Akhmatova's poetry. Online reading of the book Poems by Anna Akhmatova
And Nna Akhmatova wrote about herself that she was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and the Eiffel Tower. She witnessed the change of eras - she survived two world wars, a revolution and the siege of Leningrad. Akhmatova wrote her first poem at the age of 11 - from then until the end of her life she did not stop writing poetry.
Literary name - Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova was born in 1889 near Odessa into the family of a hereditary nobleman, retired naval mechanical engineer Andrei Gorenko. The father was afraid that his daughter’s poetic hobbies would disgrace his family name, so at a young age the future poetess took a creative pseudonym - Akhmatova.
“They named me Anna in honor of my grandmother Anna Egorovna Motovilova. Her mother was a Chingizid, the Tatar princess Akhmatova, whose surname, not realizing that I was going to be a Russian poet, I made my literary name.”
Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova spent her childhood in Tsarskoe Selo. As the poetess recalled, she learned to read from Leo Tolstoy’s “ABC,” and began speaking French while listening to the teacher teach her older sisters. The young poetess wrote her first poem at the age of 11.
Anna Akhmatova in childhood. Photo: maskball.ru
Anna Akhmatova. Photos: maskball.ru
Gorenko family: Inna Erasmovna and children Victor, Andrey, Anna, Iya. Photo: maskball.ru
Akhmatova studied at the Tsarskoye Selo Women's Gymnasium “at first it’s bad, then it’s much better, but always reluctantly”. In 1905 she was home schooled. The family lived in Yevpatoria - Anna Akhmatova’s mother separated from her husband and went to the southern coast to treat tuberculosis that had worsened in children. In the following years, the girl moved to relatives in Kyiv - there she graduated from the Fundukleevsky gymnasium, and then enrolled in the law department of the Higher Women's Courses.
In Kyiv, Anna began to correspond with Nikolai Gumilyov, who courted her back in Tsarskoe Selo. At this time, the poet was in France and published the Parisian Russian weekly Sirius. In 1907, Akhmatova’s first published poem, “On His Hand There Are Many Shining Rings...”, appeared on the pages of Sirius. In April 1910, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev got married - near Kiev, in the village of Nikolskaya Slobodka.
As Akhmatova wrote, “No other generation has had such a fate”. In the 30s, Nikolai Punin was arrested, Lev Gumilyov was arrested twice. In 1938, he was sentenced to five years in forced labor camps. About the feelings of the wives and mothers of “enemies of the people” - victims of repressions of the 1930s - Akhmatova later wrote one of her famous works - the autobiographical poem “Requiem”.
In 1939, the poetess was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers. Before the war, Akhmatova’s sixth collection, “From Six Books,” was published. “The Patriotic War of 1941 found me in Leningrad”, - the poetess wrote in her memoirs. Akhmatova was evacuated first to Moscow, then to Tashkent - there she spoke in hospitals, read poetry to wounded soldiers and “greedily caught news about Leningrad, about the front.” The poetess was able to return to the Northern capital only in 1944.
“The terrible ghost pretending to be my city amazed me so much that I described this meeting of mine with him in prose... Prose has always seemed to me both a mystery and a temptation. From the very beginning I knew everything about poetry - I never knew anything about prose.”
Anna Akhmatova
"Decadent" and Nobel Prize nominee
In 1946, a special Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” - for “providing a literary platform” for “unprincipled, ideologically harmful works.” It concerned two Soviet writers - Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. They were both expelled from the Writers' Union.
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Portrait of A.A. Akhmatova. 1922. State Russian Museum
Natalia Tretyakova. Akhmatova and Modigliani at an unfinished portrait
Rinat Kuramshin. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova
“Zoshchenko portrays the Soviet order and Soviet people in an ugly caricature, slanderously presenting Soviet people as primitive, uncultured, stupid, with philistine tastes and morals. Zoshchenko’s maliciously hooligan portrayal of our reality is accompanied by anti-Soviet attacks.
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Akhmatova is a typical representative of empty, unprincipled poetry, alien to our people. Her poems, imbued with the spirit of pessimism and decadence, expressing the tastes of the old salon poetry, frozen in the positions of bourgeois-aristocratic aesthetics and decadence, “art for art’s sake,” which does not want to keep pace with its people, harm the education of our youth and cannot be tolerated in Soviet literature".Excerpt from the Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”
Lev Gumilyov, who after serving his sentence volunteered to go to the front and reached Berlin, was again arrested and sentenced to ten years in forced labor camps. Throughout his years of imprisonment, Akhmatova tried to achieve the release of her son, but Lev Gumilyov was released only in 1956.
In 1951, the poetess was reinstated in the Writers' Union. Having never had her own home, in 1955 Akhmatova received a country house in the village of Komarovo from the Literary Fund.
“I didn’t stop writing poetry. For me, they represent my connection with time, with the new life of my people. When I wrote them, I lived by the rhythms that sounded in the heroic history of my country. I am happy that I lived during these years and saw events that had no equal.”
Anna Akhmatova
In 1962, the poetess completed work on “Poem without a Hero,” which she wrote over 22 years. As the poet and memoirist Anatoly Naiman noted, “Poem without a Hero” was written by the late Akhmatova about the early Akhmatova - she recalled and reflected on the era she found.
In the 1960s, Akhmatova's work received wide recognition - the poetess became a Nobel Prize nominee and received the Etna-Taormina literary prize in Italy. Oxford University awarded Akhmatova an honorary doctorate of literature. In May 1964, an evening dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the poetess was held at the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow. The following year, the last lifetime collection of poems and poems, “The Running of Time,” was published.
The illness forced Anna Akhmatova to move to a cardiological sanatorium near Moscow in February 1966. She passed away in March. The poetess was buried in the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral in Leningrad and buried at the Komarovskoye cemetery.
Standing on the Ugra River in 1480. Miniature from the Facial Chronicle. 16th century Wikimedia CommonsSlavic professor Nikita Struve
And not just any khan, but Akhmat, the last khan of the Golden Horde, a descendant of Genghis Khan. This popular myth began to be created by the poetess herself back in the late 1900s, when the need arose for a literary pseudonym (Akhmatova’s real name is Gorenko). “And only a seventeen-year-old crazy girl could choose a Tatar surname for a Russian poetess...” Lydia Chukovskaya recalled her words. However, such a move for the Silver Age was not so reckless: the time demanded artistic behavior, vivid biographies and sonorous names from new writers. In this sense, the name Anna Akhmatova perfectly met all the criteria (poetic - it created a rhythmic pattern, two-foot dactyl, and had an assonance on “a”, and life-creative - it had a flair of mystery).
As for the legend about the Tatar Khan, it was formed later. The real genealogy did not fit into the poetic legend, so Akhmatova transformed it. Here we should highlight the biographical and mythological plans. The biographical one is that the Akhmatovs were actually present in the poetess’s family: Praskovya Fedoseevna Akhmatova was a great-grandmother on her mother’s side. In the poems, the line of kinship is a little closer (see the beginning of “The Tale of the Black Ring”: “I received rare gifts from my Tatar grandmother; / And why was I baptized, / She was bitterly angry”). The legendary plan is associated with the Horde princes. As researcher Vadim Chernykh showed, Praskovya Akhmatova was not a Tatar princess, but a Russian noblewoman (“The Akhmatovs are an old noble family, apparently descended from service Tatars, but Russified a long time ago”). There is no information about the origin of the Akhmatov family from Khan Akhmat or from the Khan’s family of Chingizids in general.
Myth two: Akhmatova was a recognized beauty
Anna Akhmatova. 1920s RGALI Many memoirs indeed contain admiring reviews of the appearance of the young Akhmatova (“Of the poets... Anna Akhmatova is most vividly remembered. Thin, tall, slender, with a proud turn of her small head, wrapped in a flowery shawl, Akhmatova looked like a giant... It was impossible to pass by her, without admiring her,” recalled Ariadna Tyrkova; “She was very beautiful, everyone on the street looked at her,” writes Nadezhda Chulkova).
Nevertheless, those closest to the poetess assessed her as a woman who was not fabulously beautiful, but expressive, with memorable features and a particularly attractive charm. “...You can’t call her beautiful, / But all my happiness is in her,” Gumilyov wrote about Akhmatova. Critic Georgy Adamovich recalled:
“Now, in memories of her, she is sometimes called a beauty: no, she was not a beauty. But she was more than a beauty, better than a beauty. I have never seen a woman whose face and entire appearance stood out everywhere, among any beauties, for its expressiveness, genuine spirituality, something that immediately attracted attention.”
Akhmatova herself assessed herself this way: “All my life I could look at will, from beauty to ugly.”
Myth three: Akhmatova drove a fan to suicide, which she later described in poetry
This is usually confirmed by a quote from Akhmatova’s poem “High vaults of the church...”: “High vaults of the church / Bluer than the firmament... / Forgive me, cheerful boy, / That I brought you death...”
Vsevolod Knyazev. 1900s poetrysilver.ru All this is both true and untrue at the same time. As researcher Natalia Kraineva showed, Akhmatova really had “her own” suicide - Mikhail Lindeberg, who committed suicide because of unhappy love for the poetess on December 22, 1911. But the poem “High Vaults of the Church...” was written in 1913 under the impression of the suicide of another young man, Vsevolod Knyazev, who was unhappily in love with Akhmatova’s friend, dancer Olga Glebova-Sudeikina. This episode will be repeated in other poems, for example in “”. In “Poem Without a Hero,” Akhmatova will make Knyazev’s suicide one of the key episodes of the work. The commonality of the events that happened with her friends in Akhmatova’s historiosophical concept could later be combined into one memory: it is not without reason that in the margins of the autograph of the “ballet libretto” for the “Poem” there appears a note with Lindeberg’s name and the date of his death.
Myth four: Akhmatova was haunted by unhappy love
A similar conclusion arises after reading almost any book of poetry by the poetess. Along with the lyrical heroine, who leaves her lovers of her own free will, the poems also contain a lyrical mask of a woman suffering from unrequited love (“”, “”, “Today they didn’t bring me a letter ...”, “In the evening”, the cycle “Confusion”, etc. .d.). However, the lyrical outline of books of poetry does not always reflect the biography of the author: the beloved poetess Boris Anrep, Arthur Lurie, Nikolai Punin, Vladimir Garshin and others reciprocated her feelings.
Myth five: Gumilyov is Akhmatova’s only love
Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Punin in the courtyard of the Fountain House. Photo by Pavel Luknitsky. Leningrad, 1927 Tver Regional Library named after. A. M. Gorky Akhmatova's marriage to the poet Nikolai Gumilyov. From 1918 to 1921, she was married to Assyriologist Vladimir Shileiko (they officially divorced in 1926), and from 1922 to 1938 she was in a civil marriage with art critic Nikolai Punin. The third, never officially formalized marriage, due to the specifics of the time, had its own strangeness: after separation, the spouses continued to live in the same communal apartment (in different rooms) - and moreover: even after Punin’s death, while in Leningrad, Akhmatova continued to live with his family.
Gumilyov also remarried in 1918 - to Anna Engelhardt. But in the 1950s-60s, when “Requiem” gradually reached readers (in 1963 the poem was published in Munich) and interest in Gumilyov, banned in the USSR, began to awaken, Akhmatova took on the “mission” of the poet’s widow (Engelhardt also time was also no longer alive). A similar role was played by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Elena Bulgakova and other wives of departed writers, keeping their archives and taking care of posthumous memory.
Myth six: Gumilyov beat Akhmatova
Nikolai Gumilev in Tsarskoe Selo. 1911 gumilev.ru This conclusion was made more than once not only by later readers, but also by some of the poets’ contemporaries. No wonder: in almost every third poem the poetess admitted the cruelty of her husband or lover: “...My husband is an executioner, and his house is a prison,” “It doesn’t matter that you are arrogant and evil...”, “I marked with charcoal on the left side / The place where to shoot / To release the bird - my longing / On the deserted night again. / Cute! your hand will not tremble. / And I won’t have to endure it for long...”, “, / With a double folded belt” and so on.
The poet Irina Odoevtseva in her memoirs “On the Banks of the Neva” recalls Gumilyov’s indignation about this:
“He [the poet Mikhail Lozinsky] told me that students were constantly asking him whether it was true that out of envy I prevented Akhmatova from publishing... Lozinsky, of course, tried to dissuade them.
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<…>Probably you, like all of them, repeated: Akhmatova is a martyr, and Gumilyov is a monster.
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Lord, what nonsense!<…>…When I realized how talented she was, even to my own detriment, I constantly put her in first place.
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How many years have passed, and I still feel resentment and pain. How unfair and vile this is! Yes, of course, there were poems that I did not want her to publish, and quite a lot. At least here:
My husband whipped me with a patterned one,
Double folded belt.
After all, think about it, because of these lines I became known as a sadist. They started a rumor about me that, having put on a tailcoat (and I didn’t even have a tailcoat then) and a top hat (I actually had a top hat), I was whipping with a patterned, double-folded belt not only my wife, Akhmatova, but also my young fans, having previously stripped them naked.”
It is noteworthy that after the divorce from Gumilyov and after the marriage to Shileiko, the “beatings” did not stop: “Because of your mysterious love, / I screamed as if in pain, / I became yellow and fitful, / I could barely drag my feet,” “And in the cave the dragon has / No mercy, no law. / And there’s a whip hanging on the wall, / So that I don’t have to sing songs” - and so on.
Myth seven: Akhmatova was a principled opponent of emigration
This myth was created by the poetess herself and is actively supported by the school canon. In the fall of 1917, Gumilev considered the possibility of moving abroad for Akhmatova, which he informed her about from London. Boris Anrep also advised leaving Petrograd. Akhmatova responded to these proposals with a poem known in the school curriculum as “I had a voice...”.
Admirers of Akhmatova’s work know that this text is actually the second part of a poem, less clear in its content - “When in the anguish of suicide...”, where the poetess talks not only about her fundamental choice, but also about the horrors against which a decision is made.
“I think I can’t describe how painfully I want to come to you. I ask you - arrange this, prove that you are my friend...
I am healthy, I really miss the village and think with horror about winter in Bezhetsk.<…>How strange it is for me to remember that in the winter of 1907 you called me to Paris in every letter, and now I don’t know at all whether you want to see me. But always remember that I remember you very well, I love you very much, and that without you I’m always somehow sad. I look with sadness at what is happening in Russia now; God is severely punishing our country.”
Accordingly, Gumilyov’s autumn letter is not a proposal to go abroad, but a report at her request.
After the impulse to leave, Akhmatova soon enough decided to stay and did not change her opinion, which can be seen in her other poems (for example, “You are an apostate: for the green island ...”, “Your spirit is darkened by arrogance ...”), and in the stories of contemporaries . According to memoirs, in 1922, Akhmatova again had the opportunity to leave the country: Arthur Lurie, having settled in Paris, persistently calls her there, but she refuses (in her hands, according to Akhmatova’s confidant Pavel Luknitsky, there were 17 letters with this request) .
Myth eight: Stalin was jealous of Akhmatova
Akhmatova at a literary evening. 1946 RGALI The poetess herself and many of her contemporaries considered the appearance of the 1946 Central Committee resolution “On the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”,” where Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were defamed, as a consequence of an event that occurred at one literary evening. “It’s me who earns the decree,” Akhmatova said about a photograph taken at one of the evenings held in Moscow in the spring of 1946.<…>According to rumors, Stalin was angry at the ardent reception that Akhmatova received from her listeners. According to one version, Stalin asked after some evening: “Who organized the rise?” recalls Nika Glen. Lydia Chukovskaya adds: “Akhmatova believed that... Stalin was jealous of her ovation... The standing ovation was due, according to Stalin, to him alone - and suddenly the crowd gave an ovation to some poetess.”
As noted, all memories associated with this plot are characterized by typical reservations (“according to rumors,” “believed,” and so on), which is a likely sign of speculation. Stalin’s reaction, as well as the “quoted” phrase about “getting up,” do not have documentary evidence or refutation, so this episode should be considered not as the absolute truth, but as one of the popular, probable, but not fully confirmed versions.
Myth ninth: Akhmatova did not love her son
Anna Akhmatova and Lev Gumilev. 1926 Eurasian National University named after. L. N. Gumileva And that's not true. There are many nuances in the complex history of Akhmatova’s relationship with Lev Gumilyov. In her early lyrics, the poetess created the image of a negligent mother (“...I am a bad mother”, “...Take away both the child and the friend...”, “Why, abandoning the friend / And the curly-haired child...”), in which there was a share of biography: childhood and Lev Gumilyov spent his youth not with his parents, but with his grandmother, Anna Gumileva; his mother and father only occasionally visited them. But at the end of the 1920s, Lev moved to the Fountain House, to the family of Akhmatova and Punin.
A serious disagreement occurred after Lev Gumilyov returned from the camp in 1956. He could not forgive his mother, as it seemed to him, her frivolous behavior in 1946 (see myth eight) and some poetic egoism. However, it was precisely for his sake that Akhmatova not only “stood for three hundred hours” in prison lines with the transfer and asked every more or less influential acquaintance to help with the release of her son from the camp, but also took a step contrary to any selfishness: stepping over her convictions for the sake of her son’s freedom Akhmatova wrote and published the series “Glory to the World!”, where she glorified the Soviet system When Akhmatova’s first book after a significant break was published in 1958, she covered pages with poems from this cycle in the author’s copies..
In recent years, Akhmatova has repeatedly told her loved ones about her desire to restore her previous relationship with her son. Emma Gerstein writes:
“...she told me: “I would like to make peace with Leva.” I replied that he probably wanted this too, but was afraid of excessive excitement for both her and himself when explaining. “There’s no need to explain,” Anna Andreevna quickly objected. “He would come and say: ‘Mom, sew on a button for me.’”
Probably, the feelings of a disagreement with her son greatly accelerated the death of the poetess. In the last days of her life, a theatrical performance unfolded near Akhmatova’s hospital room: her relatives were deciding whether or not to let Lev Nikolayevich see his mother, whether their meeting would bring the poetess’s death closer. Akhmatova died without making peace with her son.
Myth tenth: Akhmatova is a poet, she cannot be called a poetess
Often discussions of Akhmatova’s work or other aspects of her biography end in heated terminological disputes - “poet” or “poetess”. Those arguing, not without reason, refer to the opinion of Akhmatova herself, who emphatically called herself a poet (which was recorded by many memoirists), and call for the continuation of this particular tradition.
However, it is worth remembering the context of the use of these words a century ago. Poetry written by women was just beginning to appear in Russia, and was rarely taken seriously (see the typical titles of reviews of books by women poets in the early 1910s: “Women’s Handicraft”, “Love and Doubt”). Therefore, many women writers either chose male pseudonyms (Sergei Gedroits Pseudonym of Vera Gedroits., Anton Krainy The pseudonym under which Zinaida Gippius published critical articles., Andrey Polyanin The name taken by Sofia Parnok to publish criticism.), or wrote on behalf of a man (Zinaida Gippius, Polixena Solovyova). The work of Akhmatova (and in many ways Tsvetaeva) completely changed the attitude towards poetry created by women as an “inferior” movement. Back in 1914, in a review of “The Rosary,” Gumilyov made a symbolic gesture. Having called Akhmatova several times a poetess, at the end of the review he gives her the name of a poet: “That connection with the world that I spoke about above and which is the lot of every true poet, Akhmatova has almost achieved.”
In the modern situation, when the merits of poetry created by women no longer need to be proven to anyone, in literary criticism it is customary to call Akhmatova a poetess, in accordance with generally accepted norms of the Russian language.
One of the brightest, most original and talented poets of the Silver Age, Anna Gorenko, better known to her admirers as Akhmatova, lived a long life full of tragic events. This proud and at the same time fragile woman witnessed two revolutions and two world wars. Her soul was seared by repression and the death of her closest people. The biography of Anna Akhmatova is worthy of a novel or film adaptation, which was repeatedly undertaken by both her contemporaries and the later generation of playwrights, directors and writers.
Anna Gorenko was born in the summer of 1889 in the family of a hereditary nobleman and retired naval mechanical engineer Andrei Andreevich Gorenko and Inna Erazmovna Stogova, who belonged to the creative elite of Odessa. The girl was born in the southern part of the city, in a house located in the Bolshoi Fontan area. She turned out to be the third oldest of six children.
As soon as the baby was one year old, the parents moved to St. Petersburg, where the head of the family received the rank of collegiate assessor and became a State Control official for special assignments. The family settled in Tsarskoye Selo, with which all Akhmatova’s childhood memories are connected. The nanny took the girl for a walk to Tsarskoye Selo Park and other places that were still remembered. Children were taught social etiquette. Anya learned to read using the alphabet, and she learned French in early childhood, listening to the teacher teach it to older children.
The future poetess received her education at the Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium. Anna Akhmatova began writing poetry, according to her, at the age of 11. It is noteworthy that she discovered poetry not with the works of Alexander Pushkin and, whom she fell in love with a little later, but with the majestic odes of Gabriel Derzhavin and the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” which her mother recited.
Young Gorenko fell in love with St. Petersburg forever and considered it the main city of her life. She really missed its streets, parks and Neva when she had to leave with her mother for Evpatoria, and then for Kyiv. Her parents divorced when the girl turned 16.
She completed her penultimate grade at home, in Evpatoria, and finished her last grade at the Kyiv Fundukleevskaya gymnasium. After completing her studies, Gorenko becomes a student at the Higher Courses for Women, choosing the Faculty of Law. But if Latin and the history of law aroused a keen interest in her, then jurisprudence seemed boring to the point of yawning, so the girl continued her education in her beloved St. Petersburg, at N.P. Raev’s historical and literary women’s courses.
Poetry
No one in the Gorenko family studied poetry, “as far as the eye can see.” Only on the side of Inna Stogova’s mother was a distant relative, Anna Bunina, a translator and poetess. The father did not approve of his daughter’s passion for poetry and asked her not to disgrace his family name. Therefore, Anna Akhmatova never signed her poems with her real name. In her family tree, she found a Tatar great-grandmother who supposedly descended from the Horde Khan Akhmat, and thus turned into Akhmatova.
In her early youth, when the girl was studying at the Mariinsky Gymnasium, she met a talented young man, later the famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov. Both in Evpatoria and in Kyiv, the girl corresponded with him. In the spring of 1910, they got married in the St. Nicholas Church, which still stands today in the village of Nikolskaya Slobodka near Kiev. At that time, Gumilyov was already an accomplished poet, famous in literary circles.
The newlyweds went to Paris to celebrate their honeymoon. This was Akhmatova's first meeting with Europe. Upon his return, the husband introduced his talented wife into the literary and artistic circles of St. Petersburg, and she was immediately noticed. At first everyone was struck by her unusual, majestic beauty and regal posture. Dark-skinned, with a distinct hump on her nose, the “Horde” appearance of Anna Akhmatova captivated literary bohemia.
Anna Akhmatova and Amadeo Modigliani. Artist Natalia Tretyakova Soon, St. Petersburg writers find themselves captivated by the creativity of this original beauty. Anna Akhmatova wrote poems about love, and it was this great feeling that she sang all her life, during the crisis of symbolism. Young poets try themselves in other trends that have come into fashion - futurism and acmeism. Gumileva-Akhmatova gains fame as an Acmeist.
1912 becomes the year of a breakthrough in her biography. In this memorable year, not only was the poetess’s only son, Lev Gumilyov, born, but her first collection, entitled “Evening,” was also published in a small edition. In her declining years, a woman who has gone through all the hardships of the time in which she had to be born and create will call these first creations “the poor poems of an empty girl.” But then Akhmatova’s poems found their first admirers and brought her fame.
After 2 years, a second collection called “Rosary” was published. And this was already a real triumph. Fans and critics speak enthusiastically about her work, elevating her to the rank of the most fashionable poetess of her time. Akhmatova no longer needs her husband's protection. Her name sounds even louder than Gumilyov’s name. In the revolutionary year of 1917, Anna published her third book, “The White Flock.” It is published in an impressive circulation of 2 thousand copies. The couple separates in the turbulent year of 1918.
And in the summer of 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov was shot. Akhmatova was grieving the death of her son’s father and the man who introduced her to the world of poetry.
Anna Akhmatova reads her poems to students Since the mid-1920s, difficult times have come for the poetess. She is under close surveillance of the NKVD. It is not printed. Akhmatova’s poems are written “on the table.” Many of them were lost during travel. The last collection was published in 1924. “Provocative”, “decadent”, “anti-communist” poems - such a stigma on creativity cost Anna Andreevna dearly.
The new stage of her creativity is closely connected with soul-debilitating worries for her loved ones. First of all, for my son Lyovushka. In the late autumn of 1935, the first alarm bell rang for the woman: her second husband Nikolai Punin and son were arrested at the same time. They are released in a few days, but there will be no more peace in the life of the poetess. From now on, she will feel the ring of persecution around her tightening.
Three years later, the son was arrested. He was sentenced to 5 years in forced labor camps. In the same terrible year, the marriage of Anna Andreevna and Nikolai Punin ended. An exhausted mother carries parcels for her son to Kresty. During these same years, the famous “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova was published.
To make life easier for her son and get him out of the camps, the poetess, just before the war, in 1940, published the collection “From Six Books.” Here are collected old censored poems and new ones, “correct” from the point of view of the ruling ideology.
Anna Andreevna spent the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War in evacuation in Tashkent. Immediately after the victory she returned to the liberated and destroyed Leningrad. From there he soon moved to Moscow.
But the clouds that had barely parted overhead—the son was released from the camps—condensed again. In 1946, her work was destroyed at the next meeting of the Writers' Union, and in 1949, Lev Gumilyov was arrested again. This time he was sentenced to 10 years. The unfortunate woman is broken. She writes requests and letters of repentance to the Politburo, but no one hears her.
Elderly Anna Akhmatova After leaving yet another prison, the relationship between mother and son remained tense for many years: Lev believed that his mother put creativity in first place, which she loved more than him. He moves away from her.
The black clouds over the head of this famous but deeply unhappy woman disperse only at the end of her life. In 1951, she was reinstated in the Writers' Union. Akhmatova's poems are published. In the mid-1960s, Anna Andreevna received a prestigious Italian prize and released a new collection, “The Running of Time.” The University of Oxford also awards a doctorate to the famous poetess.
Akhmatova "booth" in Komarovo At the end of his years, the world-famous poet and writer finally had his own home. The Leningrad Literary Fund gave her a modest wooden dacha in Komarovo. It was a tiny house that consisted of a veranda, a corridor and one room.
All the “furniture” is a hard bed with bricks as a leg, a table made from a door, a Modigliani drawing on the wall and an old icon that once belonged to the first husband.
Personal life
This royal woman had amazing power over men. In her youth, Anna was fantastically flexible. They say she could easily bend over backwards, her head touching the floor. Even the Mariinsky ballerinas were amazed at this incredible natural movement. She also had amazing eyes that changed color. Some said that Akhmatova’s eyes were gray, others claimed that they were green, and still others claimed that they were sky blue.
Nikolai Gumilyov fell in love with Anna Gorenko at first sight. But the girl was crazy about Vladimir Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a student who did not pay any attention to her. The young schoolgirl suffered and even tried to hang herself with a nail. Luckily, he slipped out of the clay wall.
Anna Akhmatova with her husband and son It seems that the daughter inherited her mother’s failures. Marriage to any of the three official husbands did not bring happiness to the poetess. Anna Akhmatova's personal life was chaotic and somewhat disheveled. They cheated on her, she cheated on her. The first husband carried his love for Anna throughout his short life, but at the same time he had an illegitimate child, about whom everyone knew. In addition, Nikolai Gumilyov did not understand why his beloved wife, in his opinion, was not at all a brilliant poetess, arouses such delight and even exaltation among young people. Anna Akhmatova's poems about love seemed too long and pompous to him.
In the end they broke up.
After the breakup, Anna Andreevna had no end to her fans. Count Valentin Zubov gave her armfuls of expensive roses and was in awe of her mere presence, but the beauty gave preference to Nikolai Nedobrovo. However, he was soon replaced by Boris Anrepa.
Her second marriage to Vladimir Shileiko exhausted Anna so much that she said: “Divorce... What a pleasant feeling this is!”
A year after the death of her first husband, she breaks up with her second. And six months later she gets married for the third time. Nikolai Punin is an art critic. But Anna Akhmatova’s personal life did not work out with him either.
Deputy People's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky Punin, who sheltered the homeless Akhmatova after a divorce, also did not make her happy. The new wife lived in an apartment with Punin’s ex-wife and his daughter, donating money to a common pot for food. Son Lev, who came from his grandmother, was placed in a cold corridor at night and felt like an orphan, always deprived of attention.
Anna Akhmatova’s personal life was supposed to change after a meeting with the pathologist Garshin, but just before the wedding, he allegedly dreamed of his late mother, who begged him not to take a witch into the house. The wedding was cancelled.
Death
The death of Anna Akhmatova on March 5, 1966 seems to have shocked everyone. Although she was already 76 years old at that time. And she had been ill for a long time and seriously. The poetess died in a sanatorium near Moscow in Domodedovo. On the eve of her death, she asked to bring her the New Testament, the texts of which she wanted to compare with the texts of the Qumran manuscripts.
They rushed to transport Akhmatova’s body from Moscow to Leningrad: the authorities did not want dissident unrest. She was buried at the Komarovskoye cemetery. Before their death, the son and mother were never able to reconcile: they did not communicate for several years.
At his mother’s grave, Lev Gumilyov laid out a stone wall with a window, which was supposed to symbolize the wall in the Crosses, where she carried messages to him. At first there was a wooden cross on the grave, as Anna Andreevna requested. But in 1969 a cross appeared.
Monument to Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva in Odessa The Anna Akhmatova Museum is located in St. Petersburg on Avtovskaya Street. Another one was opened in the Fountain House, where she lived for 30 years. Later, museums, memorial plaques and bas-reliefs appeared in Moscow, Tashkent, Kyiv, Odessa and many other cities where the muse lived.
Poetry
- 1912 – “Evening”
- 1914 – “Rosary”
- 1922 – “White Flock”
- 1921 – “Plantain”
- 1923 – “Anno Domini MCMXXI”
- 1940 – “From six books”
- 1943 – “Anna Akhmatova. Favorites"
- 1958 – “Anna Akhmatova. Poems"
- 1963 – “Requiem”
- 1965 – “The Running of Time”
A. A. Akhmatova worked in a very difficult time, a time of catastrophes and social upheavals, revolutions and wars. Poets in Russia in that turbulent era, when people forgot what freedom was, often had to choose between free creativity and life.
But, despite all these circumstances, poets still continued to work miracles: wonderful lines and stanzas were created. The source of inspiration for Akhmatova was the Motherland, Russia, which was desecrated, but this made it even closer and dearer. Anna Akhmatova could not emigrate, because she knew that only in Russia could she create, that it was in Russia that her poetry was needed: “I am 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 let's remember the beginning of the poetess's path. Her first poems
appeared in Russia in 1911 in the magazine "Apollo", and the following year the poetry collection "Evening" was published. Almost immediately, Akhmatova was ranked by critics among the greatest Russian poets. The whole world of Akhmatova’s early, and in many ways later, poetry was connected with A. Blok. Blok's muse was married to Akhmatova's muse. The hero of Blok's poetry was the most significant and characteristic "male" hero of the era, while the heroine of Akhmatova's poetry was a representative of "female" poetry. It is from the images of Blok that the hero of Akhmatov’s lyrics largely comes. Akhmatova in her poems appears in an infinite variety of women's destinies: mistress and wife, widow and mother, cheated and abandoned. Akhmatova showed in art the complex history of the female character of the advanced era, its origins, breakdown, and new formation. That is why in 1921, at a dramatic time in her life and in everyone’s life, Akhmatova was able to write the lines that were astonishingly updated:
"Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
The wing of the black death flashed,
Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy -
Why did we feel light?"
So, in a certain sense, Akhmatova was also a revolutionary poet.
But she always remained a traditional poet, who placed herself under the banner of Russian classics, first of all, Pushkin. The development of Pushkin's world continued throughout his life.
There is a center that, as it were, brings the rest of the world of poetry to itself; it turns out to be the main nerve, idea and principle. This is Love.
The element of the female soul inevitably had to begin with such a declaration of love. In one of her poems, Akhmatova called love the “fifth season of the year.” The feeling, in itself acute and extraordinary, receives additional acuteness, manifesting itself in extreme, crisis expression - a rise or fall, a first meeting or a completed break, mortal danger or mortal melancholy, which is why Akhmatova gravitates so much towards a lyrical short story with the unexpected, often whimsical and capricious. the end of the psychological plot and to the unusualness of the lyrical ballad, eerie and mysterious (“The City Has Disappeared,” “New Year’s Ballad”). Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama, or only its climax, or even more often the finale and ending. And here she relied on the rich experience of Russian not only poetry, but also prose:
"Glory to you, hopeless pain,
The gray-eyed king died yesterday.
..............................
...And outside the window the poplars rustle:
Your king is not on earth."
Akhmatova’s poems carry a special element of love-pity:
"Oh no, I didn't love you,
Burned with sweet fire,
So explain what power
In your sad name."
The world of Akhmatova’s poetry is a tragic world. Motifs of misfortune and tragedy are heard in the poems “Slander”, “The Last”, “After 23 Years” and others.
In the years of repression, the most difficult trials, when her husband is shot and her son ends up in prison, creativity will become the only salvation, “the last freedom.” The muse did not abandon the poet, and she wrote the great "Requiem".
Thus, life itself was reflected in Akhmatova’s work; creativity was her life.
Born near Odessa (Bolshoi Fontan). Daughter of mechanical engineer Andrei Antonovich Gorenko and Inna Erasmovna, nee Stogova. As a poetic pseudonym, Anna Andreevna took the surname of her great-grandmother Tatar Akhmatova.
In 1890, the Gorenko family moved to Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg, where Anna lived until she was 16 years old. She studied at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium, in one of the classes of which her future husband Nikolai Gumilyov studied. In 1905, the family moved to Evpatoria, and then to Kyiv, where Anna graduated from the gymnasium course at the Fundukleevskaya gymnasium.
Akhmatova's first poem was published in Paris in 1907 in the magazine Sirius, published in Russian. In 1912, her first book of poems, Evening, was published. By this time she was already signing with the pseudonym Akhmatova.
In the 1910s. Akhmatova’s work was closely connected with the poetic group of Acmeists, which took shape in the fall of 1912. The founders of Acmeism were Sergei Gorodetsky and Nikolai Gumilev, who became Akhmatova’s husband in 1910.
Thanks to her bright appearance, talent, and sharp mind, Anna Andreevna attracted the attention of poets who dedicated poems to her, artists who painted her portraits (N. Altman, K. Petrov-Vodkin, Yu. Annenkov, M. Saryan, etc.) . Composers created music based on her works (S. Prokofiev, A. Lurie, A. Vertinsky, etc.).
In 1910 she visited Paris, where she met the artist A. Modigliani, who painted several of her portraits.
Along with great fame, she had to experience many personal tragedies: in 1921, her husband Gumilev was shot, in the spring of 1924, a decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued, which actually prohibited Akhmatova from publishing. In the 1930s repression fell on almost all of her friends and like-minded people. They also affected the people closest to her: first, her son Lev Gumilev was arrested and exiled, then her second husband, art critic Nikolai Nikolaevich Punin.
In the last years of her life, living in Leningrad, Akhmatova worked a lot and intensively: in addition to poetic works, she was engaged in translations, wrote memoirs, essays, and prepared a book about A.S. Pushkin. In recognition of the poet's great services to world culture, she was awarded the international poetry prize "Etna Taormina" in 1964, and her scientific works were awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by Oxford University.
Akhmatova died in a sanatorium in the Moscow region. She was buried in the village of Komarovo near Leningrad.
