wall. This is truly a Monument to all victims of repression. "Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova is a truly folk work, not only in the sense that the poem reflected a great folk tragedy, but also in its poetic form, close to a folk parable. To summarize, we can only add to what has been said the words of Viktor Astafiev, which accurately convey the state of mind of the lyrical heroine, the idea of the entire poem: “Mothers! Mothers! Why did you submit to wild human memory, reconcile yourself with violence and death? After all, you suffer more than anyone, most courageously you are talking about your primitive loneliness in your sacred and bestial longing for children.”
Essay on literature.
The lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is bright and original. Along with her most widely known poems about love, Akhmatova’s poetry includes a whole layer of poetry containing patriotic themes.
In the collection “The White Flock” (1917), summing up the early work of the poetess, for the first time the lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova is freed from constant love experiences. Biblical motifs appear in it, the concepts of freedom and death are comprehended. And already here we find Akhmatova’s first poems on the topic of patriotism. The first poems of historical content also appear in the collection.
The theme of the Motherland increasingly asserted itself in her poetry. This topic helped Anna Akhmatova take a position during the First World War that differed from the official point of view. She acts as a passionate opponent of war:
Juniper smell sweet
Flies from burning forests.
The soldiers are moaning over the guys,
A widow's cry rings through the village.
It was not in vain that prayer services were served,
The earth yearned for rain:
Warmly sprinkled with red moisture
Trampled fields. Low, low empty sky,
“They wound your holy body,
They are casting lots for your garments.”
In the poem “Prayer,” Anna Akhmatova prays to fate for the opportunity to sacrifice everything she has to Russia:
Give me the bitter years of illness,
Choking, insomnia, fever,
Take away both the child and the friend,
And the mysterious gift of song -
So I pray at my liturgy
After so many tedious days,
So that a cloud over dark Russia
Became a cloud in the glory of the rays.
Intuitively sensing the time shift, Anna Akhmatova cannot help but notice how her native country is being torn apart. Her lyrical heroine cannot rejoice when Russia cries. She feels this crisis in her soul:
He said: "Come here,
Leave your land deaf and sinful,
Leave Russia forever.
I will wash the blood from your hands,
I will take the black shame out of my heart,
I'll cover it with a new name
The pain of defeat and resentment."
But indifferent and calm
I covered my ears with my hands,
So that with this speech unworthy
The mournful spirit was not defiled.
In this poem, Anna Akhmatova spoke as a citizen. She did not directly express her attitude towards the revolution. But this reflects the position of that part of the intelligentsia that remained with their homeland.
With the release of the collections “Plantain” and “Anno Domini”, the civil lyrics of Russian poetry were enriched with a new masterpiece, showing that the feeling that gave birth to the 1917 poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly.” not only did it not disappear, but, on the contrary, became stronger:
I'm not with those who abandoned the earth
To be torn to pieces by enemies.
I don't listen to their rude flattery.
I won’t give them my songs.
But I always feel sorry for the exile,
Like a prisoner, like a patient,
Your road is dark, wanderer,
Someone else's bread smells like wormwood.
And here, in the depths of the fire
Losing the rest of my youth,
We don't hit a single beat
They didn’t turn away from themselves.
And we know that in the late assessment
Every hour will be justified...
But there are no more tearless people in the world,
More arrogant and simpler than us.
The pre-revolutionary world, dear to the poetess’s heart, was destroyed. For Akhmatova and many of her contemporaries, this was a real tragedy. And yet she finds the inner strength to bless the eternal newness of life:
Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashed,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy,
Why did I feel light?
During the day the breath of cherry blossoms blows
An unprecedented forest under the city,
At night it shines with new constellations
The depth of the transparent July skies, -
And the wonderful comes so close
To the crumbling old houses...
Unknown to anyone,
But from the ages we have desired.
In the poems of the 30s, created against the alarming background of the outbreak of the World War, A. Akhmatova turns to folklore - to people's crying, to lamentation. She already felt in her heart the upcoming tragedy:
When an era is buried,
The funeral psalm does not sound,
Nettles, thistles,
It has to be decorated.
And only gravediggers dashingly
They are working. Things don't wait!
And quietly, so, Lord, quietly,
You can hear time passing.
And then she swims out,
Like a corpse on a spring river, -
But the son does not recognize his mother,
And the grandson will turn away in anguish.
And their heads bow lower,
The moon moves like a pendulum.
So - over the lost Paris
It's so quiet now.
The thirties were sometimes difficult life trials for Anna Akhmatova. She witnessed not only the Second World War unleashed by fascism, but also the beginning of the war between Soviet Russia and its people. The repressions of the 30s affected many of Akhmatova’s friends and like-minded people and destroyed her family. Despair and pain can be heard in the lines from “Requiem”:
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
Akhmatova does not consider the troubles that have occurred in the country to be either temporary violations of the law that could be easily corrected, or the misconceptions of individuals. After all, it was not just about her personal fate, but about the fate of the entire people, about millions of innocent victims...
While remaining a preacher of universal moral norms, Anna Akhmatova understood her “untimeliness” and rejection in the prison state:
Not the lyre of a lover
I'm going to captivate the people -
Leper's Ratchet
Sings in my hand.
You will have time to get tired,
And howling and cursing.
I'll teach you to shy away
You, brave ones, from me.
In 1935, she wrote a poem in which the theme of the tragic fate of the poet and at the same time a challenge to the authorities sound: Why did you poison the water and mix my bread with my dirt? Why are you turning your last freedom into a den? Because I didn’t mock the bitter death of my friends? Because I remained faithful. My sad homeland? So be it. Without an executioner and a scaffold, the Poet cannot exist on earth. We should go and howl with a candle. The pinnacle of Anna Akhmatova’s civic poetry can be called her poem “Requiem,” which was published only in 1988. “Requiem,” “woven” from simple “overheard” words, as Akhmatova writes, reflected its time and the suffering of the mother’s soul with great poetic and civil force:
Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.
The poem shows the form of a parable, lamentation. This is the cry of a mother who has lost her son. The poem proves to us that the Stalinist regime did not crush the poetic word of Akhmatova, who speaks truthfully and openly about the tragedy of her generation.
During the war years, Akhmatova did not want to leave Leningrad and, being evacuated and then living in Tashkent, she did not stop thinking and writing about the abandoned city. Her poems contain maternal tears and compassion:
Knock with your fist and I'll open it.
I always opened up to you.
I'm now behind a high mountain,
Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,
But I will never betray you...
I didn't hear your moan.
You didn't ask me for bread.
Bring me a maple twig
Or just blades of green grass,
Like you brought last spring.
Bring me a handful of clean ones,
Our Neva icy water,
And from your golden head
I will wash away the bloody traces.
Anna Akhmatova's lyrics during the war years are full of compassion for the fate of the country and faith in its future:
We know what's on the scales now
And what is happening now.
The hour of courage has struck on our watch.
And courage will not leave us.
It's not scary to lie dead under bullets,
It's not bitter to be homeless, -
And we will save you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
We will carry you free and clean,
We will give it to our grandchildren and save us from captivity
The lyrics of Anna Akhmatova, whose life was full of hard times tragedies, clearly conveys to us the feeling of that time. The lyrical heroine of the poetess is both a passionate patriot of her homeland, a suffering mother, and a strong-willed woman who managed to bear the hardships of time on her shoulders. The history of Russia in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova is a heartfelt story of a brave woman who, during the years of universal silence, managed to tell the difficult truth about her country.
- < Назад
- Forward >
Essays on Russian literature
"Hero of Our Time" - main characters
The main character of the novel is Grigory Pechorin, an extraordinary personality, the author painted “a modern man as he understands him, and has met him too often.” Pechorin is full of apparent and real contradictions in relation to love, friendship, seeks the true meaning of life, solves for himself questions of human destiny, choice of path. Sometimes the main character is unattractive to us - he makes us suffer...
"Judushka Golovlev is a one-of-a-kind type
Judushka Golovlev is a brilliant artistic discovery of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. No one else has been able to reveal the image of an idle talker with such accusatory power. The portrait of Judas is revealed “in dynamics.” He first appears as an unsympathetic, mother-fawning, eavesdropping child. At the end of the book, the reader sees before him a shudder-inducing, disgusting creature. The image of Judas...
"Little Man" in Gogol's story "The Overcoat"
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol's story “The Overcoat” played a big role in the development of Russian literature. “We all came out of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” said F. M. Dostoevsky, assessing its significance for many generations of Russian writers. The story in “The Overcoat” is told in the first person. We notice that the narrator knows the life of officials well. The hero of the story is Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, a small official of one of...
"Little Man" in the works of Gogol
N.V. Gogol revealed in his “Petersburg Tales” the true side of metropolitan life and the life of officials. He most clearly showed the possibilities of the “natural school” in transforming and changing a person’s view of the world and the destinies of “little people.” In “Petersburg Notes” of 1836, Gogol, from a realistic position, puts forward the idea of socially significant art, which notices common elements...
"The Fate of Man" main characters
Andrei Sokolov is the main character of the story “The Fate of Man” by Sholokhov. His character is truly Russian. How many troubles he experienced, what torments he endured, only he himself knows. The hero speaks about this on the pages of the story: “Why did you, life, cripple me like that? Why did you distort it like that?” He slowly tells his life from beginning to end to a fellow traveler with whom he sat down to have a cigarette by the road. A lot...
1812 IN THE IMAGE OF L. N. TOLSTOY
Essay "War and Peace" by Tolstoy. L.N. Tolstoy was a participant in the Sevastopol defense. During these tragic months of the shameful defeat of the Russian army, he understood a lot, realized how terrible war is, what suffering it brings to people, how a person behaves in war. He became convinced that true patriotism and heroism is manifested not in beautiful phrases or brilliant exploits, but in the honest performance of duty, military and...
Silentium Tyutchev analysis of the poem
This poem by the great poet is entirely devoted to the main problem of any creative personality - loneliness. This philosophical, lyrical poem is filled with the innermost thoughts of the poet himself. Tyutchev touches on the problem of relationships between people and tries to find answers to eternal questions. In the first line of the poem, the fears and fear of the poet himself of being misunderstood are clearly felt. AND...
“TAKE CARE OF THE HONOR OF YOUR YOUTH...” (based on A. S. Pushkin’s story “The Captain’s Daughter”, option 2)
“Take care of your dress again, but take care of your honor from a young age,” says the proverb, and its meaning is clear to everyone. But not everyone and not always succeeds in following what has been said. It is easier for those who will subsequently never think about the life they have lived, about their unworthy actions, will rejoice in the fact that, although not with a clear conscience, they nevertheless avoided responsibility for their shameful act. And not at all...
“FRAGING FRESHNESS OF FEELINGS” IN THE POETRY OF A. A. FET
Essay on literature. Afanasy Fet's lyrics reveal to us a world of amazing beauty, harmony and perfection, the three components of which are nature, love and song. Fet can be called the singer of Russian nature. The approach of spring and autumn withering, a fragrant summer night and a frosty day, a rye field stretching endlessly and a dense shady forest - he writes about all this in his poems. Fet's nature is always...
“GREAT EARTHLY LOVE” IN ANNA AKHMATOVA’S LYRICS
Essay on literature. Akhmatova’s lyrics in her first books (“Evening”, “Rosary”, “White Flock”) are lyrics of love. Her innovation as an artist was manifested in the “romanticism” of her love lyrics - each book of poems is like a lyrical novel, consisting of many love stories. This is a story about a gray-eyed girl and a murdered king, and a story about farewell at the gate (the poem “Clenched my hands under the dark...
